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Journal articles on the topic 'Postcolonial feminist literature'
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Peng, Niya, Tianyuan Yu, and Albert Mills. "Feminist thinking in late seventh-century China." Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 34, no. 1 (February 9, 2015): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/edi-12-2012-0112.
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to offer novel insights into: knowledge of proto-feminism through description and analysis of the rule of the seventh century female Emperor Wu Zetian; postcolonial theory by revealing the existence and proto-feminist activities of a non-western female leader; and the literature on gender and invisibility through a study of a leading figure that is relatively unknown to western feminists and is even, in feminist terms, something of a neglected figure. Design/methodology/approach – In order to examine Wu’s proto-feminist practices as recorded in historical materials, we use critical hermeneutics as a tool for textual interpretation, through the following four stages: choosing texts from historical records and writings of Wu; analyzing the historical sociocultural context; analyzing the relationship between the text and the context; and offering a conceptual framework as a richer explanation. Findings – Wu’s life activities demonstrate proto-feminism in late seventh century China in at least four aspects: gender equality in sexuality, in social status, in politics, and women’s pursuit of power and leadership. Research limitations/implications – Future research may dig into the paradox of Wu’s proto-feminist practices, the relationship between organizational power and feminism/proto-feminism, and the ways in which Wu’s activities differ from other powerful women across cultures, etc. Practical implications – The study encourages a rethink of women and leadership style in non-western thought. Social implications – The study supports Calás and Smircich’s 2005 call for greater understanding of feminist thought outside of western thought and a move to transglobal feminism. Originality/value – This study recovers long lost stories of women leadership that are “invisible” in many ways in the historical narratives, and contributes to postcolonial feminism by revealing the existence of indigenous proto-feminist practice in China long before western-based feminism and postcolonial feminism emerged.
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Moore, Lindsey. "Palestinian literature and film in postcolonial feminist perspective." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 2 (January 28, 2014): 241–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.882127.
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Choak, Clare. "British Criminological Amnesia: Making the Case for a Black and Postcolonial Feminist Criminology." Decolonization of Criminology and Justice 2, no. 1 (June 29, 2020): 37–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.24135/dcj.v2i1.17.
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The discipline of Western criminology emerged during the colonial era as a means of controlling the ‘other’. Despite its failures in terms of recidivism these perspectives have been adopted on a global scale. Crime and punishment have been heavily influenced by these ideas and continue to reproduce them in relation to problematic, and pathologising, discourses such as the UK gang agenda which positions young black men as naturally aggressive, sexual predators and innately criminal. How criminologists carry out research also demands attention through a decolonial lens. A move towards a British postcolonial criminology has received scant attention despite there being a range of global literature which calls for changes to be made to the roots of the discipline. Similarly, feminist criminology in Britain has barely been touched by ideas of black and postcolonial feminisms. Consequently, drawing on what has written to further the cause of a black feminist criminology (BFC), this paper argues for the adoption of a black and postcolonial feminist criminology (BPFC) in the UK whereby issues of race, intersectionality and decolonial baggage are central to how we understand crime.
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Roy, Dibyadyuti. "Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven." Humanities 8, no. 1 (February 14, 2019): 29. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h8010029.
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Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that socially disapproved/illicit relationships in these two representative postcolonial Irish and Indian narratives function as matricentric feminist tactics that subvert limiting notions of both domestic spaces and gendered liminal postcolonial subjectivities. I highlight that within the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, the trope of maternity configures the domestic-space as the “rightful place” for the existence of the feminine entity. Thus, when postcolonial feminist fiction reverses this tradition through constructing the “home and the female-body” as sites of possible resistance, it is a counter against dual oppression: both colonialism and patriarchy. My intervention further underscores the need for sustained conversations between the literary output of India and Ireland, within Postcolonial Literary Studies, with a particular acknowledgement for space and gender as pivotal categories in the “cultural analysis of empire”.
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Moi, Toril. "“I Am Not a Feminist, But…”: How Feminism Became the F-Word." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (October 2006): 1735–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2006.121.5.1735.
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If PMIA invites us to reflect on the state of feminist theory today, it must be because there is a problem. Is feminist theory thought to be in trouble because feminism is languishing? Or because there is a problem with theory? Or—as it seems to me—both? Theory is a word usually used about work done in the poststructuralist tradition. (Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault are “theory” Simone de Beauvoir and Ludwig Wittgenstein are not.) The poststructuralist paradigm is now exhausted. We are living through an era of “crisis,” as Thomas Kuhn would call it, an era in which the old is dying and the new has not yet been born (74–75). The fundamental assumptions of feminist theory in its various current guises (queer theory, postcolonial feminist theory, transnational feminist theory, psychoanalytic feminist theory, and so on) are still informed by some version of poststructuralism. No wonder, then, that so much feminist work today produces only tediously predictable lines of argument.
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Mukherjee, Sayan. "Dark Portrayal of Gender: A Post-colonial Feminist Reflection of Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-candy Man." History Research Journal 5, no. 5 (September 26, 2019): 81–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.26643/hrj.v5i5.7919.
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The portrayals of women by fiction writers of Indian sub-continent can be seen in the context of postcolonial feminism. Sidhwa’s novels may be a part of postcolonial fiction, which is fiction produced mostly in the former British colonies. As Bill Ashcroft suggests in The Empire Writes Back, the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the colonizers. About the role of postcolonial literature with respect to feminism, Ashcroft writes, “Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writings and through other arts such as paintings sculpture, music, and dance that today realities experienced by the colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.” Indian sub-continent fiction is the continuation and extension of the fiction produced under the colonial rulers in undivided India. As such it has inherited all the pros and cons of the fiction in India before the end of colonial rule in Indo-Pak. Feminism has been one part of this larger body of literature. Sidhwa has portrayed the lives of Pakistani women in dark shades under the imposing role of religious, social, and economic parameters. These roles presented in The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-Candy Man are partly traditional and partly modern – the realities women face.
