From the exuberant excesses of Carmen Miranda in the “tutti frutti hat” to the curvaceous posterior of Jennifer Lopez, the Latina body has long been a signifier of Latina/o identity in U.S. popular ...culture. But how does this stereotype of the exotic, erotic Latina “bombshell” relate, if at all, to real Latina women who represent a wide spectrum of ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and physical appearances? How are ideas about “Latinidad” imagined, challenged, and inscribed on Latina bodies? What racial, class, and other markers of identity do representations of the Latina body signal or reject? In this broadly interdisciplinary book, experts from the fields of Latina/o studies, media studies, communication, comparative literature, women’s studies, and sociology come together to offer the first wide-ranging look at the construction and representation of Latina identity in U.S. popular culture. The authors consider such popular figures as actresses Lupe Vélez, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Lopez; singers Shakira and Celia Cruz; and even the Hispanic Barbie doll in her many guises. They investigate the media discourses surrounding controversial Latinas such as Lorena Bobbitt and Marisleysis González. And they discuss Latina representations in Lupe Solano’s series of mystery books and in the popular TV shows El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. This extensive treatment of Latina representation in popular culture not only sheds new light on how meaning is produced through images of the Latina body, but also on how these representations of Latinas are received, revised, and challenged.
The role of women in making art and the agency of the overly-represented female body in artistic practices have been crucial debates in twentieth-century Western feminism and beyond. In particular, ...it was in the wake of the second wave of feminism, with the emergence of poststructuralism and deconstruction, and the postmodern turn that critical assessments of the arts started claiming back female spaces and voices in the midst of a still largely patriarchal artistic scene.
This article presents historical-literary research on the work of São Paulo poet Yde Schloenbach Blumenschein (1882-1963). It examines the reception of her productions (considering the morality of ...the time) and the final rejection (1961) of the publication of her verses, which had always been forbidden. Analysis of her 12 books indicates the steep and difficult construction of literary femininity, since women were compelled to use pseudonyms as ruses to erase identity.
Yanhong Zhu is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Washington and Lee University. Her research interests include literary and film theory, modern ...Chinese literature, and Chinese cinema. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in Chinese Literature Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of East Asian Popular Culture, American Quarterly, ECCE, and in several edited volumes on modern Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, and Chinese language pedagogy.
From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women's ...self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture.
This book examines the relationship between normative femininity and women's self-directed violence in contemporary Japanese culture. To theoretically define the complexities that constitute normativity, the book develops the concept of 'contradictive femininity' and shows how in Japanese culture, women's paradoxical roles are thematised through three character construction techniques, broadly derived from the doppelgänger motif. It then demonstrates how eating disorders and self-harm are included in normative femininity and suggests that such self-directed violence can be interpreted as coping strategies to overcome feelings of fragmentation related to contradictive femininity. Looking at novels, artwork, manga, anime, TV dramas and news stories, the book analyses both globally well known Japanese culture such as Murakami Haruki's literary works and Miyazaki Hayao's animation, as well as culture unavailable to non-Japanese readers. The aim of juxtaposing such diverse narrative and visual culture is to map common storylines and thematisation techniques about normative femininity, self-harm and eating disorders. Furthermore, it shows how women's private struggles with their own bodies have become public discourse available for consumption as entertainment and lifestyle products.
Highly interdisciplinary, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society and gender and women's studies, as well as to academics and consumers of Japanese literature, manga and animation.
Since the 1970s social science researchers have documented the cultural devaluation of femininity and its impact on experiences of discrimination among sexual and gender minorities. Yet, despite the ...continued and accumulating evidence demonstrating the role of anti-femininity (or femmephobia) in these experiences, little research has specifically examined femininity as an intersecting component of discrimination. Using in-depth interviews with sexual and gender minorities (
N
= 38), the current study explores the intersecting role of femmephobia in experiences of discrimination. Under the global theme of “femininity as target,” 5 key subthemes were identified: femininity and passing, regulating sexualities, masculine right of access, biological determinism, and the feminine joke. Participants illuminated femmephobia as a regulatory power within LGBTQ+ communities and society at large, as well as how femininity itself operates as a target in their experiences of gender policing and discrimination. By turning attention toward femininity, the current paper provides a clearer understanding of what may possibly lay at the heart of many social issues surrounding discrimination and violence. These findings have implications for the study of social inequalities, as well as strategies for remedying the pervasive devaluation of femininity.
Using a matronymic alone was highly unusual in the ancient world. Gathering evidence from three texts from the second and third centuries CE from across confessional divides, I argue that it was a ...technique to express succession lines in certain female professions—there were simply very few of these in the ancient world. Two works of literature featuring the character of Thecla (the anonymous Act of Paul and Thecla and Methodius of Olympus’ Symposium) and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans show a persistent concern with professional bonds naturalized into mother-daughter relationships.
Así pues, en aspecto, Romualdo la compara con María, la madre de Jesucristo: The greatest painters, who followed ideal beauty into heaven itself, and thence brought back to earth the true portrait of ...the Madonna ... she was rather tall, with a form and bearing of a goddess. Es decir, tal y como uno se siente ante las normas impuestas por la consciencia: ... he constantly kept his two great yellow lion-eyes fixed upon me, and plunged his look into my soul like a sounding lead, Suddenly he said, in a clear vibrant voice, which rang in my ears like the trumpets of the Last Judgment ... Being myself wholly sceptical as to the existence of any such portent as the vampire, the supernatural theory of the good doctor furnished, in my opinion, but another instance of learning and intelligence oddly associated with some one hallucination (Le Fanu, 2005: 94-95). Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific (Le Fanu, 2005: 104).
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