USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Love beyond Boundaries: Subjectivity and Sexuality through Bhawaiya Folk Song of Bengal
No full textBoundaries mark limits, and as such the transgression of boundaries is inherently subversive. My research on the Bhawaiya songs of Bengal examines this transgression. Most love songs in Bhawaiya are about ‘illicit’ love, deviating from social norms and often occur in reaction to oppressive marital circumstances. They are a gateway to exploring female narratives of subjecthood and desire, in which women are the agents of their own sexuality. My focus is on deviance from marriage in the Bhawaiya folk songs as a form of subversion. Understanding Bhawaiya and its subversive existence requires an understanding of political, religious, linguistic and cultural boundaries of the Bhawaiya areas. Cooch Behar, the birthplace of the Bhawaiya genre, has historically been situated on blurred boundaries: between the cultural borders of Bengali and Rajbangshi, the religious borders of Islam and Hinduism, the governmental borders of the British Raj and Hindu kingdom and the borders of the Colonial and Bengali nationalist narratives. Even now, the Bhawaiya areas are divided by the international borders of Bangladesh and India. These blurred boundaries create a space for marginal peoples to develop and create their own cultural products, using the language of affection to resist and subvert patriarchal social rules. In my article, I will explore the subversive existence of female desire within Bhawaiya, and examine its feminist possibilities
Homeopathy, Orificial Surgery, and the Clitoris in the United States, 1880- 1920 – an Eclectic Approach?
No full textThis article focuses on a hitherto unknown surgical practices performed around the vulva. At the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, a group of Chicago-based surgeons performing orificial surgery expounded on the curing and helpful aspects of surgical practices performed on mouth and nose and the bodily orifices below the waist. This association was founded by Edwin Pratt, a trained physician and homeopath. In 1887 he had published a monograph on Orificial Surgery, between 1892 and 1901 he edited the Journal of Orificial Surgery. Although the majority of the articles were contributions of him, other practitioners also gave examples of their treatment activities. Orificial surgery fits in well with the idea of reflex neuroses, which was an accepted explanation for disease at that time. Pratt recommended surgical interventions on the rectum, circumcision as well as the removal of the hood of the clitoris and even hysterectomy to cure masturbation and insanity, and other so-called chronic diseases. This paper attempts to contextualize the era of Orificial Surgery and their protagonists in the medical and social realm
Hierarchies of ‘Treatment’: The Influences of Comorbid Psychiatric Diagnoses on Individuals with Gender Dysphoria
No full textSince the introduction of the gender dysphoria (GD) diagnosis, previously marginalized trans individuals, such as emancipated minors, incarcerated individuals, and individuals with cognitive disabilities that are deemed able to participate in their various medical treatments, have been invited to have an autonomous role in their decisions to access medical methods of gender affirmation. It is important to note that trans individuals with psychiatric diagnosis/es in addition to GD are prohibited to this sense of autonomy since they are deemed to be incompetent due to these comorbid ‘psychiatric’ diagnoses. I investigate the creation and consequences of a hierarchy of treatment that is created by conceiving of the trans phenomenon as a psychiatric disorder which prioritizes effective management of the non-GD diagnosis/es before validating the gender identity through both social and medical methods. This hierarchical creation invariably leads to a pathologization of the trans phenomenon as medical professionals attempt to prove through causation the actual ‘true’ diagnosis embedded within the comorbidity. The consequences of this hierarchy of treatment denies a trans person with a multiplicity of psychiatric diagnoses access to gender affirming medical methods in favor of uncovering the truth of their pathology, which can exacerbate emotional distress, distress that can potentially have lethal physical manifestations, that an individual is already experiencing. The medical institution needs to reevaluate the principle “first, do no harm,” to understand how their resistance to grant autonomy to trans individuals with comorbid diagnoses can, in actuality, create the most harm. In order avoid further marginalization of this sub-population within the trans community, I propose an eradication of any diagnosis that attempts to depict the trans phenomenon in favor of a new reimagining of reimbursable medical methods of gender affirmation that privileges the autonomy of trans individuals
Review: Kay Cannon’s Girlboss
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Girlboss (2017), created by Kay Cannon (writer of Pitch Perfect and 30 Rock), is an American comedy distributed by the streaming platform Netflix. The first and only season was released on April 21, 2017, having been canceled the following June. The show is based on Sophia Amoruso’s autobiographical book #Girlboss (2014) and it follows a fictional Sophia (her last name was changed to Marlowe) as she begins a career as the founder of the Ebay store Nasty Gal Vintage. Talking to The New York Times, Kay Cannon highlighted her objectives: “I wanted to tell the story of a flawed woman that is not a fairy tale”. Adding “rough edges” freed Cannon up to more “interesting storytelling”. Working with Netflix and its binge-able mode of distribution (making an entire season available at the same time) allowed Cannon to feel less restricted when it came to presenting, as she put it, an “off-putting” protagonist
Marching Forward with #MeToo: The Representations of Women in American Political Television Series
No full textOne year has passed since the #MeToo movement started to spread on social media in October, 2017. This powerful movement has connected women not only in the United States but also around the globe to form a strong alliance to renegotiate women’s roles and status in contemporary society in which sexism and misogyny are becoming a rising trend and women are challenged by the threat of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace. In the recent October issue of The Economist, a front-page op-ed puts forward that #Metoo “is not about sex so much as about power—how power is distributed, and how people are held accountable when power is abused” (“#MeToo, One Year On” 13). In the world of law and politics, such biased power distribution between men and women is even more apparent. Struggling at the periphery of legal and political fields, women have been challenged by gender stereotypes and have been insulated from power and leadership. Over the past decades, American women have made significant progresses in legal and political professions. In the 2018 election, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland became the first two Native American women elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. More and more women politicians rise up to seize power, subvert the malecentric system, and, therefore, provide real-life examples for numerous American television series featuring women’s advancement in law and politics.
