gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies
Please note that gender forum is still in the process of moving to Open Journal Systems (hosted by USB Cologne - see https://journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/). We are currently designing the new layout and migrating back issues to this platform, so bear with us! gender forum is an online, peer reviewed academic journal dedicated to the discussion of gender issues. As an open access online journal, gender forum offers a platform for the discussion of gender-related topics in the fields of literary and cultural production, media and the arts as well as politics, the natural sciences, medicine, the law, religion and philosophy.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: Addressing the diverse field of gender and violence, the current issue of gender forum brings together aspects of gender-based violence and its traumatic repercussions as part of our everyday society. The contributors examine various themes such as sexism, rape and murder thus leading to the question of victimhood and the representation of victims in news and mass media. While men also fall victim to rape and other forms of violence, this issue is dedicated to the investigation of violence towards women and the forms of feminist narrative that empower abused women to fight not just their abuser, but a misogynist, patriarchal system at large.
Copyright (c) 2024 gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies
“Sexism is not a ‘women’s issue’”: Interview with Anne Wizorek
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the interview: Anne Wizorek is a consultant for digital strategies and online communication, blogger and feminist. She is one of the initiators of the Twitter-campaign "#aufschrei" and provided an important contribution to the German debate on sexism. She regularly writes on her blog Kleinerdrei and is an avid tweeter.
The postmortal rape survivor and the paradox of female agency across different media: Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones and its 2009 film adaptation
Alice’s Sebold’s 2002 bestseller, The Lovely Bones, challenges the silencing process surrounding the crime of rape by paradoxically establishing a postmortal rape survivor as its narrator. The paper traces how the narrator’s voice and agency are negotiated and supported, and how and where the 2009 film adaptation diverges from the novel’s feminist agenda. While both film and novel seek to condemn violence against women, the film sets out to do it by casting female characters in the role of helpless victims, whereas the original medium establishes them as canny survivors.
Empowerment Through Violence: Feminism and the Rape-Revenge Narrative in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
One of the many problematic facets of the constructions of rape victims in popular as well as news media is the way in which they are consistently denied agency. Passivity is deemed the hallmark of a ‘true victim’ (contrasted with those women who are accused of lying about rape or having ‘asked for it’ with their behavior), and the victim remains in this passivity while a supportive male avenges her. An alternative to this is presented by the rape-revenge narrative, in which the victim reclaims agency and resorts to violence to avenge her own rape, insinuating that brute physical force may be a victim’s only recourse in a rape culture dominated by systemic misogyny. Using as an example Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I examine the feminist potential of the rape-revenge narrative and its application in the novel.
Murderous Honor Past and Present: Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Contemporary Crimes of Honor
The United Nations estimate around 5000 yearly cases of ‘honor killings’ worldwide, numerous NGOs and human rights activists guess that the numbers of crimes committed in the name of ‘honor’ is closer to 10 000. ‘Honor killings’ are not limited to class, geography or gender (although the majority of the victims are women) but a socio-political issue that needs to be addressed globally. Current cases of Banaz Mahmod (UK) and Arzu Ö. (Germany) received wide media coverage. One of the finest Jacobean plays, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, becomes exceptionally relevant when looking at the relationship of ‘honor’, family, justice and women’s rights then and now.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: The majority of the world’s population today live in urban habitats. In fact, cities have grown ever so rapidly into metropolises and even megalopolises that it seems difficult to keep track of their complex developments. Urban Studies as an interdisciplinary field of research has proliferated immensely in recent years and has reached out, from its grounding in the social sciences, to encompass such disciplines as history and literary studies, for instance. This on-going turn to space has brought forth an abundance of explorations into the construction and perpetual re-construction of urban space/s through urban dwellers’ practices of habitation. It is gendered experiences, perceptions and performances of and in urban space/s that play a decisive role in these processes. The four contributions of this issue aim to shed new light upon the intersections of gender and urban space/s by highlighting the intricate interdependences between constructions of gender and constructions of urban space/s.
Walking in the city: urban space, stories, and gender
This paper outlines a feminist reading of Michel de Certeau's work on urban space and narrative in The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau offers a persuasive, highly poetic theoretical framework for understanding the production of urban space and the way it is experienced – and ‘written’ – through the everyday practices of a city’s inhabitants. The role of sexual difference in the production of this space is somewhat underdeveloped, however. In response to this gap, and with the help of Elizabeth Grosz’s essay Cities bodies, I develop a feminist analysis of the urban subjectivity implied in his work.
