The women's movement in the United States has a long and complex history, incorporating a variety of contexts, issues and identities. Often conceptualized as a series of waves of mobilization that ...grow, peak and decline, the U.S. women's movement is broadly divided into a first (1860s-1920), second (1960s-‘80s) and third (1990s and beyond) wave. However, feminist scholars find the wave metaphor problematic, a critique taught in many Women and Gender Studies classrooms. Analyzing interviews with self-identified contemporary feminists, I argue that the wave metaphor is a discursive legacy that is used to locate contemporary feminists' place in history, while at the same time emerging feminists are taught to critique it. The result is both a rejection of the wave metaphor and an acceptance of many aspects of history it provides and the adoption of a “wave” vocabulary. Consequentially, the past becoming a problem to be corrected by contemporary feminists and a yardstick by which to measure and identify their own feminism. Overall, this discursive legacy of “wave” talk encourages feminist generations to view each other through a lens of opposition and difference and influences their view of the viability of the movement.
The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a ...suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the poem for eroticising and failing to condemn the rape it depicts. To assess these charges I examine other literary uses of the Leda myth both before and after Yeats, including earlier poems which romanticise the rape, and later ones which vilify it. I also consider the implications of my discussion for the teaching of other canonical poems on similar themes. The last part of the paper discusses more generally the place of morality in literature and literature teaching, including stylistics: whether teachers and analysts should promote a moral world view and moral behaviour through their choice of texts and comments on them, or whether there are other valid criteria for selecting and describing a text such as Leda and the Swan. To elucidate current views, I draw parallels with the moral didacticism of the highly influential literary critic F. R. Leavis in the mid twentieth century, and ask whether aspects of his patrician view have undergone a surreptitious revival in some contemporary pedagogy and criticism at the beginning of the twenty first.
New Directions in Motherhood Studies Kawash, Samira
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
06/2011, Volume:
36, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article surveys scholarship on motherhood and mothering published over the past decade. Academic scholars and writer-activists have written about mothers and mothering in a diversity of genres ...and a with broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Work on motherhood is wide-ranging and fragmented, but taken as a whole, this work simultaneously insists on the particularity and specificity of motherhood while at the same time rejecting any notion of a fixed or essential aspect of maternal experience, desire, or subjectivity. The article argues that academic feminism has marginalized and neglected both mothers as mothers and the study of motherhood more generally. This essay endeavors to bring this literature to the attention of academic feminists and to argue for the necessity of including motherhood in a broader feminist movement.
Este ensayo discute La teoría de la bolsa como origen de la ficción de Ursula K. Le Guin y lo recontextualiza a la novela Bruna, soroche y los tíos (1973) de la ecuatoriana Alicia Yánez Cossío; ...novela de la que este 2023 se cumple 50 años de su lanzamiento. Comenzando desde la definición de Le Guin de lo que corresponde a la literatura masculina y su contraparte, lo que incumbe a la literatura femenina, se revindica lo quieto como un atributo de la literatura femenina y se crítica la acción como fuerza que mueve la literatura masculina. Luego, se hilan puntos de encuentro entre las dos escritoras, específicamente en su crítica al modelo patriarcal, y se explora la novela de Yánez Cossío bajo el marco teórico de Le Guin. Con esto, el ensayo se detiene en una exploración de la forma narrativa que emplea la novela para contener tanto los afectos y memorias del lugar de origen de la protagonista, para después optar por partir en un gesto significativo de ruptura.
Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed ...that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts.
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