Gender - Page 4

Black Feminist Discourse of Power in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide

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Lamia Khalil Hammad, Yarmouk University, Jordan

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This paper discusses black feminist discourse of power in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who have considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The work depicts the struggle of black women through a rainbow of experiences. At the end, the girls arrive at ‘selfhood’ by finding God in themselves. This paper focuses on how the patriarchal discourse lead to their suffereing and how they were able to claim back their identities as black females who only need to be loved and appreciated. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

A Feminist Aesthetics of Nature

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Tegan Zimmerman, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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This article examines the relatively unstudied field of the aesthetics of nature from a feminist perspective. Currently a feminist aesthetics of nature does not exist in scholarship, though I argue in our age of eco-crisis this is necessary. I explore what this feminist approach might entail by discussing three essential elements to the current masculinist study of nature: 1) the role of the subject or observer, 2) method of appreciation, and 3) appropriate object for appreciation. By focusing on the recent impasse in feminism, between essentialism and non-essentialism, this paper looks at how each side of the debate would approach these above three topics, and what future paths feminism might take in creating an adequate study of the aesthetics of nature.  Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

“Humans as Voices of God and Tradition?” Rethinking the Subjugation of the African Woman in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter

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Stephen O. Solanke, Ajayi Crowther University, Nigeria

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Over the eons, man has posed asspeaking for and on behalf of God and Tradition. His assumed positions on social issues, therefore, are regarded as infallibles. Polygamy as one of the issues is advantageous for male. This paper discusses, through a sociological consideration of Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and the effects of polygamy, that a positive consideration be cast on the issue in the modern African world. Women need not be abandoned, children need not be cast aside, and men’s lives need not become loveless as much as the society need not be shackled with frustrated marriages and destroyed lives. The African world, faced with the negative effects laid on the table in this paper, should sociologically re-adjust itself into the modern world of love-giving, acceptance and sharing. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

The “Politically Correct Memsahib”: Performing Englishness in Select Anglo-Indian Advice Manuals

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S. Vimala, M.G.R. College, Hosur, India

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Examining select Anglo-Indian advice manuals written after the Indian Mutiny in 1857and during the ‘high imperialism’ period of the British Raj, the essay proposes that this cultural artefact served the purpose of constructing and naturalizing the English Memsahibs’ gendered racial identity. By reiterating the performance of gender, class and race imperatives to construct a unique identity prerequisite for the Anglo-Indian community as well as the Indian colony, these texts aimed at the crystallization of this identity that will strengthen the idea of the British Raj. Such reiteration- apart from revealing the imperial anxiety of the subversion of the Memsahib identity- were useful to caution the English women new to the colonial environment.  Reading these Anglo-Indian advice manuals produced for the consumption of the Anglo-Indian community, what the essay further proposes is that the performance of gendered-racial identity of the English women in India constituted not only the governance of their bodies and the Anglo-Indian spaces, but also their management of travel and material consumption including food.  Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter provide useful insights to study the performance of the “politically correct Memsahib” identity and its attendant relation to the imagining of the homogenous British Raj.    Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Gender Dialectics of Yoruba Drum Poetry

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Azeez Akinwumi SESAN, Al -Hikmah University, Ilorin

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The analytical and dialectical nature of Yoruba oral art with the inclusion of drum poetry facilitates its unending discourses. In the past and contemporary African society, gender issues have attracted critical attentions of scholars and researchers using different subject areas. In the past Yoruba societies, women were acknowledged as the performers of oral art, particularly in the genres of poetry and prose but with the exemption of drum poetry. It is on this understanding that this paper examines the impact of gender dialectics on the discourse of Yoruba drum poetry. The paper draws inferences from Ifa literary corpus for mythico-historical origin of Yoruba drums. Data are gathered through primary source (field investigations) and secondary sources (books, journals and periodicals).As a verbal art, Yoruba drum poetry has some masculinity attached to it and until recently, women are passive participants in drum poetry performance. It is established that gender dialectics has made a score as there are now the emergence of female professional drummers. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Three Book Reviews

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The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays

The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays

Edited by Richard J Gray, Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-7864-6830-0

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal

By J. Jack Halberstam, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-8070-1098-3

Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays

Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays

By Bernadette Barton, New York: New York University Press, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-8147-8637-6

Review by Rohit K Dasgupta, University of the Arts London Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Signifying The Self: Intersections of Class, Caste and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s Dance Drama Chandalika (1938)

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Sutapa Chaudhuri, Dr. Kanailal Bhattacharyya College, Howrah, India

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Much has been said about the way Tagore views his women in his poems, essays, novels and drama. Yet it is the dance dramas of Tagore, a genre quite unique in his time and milieu, which portray the radical nature of Tagore’s conception of women and the maturation of their selfhood. The dance dramas illustrate Tagore’s bold and perceptive experimentation with various literary forms and techniques and the radical nature of his ideological orientation. Among the dance dramas of Tagore, Chandalika has a special place as it foregrounds the theme of female desire in an untouchable girl, a tabooed subject in his times, indeed even now in Bengali writings. This paper tries to show how Tagore uses the nuances of the dance form to showcase the intersections of caste, class and gender as well as the evolution of selfhood in Prakriti, the Chandal girl. Keep Reading

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The Sexologist and the Poet: On Magnus Hirschfeld, Rabindranath Tagore, and the Critique of Sexual Binarity

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J. Edgar Bauer, Researcher and Author                 

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Between 1930 and 1932, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) undertook a world journey that he eventually reported in Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933), arguably the first non-Eurocentric, anti-colonialist critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective.  Saluted as “the modern Vatsyayana of the West,” Hirschfeld met during his stay in India personalities such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Jagadish Chandra Bose, and Radindranath Tagore, whom he visited at his family residence in Calcutta.  Against the backdrop of Hirschfeld’s “doctrine of sexual intermediaries” and his general postulate that truly creative artists have mostly “united in themselves both sexes in especially pronounced form,” the study analyzes and assesses his reference to Tagore’s femininity. While acknowledging the correspondences between the sexologist’s universalization of sexual intermediariness and the poet’s premise that “[t]he Creator must be conscious of both the male and female principles without which there can be no Creation,” the elaborations focus on their divergent conceptualizations of sexual difference, womanhood, and the erotic life. Keep Reading

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Book Review: Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai edited Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History

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New Delhi, Penguin Books India, 2008. ISBN 9780143102069. xxxvi + 479 pp.

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Review by Jaydeep Rishi, Sarojini Naidu College for Women, West Bengal, India Keep Reading

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