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Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular—and controversial—writers in the Asian American literary tradition. This book traces her development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings, and her two-book ‘life-writing project’. The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity—or fakery—of her cultural references. This book traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work The Fifth Book of Peace.
Carter‘s fiction sits uneasily in relation to both Gothic and feminist discourses, especially as they converge through the category of the ‘female Gothic’. Owing to her interest in pornography and her engagement with the sexual/textual violence of specifically ‘male Gothic’ scripts – for example, the Gothic scenarios of Sade, Poe, Hoffmann, Baudelaire and Stoker – Carter‘s Gothic heroines have frequently been censured as little more than objects of sadistic male desires by feminist critics. This article re-reads Carter‘s sexual/textual violations – her defiance of dominant feminist and Gothic categories and categorisations – through the problematic of (post-)feminist discourse and, especially, the tension between ‘victim’ and ‘power’ feminisms as prefigured in her own (Gothic) treatise on female sexual identity, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Mapping the trajectory of her Gothic heroine from Ghislaine in Shadow Dance (1966) to Fevvers in Nights at the Circus (1984), it re-contextualises Carters engagements with the Gothic as a dialogue with both the female Gothic and feminist discourse.
( London : Sage ). Bacchi , C. L. ( 2005 ), ‘ Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology ’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies , 13 : 3 , 198 – 209 . Bacchi , C. L. ( 2009a ), Analysing Policy: What
(‘empirical shudras’) (Guru, 2020 ; Mahadevan, 2020 : 229–3). As Cynthia Stephens ( 2009 ) suggests, Dalit feminist theoretical claims ‘is a conscious effort to break the existing stereotype of Dalit women as mainly activists (doers) who have little to contribute (as thinkers) to ideological discourses in society, politics, governance, ethics, economics, and development’. There is a risk of subsuming Dalit feminism within dominant feminist discourse through a mere acknowledgement of difference, and making room for ‘different voices’ from non
harridans, most notably the Wife of Bath and La Vielle from Rose . 1 But the widow goes beyond even these speakers, who themselves represent the complex and nuanced relationship of speaker and speech. Most evidently, she distorts the sermon form by transforming it from a mode for teaching Christian morality to a manifesto for adulterous wives. Suffice to say, the sermon that she delivers to the wives does not allude only to biblical material. Conduct literature and anti-feminist discourse are each subverted to provide the
responsibility to the wandering member of the British race, who may be without ties in a new country. For such members may work great damage to their own and to other races if they have not means of recreation or of fellowship, but live in dangerous loneliness.’ 5 In feminist discourse, mobile men were dangerous men and the wandering members of the British race – the nomad tribe, the
the moral fable’ ( BL Add MS88899/1/84 ). This chapter is concerned, in part, with bodying forth – or awakening – the spectral presence of the Gothic in The Sadeian Woman to realign its political and aesthetic matters. To that end it explores the Gothic as a site for the intersection of Sadeian and feminist discourses of female victimisation. The figure of Sleeping Beauty
1 sex workers who have violently lost their lives. It further promotes the recognition of sex workers’ human rights, including the constitutional rights to healthcare, justice, labour law protection and, of course, freedom from violence. The campaign serves as an important curative in the global feminist discourse on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) – such as the #MeToo movement/moment – as it brings to the fore the all too often marginalised voices of African womxn sex workers. In this chapter, former SWEAT
Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval English studies, Dating Beowulf: studies in intimacy playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. This volume presents an argument for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice versa, while offering a riposte to anti-feminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, feminist criticism, literary theory, Old English literature, and medieval studies alike. To this end, the chapters embody a range of critical approaches, from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to Actor-Network theory, all organized into clusters that articulate new modes of intimacy with the poem.
This book examines how the identities of women and girls in colonial India were shaped by interaction with each other, a masculine raj and feminist and non-feminist philanthropists situated mostly outside India. These identities were determined by the emotional and sexual needs of men, racial hybridity, mission and religious orders, European accomplishments mentalities, restricted teacher professionalism and far more expansive medical care interaction. This powerful vista is viewed mostly through the imagery of feminine sensibility rather than feminism as the most consistent but changing terrain of self-actualisation and dispute over the long time period of the book. National, international and colonial networks of interaction could build vibrant colonial, female identities, while just as easily creating dystopias of female exploitation and abuse. These networks were different in each period under study in the book, emerging and withering away as the interplay of state imperatives and female domesticity, professionalism and piety changed over time. Based on extensive archival work in many countries, the book provides important context for studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial women in many colonial domains. The book also explains why colonial mentalities regarding females in India were so different to those on the nationalist side of the story in the early twentieth-century. This was even when feminist discourse was offered by a failing raj to claim new modernity after World War One and when key women activists in India chose, instead, to cross over to occupy spaces of Indian asceticism and community living.