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Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (1999), edited by Ashwini Sukthankar, anthologizes short personal writing and fictional pieces, memoirs, poems, essays, letters and more, all produced by Indian women-loving-women (WLW) (an umbrella term for women with queer sexualities and romantic interests in women). The back cover of the book is blazoned with the quote: 'A groundbreaking book where lesbians found their voice for the first time.' Even more than twenty years after its publication, there is not much scholarship on this book despite it being one of the first few publications to assert and embody the existence of a community of Indian queer women. This paper intends to explore how this collection uses (lesbian) 'writing' as a representative strategy to address the limits of the universalized paradigm of 'lesbian' desires. To this end, the paper will employ the Derridean concept of 'arche-writing' and argue that this anthology becomes an arche-writing of Indian female queer subjects who speak/write/narrate in both homodiegetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third-person) narratives. Citing some of these pieces from this anthology, the paper will argue that 'lesbian writing' is not merely a collection of literal writings but a concept of writing that directly embodies the material existence, experiences, voices, desires and bodies of WLW of India. This paper will also argue that through queering or deconstructing the notion of writing as fixed, the anthology destabilizes and queers the fixed understanding of the subjectivities of queer women and lesbians. Keywords: Lesbian, Queer, Writing, Arche-writing, Derridean theory, Deconstruction, Lesbian writing, Introduction Life narratives, fictional pieces, poetry, and several other non-fictional writings make up Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (1999), a collection that embodies Indian lesbian subjectivity. Facing the [...]

Feminist discourses on the 'New Indian Woman' focus on the woman's body as a surface upon which modernity is inscribed. Sexual transgression has been the only lens through which the New Woman has been usually studied and analyzed until now, thus offering a superficial definition of modernity by women being defined only by the corporeal. This is problematic not only because it offers a reductionist view of modernity but also 'constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes woman whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault' (Daya, 'Embodying Modernity' 97). This paper will study two novels, Kishwar Desai's Witness the Night (2010) and Kalpana Swaminathan's I Never Knew It Was You (2012), closely analyzing the women sleuths as portrayed in these texts: Simran Singh in the former, Lalli and Sita in the latter. The paper will move beyond the existing discourses on the New Indian woman and demonstrate how the New Woman in these narratives of detection is transgressive in contesting dominant ideals of femininity. The aim will be to understand how these women detectives contest and challenge patriarchal hegemonies through their behavior and how their acts of detection also are essential acts of rebellion against a largely misogynistic system. Swaminathan's Lalli and Sita and Desai's Simran can be seen as a reflection of the uninhibited, independent, professional, twenty-first century Indian woman. The paper seeks to reconstruct the figure of the New Indian woman through the representations of these women fighting crimes against women in modern-day India, enacting their autonomy and rebellion in the process by deftly taking on the role of a detective, traditionally a profession for men. The aim will also be to discuss how these works provide a space for creating new roles for women, while also illustrating a wide spectrum of women's experiences. Lastly, the paper will explore these works in the context of India's economic growth and how they affect and are affected by India's publishing industry. Keywords: Detective fiction, Women sleuths, New Indian Woman, 21st century women's fiction, Introduction The New Indian woman is often discussed in academic and popular discourses as the embodiment of the 'new India'--an emerging superpower. Shari Daya argues that the identity of womanhood [...]

Fiona Kidman is one of New Zealand's premier contemporary novelists with a writing career spanning about half a century. A prolific writer in multiple genres, including the novel, short story, [...]

With scientific precision, I studied the memoirs of Blunden, Sassoon, and Graves. Surely, I thought, my story is as interesting as theirs. Besides, I see things other than they have [...]

I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of [...]

The 21st century has seen an outpouring of works by African women writers and many of them have been unabashedly feminist. These works have one thing in common: they tell of bodies in pain and they provoke pertinent ethical questions in that regard. This article examines Chika Unigwe's novel, On Black Sisters' Street, and argues that it belongs to the new generation of African women's writing that recasts feminism as a moral issue of our times. The novel draws attention to some of the central issues of feminism: rights and dignities of the body of woman. In so doing, it establishes women's rights as fundamental human rights that have to be addressed in Africa., INTRODUCTION Chika Unigwe belongs to what has been identified as the third generation of Nigerian writers (Adesanmi and Dunton). While this generation is sincerely concerned with the fate of Africa [...]

Much of the scholarship regarding film and television productions of The Taming of the Shrew fixates on the Kate-Petruchio plot, especially on the delivery and antifeminist implications of Kate's final [...]

A 'rhetoric of fiction,' to borrow Wayne Booth's familiar phrase, involves different positions and attitudes on the author and narrator's part, depending on the generic choice s/he makes and effects [...]