A Mass-Produced Muse: Gender and Late-Victorian Urban Developments in George Du Maurier’s Trilby
This paper examines the gender dimension of several issues emerging in the context of the fin-de-siècle urban setting through a discussion of George Du Maurier’s popular novel Trilby. Set in bohemian Paris, the novel’s female protagonist Trilby, initially a highly hybrid character, is gradually turned into a domestic creature in order to be protected from the lures and temptations of the city. Later hypnotized by the evil Svengali, she is then transformed into an outstanding diva, La Svengali, and as a female performer she arouses insatiable feelings of passion and desire in her audience. The paper examines the ways in which the heroine and her associations with the city engage with various ideological formations, including the cult of domesticity, the paradigm of the pastoral tradition, and the Romantic conception of artistic genius. Trilby’s transformation into a metropolitan celebrity also highlights several developments in the late nineteenth-century city, including new technologies of display, changing modes of consumption, a burgeoning mass culture, as well as a preoccupation with the commodity. Du Maurier’s best-seller may teach us contemporary readers about the ways in which the issue of gender and the position of women constitute one of the fault lines in the development of urban modernity.
The Slutwalks: Reappropriation through Demonstration
The Slutwalks were protests which took place in cities across the world in summer 2011 and were sparked when a police officer told a group of students that they should stop dressing like sluts to avoid being sexually assaulted. A global movement in which women and men took to the streets - many dressed provocatively and proudly called themselves sluts - in an attempt to reclaim both the derogatory term and the right to dress how they want; free from judgement. This paper interviews Slutwalk participants from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK and Vienna, Austria to explore their motivations for getting involved and to gain a deeper understanding of how they have challenged androcentric structural norms that are manifest within the city.
Dowry Practices and Gendered Space in Urban Patna/India
In arranged marriages, bride-givers and bride-takers participate in the transactional space with different intentions during marriage solemnization. Hypergamy along with caste- endogamy restricts the options for brides’ fathers in the selection of grooms leading to dowry competitiveness while grooms’ families feel justified in demanding dowry as a return for the investment in their son. Raised lifestyles and more disposable income due to modernization in Indian cities have aggravated the phenomenon further. This article investigates how dowry practices create and sustain a highly gendered space in urban Patna/Bihar. The representational space of the social practice of dowry is analyzed in 16 unstructured in-depth interviews with fathers of brides and women of the Hindu Kushwaha caste in West Patna and old Patna city. To examine how transactional space is created, groom’s family factors and bride-giving family factors that encourage dowry practices are identified. Furthermore, the discriminatory spaces in the brides’ parental and marital homes as well as strategies and attitudes to deal with dowry are investigated.
Review: Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. By Rhacel Salazar Parrenas
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: The rhetoric of public officials and anti-trafficking activists, academic discourse, and the media often focus on sex trafficking as the sole defining feature of trafficking. TV programs and movies dramatize and/or sensationalize the plight of trafficking victims, mostly women from Asia and Eastern Europe, in forced prostitution. According to the US Department of State’s Trafficking in Person Reports in 2004 and 2005, Filipina hostesses are the largest group of victims in global sex trafficking. Parrenas challenges the label of Filipina hostesses as trafficking victims coerced into prostitution. She argues that empirical studies are needed to assess the exact scope of trafficking among Filipina hostesses (or any groups of migrant women) and to formulate appropriate policies for redress. In Illicit Flirtation: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, she deconstructs this generalized portrayal of Filipina hostesses in Japan as trafficking victims through months of fieldwork. She works as an insider (a hostess) and conducts in-depth interviews with hostesses, club owners, brokers, non-governmental organizations, and government officials to understand these women workers’ subjectivities and to accurately represent the lived experiences of Filipina hostesses.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: This special issue of Gender Forum is dedicated to various discussions of the construction of gender in the context of Imperialism and colonial power structures. Acknowledging the profound impact of colonialism on representations and self- understandings of concepts of masculinity and femininity, our contributors examine the role that gender plays in the works of authors writing in a colonial context, past and present.
