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The plastic woven bag has become a symbolic representation of Indonesian women's identity since the trend increased in 2021. The plastic woven bag represents femininity and the image of women as a result of socio-cultural construction. The activity of weaving paradoxically puts women in both a central and a marginal role. The weaving industry is characterized by an increasing number of platforms for women to generate income and improve their economic welfare. Nevertheless, women are still faced with patriarchal domination, because the demands of their domestic role limit their ability to move freely in public space. Therefore, their status as homeworkers has subordinated women to the status of marginal breadwinners in the economic system. This research aims to reveal the marginalization of women in plastic woven bag SMEs (small and medium enterprises). This research also aims to analyze the environmental risks that are faced by women, families, and society due to the use of synthetic chemicals in the production of woven plastic bags. This research used the perspective of eco-feminism, Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus, and Ulrich Beck's concept of a risk society (2012) as analytical tools. This research used qualitative research methods, and it was conducted at SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that produce plastic woven bags in Sambirejo Village, Madiun Regency, East Java, Indonesia. The subjects in this research were women who run SMEs. This research found that the marginalization experienced by plastic woven bag craftswomen was divided into two domains--the public (Woven House) and the domestic (household). Women still perceive the practice of marginalization as normal because of their pessimistic attitude and the Javanese philosophy of 'nerimo ing pandum (accepting one's lot in life as a gift of God). This study also concludes that environmental risks include the absence of waste management and the emergence of respiratory diseases suffered by some craftswomen. Therefore, it is necessary to have government policies and environmentalists' input to overcome the health problems experienced by craftswomen of these plastic woven bags. Keywords: Marginalization of women, Homeworkers, Environmental risks, Plastic woven bags, SMEs, Indonesian women workers, Introduction Community participation in the SMEs (small and medium enterprises) sector and the role of SMEs in national economic growth is increasing (Eriza & Saragih, 2019; Halim, 2020; Huda & [...]

Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi (1985) is representative of African women's subordination in 'motherhood,' 'body movements' (used for communication in the absence of any bridge language), and 'marriage' after the arrival of a group of uninvited exclusively white people (albinos) from England in the land of shavi, a land that was abundantly blessed with a robust matriarchal spirit and self-sustaining powers of African women. This article examines how African women novelists shaped heteronormative plots as a compulsory gendered perspective for articulating the politicized disappearance of African femininity left for organizing African manhood and the masculine principle of the social, political, and heterosexual in a community like shavi. Extending old shavian men's vision, Queen Mother attempts to reawaken European visitors', such as Flip, Mendoza, Ronje, Andria, and Ista, struggle for a heterosexual role and desire limited to their race so as to save shavian women from the men's sexual advances and to assist Shavian women in the preservation of African virtues such as hospitality, cooperation, equality, and love besides protection against Western and young Shavian men's critical and oppressive attitudes. This article thus contributes to persistent discussions on heterosexuality, the masculinity-femininity division, and heterosexual imaginary., INTRODUCTION Heteronormative plots constitute an expression of emotional detachment by African women from the ideology of marital bliss, domestic engagement, and a supreme portrait of husbands. Fashioned on the popular [...]

Myth, legend, and the Bible all warn of the dangers of looking where we ought not. Those who turn their gaze in the wrong direction are cursed, blinded, turned to [...]

Literary scholars have consistently construed biracial figures as instruments for exploring other matters than biraciality. This trend has persisted at least since 1945, when Penelope Bullock (1945: 80) observed that [...]

Dans cet article, Dayna McLeod fait un retour sur sa performance de longue durée Cougar for a Year pour montrer comment les oeuvres et les pratiques axées sur la performance peuvent avoir une incidence sur des enjeux liés au genre, à l'âge moyen et au fait d'être queer. Mettant la théorie queer en dialogue avec les études de l'âge, McLeod s'interroge sur la façon dont on impose une in/visibilité à la féminité et au queer selon l'âge des sujets féminins queer. Elle situe le terme << cougar >> en décrivant ses origines canadiennes et ses liens avec la culture hétérosexuelle et pense la durée en tant que pratique liée au vieillissement, et aussi en tant qu'aspect vivant de l'art de la performance. En s'intéressant aux réactions du public à Cougar for a Year qu'elle observe en tant qu'interprète de la pièce, elle montre qu'il est pratiquement impossible de situer le cougar en tant que sujet queer, tellement la dominance et les effets du patriarcat hétéro et cis normatif se font sentir. Elle explore également comment le cougar, en tant que symbole non normatif qui vieillit, investit l'hétéronormativité d'une dimension queer. Mots-clés : cougar, âge moyen, queer, performance art, féminité, représentation This article engages with Dayna McLeod's durational performance Cougar for a Year to demonstrate how performance-based artworks and practices have the potential to impact, affect, and intersect with gender, middle-aging, and queerness. Putting queer theory in conversation with age studies, McLeod examines how femininity and queerness are potentially rendered in/visible in relation to aging for queer female subjects. She situates 'cougar' as a term by describing its Canadian origins as well as its relationship to heterosexual culture. McLeod also examines durationality as a practice of aging itself as well as an aspect of the live/living production of performance art. Examining public responses to Cougar for a Year gleaned from her observations as the performer, McLeod demonstrates how situating the cougar as queer subject is next to impossible because of the dominance and effects of cisheteropatriarchy, while excavating how the cougar queers heteronormativity as a non-normative aging sexual symbol. Keywords: cougar, middle-age, queer, performance art, femininity, representation, 'Cougar' is a term charged with contradictions and double meanings that can simultaneously mock or celebrate the woman in question. The generally accepted cultural definition for cougar is an older [...]