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Navarro-Tejero, Antonia. "BRIDGING GAPS THROUGH FEMINIST PEDAGOGY: TEACHING ABJECTION IN A POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE COURSE." Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT 02 (2017): 85–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.46687/silc.2017.v02.007.
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Hayhurst, Lyndsay M. C., and Lidieth del Socorro Cruz Centeno. "“We Are Prisoners in Our Own Homes”: Connecting the Environment, Gender-Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights to Sport for Development and Peace in Nicaragua." Sustainability 11, no. 16 (August 19, 2019): 4485. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su11164485.
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This paper draws on postcolonial feminist political ecology theory, feminist theories of violence and new materialist approaches to sport and physical cultural studies—combined with literature on the role of non-humans in international development—to unpack the connections between gender-based violence and the environment in sport, gender and development (SGD) programming in Nicaragua. To do this, postcolonial feminist participatory action research (PFPAR), including visual research methods such as photovoice, was used to better understand, and prioritize, young Nicaraguan women’s experiences of the environment and gender-based violence as they participated in an SGD program used to promote environmentalism and improve their sexual and reproductive health rights. To conclude, the importance of accounting for the broader physical environment in social and political forces was underlined as it shapes the lives of those on the receiving end of SGD interventions.
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Bashkyrova, Olha. "REPRESENTATION OF FEMININITY IN MODERN UKRAINIAN NOVELS." Слово і Час, no. 6 (November 26, 2020): 72–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.33608/0236-1477.2020.06.72-86.
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The paper deals with the main tendencies of the artistic reception of women images in modern Ukrainian novels. The principles of modeling femininity in literature have been considered from the positions of the gender studies, postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. It is proved that the peculiarities of this modeling are determined by stylistic and genre tendencies of the Ukrainian literature. The interpretation of feminine images typical for the national literary tradition (mother, family-keeper, demonic woman) has been demonstrated in numerous examples. These images correlate with the fundamental artistic principles of the turning points in history (actualization of the archetypes, attention to the irrational manifestations of human psychics). They display the ‘masculine’ literary tradition (representation of a woman as an external object), but at the same time demonstrate a new accent in the understanding of the gender roles (woman as a mentor of a man). The alternative types of the feminine identity represented by feminist and culturological women’s writing have been explored as well. Special attention has been paid to procreation as the main woman’s ability, which forms different models of feminine mentality – from the essentialist mother-type to the image of a child-free woman. The modeling of a feminine artistic worldview becomes an actual strategy in overcoming the postcolonial trauma. It is explained by the peculiarities of the postcolonial literatures, which fulfill their historical reflections in the local family stories. In this context, feminine conscience gets the status of a memory-keeper and shows the ability to trace the development of national history in its everyday dimensions. Based on the large-scale generalization of the last decades’ artistic practice, the researcher determines the main worldview intentions of modern novels, in particular the tendency to achieve gender parity, the full-fledged dialogue of men and women as the equal subjects of culture creation.
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Bilgin, Inci. ""Hamlet" in Contemporary Turkey: Towards Postcolonial Feminist Rewrites?" Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 12, no. 27 (June 26, 2015): 65–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/mstap-2015-0006.
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Parihala, Yohanes, and Jelfy L. Hursepuny. "Tafsir Post-Kolonial Femenis Yehezkiel 16:15-22 sebagai Teks Pornografi Kenabian." Khazanah Theologia 2, no. 2 (August 29, 2020): 94–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.15575/kt.v2i2.8874.
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The issue of violence against women not only occurs in the space of action or the form of direct violence but also in the way of indirect violence, among others through the understanding of the biblical text that discredit women. This study aims to carry out a postcolonial feminist interpretation of Ezekiel 16: 15-22. This text, if understood, literally contains pornographic ideological messages that confront women as victims. Qualitatively, the interpretative analysis approach helps the writer to reinterpret the meaning of Ezekiel 16: 15-22 and find its relevance to the feminist struggle in the present. For this reason, the study of literature is the choice of writing to study various references related to the issues discussed. The results of this study indicate that certain Bible texts written in a patriarchal context have a picture of discrimination against women. With the feminist postcolonial approach, the reinterpretation of discriminatory texts can be done by emphasizing that both men and women were created equally by God.
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Dovey, Teresa. "The intersection of postmodern, postcolonial and feminist discourse in J.M. Coetzee'sFoe." Journal of Literary Studies 5, no. 2 (June 1989): 119–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02564718908529908.
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Băniceru, Ana Cristina. "Going Back to One’s Roots: The Revival of Oral Storytelling Techniques in The English Contemporary Novel." Romanian Journal of English Studies 9, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 166–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10319-012-0018-7.
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Abstract My paper examines the interplay between the sophisticated postmodernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, metafiction and a return to orality or better said of pseudo-orality, a simulated-oral discourse or what the Russian Formalists called “skaz”, brought about by much postcolonial, ethnic or feminist literature.
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deCaires Narain, Denise. "Close Encounters: Solidarity, Servitude and Postcolonial Feminist Affects and Affiliations." Women: A Cultural Review 24, no. 4 (December 2013): 274–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2013.863519.
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Raman, K. Ravi. "Can the Dalit woman speak? How ‘intersectionality’ helps advance postcolonial organization studies." Organization 27, no. 2 (January 2, 2020): 272–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508419888899.
