USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Review: Dimple Godiwala. Breaking the Bounds. Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since c. 1980.
No full textDimple Godiwala\u27s aim is to give a detailed analysis of contemporary plays by feminist dramatists and to show how they have entered, and thus effectively changed, the British dramatic mainstream, or rather the "malestream" of English, male, white, heterosexual, middle-class, leftwing dramatic writing. Following Foucault\u27s claim that one can never write outside the dominating discourse, Godiwala demonstrates how the five chosen feminist playwrights have managed to transform the patriarchal dramatic discourse from within, thus intervening in the mainstream theatre as "the last site of negotiation" (xiii) that feminism had to enter in the second half of the twentieth century.1 At one level she hence offers an analysis of the changes within dramatic discourse, on another level she undertakes a theoretical critique of Western patriarchy. Assuming an unbroken episteme of patriarchy, which as only in the twentieth century been ruptured by feminism, Godiwala contests Michel Foucault\u27s analysis of epistemological breaks within Western discourse as developed in The Order of Things
Review: Butoh and Transcending the Identity of Sex. Towards a "tantric" interpretation of Sankai Juku\u27s "Kagemi"
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Kagemi by the Japanese Butoh company Sankai Juku was originally created for and at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris. The production is currently touring internationally. I saw it in London at the major dance venue, Sadlers Wells. The Theatre\u27s Press Release describes the performance (10-14 June, 2003) as one which "explores the other world reflected by the mirror image" (Sadlers Wells, 2003). The noun "Kagemi" is thought by the company\u27s Artistic Director Ushio Amagatsu to be the original Japanese word for mirror. In Kagemi\u27s seven scenes water, wind, dance, echo, dark, light, abundance and emptiness blend into a beguiling stage composition. The dance floor is an imaginary pool into which Amagatsu gazes at imaginary reflections. There are moments when the stance of the dancers suggests mirror images. Above the dancers as they negotiate the stage, is a bed of "floating" (in/on air) lotus plants. In the ultimate sequence of the work, the male dancers perform gestures of prayer and supplication followed by the lowering of the lotus flowers to engulf and "drown" them. Finally their hands emerge, like plants, through the jungle of lotuses, as if lotus stems and possibly flowers themselves. I will return to the central significance of this final image with regard to gender later on in this article. Phytomorphic representations of the divine also are rich in diverse examples and often enigmatic. Holy plants and plants considered to be divine are represented in connection with notions of god/goddess in human form
Review: Stephen M. Whitehead. Men and Masculinities: Key Themes and New Directions.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Since the project of masculinity studies began in the Anglo-American academia in the 1970s, much has been published on "man" as a gendered category. From within the context of women\u27s studies, a critical view of men and masculinity has been demanded by feminist critics as a necessary contribution to the project of deconstructing patriarchal myths and power structures. "Man," for centuries held to be "the very centre, the core, the drive, the universal \u27mankind,\u27" (Whitehead 5) has become the object of rigorous scholarly scrutiny which aims at making men visible as a political and a gendered category and at decentring and particularizing men\u27s experience and social position. Over the last two decades, predominantly sociological literature on men has provided increasingly complex tools for theorizing masculinity. This sociology of masculinity focuses on contemporary masculine identities. Another strand of academic writing on men is located within the field of gender history and aims at laying open the historical change of notions of masculinity and hence deconstructing an ahistorical, universal image of Man
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first abstract of the editorial:
Imagendering II is a continuation of Imagendering I, analyzing visualisations of gender and the gendering of visualisation. This second issue presents target essays which focus on the negotiation of gender and sexuality in contemporary poetry, in the nineteenth-century image culture, and in films of diverse genres, from US and German comedies of the 1950s to The Matrix trilogy
Navigating the Narrative Space of Women: Gender and Sick Humour
Get PDFWomen\u27s "narrative space" - the authority granted women\u27s stories - exists marginally, as the concept of female story continues to compete with the perceived monopoly of the "master text." "Sick humour," an approved method of publicly reducing subject to object, principally reconstructs its target, or "butt," through the mechanism of gender identification. Exploring the culture and popularity of "sick humour," I critique the means by which sick jokes-which can in some cases effect social change-define the public awareness of three ordinary American women: Christa McAuliffe, Cathleen Webb and Lorena Bobbitt. Assessing the narrative space of these women, whose private tragedies became sensational public domain, we experience how the humour surrounding and confining women replaces their specificity with the saleable and consumable images of other female bodies
Review: Ina Habermann: Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
"I consider defamation principally as a mode of social exchange which operates on the basis of the spoken word - hence my overall focus on oral defamation, or slander." (1) Recent tabloid, i.e. paper, battles over celebrity love affairs would thus clearly seem to be beyond the scope of Ina Habermann\u27s book - and not only for historical reasons. However, what makes her concisely argued and well-written study fascinating also for anyone interested in the contemporary politics of gendered defamation is the way in which it traces the topic in a period no less obsessed than our own with individuality, reputation and social as well as erotic prowess. Early modern England differed in many respects from present-day Britain but the problems of self-fashioning and of the husbandry of one\u27s own economic and social position that Habermann examines are not only similar to today\u27s culture of self-realisation but can also be read as an archaeology of contemporary forms of subjectivity
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
Gender Roomours II continues the discussion of the first gender forum issue on gender and space by presenting four articles which investigate the nexus of various (fictional) spaces - comprising a room in Paris, a brothel, the Wyoming mountains, and outer space - and (postmodern) gender identity in 20th-century fiction and film
"In the dark camp," Or: Straight with a (Pastoral) Twist: American Western Masculinity in Brokeback Mountain
Get PDFTracing both the fascination and the discomfort that tend to engulf a mainstream audience confronted with "Brokeback Mountain," this article contends that the major source of controversy concerning both the short story and the movie resides in a yet unacknowledged generic crisis rather than in the scarcely innovative postulation of a gay American Western masculinity as such. In a line of reasoning that explores the potentials of generic camp, this crisis is shown to result from a subversion of the Western itself whose conventions have been infiltrated and thoroughly undermined by the sentimental homoeroticism of an altogether different genre, the pastoral elegy. In "Brokeback Mountain," then, this camp invasion of normative generic traditions eventually culminates in the polarisation of two dissimilar stereotypes of masculinity, namely that of the anti-sentimental American Western cowboy, Ennis del Mare, and that of the sentimental pastoral shepherd, Jack Twist
The Obscure Subject of Desire: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Get PDFThis article focuses on new representations of Lucretia in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the many existing versions, those of Bulwer-Lytton, Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo reveal different contextualizations of gender while discussing the poisoner as non-subject, a poisoner whose desire corresponds to collective ideals while her methods reflect the dark side of that same configuration and at the same time comment on the secret workings of money and murder. Non-subjecthood here is what Kristeva\u27s term of the abject points to, as it is produced by the same logic as the subject herself, but reveals that logic in its negatory rather than affirmative power. Whereas the abject can manifest itself in any form of "uninhabitable zone" (Butler 3) that challenges the borders of the self, the female poisoner is a more complicated phenomenon as she reaches out for the status of subject, claiming free will, autonomy and reason as her defining features