A murderous mother who kills her own sons, a sensual sorceress who transforms men into beasts, a child-woman billed as 'The Happiest Girl in the World,' a high-class prostitute 'that [...]

Ah der siebzehnjahrige Karl Rossmann, der von seinen armen Eltern nach Amerika geschickt worden war, weil ihn ein Dienstmadchen verfuhrt und ein Kind von ihm bekommen hatte, in dem schon [...]

'Oh girls in space, be wary, be wary, be wary!' --as sung by Lieutenant Uhura in 'Charlie X' To dismiss the original Star Trek television series, 1966 to 1969, as [...]

First and above all came that sense of color: into this world of pale yellowish and pinkish parchment, that absence or negation of color, came, suddenly, a glow of golden [...]

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between is a central text in discussions of gendering practices and gendered configurations within Kenyan and African colonial modernity. This article extends those discussions by focusing on girlhood as an especially vexed category in the novel. Taking Muthoni, the Christian leader Joshua's daughter, as its point of departure, it argues that colonial modernity ruptured concepts and practices of girlhood for girls like Muthoni, who were caught between the limbo of Christian modernity and ethnic cultural practice. Unable to fit neatly within either paradigm, these girls experienced themselves as spectral, material apparitions. As these girls interacted with and moved between Christians and traditionalists, their spectral materialities threatened to dissolve the ostensible distinctions between both groups, rendering gendered and sociocultural identifications unstable., When does Muthoni, daughter of the Christian leader Joshua, die in Ngugi wa Thiongo's The River Between? Toward the end of the novel, Waiyaki is summoned to a secret meeting [...]

This article examines the ways in which literary representations of the sacred feminine have shifted and evolved in anglophone Nigerian-Igbo literature. Beginning with an examination of the precolonial tradition of Mami Wata, or mother water, goddess worship among Igbo communities, this article traces the ways in which colonial imposition both fossilized previously flexible standards of gendered discourse and promoted largely Judeo-Christian norms for gendered behavior as part of a total political, economic, and social process of domination, which resulted in an effacement of the sacred feminine from literary representation. This effacement, however, has been redressed in recent years through a shift in engagement that has allowed the anglophone Nigerian-Igbo writer to return to the feminine as a means of voicing an alternative tradition, turning away from the colonialist problematic of earlier works. This evolution in discursive representations of gender and femininity is explored through readings of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Nwapa's Efuru, Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, and Abani's GraceLand., This essay takes for its starting point a passing reference in Chris Abani's 2004 novel GraceLand. In a passage buried midway through the narrative, Abani's protagonist, Elvis, sees the remnants [...]

On 1901 Harper's Bazaar asked the question, 'Have Women a Sense of Humor?' (Coquelin 67). More than one hundred years later, Vanity Fair published an article explaining 'Why Women Aren't [...]

Gender, like the real, is not only the effect of representation but also of its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma which can rupture or destabilize, if [...]

In African literature, a substantial body of scholarship deals with gender cleavages but the tension opposing the cultural construction of femininity and women's subjective consciousness lacks attention. This article examines the resistance against the cultural elements that mark women's bodies as female. A consideration of the novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el Saadawi, one of the leading Egyptian feminist writers, reveals the contradictions embedded in women's self-oppressive struggle against patriarchy. The interconnection of resistance and oppression indicates how women's liberatory practices are inseparable from the patriarchal realm. The major flaw of the feminist discourse resides in the configuration of men and women in terms of oppressors and oppressed and the subsequent reinscription of the already existing and socially sanctioned sexual binaries. Reshaping the relationships between men and women in a new light of partnership rather than antagonism for a resolution of the problems they face together is more empowering for the feminist writer., The formation of feminist critical discourses is deeply fashioned by the political and sociocultural environment of their productions. Improving women's condition and lifting them off the weight of patriarchy motivate [...]

Solar Storms begins and ends with a face. As the novel opens, Angela Jensen, the narrator, returns to her homeland in Adam's Rib as a scared teenager who hides her [...]

Geoffrey Wright's ambitious re-imagining of Macbeth transposes Shakespeare's 1606 Scottish play to the warring criminal underworld of contemporary Melbourne, Australia. One might expect a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare produced and [...]

Vendredi soir (2001) is a film of enigma and contradiction. It is the story of a thirty-something Parisian woman relocating from her apartment to that of her partner, who--en route--meets [...]