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Through a sustained engagement with postcolonial/subaltern studies scholarships, I would inquire into how intersectionality as an approach could advance an argument in the context of the postcolonial organization studies. This would ensure a submerged possibility of understanding ‘workplace resistances’ and their varied dynamics. The case study involves both contemporary ethnographic and in-depth historical accounts sourced from the Dalit women’s protests at tea plantations in the south Indian state of Kerala in 2015 (along with pertinent secondary sources). The article explores how ‘self-organizing’ by the mis-organized, during the course of the struggle, turned them into active political subjects: a ‘subject position from which to speak’. Exposing certain theoretical constraints within the postcolonial approach and incorporating insights from deeper subjective aspects of the labour process, social reproduction in postcolonial perspectives, and the feminist literature on intersectionality as an integrative narrative, an attempt is made to supplement the postcolonial organization studies and open up the gateway to its advancement.
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Forbang-Looh, Gilda N. "The Fallacy of the “Metropolis” in Postcolonial Feminist Discourses: Reading Osonye Tess Onwueme’s Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women." International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 8, no. 4 (July 31, 2019): 51. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.8n.4p.51.
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This paper focuses on intra-gender representations and difference, using Osonye Tess Onwueme’s Tell it to Women: An Epic Drama for Women, the major concern being the controversies in universalising Western Oriented Feminist discourses in non-Western contexts. Among these are questions of patriarchy, oppression, mothering and universal sisterhood which tend to dominate metropolitan discourses, yet do not represent non-western Feminist ideologies and the other. Postcolonial Feminism is used to discuss these fallacies and the need for assertiveness of the other-Idu women in the stronghold of Eurocentric Feminism as espoused by Ruth and Daisy. Analyses show that it is fallacious not to consider, study and understand other contexts/people or supposed others before theorising about them and their needs. There is need to assert and preserve one’s identity in the face of Western impositions. Thus, the need for reorientation of the perception and consideration of modern intellectual women towards rural women is necessary. This is imperative because uncritically propagating western discourses in non-western spaces has remained unproductive and will for a long time be so.
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Vila, Adrián R. "Latin American and Caribbean Literature Transposed into Digital." Journal of Information Technology Research 9, no. 1 (January 2016): 34–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/jitr.2016010103.
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The aim of the present paper is the study of the action performed by the publishing industry in the context of the transposition into digital format of printed books comprising a Latin American and Caribbean literary corpus. The designed corpus includes works and authors labelled as a Latin American segment of the Western Canon, in addition to those segments provided by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and/or decolonization critical theories. It is described/defined the digital ecosystem to which the corpus is transposed as well as some of the strategies implemented by the major e-book trade platforms and the main digital libraries to offer Latin American and Caribbean literature transposed into digital format.
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Mtshali, Mbongeni N. "Hottentot Venus Redux: Nelisiwe Xaba’s Critical Moves of Resistance." TDR/The Drama Review 64, no. 2 (June 2020): 28–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/dram_a_00915.
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In her transdisciplinary work, The Venus (2009), Nelisiwe Xaba reimagines Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, as a cosmopolitical black feminist African figure. Her work disrupts the meanings attached to the colonial spectacle of hypervisible black flesh, as well as the logics that keep these meanings intact in the postcolonial world now.
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Sohl, Lena. "Feel-bad moments: Unpacking the complexity of class, gender and whiteness when studying ‘up’." European Journal of Women's Studies 25, no. 4 (March 23, 2018): 470–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350506818762232.
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Intimacy, shared experiences and evening out the power relations between researcher and the participants play an important role in feminist methodology. However, as highlighted in previous research on studying ‘up’, such methods might not be appropriate when studying privileged groups. Therefore, studying privileged women challenges fundamental assumptions in feminist methodology. When researching privileged women, the assumption that the researcher is almost always in a superior position within the research process becomes more complicated. The article seeks to contribute to the feminist methodological literature on how to study privileged groups by exploring how class, gender and whiteness are produced in three fieldwork situations with women who hold privileges in a postcolonial and capitalist landscape. Drawing on interviews and participant observations with white Swedish migrant women, the article argues that researchers need to turn the problems, fears and feelings of being uncomfortable into important data, in order to study privileged groups of women.
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Ashenafi Aboye. "Patriarchy in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power: A Gynocentric Approach." Ethiopian Journal of the Social Sciences and Humanities 16, no. 2 (April 15, 2021): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ejossah.v16i2.1.
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African literature has been dominated by male African writers. However, there are a number of female African writers who contributed to the literary landscape of the continent significantly. In line with this, researches that deal with issues of gender in African literature are increasing (Fonchingong, 2006; Salami-Boukari, 2012; Stratton, 1994). In this study, I aim to expose patriarchal oppression in two selected post-colonial African novels. I ask “How do postcolonial African female writers expose gender oppression and patriarchy in their novels?” I ask how the female characters in the selected novels resist patriarchal dominance and oppression. I seek to uncover any thematic patterns and/or overlaps that would emerge across the selected novels. To achieve this, I analyze two feminist Anglophone African novels by female writers of the continent, namely ‘The Slave Girl’ and ‘A Question of Power’. Gynocentrism is used as an approach to achieve this purpose. The analyses of the novels make it feel that patriarchy is used as a tool to stabilize the discrimination of the feminine gender. The heroines in both novels are found to be patriarchal women with some attempt to reverse the gender order. The major female characters in the novels stand against the intersectional discrimination of the feminine from the male personhood, religion, as well as colonial culture. These discussions about patriarchy revive the vitality of African feminist novels to the present readers.
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Struckmann, Christiane. "A postcolonial feminist critique of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: A South African application." Agenda 32, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 12–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2018.1433362.
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van der Merwe, Leana. "Writing Desire and History: Collecting as Postcolonial Feminist Methodology in South African Art." International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity 14, no. 2 (July 3, 2019): 151–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18186874.2019.1690398.
