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Robert Burns’s Friend Robert Cleghorn in his Cultural Context
Get PDFFolklore, Ethnology, Antiquarianism, Robert Burns, Scottish literature, Scottish poetry, Scottish song, Scottish music, Robert Cleghorn, Cultural History, Scottish history, Caledonian Mercury, Kingsknow, Redford, Saughton, George Thomson, Ann Hunter, Vocal music
The European Ethnological Centre
No full textEthnology, Folklore, Scottish culture, Scottish history, material culture, fieldwork, local studies, regional studies, Dumfries and Galloway, Archive
Can Religious Modest Dress be Included in the Feminist Project
No full textIn 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, claimed that the burqa was not a symbol of faith but rather a sign of enslavement, and was therefore unwelcome in French society (La Fornara, 2018). Feminism aims to free women from any such ‘enslavement’ that would act as a barrier to gender equality. Nevertheless, the intersectional injustices that impact religious women make this debate more complicated than what Sarkozy suggested. This essay will therefore explore the ethical significance of religious modest dress, and advocate for its compatibility with the feminist project. This will be achieved through focusing on Jewish and Muslim women, living as minoritised groups in Western countries. While religious patriarchal structures seem to contradict the strive for gender equality through dictating how women present themselves, this should not permit the Western world to act as ‘saviours’ and reduce these women to victims. Instead, they should be included in the feminist cause and an effort should be made to truly understand their perspectives in order to strive for a modern world that treats men and women from all backgrounds more equally than it does currently.
Against Chrononormativity: How May a Concept of Queer Time Challenge Traditional Ideas of Historical Progress?
No full textIf we, in modernity, define time as the standard by which we measure and organise the expected life course, as ‘linear, ordered, progressive, and teleological’ (Luciano, 2007:2), then queer discourse and experience can be seen to exist as oppositional to it. Historical progress is marked by heteronormative assumptions of the life course - regarding factors such as bodies, achievements, goals, and productivity - assumptions that queer communities may not always assimilate to. This essay aims to discuss how a concept of ‘queer time’, borne from this alienation and difference, can be seen to challenge traditional, heteronormative, and ‘western’ ideas of historical progress. To do so, it is important to consider further concepts, such as chrononormativity, grief, and activism, through contesting queer theories on futurity. Additionally, all arguments should contemplate intersectional applications, as what we define as ‘the queer experience’ continues to adapt and diversify
Translating Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Surrealist Art
Get PDFVirginia Woolf often crosses the boundaries between literature and painting in her writing, masterfully combining these two realms. However, her novels are only ever read within a post-Impressionist framework. In this essay, I aim to challenge this well-established notion by translating To the Lighthouse into the terms of surrealist art. Firstly, I compare automatic writing used by surrealists and Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique and free indirect discourse, also reflecting on their significance in Lily Briscoe’s painting. Then, I explore the concept of the surreal house and space in both surrealism and To the Lighthouse. Lastly, I develop the notion of Mrs Ramsay as a ghost and her influence on Lily’s final piece of art. To justify my translation, I return to Freudian psychoanalysis, which was fundamental for surrealists and equally significant for Woolf, although in a less immediate way. It is essential to note that existing scholarship does not associate Woolf with surrealism at all, and, accordingly, I am not going to argue that Woolf considered herself a surrealist, nor that To the Lighthouse is representative of the movement. Instead, I plan to challenge the form of Woolf’s novel, redirecting our transfixed gaze towards new possible dimensions of this well-known, extensively interpreted text, and assist in merging the realms of literature and painting
Consonant clusters and verb stems: making sense of distributional gaps
Get PDFThis paper investigates an apparent gap in the distribution of nasal + stop clusters, as well as certain aspects of the diachronic emergence of this gap, in Latin and Hungarian. The phenomenon investigated is the absence of a frequent consonant cluster ([nt] in Latin, [ŋk] in Hungarian) from a position at the end of verb stems. An important property of the missing consonant cluster in both languages is that it also functions as a person marker in the verbal inflection. It is argued that in Latin this gap is functionally motivated: it represents a case of syntagmatic pressure to avoid repeating the same sequence at too close an interval. In Hungarian, by contrast, the absence of [ŋk] from verb stem-final position is arguably unrelated to the identical phonological form of the 1Plural affix and is simply the result of accidents of diachronic development
Déjà Vu: The story so far (right)
No full textIn the process of writing this article, I reflected on my experience of the transformation of Ireland from an avowedly theocratic state, to one that has been the first in the world to vote for marriage equality by a margin of two to one. In addition, Leo Varadkar, the current Taoiseach, that is, Prime Minister, is openly gay, and his father was from India. Further, five years ago, in 2018, Ireland voted by 66.4% to 33.6% with a turnout of almost 65% to delete an anti-abortion clause in the Constitution of Ireland following a long and arduous campaign (Fitzsimons, 2021)
Thinking the Self through Hooks, Needles, and Scalpels: Body Suspensions, Tattoos, and other Body Modifications
No full textBody modifications such as tattoo, scarification and body suspension represent not only aesthetic interventions, they can also be social practices with which to challenge and transcend the body’s limits, operating on the perception of wellbeing and moulding specific forms of self. In this Research Article, based on research on body suspension in Europe, I aim to analyse body modifications as a means to voluntarily intervene in human perceptive abilities, shaping individual lives through unconventional sensory experiences. In these practices, pain is signified as a threshold for sensory turmoil, capable of shaping the protagonists into a ‘sensory poiesis’. Through such sensory experiences the individual embarks on a process of ‘self-design’ to achieve a better state of being, combining suspensions with other body modification techniques. Suspension practitioners act on the flesh and skin with hooks, scalpel, and ink in order to process events, to trigger new versions of the self, and to enhance how they feel. In doing so, they produce unique and original ‘projects of humanity’, that is, new forms of humanity created by the individuals themselves
Making Sense of New Disease Categories: Naming, Spatialising, and Serialising in Genomic Medicine
No full textIntrigued by geneticists’ framing of new gene names as somehow devoid of meaning, I set out to explore how patients and families make sense of naming practices in the field of genomic medicine. The aim for ever-more precise disease categorisation has resulted in names for medical conditions that are more akin to car-licence plates, such as DPF2 and G246A. Conducting fieldwork in Denmark, I followed the introduction of personalised medicine—that is the aim to tailor prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to the individual based on genomic and other data—in the field of rare diseases and diabetes. Engaging with theories of naming, spatialisation and serialisation, I suggest that it is exactly because of their unsettled meaning and presupposed lack of history that new gene names provide patients extra room for creative identity work. I argue that some patients and families use the new genetic disease labels to escape unwanted moral regimes, relocating disease aetiology from a moralised landscape to a ‘molecularised’ genetic one. I discuss how practices of serialisation enable patients to feel recognised as unique persons. In conclusion, I suggest that while the new genetic names may not stigmatise, they do change the patients’ idea of who they are in surprising ways, some of which the geneticists had not anticipated