Women's Studies

In the 21st century, when women have acquired equal rights in all spheres of life, the subject of women empowerment appears by default in literature. In this regard, Amish Tripathi’s fiction presents certain fascinating aspects. Shiva Trilogy is a mythic Fiction based on mythology related to Lord Shiva, the prime deity in Hindu Religion. He has re imagined a utopian society called Meluha, created by the Hindu God, Lord Ram, as per his ideals. It is interesting to analyse the status Amish assigns to the women in his visualization of Ram Rajya through mythic archetypes like; Shiva and sati, prototype of Lord Shiva and Goddess Sati. The setting of his fiction is 1900 BC, the period when the projected Saraswati Civilization, commonly referred to as Indus Valley Civilization, collapsed. This fiction presents the status of women in the distant past, intuited by today’s ideals of feminism. This article analyses the shades of feminist approach undertaken by Amish in his mythic fiction Shiva Trilogy which includes The Immortal of Meluha (2010), The Secret of Nagas (2011) and The Oath of Vayuputras (2013).

Military is a profession which is mostly dominated by men. Often the words like combat, war and bravery are used for men folk. However, the scenario has changed in last few decades and women have also been commissioned in the forces in many countries. Despite the induction of women in forces they are mostly assigned desk jobs and not taken for combat role or command positions. Since their induction, women are having only 15% or less representation in forces worldwide. They continue to strive to achieve professional competence in the field. Women today are excelling in every field but military is a field where their potential has not been recognised yet. The current paper presents a review of relevant studies in order to investigate the root of gender variance in forces and provides an in-depth understanding into the issues and challenges in achieving gender equality in forces. Various psychological theories along with supporting studies have been discussed to critically analyse the pros and cons of employing women in combat role. It is recognized that armed forces need the fittest and finest, irrespective of gender. Hence, a competency based approach in deployment for combat role is recommended as it will give women equal opportunity to prove their competency and serve in combat role.

Oi Christianoi - Sezione antica, n. 26 ----- Su Ipazia di Alessandria e su Sinesio di Cirene molti hanno già scritto: Ipazia, una nota antica scienziata e filosofia, Sinesio, un nobile, suo allievo e poi vescovo cristiano; Ipazia, da alcuni presa in considerazione unicamente come vessillo del femminismo, Sinesio, spesso trascurato a fronte di più famosi Padri della Chiesa. La peculiarità del libro, che è frutto di un accurato studio critico delle relative fonti primarie e secondarie, consiste nel tipo di approccio: le due figure e le loro opere sono esaminate sullo sfondo dei differenti ambiti culturali in cui si sono sviluppate le vicende della loro vita, pur nella contemporaneità: la differenza di ambiti culturali consente di evidenziare di questa donna e di questo uomo non solo la validità del loro lungo rapporto amicale, testimoniate da alcune lettere di Sinesio a noi pervenute, ma anche l'alto valore interculturale di tale rapporto.

Nineteenth-century prima donnas were continually on the move, and making a living as a famous diva meant travelling as far and as wide as possible under conditions that were not always terribly pleasant. Pauline Viardot’s life was no exception to this rule. Her journeys have been amply documented by her biographers with the intriguing exception of one of the most important trips she took in the later years of her operatic career: during the months straddling 1857 and 1858, Viardot visited Warsaw and various cities in Germany, where she appeared in opera productions as well as in public and private concerts. While she was away, she wrote to her husband Louis every day -- long, chatty letters that often filled numerous pages. Throughout each of these communications she wove detailed descriptions about the music she sang, the people she encountered, and the money she earned. These letters, in other words, provide a clear and nearly unprecedented picture of the life of a nineteenth-century virtuosa on the road. In this article, the focus is on the letters that she wrote to Louis over the course of this tour. As John Rosselli has demonstrated in the person of the nineteenth-century impresario, the complexities of life on the road were manifold, generating a heightened level of uncertainty and anxiety that seeped into every interaction with other artists traversing the same rocky terrain. The letters Viardot wrote during her trip to Warsaw and Germany provide a vivid and unusually detailed picture of these vagaries from a diva’s perspective.

