Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Black Protest on the Streets: Visual Activism and the Aesthetic Politics of Black Lives Matter
Get PDFIn this article I am reading the visual protest practices of the Black Lives Matter movement as aesthetic and artistic actions which redistribute the sensible, presenting the legacy of slavery and the consciousness of being in the wake. By looking at representations of the movement in press photographs, I am trying to establish the movement’s iconography of protest and the visual strategies employed therein.
Resisting Xenophobia: Transatlantic Mobility and Aleksandar Hemon’s Immigrant Autobiography The Book of My Lives
Get PDFThe article examines the significance of xenophobic language used in the current portrayal of migration in mainstream media and its potential to determine Western – i.e. especially U.S. American and European – understandings of the migration debate. By critically observing how politically diverse media outlets essentialize the identity of migrants, the article attempts to expose the dangers inherent in the emerging xenophobic anti-immigration rhetoric. The focus on Aleksandar Hemon’s personal account of displacement and the subsequent difficulties and opportunities that arise from his life in diaspora serve to humanize the migrant self. In this context, special attention will be paid to Hemon’s ability to both transgress national ideas of belonging and reconstruct a self that is at home in Sarajevo as well as in Chicago. The selected sections from Hemon’s autobiographical narration will be put into a dialogue with the abstract images of an immigrant deeply rooted in xenophobic discourses.
Editorial Introduction: Women and Medicine in American Literature and Culture
Get PDFThe articles in this special issue of COPAS“ are the products of an advanced seminar on “Women and Medicine in American Literature and Culture” I taught at the universities of Regensburg and Bamberg during the winter semester 2014-2015. The interdisciplinary nature of the seminar was underscored by the collaboration of students from different disciplinary backgrounds on projects at the interface of medicine, health, and gender in American literature, film, and TV series. Together, students analyzed the representations of women in medical professions from historical, cultural, and literary points of view in ‘texts’ from the second half of the nineteenth century until today and presented their research results at a student symposium at the University of Bamberg on 12 February 2015
Bearing Independence: The Concept of Social Childbirth in Martha Ballard\u27s Life Writing
Get PDFMartha Ballard worked as an 18th-century midwife in Hallowell, Maine. Her diary, an important historical account of her time, represents the concept of social childbirth. Women formed a female community around the expecting mother shortly before, during, and after giving birth to support her and allow for a period of recuperation. As a midwife, Martha Ballard was the most important woman to attend the expecting mother. This article argues that this significant status, which Ballard performs in her diary, allowed her and other midwives to break through traditional gender roles, to earn a personal income, travel freely, and live a more independent life
The Struggle of Being Alive: Laboring Bodies in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
Get PDFThis essay reconsiders the Marxist question of how value is created through work and expressed within a lived experience of the body in a near-future setting that is characterized by an expanding impact of biotechnologies. To do so, I will read androids – organic, humanoid beings – as an allegory of the human laborer in a globalized capitalism. The object of my critical inquiry will be Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl“ as it uncompromisingly draws the critical attention towards laboring conditions of laborers of the working class especially in the Global South. It does so by exemplifying social injustices by telling the stories of marginalized laborers. This essay focuses on the android Emiko – a former secretary who is forced to work as a prostitute. By examining her, I want to demonstrate that an analysis of laboring bodies – especially in an increasingly technologically inflicted world – is crucial to the study of living and working conditions since these determine whether we feel alive, autonomous, accepted, or lifeless, restricted, and devalued
“Do You Know” of the Conflict of Having a Family and Career as a Female Surgeon? The Representation of Cristina Yang in ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy
Get PDFAccording to a 2009 poll, only 27% of all surgeons in the United States are women, and looking at thoracic cardiac surgeons, this number declines to merely 3%. Seeking to shed light on cultural, political, and social preconditions of this fact, this essay investigates the conflict many female heart surgeons face, namely the decision between job and family, as it is represented and performed by Cristina Yang in the popular ABC drama series Grey’s Anatomy “(2005-today)
“Perceptions and Their Mutability” in Siri Hustvedt’s Works
Get PDFThis essay investigates how literature can provide insights into the ways human beings perceive the world and themselves. I discuss how Siri Hustvedt uses her fiction and nonfiction to explore questions of visual perception, focusing on its connection to perspective, embodied self, and context. I demonstrate that, being an intersubjective concept, perception in Hustvedt’s writings is always in flux and shaped by the “embodied minds.” The tracing of the mechanisms involved in perception provides insights into Hustvedt’s novels’ narrative unraveling and a key to understanding her characters
From Pearl Harbor (1941) to Pearl Harbor (2001): On the Emancipatory Potential of Nursing During Wartime and its Representation in Hollywood Film
Get PDFThis essay examines the representation of the nursing profession in the Hollywood movie Pearl Harbor“ (2001). As cultural products of their time, films tell us about the social and political conditions in which they were created. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a conservative feminist backlash, which Susan Faludi described as early as 1991 was still impacting the emancipation of women. In its often reactionary portrayal of the women nurses of World War II, Pearl Harbor“ seems to reflect more the situation of women in the 1990s than doing justice to the role of nurses during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thus, through a cultural studies-informed analysis of the movie and its protagonist Evelyn Johnson, expectations of nurses during World War II will be examined and challenged
The Medical Gaze in Psychiatric Treatment: Women Doctors and Nurses in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted
Get PDFThis essay focusses on the forms of psychiatric treatment the protagonists undergo by women doctors and nurses in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. The theoretical basis for this comparative analysis is provided by Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze.’ The different degrees to which this medical gaze is applied by male and female psychiatric staff ultimately have a strong impact on the female patients’ recovery in both narratives.
The Function of Form, Fiction, and Faith in Elisabeth Elliot’s Life Writing
Get PDFThis article explores the role of form, fiction, and faith in the formulation of the self in the life writing of U.S.-American writer and missionary Elisabeth Elliot. Her novel No Graven Image“ (1966) depicts the experiences of an unmarried female missionary who encounters personal and professional difficulties in Ecuador. Parallels between the novel’s content and Elliot’s past experiences as recorded in her journals and her memoir These Strange Ashes“ (1975) raise the question whether the fictional genre can fulfill an autobiographical function. In this regard, the article investigates the influence of the writer’s present circumstances on the writing process and asks whether Elliot’s writer’s block, which she outlines in her journal, plays into the composition and language of the novel. The literary examination reveals the impact of Elliot’s faith in negotiating her self in different genres