The present article aims to investigate the representations of women in two American political television series—House of Cards (Netflix, 2013-2018) and The Good Wife (CBS, 2009-2016)—by tackling one major question, namely, the representations of women and how they deal with the sexual assault cases. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the female rape victims (including one female politician) who have experienced sexual assault, and women lawyers who represent and help the female rape victims. By focusing on the rape-centered episodes in these two television dramas, this article also attempts to connect with some real-life incidents, for instance, the #MeToo movement, so as to contemplate existing problems with respect to women’s empowerment, gender equality, sexual misconducts, and social justice in and beyond legal and political fields
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
In 2019, Stonewall celebrates its 50th anniversary. While rainbow flags and merchandise fill the streets of cities celebrating Pride all over the world, queer experience remains highly ambiguous, its status complicated. Although the commercialization of the LGBTQ* movement points both to a growing awareness of pluralism in public discourses as well as to economy’s comprehension of diversity’s buying power, it may also represent the mainstream’s grasp on what used to be exclusively queer spaces out of necessity: Pride month has just ended and already Boston’s approved ‘Straight Pride’ is lurking. Scheduled for August 31 (Stock), the event exemplifies only a fraction of heteronormativity’s ongoing reign1 over global social structures, but almost symbolically stands for the rigor with which a privileged majority (here, in terms of gender and sexual identity) continues to take the lion’s share. Normalized identity and behavior is maintained and only challenged temporally when the ‘unusual’ seems more profitable
Review: Brown Girls (2017) by Fatimah Asghar and Sam Bailey
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In Brown Girls, the viewer observes a portrait of racialized youth. Brown Girls, directed by Sam Bailey and written by Fatimah Asghar, is set in contemporary Chicago. In February of 2017, the OpenTV webseries released on its own, independent URL. Viewers can access the website, and therefore the episodes, from numerous countries; however, Brown Girls is a comedy that confronts American issues. A number of U.S. sociopolitical events set the stage for Brown Girls’ focus on race, queerness, and femininity: the 2016 Presidential election, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, and an ever-increasing rate of police brutality against people of color
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
If gender is enacted like a script, then Kathy Acker\u27s oeuvre can be seen as a re-writing of that script. Acker’s texts feed on and rip off other texts with subversive irony, transgressing the sociocultural script of what women and literature ought to be. Coming from an upper-class family, she chose to speak to the working classes. This conscious choice is linked to her disinheritance because of her marriage to a man beneath her status and her subsequent divorce. Significantly, Kathy Alexander appropriated the name Acker from her first husband, while emancipating herself from the institution of marriage. Similarly, her appropriation of texts as a writer indicates her divorce from these texts, a rewriting of the terms she was expected to agree upon, of the script she - as a woman - was expected to follow. This divorce enabled her to see the upper class narratives she had been brought up with in a different light, as she started working in sex shows and as a stripper. It is this intersection of class, sex, and gender, which defines the trajectory of Acker’s writing
Delinquent
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article\u27s introduction:
It’s not easy to love a delinquent girl.She’s vulgar, she’s coarse. She despises the world.— G.B. Jones Retrospectiv
Kathy Acker’s Dildos: Literary prosthetics and textual unmaking
No full textReading Acker through the lenses of Paul B. Preciado, Linda Williams, Pierre Guyotat and Georgina Colby, Finch proposes to think of Acker’s literary practice as a series of “dildos”: textual prosthetics that perform protocols of textual unmaking. Finch bases her textual reading on Acker’s early typescripts, recently published for the first time, providing an original analysis of these archival materials that works to bridge ‘70s avant-garde literary practices with current queer theories of immersive embodiment