Hermine von Hug-Helmuth was one of the first women in Freud's circle, and the first child-analyst whom he personally supported. Her primacy of a pioneer is overshadowed by  the circumstances of her tragic death. She was violently killed by her 18 years old nephew and foster child, who served for her as a case model in her child analytical writings since his earliest childhood.
Her life and work which is  is reconstructed and analysed based on  her numerous autobiographical and auto analytical writings reveals the desastrous dependency  from Freudian theory in the understanding of her analyst Isidor Sadger;  she foresaw her violent death in a self fulfilling prophecy.

Presentación para el Seminario Internacional de Estudios del Caribe, sobre mi libro en curso "Crónica de un amor terrible", que revisa la historia real tras Crónica de una muerte anunciada de García Márquez, a partir de nueva evidencia sobre los hechos reales que la inspiraron y su proceso de escritura, con énfasis en la historia de la historia de amor en la novela y la mujer que inspiró su personaje femenino, Margarita Chica Salas. Ver en:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPmEwUNLCs4

Nella letteratura italiana dal XIV al XVIII secolo ha discreta fortuna e circolazione il tema della sconfitta del dio dell’amore, umiliato e privato delle proprie armi soprattutto dalle donne. A partire dalle fonti classiche dell’episodio, rintracciabili nell’epigrammatica alessandrina e nel "Cupido cruciatus" di Decimo Magno Ausonio, si ricostruiscono il significato e le molteplici declinazioni del soggetto nella produzione letteraria italiana, dal "Triumphus Pudicitie" di Francesco Petrarca alla poesia in ottava rima di Luigi Pulci e Angelo Poliziano, dalle raccolte di emblemi ed imprese ai poemetti encomiastici cinquecenteschi in lode di donne, dalle opere di Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinelli alla letteratura morale settecentesca (con particolare attenzione per l’"Amore disarmato" attribuito a Jacopo Durandi). Ripercorrere le tappe della ricezione, tra riscrittura e risemantizzazione, del topos di Cupido punito e disarmato significa andare oltre un’indagine puramente tematica, per ricostruire la fortuna, letteraria ma anche iconografica, di un motivo di lunga durata.
Questo libro ha vinto il Premio Tesi di Dottorato istituito dalla Sapienza Università di Roma, nell’edizione 2013."

Over the last thirty years we have witnessed the emergence, formation and consolidation in Australia of the field of futures studies and foresight. Given its relative population size and geographic isolation from major centres of intellectual activity in Europe and North America, Australia has more than its fair share of futures researchers and practitioners (often called Futurists or Foresight Practitioners). Perhaps even more surprising to some is what the unwritten history reveals. This short piece shows that a significant number of the pioneers and shapers of Australian futures studies were women. Furthermore, a large proportion of futurists, researchers and foresight practitioners in Australia today are women.
The following “annotated time line” covers the last three decades from 1985 to 2015. It has been sectioned into three phases, roughly corresponding with the decades of “Pioneers”, “Institution Building” and “Professional Consolidation”. As we now move into a fourth decade of Australian futures practices we can ask “How will the contributions of Australian women futures researchers and foresight practitioners contribute to, and further develop, the complex futures for Australia and our global society?”

The aim of this project is to compile names and biographies of women attached to the military forces of the War for American Independence, 1775 to 1783; Whig (Continental), French, Spanish, British, German, and Loyalists. This includes females (and their offspring) who followed the troops on campaign, or served in a camp, garrison, or other settled military post (including artificers and other military support groups). Spouses and retainers of both enlisted men and officers are eligible. The project will begin with Continental army and Whig militia female followers. Eventually, my hope is to convince people with special knowledge of the other nations’ armies involved to participate.
    Material may be sent to the editor at ju_rees@msn.com or via Facebook messaging (John U. Rees). Names must be accompanied by supporting source material and a transcription of the same. Please include available pension narratives and as much detail from other sources as is available. Contributors will be listed with their submissions.