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Farag, Joseph R. "Palestinian literature and film in a postcolonial feminist perspective / Rhetorics of belonging: nation, narration, and Israel/Palestine." Middle Eastern Literatures 20, no. 3 (September 2, 2017): 308–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2017.1385703.
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Safronova, Lyudmila, and Aygerim Bekmuratova. "Ethnocultural images in postcolonial publications in the Russian-language prose of the Korean diaspora." Przegląd Wschodnioeuropejski 11, no. 2 (December 30, 2020): 275–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/pw.6510.
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The literature of the Korean diaspora of the former Soviet Union combines the national characteristics of the Korean culture of the metropolis, the Korean national mentality, and at the same time reflects the historical realities and difficult, sometimes tragic fates of all peoples of the USSR and post-Soviet period. In this respect, the evolution of the literature of the Korean diaspora, leading from the prose in Korean to the first settlers from Korea to Sakhalin, was shown, which later were deported by Stalin’s decree to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The literature of the Korean diaspora in Kazakhstan goes through all stages of the development of Soviet literature – from anti-Stalin prose, romanticized thaw literature and “quiet” stagnation prose, to postmodern and feminist literature. Moreover, Confucianism and Christian motives, Buddhism and Taoism, shamanism and Russian traditional literary images, motives, and themes are organically intertwined in the work of Russian and Kazakhstani Koreans. However, crosscutting issue through all the work of Korean writers who find themselves outside their homeland, it is an appeal to national identity, attempts to acquiring, preserving or tragedy and the pain of loss.
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Johnson, Alicia J., and Meredith A. Whitley. "Girls’ Sport in Northern Uganda: A Postcolonial Feminist Exploration of Definitions and Benefits." Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal 24, no. 2 (October 2016): 131–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/wspaj.2015-0023.
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Sport is increasingly used as a tool for development and peacebuilding to reach an array of populations (Hayhurst, 2009), including girls and women in the Two-Thirds World (Brady, 2005; Hayhurst, 2014; Saavedra, 2009). However, scholars have cautioned against a universal definition of sport considering its historical link to colonization (Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011; Saavedra, 2009) as well as the promotion of universal benefits of sport for girls (Brady, 2005; Larkin, Razack, & Moola, 2007). Therefore, a postcolonial feminist framework was employed to qualitatively explore how 12 secondary school girls in northern Uganda define sport. In addition, participants in this study identified the benefits that they and other girls and women receive from participating in sport. Semistructured interviews were conducted face-to-face and were transcribed, coded, and thematized by the researchers. Trustworthiness was established by engaging a peer debriefer from Uganda and critical awareness of researcher positionality through reflexivity. Results include how the participants defined sport and physical activity, some as a singular and others as a binary concept, and how girls benefit from participating in sport in northern Uganda. The identified benefits include aspects of health, social life, engagement, opportunities, socioemotional development, and competition. Many of these benefits are congruent with literature from within and outside of Uganda; however, the results also indicate a need for a deeper understanding of how communities define and benefit from sport where sport for development programs are delivered. Connections between the results and the postcolonial feminist framework, study limitations and future research directions are also discussed.
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Gore, Ellie. "Reflexivity and Queer Embodiment: Some Reflections on Sexualities Research in Ghana." Feminist Review 120, no. 1 (November 2018): 101–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0135-6.
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The ‘reflexive turn’ transcended disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Feminist scholars in particular have taken up its core concerns, establishing a wide-ranging literature on reflexivity in feminist theory and practice. In this paper, I contribute to this scholarship by deconstructing the ‘story’ of my own research as a white, genderqueer, masculine-presenting researcher in Ghana. This deconstruction is based on thirteen months of field research exploring LGBT activism in the capital city of Accra. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes, I examine questions of queer subjectivity, embodiment and self/Other dynamics in the research encounter. Specifically, I interrogate what a reflexive concern for power relations means when researchers share moments of commonality and difference with research participants, here in relation to axes of gender, sexuality, race and class. Finally, I explore the challenge of theorising resistance in light of feminist postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation. I conclude that it is only by locating these tensions and dissonances in the foreground of our inquiries that reflexivity becomes meaningful as a way of rendering knowledge production more accountable and transparent, of practising feminist solidarity, and of excavating our own queer research journeys.
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Zimmerman, Tegan. "Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies." MELUS 45, no. 1 (2020): 95–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlz067.
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Abstract This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela’s presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela’s voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti’s contribution to the Dominican Republic’s history—makes visible the unacknowledged yet essential role of the Afra-Dominican not only in this novel specifically but also to the Dominican Republic more generally.
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Roșcan, Nina. "Childhood Trauma in Maya Angelou’s Autobiographical Fiction – Abuse and Displacement." University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series 9, no. 1 (November 19, 2020): 33–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.31178/ubr.9.1.4.
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The article discusses how trauma is represented in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical fiction, one of the most important themes in all her seven autobiographical novels and an African American feminist marginalized experience that speaks about the intensity and effects of women’s oppression. It explores how the novelist locates traumatic affects in the protagonist, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts. My purpose is to explore the different juxtapositions that the story offers between individual and collective experiences of
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Ogana, Winifred N., and Vivian B. Ojong. "The thin/thick body ideal: Zulu women's body as a site of cultural and postcolonial feminist struggle." Agenda 27, no. 4 (December 2013): 110–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2013.868682.
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BOADA, IRENE. "NATIONALISM AND LANGUAGE IN CATALAN AND IRISH CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES: FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES." Catalan Review: Volume 12, Issue 1 12, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 9–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/catr.12.1.1.
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Van Raemdonck, An. "Egyptian Activism against Female Genital Cutting as Catachrestic Claiming." Religion and Gender 3, no. 2 (February 19, 2013): 222–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18785417-00302005.
