USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Gender and the Abject in Sartre
Get PDFThis essay takes Julia Kristeva\u27s concept of abjection as a starting-point to explore the relationship of the French nation to German fascism in the twentieth century — a relationship marked by an othering of fascism as foreign. To investigate this relationship, the essay specifically analyzes the discussion of fascism and the phobic abjection of the feminized (female or homosexual) Other in the early work of France\u27s leading philosopher of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. In contrast to Sartre\u27s claims to an unequivocally antifascist ideological stance, his early work demonstrates the historical continuity between the modern European patriarchal tradition and fascism, and the dialectical implication even of antifascist philosophy and art in fascist thinkin
Interview: "I never dared to write a comedy before. If nobody laughs you\u27re stuffed, aren\u27t you?": Lisa Evans in Conversation
No full textLisa Evans has written extensively for the theatre, radio and television. Her stage work includes both new plays and adaptations, and has been performed apart from the UK in Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Israel and the USA. She regularly collaborates with director Gwenda Hughes and has been writer in residence at the Theatre Centre, London and Temba Theatre. She has won, among others, British Theatre Association awards and her work is published by Oberon. In this interview, she speaks about her work in general, and her play Once We Were Mothers in particular
Tears of Blood and Sorrow: Depression and Women in Traditional China
Get PDFThis article examines the connection between women and depression in traditional China. By analyzing poems written by women from the 11th to the 18th centuries, the paper argues that these poems were used to express profound personal loss, sadness and depression. Over a span of eight hundred years, women used similar images and ideas when expressing their depression. As well, their depression was seen by the poets as a part of being a woman. This concept of depression is re-iterated by the medical practices that most physicians relied on curing physical illness, not mental illness. As a result, women were rarely treated for this mental condition
“What the Books Told”: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artists’ Books
Get PDFThe essay explores the specific insights artists’ books offer to contemporary feminist understandings of breast cancer, questions of representation and embodiment, discourses of ‘witnessing,’ and to doctor-patient relationships, using the work of American book artist Martha A. Hall as a case study. Hall’s artists’ books, created in response to her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989 and the effects of later recurrences until her death in 2004, consist of poems, prose passages, ironic quotations by health practitioners, and images such as x-rays, bone scans, and pictures of prescription bottles. Artists’ books create a different kind of ‘reading experience’ compared to most ordinary books. While this is often described in terms of a powerful ‘aesthetic’ experience, in the essay I am more concerned with illustrating how artists’ books engage and complicate discourses of witnessing, which have recently become foregrounded in the fields of trauma, disability, and illness studies. I also discuss the potential the artist’s book holds as a medium for sharing experiences of critical illness and for effecting change in the ways medical professionals interact with their patients, thus commenting on both its personal and political value. The essay concludes with a series of reflections triggered by my own particular encounter with Hall’s work.
Undoing gender revisited: Judith Butler’s parody and the avant-garde tradition
Get PDFThe considerations outlined in this text are motivated by two interrelated phenomena: the passionate use that contemporary political movements such as the alter-globalisation movement or the queer movement make of aesthetic tactics such as parody, irony or alienation and the similarities and manifold relations that exist between this political practice and the feminist theory that has developed since the late 1980s
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
Gender, race and class used to be seen as separate categories for members of the dominant and repressed groups, until scholars started to understand that the intersection of these issues, in combination with age, sexuality, abilities and others, are integral to the position a member of society may hold. These intersections are referred to as the “race-class-gender matrix, the intersectional paradigm, interlocking systems of oppression, multiple axes of inequality, the intersection and intersectionality.”(Berger and Guidroz, 2009, 1) Because of its “[...] critical stance toward knowledge in the traditional disciplines, its interdisciplinary approach, and its orientation toward social change and social betterment, women’s studies has been most open to self-critique for its exclusion of multiply oppressed groups such as women of color, working-class women, and lesbians.” (Weber 2004, 121
A Republic of Laughter: Marietta Holley and the Production of Women’s Public Humour in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States
Get PDFIn the latter half of the nineteenth century, Marietta Holley enjoyed massive success as one of the most popular American humourists. Known as “the female Mark Twain” (Curry xiii). Holley blended dialect and regional humour into a new, democratic and transformative genre that challenged conventional representations of women’s emotional life and their relation to public and political spaces. In this paper, I define the genre of humour writing Holley helped to fashion, “women’s public humour,” and situate it in relation to political and social notions of the public, especially those fractured along gender lines, that were of key interest to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. humour industry
Where Two Worlds Coincide. David Berger on Repression, Transgression, and the Roman Catholic Church
Get PDFDer heilige Schein is not so much a continuation of an ongoing and - some may say – muted debate, in which a conservative Catholicism is set off against an enlightened way of thinking. Berger’s book in fact undermines reiterated concepts of power and discrimination as well as clear-cut positionings of perpetrator and victim. On the one hand homosexuality generally figures as the repressed and marginalised desire in oppressive, heteronormative cultural systems. But the apparent fear of its disruptive potential and its assumed opposition to “the norm” on the other hand has endowed it with a highly mythologised status. Within the realms of the Roman Catholic Church, the power mechanisms in relation to same sex desire are even more complex. Because while as an institution the Church strongly promotes the repression of homosexuality since it “hates the sin and not the sinner”, it is built upon the support of gay men and even provides a welcome setting for its pursuit. It is the transgression and blurring of boundaries in terms of communities and obligations, its foregrounding of the ambiguous interplay of repression and oppression which renders the text so uncanny
Dis-placing Laughter in 30 Rock. Beyond Corporate Comedy or Back to the Funny Female’s Modern Roots
Get PDFThe significance of 30 Rock’s TV comedy for gendered laughter can only be evaluated fully if historical and theoretical perspectives are combined: Between Liz Lemon and her Boss Jack Donaghy a socially pre-modern comedy of carnivalesque reversal and familiarization clashes with a type of ambiguity that results from the different systems within modern society as described by Niklas Luhmann. While the corporate man’s sense of humour is tied to institutional hierarchies the funny female character may have become an institution – as head writer and star comedienne –, but her metafictional ironies are used to risk and secure follow-up in a way that shows awareness both of the change in social organization and the established status of women in comedy today. Even if the conditions of being subversive are not the same as in earlier waves of feminism and modernity, 30 Rock’s arrangement of comic modes owes its sophistication not simply to media intertextuality, the history and gender politics of comic communication turn out to be more structurally revealing