Home and Away: Notions of In-betweenness in Tanika Gupta’s The Waiting Room
When faced with feisty Priya, heroine of Tanika Gupta's The Waiting Room, one cannot help but feel that ghosts on the stage have come a long way since Hamlet's gloomy father. Gupta's unlikely ghostly heroine dominates the play and all the characters in it, breaking a great many traditions as the plot develops. This article argues that Gupta's play presents a mode of cultural in-betweenness, offering alternatives to dichotomous pairs such as biography/fiction, East/West, life/death and tradition/modernity. In-betweenness as used and presented by Gupta serves as a means to criticise and reduce the ethnically limited reception and perception of British-Asian women's writers today. "Well, I’ve been ranting and raving about this for years: (...) they put you in a box. You don’t call Tom Stoppard a Czech writer or Harold Pinter a white Jewish writer, so why do we have to be called either women writers or Asian writers? For years I had been resisting writing plays that are only about Asian people, and writing plays about arranged marriages and all the rest of the clichés. I think that if you are a writer you should be allowed to write whatever you want" (Gupta in Sierz 266).
Gender/Mutiny in Edwardian Fiction: Charles Pearce’s Fiction of 1857
This article examines how political events in the far-flung spaces of the British Empire affected gender relations in Britain in the Edwardian period. It offers a reading of an alternate corpus of works which tracks masculine anxieties over changing gender relations that led to suffrage for women and shows the closely knit relationship between gender and race in early twentieth century in Britain.
Masculinity under Imperial Stress – Mr Biswas and V S Naipaul
In Mr Biswas, Naipaul creates his most destitute of protagonists. Born into a community of Indian labourers on a sugar estate, in a remote village of Trinidad, Mr Biswas grows to face a life without prospects. Cut off as much from the distant homeland of his ancestors in India, as from the African society around them, the circumstances of Mr Biswas and his people are a direct outcome of colonisation, and Indians in Trinidad are among the twice colonised. Claiming to be of Brahamincal origin yet uneducated, caught in poverty and demeaning labour, East Indians living in West Indies, the circumstances Mr Biswas finds himself in are dire. His efforts to break out of this world to which he is politically and socially confined eventually crystallise into the one desire – to have a house of his own. The ownership of a house for Biswas is fundamental to establishing his identity as a man within the colonial context. This paper examines the impact of colonisation in the construction of masculinity in Mr Biswas, and insofar there are biographical parallels, and in Naipaul himself.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: This issue of Gender Forum is dedicated to the discussion of gender and how it is impacted by and reproduced in fairy tales. The influence that fairy tales have on our culture is indisputable even today – the Grimms’ tales remain present in children’s bedrooms in the shape of Disney movies, and many cultural tropes, from the evil stepmother to the potion- brewing witch, have their foundation in fairy tales. The contributors to this issue have examined a wide variety of diverse texts – from Angela Carter’s short stories to contemporary TV series – to trace the continued cultural impact of fairy tales in relation to constructions of gender and sexuality.
In chivalric romances, courtly love often entails the love between a single knight and a married woman. This love cannot be consummated in a physical sense and, if it is, disaster and death ensue. Courtly love therefore involves the agonies of unfulfilled love. What Lacan finds of interest in these chivalric romances is its symbolic aspect. The poetic exercise of courtly love raised by Lacan has various manifestations in Robert Coover’s “The Dead Queen”, Anne Sexton’s “Snow White” and Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child”, three contemporary revisions of the classical fairy tale “Snow White”, where the conventional utopia ending of “Prince and Princess live happily ever after” is rarely seen. Instead, twists, suspension, revelation, confusion and subversion often accompany the plots, and complicate the relations between heroes and heroines, which can find equivalents of idealizing themes in courtly love. These three revisions of “Snow White” draw a parallel between women in love and women in language, and are committed to disenchant the constructed feminine myth.
Detectives and bail bonds “persons” as fairy tale hero/ines: A feminist antimilitarist analysis of Grimm and Once Upon a Time
In this article, I explore the re/writing of gendered scripts in the television programs Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Using a framework of feminist antimilitarism, I examine how these programs, as modern retellings of fairy tales, interconnect with each other and with societal performances of masculinities and femininities. I argue that gender, violence, and militarism are represented in complex ways that variously position ideas of good and evil, protected and protector, masculinity and femininity through the programs’ characterizations of heroic hunters and saviours who are also estranged mothers and sons.
Chaos Reigns: Women as Witches in Contemporary Film and the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
The image of the witch is etched on the memory from childhood on, characterised by her portrayal in fairy tales and shaped by popular culture, especially contemporary film. Although of pre-Christian origin, and exploited during the peak of the witch-hunts from the late 15th to the middle of the 18th century, the belief in witches has barely forfeited its sometimes dubious popularity. While the commercialisation of other magical and monstrous creatures such as vampires, elves and werewolves follows the trend of Hollywood marketing experts and the development of youth culture, the witch appears to be a constant fictive companion in bed-, child’s and living rooms. Be it as animalistic grandmother-gone-bad in the Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel or as narcissistic queen in the form of Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman, the depiction of female witches is versatile.
