Academic literature on the topic 'French Religious satire'

The January 2015 assassination at the Charlie Hebdo offices and the dozen ensuing terrorist attacks in France over the last eighteen months are the manifestation of a structural opposition between a civic identity whose most controversial manifestation is political satire and a religious identity hijacked by radicals. This paper explains how political satire is deeply entrenched in French culture and how it has been used as a democratization and liberating tool by a society eager to counterbalance the existing religious establishment. Similarly, it then addresses satire in the Muslim world and underlines that, instead of being considered a tool of the weak against the powerful, it is perceived as a neo-colonial manifestation of an exogenously imposed political order that ostracizes the citizen from his legitimate religious belief. Instead of a liberating instrument, it is perceived as attacking the foundation of a religion that many see as their refuge against authoritarian elites. This paper then analyses the historical evolution of Islamic political activism. After highlighting the existence of satire and religious representation in Islam in some of its earliest societal orders, this paper argues that the Muslim community under the leadership of its Ulema has been fractured into a range of different scholastic interpretations of Islam resulting into different acceptation of liberal civic orders. The reaction towards Charlie Hebdo and the strong/weak condemning or silent/vocal approbation are representative of their contamination by radicalism. This paper finally demonstrates that the rejection of satire is symptomatic of the incomplete evolution of the state and the weakness of national and transnational institutions. Addressing the reforming of Muslim institutions in France itself, this paper argues that there is no incompatibility between Islam and a liberal republican order guaranteeing freedom of expression and satire.

AbstractThis article compares three French operas from the fin de siècle with regard to their appropriation of Gregorian chant, examining their different ideological and dramaturgical implications. In Alfred Bruneau’s Le rêve (1891), the use of plainchant, more or less in literal quotation and an accurate context, has often been interpreted as naturalistic. By treating sacred music as a world of its own, Bruneau refers to the French idea of Gregorian chant as ‘other’ music. In Vincent d’Indy’s L’étranger (1903), a quotation of Ubi caritas does not serve as an occasional illustration, but becomes essential as part of the leitmotif structure, thus functioning as the focal point of a religious message. Jules Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (1902) provides a third way of using music associated with history and Catholicism. In this collage of styles, plainchant is not quoted literally, but rather alluded to, offering in this ambiguity a mildly anti-clerical satire.

The article deals with the question of the functioning of the game code of M. Bulgakov’s novel “Master and Margarita”. The focus of the researcher is the image of the cat Begemoth, one of the members of the Woland suite. The article explores the connection between the image of the cat and the figure of Hans Sachs, a well-known representative of the German Renaissance. Principles of game conjugation of two figures are buffoonery, carnival, satire. At the same time, the three hypostases of the cat Begemoth (the cat – fat man – a boy with a knight (pazh) refer the reader to the figure of Leo Taxil (the French writer Gabriel Zhogan Pazhes), the punning allusion which is found in the last chapters of the novel and is determined by the writer’s position in depicting the religious question.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. 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Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

This chapter takes a more critical approach to Bruce Lincoln’s work, by interrogating the limits of his “irreverent” methodology itself. Focusing on the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the response by Lincoln and Anthony Yu, this chapter argues that Lincoln perhaps failed to follow through with his own irreverent approach when he French Muslims against this sort of religious satire. Charlie Hebdo was ultimately far more uncompromising in its irreverence than Lincoln himself, raising profound questions not simply about the role of the academic study of religion but about secularism and religious freedom in the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyzes the music of two military bands: Zangalewa of Cameroon and Zao of Congo-Brazzaville. Zangalewa is the marching band of the presidential guard in Cameroon. Part of its “Suffering Soldier's Medley,” a self-deprecating military entertainment piece, was actually a subtle politico-cultural parody, couched in jester's garb, that lampoons the brutal and oppressive Cameroon army. For its part, Zao is a “pseudo military” band, a civilian band that adopted a military persona and uses subtle satire couched in humor to critique the military and militarism. The author analyzes the politico-cultural contexts and lyrics of both bands within the framework of metaphorical couching, the embedment of messages in humor. Both bands couched criticism of the authorities in humor and African metaphors, sayings, and proverbs expressed in a mixture of English, French, pidgin, and African dialects to bypass censorious gatekeepers.

After World War II, Black writers and thinkers, from Richard Wright to bell hooks, influenced by French existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre, adapted existentialism as a way to explain and respond to the African American experience. In his novels, Frank Yerby displays a sophisticated awareness of philosophical ideas, especially absurdism, and theological questions, despite his insistence that his novels could not be “reduce[ed] to a morality play” (Hill, “Interview,” 212). Yerby, in addition to using fiction to debunk historical myth, develops arguments about religion—that religion is invented “nonsense,” and, therefore, not worth killing or dying for, that God, if he exists, is cruel, careless, or distant, and that morality need not hew to an a priori standard. Yerby, then, responded to religious belief and voiced a philosophical response to human suffering (though, not particularly African American suffering) that was shaped by absurdist thought.

This chapter considers the evolution of the political print from 1500 through the mid-seventeenth century. This discussion examines satirical strategies employed by printmakers working at four key historical moments—the Reformation in Germany, the Dutch revolt from Spain, the French wars of religion, and the Commonwealth in England—in order to provide a larger context for the assessment of Romeyn de Hooghe’s innovation of the genre. Two strategies dominate the political prints considered in this chapter: (i) those that employ animal imagery, such as the animal fable and the animal hybrid; and (ii) those that feature individual human protagonists. This chapter introduces three themes that feature prominently throughout the book: (i) the elision of boundaries between man and animal; (ii) the treatment of the satirized body; and (iii) the inter-relationship between text and image. It is shown that the finished, closed, and choreographed body of formal portraiture that dominates earlier political prints gives way in De Hooghe’s satires to the expansive, gaping, and uncontrollable body that has been associated with the genre ever since.

The anonymous satirical Divorce satyrique (1660) stages the fake confession of Henri IV, king of France, who justifies his divorce from Marguerite de Valois by her monstrous sexuality, describing her as ‘the most deformed woman in France’. This chapter explores how sexuality and monstrosity are linked to representations of feminine power within the context of general satire against the Valois family during the French Wars of Religion. Additionally, it shows how this violent pamphlet is symptomatic of a transitional period in which the definition of monstrosity evolves from physical to internal abjection. This cultural transition allows the writer to bring the sexual shaming of a woman to a new misogynistic level that essentializes the concept of female depravity.

It has often been argued that the picaresque genre derived from the Lazarillo castigado, if not from the Guzmán de Alfarache, more than from the original Lazarillo. Such an assumption neglects the fact that the first French and English translations did rely on the 1554 text, whose influence, conveyed by the 1555 sequel also translated in French in 1598, did last until the early 17th century. Probably designed in an Erasmian circle, the anticlerical satire, enhanced by provoking allusions to certain catholic dogmas, did not pass unnoticed: the marginal comments of the translations, for instance, testify for a strong interest for this theme. It is no wonder, therefore, if the first satirical narratives freely inspired by the Lazarillo, such like The Unfortunate Traveller by Nashe, the Euphormio Lusinini Satyricon by Barclay, or the Première journée by Viau, adapted its religious satire to their own actuality: in the context of the rise of libertine thinking, characters of Jesuits and Puritans could become new targets for novelistic scenes based on an obviously “lazarillesque” model.