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This paper deals with questions of the politics of location in knowledge andnorm production within the context of Egyptian feminist activism for abandoningfemale genital cutting practices. It seeks to determine underlying schemesof international campaigning discourse and analyzes how these predicate andcomplicate Egyptian postcolonial activism. It draws on a broad literature studyin addition to fieldwork in Cairo consisting of in-depth interviews with activistsand policy makers. My focus is on the national Task Force against FGMfrom 1994 until 1999 and its subsequent cooptation by the National Council ofChildhood and Motherhood. I argue through the concept of catachresis thatlocation matters in setting the terms of anti-FGC discourse and its relation toreligion.
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Radford, Clare Louise. "‘The Desert is Our Neighbour’: A Postcolonial Feminist Ethic of Narrative Encounter in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox." Literature and Theology 32, no. 2 (May 30, 2018): 193–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fry006.
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Lousley, C. "Home on the Prairie? A Feminist and Postcolonial Reading of Sharon Butala, Di Brandt, and Joy Kogawa." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2 (July 1, 2001): 71–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/isle/8.2.71.
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Shrivastava, Dr Ku Richa. "Environmental, Eco - Criticism and Eco - Feminist Perspectives in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance & Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 7, no. 8 (August 28, 2019): 16. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v7i8.9610.
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This paper attempts a reading of Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance (1997) and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) envision insights from recent developments in eco-criticism and eco-feminism. Through Gender theory eco-feminism substantiates the silence of women in Linden Hills.
Eco-criticism is a form of literary criticism based on ecological perspectives. It investigates the relation between human and the natural world in literature, such as the way in which environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals of eco-criticism concerns the environment and attitudes towards nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years (approximately since 2000) due to greater social emphasis on environmental destruction as a result of increased technology. It is hence a way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts. Eco critics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of “Place” should be a distinctive category, gender or race. By examining the eco critical discourse in A Fine Balance, the paper posits that Mistry’s vision of development in India is predicated on the conditions of sustainability.
The Ecological Feminism is an interdisciplinary movement which interrogates the new ways of thought process concerning natural world, diplomacy, and mysticism. Eco-feminist speculation has exacting and important association between females and natural world. Eco-feminism understands the suppression of women and their mistreatment in phrases of the subjugation and operation of the environment. Naylor discusses gender conditioned with eco-feminism perspectives. She scrutinizes United States as a “Place”, in relation to race of Linden Hills.
The postcolonial feminist theory contends that through novel, A Fine Balance comparing with Linden Hills, Mistry interrogate the difficulties of maintaining natural and human diversity in the contemporary economic and social development in the Indian subcontinent. The aspects of paper are tailoring sustainability, ecology, eco - feminism and environment, urbanization and modernization, creation of ecological imbalance and the use of nature ‘as an end to all means’.
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Wenzel, M. "The same difference: Jesusa Palancares and Poppie Nongena’s testimonies of oppression." Literator 15, no. 3 (May 2, 1994): 41–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v15i3.676.
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Two women's texts from postcolonial countries, Mexico and South Africa, on different continents show surprising correspondences in subject matter and style. Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Till I meet you, my Jesus) and Elsa Joubert's Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (The journey of Poppie Nongena) examples of testimonial writing, both address issues of gender and politics in an innovative way. They combine autobiography and biography to render a dramatic account of social injustice despite their disparate backgrounds/cultures and subtle differences in style. In comparison, the texts not only affirm the validity of women’s writing and contribute to its enrichment, but also constitute a valuable contribution towards the formulation of a general feminist aesthetics. In fact, they illustrate conclusively that comparative literature fulfils a vital function in the exploration and interpretation of women's literature from different cultures.
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Reddy, Vanita. "Femme Migritude." Minnesota review 2020, no. 94 (May 1, 2020): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00265667-8128421.
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This article examines the queer feminist Afro-Asian poetics and politics of spoken word and performance artist Shailja Patel’s 2006 onewoman show and 2010 prose poem, both titled Migritude. Patel’s migritude poetics resonates with and departs from much contemporary migritude writing, particularly with respect to the genre’s focus on a global-North-based, black Atlantic African diaspora. The article draws attention to a “brown Atlantic,” in which Africa is the site both of diaspora and of homeland. More important, it shows that Patel’s queer femininity unsettles a diasporic logic of racial exceptionalism. This logic aids and abets a (black) native/(South Asian) migrant divide in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Patel’s femme migritude, as I call it, draws on nonequivalent histories of black and Asian racialized dispossession to construct a mode of global-South, cross-racial political relationality.
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SUGIERA, MAŁGORZATA. "Beyond Drama: Writing for Postdramatic Theatre." Theatre Research International 29, no. 1 (March 2004): 6–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883303001226.
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The article begins with a short description of the current situation in Polish theatre where the traditional understanding of a dramatic text has made the reception of formally innovative European playwriting difficult. On the basis of recent German plays by Rainald Goetz, Dea Loher and Roland Schimmelpfennig, which have been translated into Polish and published but have not yet received significant productions, the article tries to answer two important questions. Firstly, how the postdramatic texts written for avant-garde, feminist and postcolonial theatre during last three decades have influenced plays written for and put on the mainstream stages in the 1990s. Secondly, in what ways the new texts, which in many respects go far beyond the borders of traditional drama, have changed the existing definitions of theatrical mimesis and theories of drama
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Onyemelukwe, Ifeoma Mabel, Abubakar Dauda Adamu, and Chukwunonso Hyacinth Muotoo. "Le Griot Dans La Litterature Postcoloniale: Une Etude De Guelwaar De Sembene Ousmane." UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities 22, no. 1 (July 8, 2021): 55–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ujah.v22i1.3.