A Scopophiliac Fairy Tale: Deconstructing Normative Gender in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”
Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a reworking of traditional fairy tales, or as she suggested “stories about fairy stories.” Carter takes up the flexible structure of the fairy story in order to communicate the experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society, subjected to certain ways of seeing and being seen. In this article, I explore the economy of vision in the title story of Carter’s collection, arguing that she deconstructs the violent structure of seeing embodied in the two main characters in the story. I conclude by looking at two alternatives that appear in the story, both of which move beyond the violence and seductiveness of ways of seeing within a patriarchal society.
Review: Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: Gay men in racial minority and immigrant communities encounter multiple levels of oppression and stigmatization, e.g., the intersectional construction as the racial other and the sexual deviance. Minority and immigrant gay men also face homophobia from their community members. They are blamed for bringing shame upon their communities, which demand men to uphold the dominant ideology of hegemonic masculinity in a racist and sexist society. In this globalized world under which national boundaries are often blurred, how do immigrant gay men negotiate their sexual identity in the process of transnational migration? Exploring an uncharted territory, Decena in Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men examines experiences of Dominican immigrant gay and bisexual men in New York. Central to the text are the following questions: How do Dominican immigrant gay men in New York reconfigure their sexual identity and gender presentation through transnational migration? How do they refashion themselves as modern subjects? How does their migration reshape their relationships to their homeland and their identification with Dominicanidad (Dominican identity and community)? What are the implications of their ambivalence toward the US colonial legacy as well as their simultaneous construction of the United States as the modern and Dominican Republic as the backward? What does all this mean in terms of their stigmatization as the racial/sexual other and their idealization of white gay men and identification with whiteness?
Female Trauma and the Pursuit of Self in Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother
In 1915, the first genocide of the twentieth century was committed in the Ottoman Empire. Ever since, the Armenian Genocide has been denied by the Turkish government and excluded from Turkey’s official historiography. Contemporary Turkish society has brought about the issue of so-called “leftovers of the sword”, mostly female survivors of the genocide, who have been assimilated into Turkish society. Among the descendants of these survivors is human-right’s activist and lawyer Fethiye Çetin. This article examines cross-generational, post-genocidal trauma transmission in the exemplary case of her memoir My Grandmother. Hypothesising that trauma can be overcome by means of narrative, this article focuses on the pursuit of self in the aftermath of traumatic experience.
In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: The Early Career Researchers Issue of Gender Forum provides a platform for emerging scholars who wish to critically engage with questions of gender in their respective areas of research. In order to present a wide spectrum, we selected papers by students who are still working on their first degrees (BA and MA) as well as by those who are already pursuing a PhD project. The articles are arranged according to the contributors’ current position in their academic career starting with papers by students working towards their first and second degrees, and ending with essays by PhD candidates. What they all share is a keen interest in gender issues and in exploring and developing gender studies as an interdisciplinary field of necessary global importance and impact.
The Denotation of Room and its Impact on the Construction of Female Identity in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” According Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, money and room are the predominant items that empower a woman to gain independence and self-reliance. Thus, this article will deconstruct the idea of the room both in a physical and metaphorical sense and apply Woolf’s thesis to the life of Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening to show how exactly the notion of the room is able to shift a woman’s personality which has already developed in an environment dominated by the patterns of patriarchy.
The Search for Identity in Black British Women’s Drama: An Analysis of Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues
Black British women cannot be counted amongst those female playwrights who have profited from the “revolution” within British theatre – a development which Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge have attributed to the last decade. Many, especially feminist, scholars have pointed to the fact that black women are marginalized as well as silenced in British cultural and political discourses and regimes of representation. Consequently, the search for identity very often is an issue black female playwrights are concerned with in their writings about black women’s lives. Drawing on African-American, but mainly British scholarly discourses of performance and dramatic texts as well as on theories of identity and representation, this paper analyzes the ways in which Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Winsome Pinnock’s Talking in Tongues represent black female identities. It will argue that both playwrights portray black women’s search for identity as an ongoing process of becoming and depict black female identity as complex and simultaneously influenced by and interwoven with issues of race, gender, sexuality and belonging.