In this essay, I attempt to outline a feminist philosophical approach to the debate concerning (allegedly) false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Bringing the voices of feminist philosophers to bear on this issue highlights the implicit and sometimes questionable epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical-political commitments of some therapists and scientists involved in these debates. It also illuminates some current debates in and about feminist philosophy.

From sites like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, which document instances of street harassment and misogyny, to social media-organized movements and communities like #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported, feminists are using participatory digital media as actvist tools to speak, network, and organize against sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. As the first book-length study to examine how girls, women, and some men negotiate rape culture through the use of digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps, the authors explore four primary questions: What experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture are being responded to? How are participants using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? Why are girls, women and some men choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in this way? And  finally, what are the various experiences of using digital technologies to engage in activism? In order to capture these diverse experiences of doing digital feminist activism, the authors augment their analysis of this media (blog posts, tweets, and selfies) with in-depth interviews and close- observations of several online communities that operate globally.

The Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta" are the daughters and the protagonists of three novels set in three different geographical-linguistic areas: the United States, France, and Italy. "The Virgin Suicides" (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides, "Hunting and Gathering" ("Ensemble, c’est tout", 2004) by Anna Gavalda, and "A Girl Returned" ("L’Arminuta", 2017) by Donatella Di Pietrantonio are the selected novels covering the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century. The theoretical background of the mother-daughter relationship provides an introduction to the textual analysis of the novels, which unveils the condition of outsiders of the protagonists. Their characterization develops within their social marginality: imprisonment (the Lisbon sisters), "emotional autarky" (Camille), and abandonment (the "Arminuta"); while their marginal status is the product of their particular relationship with the controversial personality of their mothers. Mrs. Lisbon is a control-obsessed, authoritarian mother; Catherine is a narcissistic woman; while both the biological and the adoptive mothers of the "Arminuta" abandon her. The outsider theme, particularly its literary-philosophical theorization by Colin Wilson, is the key point of our analytical method. In our literary selection, each storyline identifies one of the three existential steps of the outsider, originally conceived as a male figure. By analyzing the fictional development of the Lisbon sisters, Camille, and the "Arminuta", we retrace backwards the existential journey of the outsider as theorized by Wilson: the mystic detachment from reality as the final stage of a route which started with the pursuit of Truth, and went through the process of accepting personal alienation. Retracing the outsider's experience allows us to show that being an outsider in literary terms is not a male prerogative: it is a condition of marginality embodied by female characters as well. In addition to this, precisely as outsiders the protagonists can express their agency.

What exactly keeps women ‘in’ inequitable care relationships, and how do we get ‘out’? This dissertation offers a timely response to a pressing societal problem – that of how to understand and organize care. Feminist scholarship and debates focus on the redistribution of care, considering how to shift care responsibilities from women to men or from individuals to the state. My research expands this work by critically reflecting on (shifting) relationships between women and the care economy with a focus on the moral dimensions of care work and on the narrative, intrasubjective work that women do.

The research mobilizes sociological theories of care work, gender and moral worth, and uses feminist life history and arts-based, auto-ethnographic methods to contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care.” Taking an interpretive, narrative, feminist approach, I draw on 20 in-depth life history interviews with 12 participants, as well as on my own autoethnographic experiences as a live-in care worker at L’Arche. I analyze how women narrate renegotiating care responsibilities or expectations across our lives and in different paid and unpaid care contexts in Ontario, Canada. Making links to class, gender and conditions in the caring economy, the project contextualizes women’s narratives of orienting to projects of care, negotiating moral dilemmas at the limits of care, and stepping back from or renegotiating care responsibilities.

The study enriches feminist theories of care by developing a theorized account of the “relational care economy” that makes intrasubjective conditions, and the contradictions that people negotiate, central. I also contribute to a conceptual reimagining of “care” both by raising questions about whether “care as an ethic” should apply at the level of individual women’s lives, as well as by calling for a conception of care that makes limits central. Aiming to foster solidarity amongst carers in different roles, I ask tough questions about what we expect of ourselves and others, how we can stop setting women up for such intimate losses, and how our lives can be otherwise.