The boom of romantic novels in the Spanish literary scene during the initial years of Franco regime and its implication on the feminine standards is analyzed. The romantic novels by Carmen de Icaza were found to fit the distinct parameters of femininity such as passivity or of love and sentimentalism but on the other hand they challenged the basis of a patriarchal society.

The article discusses the conflict interwar single women experienced to pursue public freedom of travel while adhering to the limitations imposed on them. Elizabeth Bowen's 1932 novel 'To the North' exposes the contradictions in discourses on female sexuality in the 1930s British society.

The history of the term 'slut' and the articulation of different meanings around it are examined. Findings show some of the ways in which the term is accepted in various popular cultures and new media text.

A study on some educated Chinese heterosexual men's consumption of Korean dramas in the industrial society of Hong Kong is conducted. Results show that Chinese men enjoy the images of the ideal women, fantasy of love and the beautiful cosmopolitan city life.

The manner in which the 1970s television serial 'The Bionic Woman' sought to address feminist issues of gender and sexuality, even while portraying the female as a strong, liberated woman with a cyborg body is discussed.

This article is intended as a modest follow-up on a classic study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. In Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, these two linguists showed [...]

The wave of women's poetry anthologies in the 1970s showed that it was the distinctiveness of women's bodies that mattered most to the writing of poetry, but by the 1980s, the anti-essentialism of gender theory made such reliance on the female body look obsolete. Anti-essentialism has however proved to be entirely compatible with the most recent wave of interest in avant-garde or 'innovative' women's writing, an interest that makes the distinctiveness of women's bodies as essential in the 21st century as it ever was.

Else Ury's ten-volume Nesthakchen series for girls (published 1918-25) tells the story of a doctor's daughter from Berlin, beginning with the heroine's childhood and ending with her life as a [...]

The accessibility of self-rated masculinity and femininity is proposed to vary as a function of individual differences, product types, and affective states. In turn, enhanced accessibility of masculinity or femininity should increase the influence of masculine or feminine ad-self congruency on advertisement evaluations. Results of two experiments showed that, for individuals whose masculinity or femininity was chronically accessible, congruency between ad portrayals and self-ratings on these dimensions predicted more positive attitudes toward the advertisement. Moreover, product types and affective states altered the degree of influence that masculine or feminine ad-self congruency exerted on advertisement evaluations. Finally, individuals high in masculinity were found to rely more on product function beliefs when evaluating advertised brands. Keywords Advertising * Femininity * Masculinity

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat claims to be uniquely interested in the metaphysics of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, yet her films always bring together erotics and erasure. Breillat proposes a materiality of sex and a metaphysics of sex and, in that, she requires the figure and function of death in order to make both moves simultaneously.

The fact that almost all the Bad Sex Awards of Literary Review went to male writers, suggests that female readers appear dissatisfied with male representations of sex and that either women apparently do not write about sex at all or that they write differently. Dominant conceptions of female sexuality are formed by patriarchy as Michele Roberts expressed through her 'Politics of Pleasure' and it is argued that in her novels Roberts conveys that changes in social relations can take place only through changes in sexual relations.

The idea of female consumption as a basis for an investigation into multiple constructions of femininity is explored. The way in which the interaction between readers and text reflects the interaction between minds and bodies is also examined in the light of Helen Dunmore's 'Talking to the Dead'.

When Gertrude Stein immortalized those American expatriates living in Paris during the 1920s as 'a Lost Generation,' she was referencing the sense of alienation characterizing that cohort of artists and [...]

Because women's sexuality was ... strongly denied, the pre-sexual girl, the epitome of innocent beauty which awakens longing without itself demanding sexual satisfaction, was above all idealized. (1) The common [...]

The poet, painter, and biographer Matilda Betham (1776-1852) earned her own place in the annals of literary history chiefly through her friendships with and portraiture of famous men, most notably [...]

This essay focuses on the career of the most popular Czech turn-of-the-century actress, Hana Kvapilova (1860-1907). Kvapilova has been widely considered by her contemporaries and theatre historians both a 'national [...]

This essay explores the possibility of regarding Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms as evidence of Hemingway's dissatisfaction with cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity. Working with Cixous' definition of bisexuality, [...]

At first glance, the suffrage activism of singer and actress Lillian Russell meshes neatly with conventional wisdom about actresses' involvement in the movement for women's enfranchisement. As a successful star [...]

The dance scenes in Brigitte Bardot's films encourage the female spectator to identify with the Ideal body. In addition, Bardot constitutes herself as subject in these scenes, and dance signifies individual freedom.

This article explores the influence of artistic parents on the creativity of their children, juxtaposing theories by Harold Bloom who sees generation as oedipal rivalry in a patrilineal geneaology as opposed to Virginia Woolf's theories of the matrilineal artistic heritage as feminine creativity handed down from mothers to daughters. The author suggests that women artists have grown up with elective-artist mothers for the first time in the 20th century and this has contributed to their ability to produce new forms of art; references to the work of Rachel Whiteread are highlighted.