Who Will Survive? On Bodies and Boundaries after the Apocalypse
Preppers and Survivalists are commonly described as people who believe in abrupt, imposing and near-in-time disasters and who are actively and practically preparing to survive this imminent apocalypse. This paper examines how the body, and the closely connected analytical categories of gender and sexuality, are used to define survivalism. In other words, how does corporeality structure survivalism – who gets to be a survivalist and who does not? In an attempt to answer these questions the paper turns to a theoretical framework that combines the notion of trans-corporeality with the performance of gender, sexuality and embodiment in virtual digital space. To bring focus the paper specifically concentrates on a recent online discussion about “if, how, and to what extent one, as a survivalist, should or would help a woman with small children alone in a forest with no survival equipment after TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It)” (Swedish Survivalist Forum, 2013). This particular discussion is relevant since it, as we shall see, puts analytical categories, such as gender and sexuality up front, pointing to their retained importance as objects of study. The results show a desire to protect the body from change – change that often emanates from other bodies. As such, the desire to remain bodily untouched or unaffected emerges as a foundation for survivalism.
Love and Madness in Renaissance Tragicomedies – The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale
Madness is a topic often dealt with on the Renaissance stage. The article’s main interest is to analyze how the concept of madness is negotiated in tragicomedies. Before elaborating on how madness is constructed in two selected tragicomedies, The Winter’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the genre will be defined. The complex relations of gender, love and madness are subsequently examined in the two plays. Madness not only sets conflicts in motion but also involves notions of gender and social criticism in both tragicomedies. The paper further analyzes how madness evolves in the protagonists and how it is treated throughout the play.
The Vietnamese Concept of a Feminine Ideal and the Images of Australian Women in Olga Masters’ Stories
Doing research on Olga Masters’ life and writing helps me to understand the claim that Masters’ writing often deals with many of the Australian women’s matters such as taking care of the family, bringing up the children, building up their agency. Together with my own experience as a Vietnamese woman and helpful discussion with the experts in the field of Masters’ writing, I put forwards a hypothesis that there are any similarities in Masters’ portrayals of Australian women and the Vietnamese concept of a feminine ideal despite of cultural and geographical differences. The current paper investigates how women are portrayed in Olga Masters’ writing from the point of view of Vietnamese traditional perceptions of an ideal woman who holds four essential characteristics: Industriousness, Appropriate Self-presentation, Communication Skills, and Virtue. I will explore the similarities in the reflection of that conception from the two different cultures of Vietnam and Australia. The paper will develop a textual discourse of Olga Masters’ writing and attempt to show how, in spite of oceans apart, women both in Australia and Vietnam struggle to pursue the so-called feminine ideal.
Re-Thinking Wellness: A Feminist Approach to Health and Fitness
Is wellness a feminist issue? Can self-care contribute to popular paradigm disruption? Fitness and wellness are often approached in decidedly non-feminist ways, with popular culture’s emphasis on beauty and size detracting from the core benefit of any personal wellness practice – empowerment. This paper explores the roots of feminist critiques of sexist beauty norms and thinness mandates and analyses how these provide barriers to holistic wellness in society at large, and within the feminist community. From “besieged feminists” to athletes and sex radicals, women are affected by the negative messaging currently deployed concerning fitness ideals. Fitness ideals and beauty norms combine to promote and image of thin as ideal, rather than athletic or strong. Mindfulness-based wellness practices can build individual awareness and strength and create communities of connection that foster social change. Self-care and the embrace of our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves is a feminist notion.
Body Talk: Reconsidering the Post-Feminist Discourse and Critical Reception of Lena Dunham’s Girls
This paper will address the ways in which Lena Dunham, the creator, head writer, producer, sometimes director, and star of the television series Girls, defies the glorification of traditional femininity and denounces the representations of what Angela McRobbie named the 21st century “postfeminist masquerade.” She also defies the televisual male gaze, as first posited in film theory by Laura Mulvey, by establishing a new form of authorship in TV. Flawlessly sculpted, sexualized female bodies from every era have long populated the landscape of HBO, the premium cable channel that airs Girls. Contrasting many depictions of twenty something women on television, Dunham chooses to bare the imperfections of her body in her performance. Shots of her naked figure often highlight her hardly flat stomach, double chin, and knickers not purchased from any lingerie shop. Although her character is not sexualized in the typical sense, her weight does not render her asexual or deter her from being both desired and desirable. And lastly, although the series frequently relies on romantic relationships, it is essentially about the friendships and bonds between the four Girls, and the ritual of undressing is not sexualized, but shows the intimacy of the characters.