In this book, women living in various cities in Turkey with different professions such as writers, scholars and journalists wrote about their mothers and their relationships with their mothers. The book includes not only essays but also poems and short stories because each mother and daughter relationship is unique and there is not just one way of expressing this special bond. None of them resembles any other. On the cover of the book, there is a photograph showing a little girl looking at her mother with admiration, like many of us who did the same thing when we were children. The narratives in the book are like shots reflecting how we view our relationships with our mothers. They are shots that we look at with joy, longing or sometimes with sorrow and regret.

The research discusses the development of the women’s movement in Palestine in the early British Mandate period through a photo that was taken in 1945 in Jerusalem during a meeting of women activists from Palestine with the renowned Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’rawi.
The photo sheds light on the side of Palestinian society that hasn't been well explored or realized by today's Palestinians. It shows women in a different role than a constructed "traditional" or "authentic" one. The photo gives insights into a particular constituency of the Palestinian women’s movement: urban, secular-modernity women activists from the upper echelons of Palestinian society of the time, women without veils, contributing to certain political and social movements that shaped Palestinian life at the time and connected with other Arab women activists. Veiling or unveiling of the women is often analyzed through the frames of ‘modernity' and ‘tradition,' where for modernists unveiling women represents progress and modernity, while the veil becomes the symbolic locus of culture, backwardness and gender discrimination.  A shift in the way women dressed indoors and outdoors, publically or privately might indeed be read as saying something about the margin of freedom women had, and hence the contradictions women encounter in the society, but the veil must not be simplistically equated with tradition or religious conservatism. Modernity and education, often represented as vehicles of empowerment, have in fact also had a regulatory and disciplinary effect on women's lives- they are not a panacea for women’s emancipation. Consequently, analyzing women's movement in Palestine as elsewhere, must be set within a wider frame that analyses the politics of modernity, and the rhetoric of binary discourses  juxtaposing ‘tradition', 'modernity', 'East' and ‘West' by different political actors on the ground engaged in processes of modern state building. 
Palestinians have been doomed to face the challenges of liberation. That time was no exception. This exploration delves into those activities, and the roles women helped to form in that period. 
Women’s roles were part of a collective forgetfulness due to the brutal decades of the end of the Ottoman era—a forgetfulness that resulted in a total amnesia regarding real acts of that era. When people remember stories of forced militarization and collective punishment, massacre, poverty, and illnesses, such negative aspects overshadow the reality of the life of that era.
Hence, the thesis attempts to explore how the political disputes, national consensus affected the development of an effective social feminist agenda.
The thesis will examine the question of whether the rise of women’s movement was part of the rising modernist middle or /and elite class, due to the natural development of the period, including education, political activism, etc. within the mandate period; or it was as well, a collective awareness within the society and its different classes.

"ABSTRACT

Before World War II, popular American culture, including newspapers, radio, and cinema, regularly depicted beauty as necessarily white. Similarly, mainstream magazines, board games, postcards, dolls, and virtually every form of visual media and material culture presented the image of the black woman as either that of the hypersexual sex worker “Jezebel” or the unattractive house servant “Mammy.” Faced with such negative and maligned representations of their race in the popular media, a number of enterprising businesswomen set out in the decades after WWII to change the stereotypical mass representation of black women. African-American modeling and charm school owners –such as New York City’s Ophelia DeVore and Barbara Watson, Berkeley’s Annette Starr, and Cleveland’s Artha Woods– applied their ventures in beauty and business towards promoting social change. In part because of their hard work, mainstream cultural outlets began to depict women of color as attractive, poised, and professional. African-American modeling and charm school owners conceptualized their life’s work as an important part of the mid-twentieth century’s Civil Rights Movement. In doing so, black beauty entrepreneurs used for-profit business enterprise as a means to promote sweeping social change in America."

Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of the Church and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories.