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Le griot dans la société traditionnelle africaine de l’ère précoloniale est un personnage complexe chargé d’une myriade de fonctions. Il est bien respecté et honoré. La présente étude se donne l’objectif d’examiner profondément la peinture du griot dans la littérature africaine postcoloniale utilisant Guelwaar de Sembène Ousmane comme texte de base tout en établissant ses fonctions et ses portraits. L’étude privilégie quelques théories critiques comme le postcolonialisme, les théories marxiste et féministe. De plus, l’examen s’effectue à la lumière de l’image du griot d’antan et des sept catégories de nouveaux griots postulés par Ifeoma Mabel Onyemelukwe. Nous découvrons deux types de griot dépeints par Ousmane dans Guelwaar : le griot personnage littéraire nommé Guelwaar et le griot écrivain contemporain africain, Sembène Ousmane lui-même. Ces deux griots entretiennent des rapports de similitude et de divergence avec le vrai griot. Mais le griot écrivain contemporain africain ressemble beaucoup plus au griot d’antan en dépit des points de divergence. Nous finissons par déceler dix-huit fonctions du griot et par-là arriver aux dix-huit portraits du griot dans Guelwaar dont le griot bibliothèque publique bien documentée et le griot détenteur de la littérature écrite africaine postcoloniale. Nous parvenons à la conclusion que la littérature postcoloniale, comme l’atteste Guelwaar de Sembène Ousmane, se caractérise par une revalorisation des valeurs authentiques, honorables et louables du griot de caste. Ceci est symbolisé par l’apparition du griot personnage littéraire dans certaines oeuvres de la littérature écrite postcoloniale africaine comme Guelwaar et surtout la prééminence accordée aux griots écrivains contemporains africains tel Sembène Ousmane.
The griot, in the traditional African society is a complex personality charged with multiple functions. He is well respected and honoured. The objective of the present research is to make an in-depth study of the depiction of the griot in post-colonial literature using Guelwaar as study text while establishing his functions and portraits. Postcolonialism, Marxist and Feminist theories constitute the theoretical framework. Furthermore, the examination is carried out in the light of the image of the real griot and the seven categories of new griots promulgated by Ifeoma Mabel Onyemelukwe. It is found that Sembène Ousmane depicts two types of griots in Guelwaar, namely: the griot as literary character named Guelwaar and the griot as contemporary African writer, Sembène Ousmane, himself. These two griots have certain similarities and differences with the real griot. But the findings show that the griot as contemporary African writer resembles more the real griot, their points of disparity notwithstanding. Eighteen functions and eighteen portraits of the griot are established, among which are: the griot as well documented library and the griot as custodian of written postcolonial African Literature. A firm conclusion is reached, that postcolonial literature, as reflected in Sembène Ousmane’s Guelwaar, is characterized by the revalorization of the real griot’s authentic, honorable and praise-worthy values. This is symbolized in the projection of the griot as literary character in some literary works like Guelwaar and in particular, the preeminence given to griots as Contemporary African writers as typified by Sembène Ousmane.
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Hayhurst, Lyndsay M. C., and Audrey Giles. "Private and Moral Authority, Self-Determination, and the Domestic Transfer Objective: Foundations for Understanding Sport for Development and Peace in Aboriginal Communities in Canada." Sociology of Sport Journal 30, no. 4 (December 2013): 504–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/ssj.30.4.504.
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Sport for development and peace (SDP) is a contemporary term for practices that have a long history, particularly in Canada’s provincial and territorial north, and especially with Aboriginal peoples for whom the region is home. Using a postcolonial international relations feminist approach, theories of global governance and private authority, and by exploring recent literature on self-determination in the context of Aboriginal peoples, we investigate 1) the assumptions at work in attempts to “transfer” SDP programming models in the Two-Thirds World to Aboriginal communities across Canada; 2) how the retreat of the welfare state and neo-liberal policies have produced the “need” for SDP in Aboriginal communities; and 3) how efforts toward Aboriginal self-determination can be made through SDP. We argue that, taken together, these concepts build a useful foundation better understanding for the historical and sociopolitical processes involved in deploying SDP interventions in Aboriginal communities.
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Burcar, Lilijana. "Imploding the Racialized and Patriarchal Beauty Myth through the Critical Lens of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye." Journal for Foreign Languages 9, no. 1 (December 28, 2017): 139–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/vestnik.9.139-158.
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This contribution investigates and lays bare the ideological workings of racialized beauty myth as presented in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye by bringing together feminist theory and postcolonial theory of race. It demonstrates that racialized beauty norms are informed by both the constructs of gender and race, and that they serve as a tool of social positioning and social control in Western capitalist patriarchies. This kind of contextual understanding, which Morrison’s The Bluest Eye helps to foster on a number of structurally interlocked levels, is also of crucial importance for the understanding of the way beauty myth operates today in the context of globally exported Western beauty industry. Its basic tenets remain firmly rooted in the construction and perpetuation of racialized and gendered otherness, which is why The Bluest Eye remains an eye-opener and therefore a novel of lasting value for readers in general and, as this contribution demonstrates, for students of English literature in particular.
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Singh, Jaspal Kaur. "Negotiating Ambivalent Gender Spaces for Collective and Individual Empowerment: Sikh Women’s Life Writing in the Diaspora." Religions 10, no. 11 (October 28, 2019): 598. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10110598.