The old are as mysterious as idols in a temple; we take off our shoes before we approach them. The whole of our tradition is against unpremeditated intercourse with them; [...]

Soon after its publication in 1944, Caroline Gordon's The Women on the Porch --her sixth novel--generated two reviews in The New York Times . The first, by Orville Prescott, noted […]

Although recent studies of early Native American literature have uncovered a wide range of primary texts, a paucity of works by women remains. Fortunately, Monica Diaz expands the offerings in [...]

There are hundreds of her. Here: she poses in shimmering gold, with burnished curls and dosed eyes. (1) In another portrait, her gaze fades behind lavender veils. Ghostlike, she rematerializes [...]

"Didn't you know this was the twenty-eighth of August?" "The twenty-eighth of August?" "Yes. On the twenty-eighth of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is shining--the [...]

The question that titles this essay (as I'm sure will be recognized) comes from a letter of Freud's to Marie Bonaparte: there he refers to it as 'the great question [...]

Traumatism as an opening to the future of the wound is the promise of a text. Helene Cixous, Stigmata Literary criticism [...] has a crucial role to play in furthering [...]

An examination of primary usage in Greek and Latin databases confirms the traditoinal feminine 'Junia' and the time-honored attribution 'esteemed among apostles'. It demonstrates that the masculine 'Junias' and the attribution 'well-known to the apostles' lack grammatical and lexical support.

Nineteenth-century feminist discourse was an oppositional ideology, a resistance to obstacles to female fulfillment. The hegemonic institutions of nineteenth-century society required women to be objects in marriage and in motherhood, [...]

The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep Joy Kogawa, Obasan Combining prose, poetry, and documentary, Obasan records the struggle of the Japanese Canadian community against a hostility [...]

To begin to tell the stories of her life, a woman writer of the past has tended to look to male models first. Sidonie Smith's pioneering work on women's life [...]

Correspondence concerning 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' between the book's author Choderlos de Laclos and popular novelist Jeanne-Marie Riccoboni examines gender differences in reading and interpretation. Riccoboni offers a feminist critique of the novel in which she objects to Laclos' characterization of Mme de Mertuil and questions his right as a man to portray women. Laclos insists his creation of the manipulative Mme de Mertuil and the book as a whole was both based on experience and designed to be read by women.

Edna O'Brien's 'A Scandalous Woman' (1972) ends with the statement that Ireland is 'a land of strange, sacrificial women' (33). Like O'Brien, Mary Lavin features sacrificial women in her short [...]

The short story 'Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres' ('When women love men'(1)) by Rosario Ferre is an excellent example of the presentation and the intersection of the themes [...]

For over half a century, the Mystery Writers of America has been presenting the Edgar Allan Poe award for Best Novel, but since 2954 (when the first was given to [...]

The adornment of female characters has served the social role of repression and degradation in fiction of the past two centuries. For example, Enlightenment novels used ornamentation to add emphasis to women as objects of beauty. This is illustrated by the character Madame Loisel in Guy de Maupasant's story 'The Diamond Necklace.'

The dramatic obsession and repeated use of sleeping women by Shakespeare is illustrated through scenes in many of his plays, whether it is disturbed like Lady Macbeth's and Richard III's, comical like Titania's, or deathly like Henry IV's, where he portrays a beautiful woman asleep in bed. The image of the sleeping beauty in his plays transforms the narration into a speaking picture, and he transfers the voyeuristic tendencies of the onstage observer of the woman to the readers or spectators of the play.

Authors Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their book 'Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination', exposed with authority, amplitude and energy the power of the metaphors that mad, writing a men's club. Gilbert and Gubar restricted themselves to familiar names, such as Jane Austen or the Brontes, but the new interest in women as writers, combined with the perception that some women's writing was dismissed because it failed to conform to dominant male paradigms, led to the important efforts to recover the work of previously neglected women writers.

The publishing careers of two American women are chronicled: Helen Armstrong Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter. Several examples from William Shakespeare's plays are used to illustrate Clarke's and Porter's early feminist criticism.

The article examines the appeal of author Tim O'Brien's war novel 'The Things They Carried' to women, positing that its gothic blend of romance and spirituality elevates women's love to a higher status and value than it otherwise enjoys in American culture, and thus appeals to a female audience.

It is now well over a hundred years since the publication of Lou Andreas Salome's Henrik Ibsen's Female Characters (Henrik Ibsen's Frauen Gestalten,(1)), and it is over a decade since [...]

Drew Faust's central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Wind must attend to how representations of race and gender work together. I could not agree with [...]