"En las siguientes páginas se analizan principalmente dos aspectos. En primer lugar, la posición de los diferentes actores políticos y sociales marroquíes con respecto a la situación de los derechos civiles y políticos. De entre estos actores me ha
interesado especialmente el movimiento de defensa de los derechos humanos. La pregunta que subyace en todo el estudio es en qué medida este movimiento contribuyó a la liberalización del régimen y en qué medida puede contribuir a su democratización.
Con esta intención he analizado su cultura política, sus características sociológicas y, sobre todo, su posición y margen de maniobra dentro del campo político (vínculos e instrumentalización por el poder, relaciones con los partidos políticos, con actores internacionales, etc.). Se trata de determinar la capacidad y los límites de un movimiento que ha experimentado una importante transformación en las últimas tres décadas. El contexto represivo de los años setenta (en el
que el movimiento únicamente podía preocuparse de su propia supervivencia y debía guardar silencio sobre gran parte del dossier represivo de los años de plomo) se suavizó a finales de los ochenta, y la liberalización se consolida en la segunda
mitad de los noventa."

The response to an uncontrolled spread of disease often incites a commingling of medical, moral, and political panic. Whether in the context of threats presented by early plagues, to contemporary super viruses, to lead toys, contagion, via transmission , makes interconnections visible, among and across peoples, cultures, objects, forms of commerce, and more. In this article, I use an intersectional disability studies framework to first discuss how, faced with the bio-insecurity of contagion, responses typically invoke discourses of war, empire, and what Priscilla Wald calls " medical nativism " (2008, 9). I then discuss how metaphors of autoimmunity often simply shift this discourse from concerns about external terror to that of internal terror (Sengupta 2014). Viewing autoimmunity from this vantage point, the body/nation is still viewed as vulnerable to attack, but the victim and the villain are the self/same. In the final section, I posit that a reimagined ethic of autoimmunity could offer new and fruitful ways to think about self/other relations that rely on mutual recognition and reject the binary, oppositional stance that undergirds annihilation. Keywords: autoimmunity / contagion / intersectional disability studies / metaphors of disease and illness / war metaphors

Questo intervento intende esplorare e problematizzare la rappresentazione delle donne in quanto icone, muse o soggetti passivi, e come esse diventino ricettacolo di proiezioni sociali. Quali strumenti estetici e politici le donne hanno impiegato per riappropriarsi della propria soggettività e autonomia in una cultura visuale patriarcale ed eteronormativa? Attraverso un’analisi critica queer-femminista – e percorrendo le definizioni di sesso, genere e sessualità – questa lectio prende come punto di partenza esempi tratti dai media mainstream per poi allargarsi verso problematiche che riguardano la rappresentazione dei corpi in ambito artistico.

[EN]
'Body, Femininity and Objectification: Queer-Feminist Perspectives'
This presentation explores and problematises how women are usually portrayed as either icons, muses or passive subjects, either way becoming receptacles of social projections. What aesthetic and political tools have women employed to re-frame their own subjectivity and autonomy within a heteronormative and patriarchal visual culture? Through a feminist and queer critical analysis, this lecture will take as its starting point examples drawn from mainstream media, to move towards issues that relate to the representation of bodies in the arts.

-- text available only in Italian --

This article examines recent TV (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries) and cinematic stories (Twilight saga) from a feminist perspective. It focuses on the the gender relations and female agency embedded in these stories in order to determine if they conjure up any liberating potential for their audience.

This senior honors thesis evaluates the theories for racial progress put forth in A Voice from the South (1892) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Using secondary sources by David Levering Lewis, Joy James, and more, I critique Du Bois’s gendered oversights and argue that Cooper at times offers superior paradigms for understanding oppression. This project positions Cooper as an early black feminist thinker.