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In order to examine gender and identity within Sikh literature and culture and to understand the construction of gender and the practice of Sikhi within the contemporary Sikh diaspora in the US, I analyze a selection from creative non-fiction pieces, variously termed essays, personal narrative, or life writing, in Meeta Kaur’s edited collection, Her Name is Kaur: Sikh American Women Write About Love, Courage, and Faith. Gender, understood as a social construct (Butler, among others), is almost always inconsistent and is related to religion, which, too, is a construct and is also almost always inconsistent in many ways. Therefore, my reading critically engages with the following questions regarding life writing through a postcolonial feminist and intersectional lens: What are lived religions and how are the practices, narratives, activities and performances of ‘being’ Sikh imagined differently in the diaspora as represent in my chosen essays? What are some of the tenets of Sikhism, viewed predominantly as patriarchal within dominant cultural spaces, and how do women resist or appropriate some of them to reconstruct their own ideas of being a Sikh? In Kaur’s collection of essays, there are elements of traditional autobiography, such as the construction of the individual self, along with the formation of communal identity, in the postcolonial life writing. I will critique four narrative in Kaur’s anthology as testimonies to bear witness and to uncover Sikh women’s hybrid cultural and religious practices as reimagined and practiced by the female Sikh writers.
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Ngeh, Andrew T., and Sarah M. Nalova. "Rethinking Language and Gender in African Fiction: Towards De-gendering and Re-gendering." Social Science, Humanities and Sustainability Research 1, no. 1 (June 20, 2020): p132. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sshsr.v1n1p132.
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The recognition and acceptance of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist discourse which challenges the subjugation of the woman. G.D. Nyamndi, therefore, in his Facing Meamba attempts to address these concerns and proffer feasible solutions. The representation of women in literature, the role of gender in both literary creation and literary criticism, as studied ingynocriticism, the connection between gender and various aspects of literary form in such genre and metre embody masculine values of heroism, war, and adventure. This androcentric stand has compromised the rights of the woman, resulting in her marginalization, alienation and exclusion from socio-cultural activities. She is maligned with a sense of inadequacy. The patriarchal centre prevails and dominates the woman who has been pushed to the margin of the society. In this regard, Nyamndi demonstrates that, the African woman still has a place within the postcolonial context even though the man is imbued with more powers than the woman. Informed by the postcolonial theory, this study argues that, gendering constitutes a grave danger to a harmonious existence between the two genders. The study revealed that, de-gendering and re-gendering can create harmony between the man and woman because the two concepts are basis for gender equality. To achieve this, language which constitutes a semiotic mould has been exploited to deploy themes like, gender inequality and cultural issues.
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Van Coller, H. P. "Die reisverslag van ’n post-kolonialistiese reisiger: Die reise van Isobelle deur Elsa Joubert." Literator 19, no. 3 (April 30, 1998): 53–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v19i3.557.
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The travelogue of a post-colonial traveller: The travels of Isobelle by Elsa Joubert Die reise van Isobelle (The travels of Isobelle) written by Elsa Joubert is regarded as one of her best novels. In many respects this novel can be considered as an overview of an extensive and impressive oeuvre. This article attempts to indicate that this novel not only relates to the important tradition of travel writing in Afrikaans literature, but also comments on this tradition from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. In a certain sense this novel can also be read as a continuance (or rewriting) of Joubert's own travel journals that have still been embedded in a colonial consciousness. Once again a symbiotic relationship exists between the above-mentioned novel and several of Elsa Joubert's other travel journals. In this article the intertextual ties with Water en woestyn and Die verste reis are explored in particular. The premise of this hypothesis is that the characteristic aspect of travel literature is the unseverable tie between centrifugal and centripetal forces. To a great extent the structure of this extensive work, with its extraordinarily solid motif structure, already determines this.
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Olukotun, Oluwatoyin, Kaboni Gondwe, and Lucy Mkandawire-Valhmu. "The Mental Health Implications of Living in the Shadows: The Lived Experience and Coping Strategies of Undocumented African Migrant Women." Behavioral Sciences 9, no. 12 (November 26, 2019): 127. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs9120127.
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In the United States, undocumented immigrants often encounter complex challenges that impact their emotional well-being. Existing literature has primarily focused on Latino immigrants. Thus, little is known about the mental health needs of undocumented African immigrant women. To address this gap, we examined the stressors, mental health concerns and coping strategies of undocumented African migrant women in the United States. This qualitative study used a postcolonial feminist framework approach. Twenty-four undocumented African migrant women were interviewed, and data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings showed that the women dealt with complex stressors created by the sociopolitical environment. These stressors contributed to feelings of depression and anxiety which they coped with using social support and religion. The results uncover the need for culturally relevant tools for screening and addressing the mental health needs of undocumented women and increased awareness amongst healthcare providers on how social context and policies adversely impact the mental health of marginalized groups. Lastly, at a structural level, the need for policy and social change that fosters an inclusive and safe environment for undocumented persons.
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Wang, Cangbai, and Jing Huang. "Desiring homeland: The return of Indonesian Chinese women to Maoist China." Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 29, no. 2 (June 2020): 163–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0117196820931314.
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The past decades have witnessed a burgeoning literature on guiqiao (Returned Overseas Chinese) in the People’s Republic of China. These works have advanced and broadened research in this field; however, there is a persistent male bias that tends to ignore the gendered nature of migration processes or simplistically frame the return migration of women through a monolithic masculine/patriotic lens. To fill this gap, this paper looks at gendered motivations behind the ‘return’ of Chinese women from Indonesia in the 1950s. Seeing gender as ‘a central organizing principle in migration flows and in the organization of migrants lives’ ( Lutz 2010 : 1651) and drawing upon interviews and archival studies, it suggests that the ‘return’ of Chinese women to Maoist China was closely associated with postcolonial feminist imagination, or more specifically, a longing for ‘emancipated womanhood,’ in a transnational context mediated by citizenship and ethnicity. In addition, the experiences of female guiqiao as voluntary migrants and successful careerists challenge the (mis)conception of Chinese women migrants as trailing dependents, adding a counter narrative to the overarching androcentric discourse about Chinese migration from a historical perspective.