The concept of feminism, which discusses the difficulties and oppression experienced by women just because of their gender, is an approach that defends all kinds of economic, political, and socio-cultural equality between the opposite sexes by opposing the discrimination between men and women. The concept of cryptofeminism which was used for the first time in the press in the 1960s, was referring to some cryptic and unnamed problems experienced by women. However the concept discussed as cryptofeminism within this study is different, the main starting point is similar as it points to a problem that cannot be named. Cryptofeminism as a concept which refers to the blockchain technology is being discussed and added to the academic literature for the first time with this article. Crypto assets are technology products that take their name from the science of cryptography. Crypto assets can store and transfer any kind of data and information with encryption and confidentiality principle. Crypto assets, which entered our lives with blockchain technology and spread very quickly in different areas, have created their own ecosystem and industry. The crypto ecosystem draws attention not only with its players, but also with its unique culture. The culture that develops in this ecosystem is at risk of being knitted around the ideas that feminism has been fighting for years. The perception of technology in the historical process has spread to the field of software, which is a new type of machine, by being built with mainly production equipment and machines after the industrial revolutions. The relatively pessimistic early literature and debates on technology and gender focus heavily on women's inability to develop their technical knowledge and skills. In the following period, discussions about the exclusion of women with higher technical education from the business world and its cultural basis follows. The masculine construction of the language and symbolism of technology carries inclusiveness to a point far away from competence and skills. From this point of view, it would be correct to discuss the cryptofeminism debate over the spread of a male-dominated culture in crypto. The gender of the crypto industry is encoded by symbolic conceptualization and male-dominated. The image of Bitcoin, the first blockchain network and cryptocurrency, is masculine. The fact that almost all of the images produced about the inventor of Bitcoin, whose real identity is unknown today, are male, is an extension of the maledominated culture that has begun to take root. On the other hand, blockchain technology, which provides secure anonymity, allows the construction of gender-neutral virtual identities. The positive reflections of the anonymity and trust issue, which reinforces its place in our lives with crypto through new communication forms, are candidates to open up space for the capture of gender equality in the focus of cryptofeminism.

¿Cómo pudo ocurrir que la institucionalización de los derechos de las mujeres posibilitara  la violación de los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres indígenas?  Esta tesis empieza con el establecimiento del PNSRPF 1996-2000 (Plan de planificación familiar) que fue parte de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer en el Perú fujimorista y causa de las esterilizaciones forzadas de más de  diez mil mujeres campesinas.  En esta tesis examino la memoria histórica del movimiento feminista peruano con el objetivo de comprender los factores que permitieron la vulnerabilidad de las campesinas dentro del marco de una campaña por los derechos de la mujer.  El movimiento feminista peruano puede mostrar tres dimensiones de los derechos humanos: los reproductivos y sexuales; los humanos y ciudadanos, y los derechos políticos.  Sin embargo, ninguno de estos  pudo responder a la condición interseccional de la identidad de las campesinas y a su exclusión inclusiva como ciudadanas.  Aun cuando se pensaba que  los derechos protegían a “todas las mujeres” o a “todos los peruanos” estos paradigmas aislaron los proyectos de derechos específicos que permitieron la invisibilidad de las campesinas.

The 'coat of many colors', worn by Joseph in Hebrew Scriptures, is possibly the most famous garment in the Western world. However, readers of the King James Version of the Bible may not realize that one other person in the Bible, Tamar the daughter of King David, also wore the k'tonet passim, mostly translated 'a garment of divers colors' (2 Sam. 13.18-19). You will remember that Jacob sent his favorite son on a journey to report on the well-being of his half-brothers and the herds. From a distance, his brothers recognized Joseph in the garment that announced his favored status in the family. Conspiring to kill this 'master of dreams', they instead stripped him of his 'coat of many colors', threw him in a pit, then sold him as a slave (Gen. 37.12-28). Also commissioned by her father, Princess Tamar went to the house of her half-brother Amnon who claimed to be ill. Wearing the k'tonet passim, she shaped and baked dough in his sight, poured something and brought the food to an inner chamber, to his bedside so that he might eat. He grabbed hold of her, raped her, then threw her out (2 Sam. 13.6-18). This article discusses the meaning of the garment in the ancient Near East and how it relates to the two characters who wear it.