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Langah, Nukhbah Taj, and Muhammad Abudllah. "Trimti: Siraiki Feminism and the Role of Women within Siraiki Literary Domain." Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies: Alam-e-Niswan 26, no. 1 (May 30, 2020): 95–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.46521/pjws.026.01.0019.
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This paper applies textual analysis and an ethnographic approach to explore the role of women within the Siraiki cultural and literary domain. The debate about Siraiki as an ethno linguistic identity is a postcolonial development in Pakistan. Siraiki language speakers identify themselves being distinct from any other ethnic group in Pakistan. Based on this claim they resist the hegemonic control of Punjabi-Mohajir over their resources, area and disregard towards their literary and cultural tradition. The demand for a new Siraiki province within the federation of Pakistan by bifurcating Punjab is an outcome of this lack of political recognition. We contend that due to social taboos and patriarchal pressures, these women are experiencing suppression that results in limited visibility within mainstream literary circles. The lack of both appreciation and mentorship for their creative outputs has resulted in the dearth of literature produced by Siraiki women writers. The objective of this study is to indicate how this oppression can result in an enactment of power through creative writing. In order to substantiate our argument, we rely on selected works by Iqbal Bano, Shabnam Awan and Mussarat Kalanchvi. In the process, we also attempt to theorize an indigenous manifestation of feminist intent of these Siraiki writers as Trimti
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Piotrowska, Agnieszka. "Who is the author of Neria (1992) – and is it a Zimbabwean masterpiece or a neo-colonial enterprise?" Journal of Screenwriting 11, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 287–302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/josc_00034_1.
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This article focuses on the Zimbabwean film Neria (1992), arguably one of the most important films in the history of sub-Saharan Africa. Directed by the Black Zimbabwean Godwin Mawuru, it was the first feminist film in Zimbabwe and in the region, highlighting the plight of women who become the property of their brothers-in-law after their husbands die. The article addresses the issues of the origins of the story and the authorship of the screenplay. On the final reel of the film, the story credit names the accomplished Zimbabwean female novelist, Tsitsi Dangarembga; while the screenplay credit names Louise Riber. Riber served as the film’s White American editor and co-producer who, with her husband John Riber, managed the Media for Development Fund in Zimbabwe. The key question of this article is simple: who wrote the screenplay for Neria? Through the physical and metaphorical journey of this research, we discover that the story is based on the personal experiences of Anna Mawuru, the director’s mother. This is the first time that this fact has surfaced. As such, this article also offers some reflections on issues of adaption/translation, particularly in the context of postcolonial collaborations.
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Appel, Hannah. "Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy." Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 2 (May 12, 2017): 294–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.09.
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What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation. Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, the article argues for the centrality of the state and questions of geopolitical scale in any approach to the national economy form. Juxtaposing the literature on economic performativity with Equatoguinean political history and the power of U.S. oil companies in the global South highlights the open-endedness of what Michel Callon has called economics “in the wild” and the as-if qualities generated at the crossroads of economic theory and postcolonial inequality. This article thus aims to open up ethnographic possibilities in the face of national economies far beyond Equatorial Guinea’s borders.
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Grassi, Umberto. "Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality." Cultural History 5, no. 2 (October 2016): 200–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cult.2016.0126.
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In the first part of this article I summarize the ongoing historiographical debate over Michel Foucault's theory of the nineteenth-century medical ‘invention’ of homosexuality, as it was formulated in the 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge. Starting from the now-outdated conflict between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’, I underline the ‘blind spots’ of the Foucauldian narrative as highlighted by postcolonial, feminist and queer criticisms. In the second part, I shift to the historiography of the early modern Iberian and Colonial world. Even though a lot of work in this field has already been done, I think that a full comprehension of the connections between this research and the international debate on the history of gender and sexual transgressions is still lacking. Through the analysis of this literature, I propose a revision of Foucault's account, questioning the idea of the nineteenth-century ‘great paradigm shift’. On the one hand, these studies address the long-term genealogy of issues that has fully ripened in the nineteenth century. On the other, they confirm the coexistence in past societies of a multiplicity of understandings of sexual behaviors that questions the hypothesis of a succession of coherent and homogeneous epistemological patterns.
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Pereira, Maria do Mar. "Boundary-work that Does Not Work: Social Inequalities and the Non-performativity of Scientific Boundary-work." Science, Technology, & Human Values 44, no. 2 (August 28, 2018): 338–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0162243918795043.
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Although the STS literature on boundary-work recognizes that such work unfolds within a “terrain of uneven advantage” vis-à-vis gender, race, and other inequalities, reflection about that uneven advantage has been strikingly underdeveloped. This article calls for a retheorizing of boundary-work that engages more actively with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholarship and examines more systematically the relation between scientific boundary-work, broader structures of sociopolitical inequality, and boundary-workers’ (embodied) positionality. To demonstrate the need for this retheorization, I analyze ethnographic and interview data on scientific boundary-work in the natural and social sciences in Portugal, showing that scholars’ gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality affect the success of their boundary-work. I suggest, therefore, that in unequal societies where credibility is unevenly distributed, the conditions are not in place for some scholars’ boundary-work to work. I draw on Sara Ahmed (and J. L. Austin) to argue that we must conceptualize scientific boundary-work as always potentially performative, but not always successfully so, and explicitly interrogate the actual conditions of performativity. Recognizing the links between inequality, embodiment, and non-performativity in scientific boundary-work will enable STS to better understand, and hopefully transform, the relations between contingent struggles over scientificity and entrenched structures of power.