“The Ideal Woman”:
Interrogating
Femininity across
Disciplines and Time
Queen’s University Belfast
Friday 11 - Saturday 12 March 2011
A conference of the First Mondays International
Research Forum on Women, QUB
Thanks to sponsorship from
First Mondays, Student Led Initiative
at Queen’s and CAWP (Centre for the
Advancement of Women in Politics)
A Conference to Celebrate International Women’s Day
‘The Ideal Woman’: Interrogating Femininity across
Disciplines and Time
Queen’s University Belfast
Friday 11 - Saturday 12 March 2011
Historically, there have been various constructions of what is to be an “ideal
woman”. Across disciplines, cultures, spheres and societies the “ideal woman” has
become associated with modes of femininity and ‘proper’ behaviour. Political
theories, ideologies, legal institutions and religious faiths have defined rights and
duties; virtues and vices and condemned those who do not conform. World literature
presents a full array of models and characters which personify both the ‘ideal’ woman
and those women who subvert the archetype. Contemporary popular culture still
disseminates ideas and presents women of different nationalities and age with
models of ‘proper’ sexuality, behaviour, style, and appearance. This interdisciplinary
postgraduate conference seeks to interrogate constructions of ideal femininity and
how such models have been reiterated, reinvented, manipulated, and challenged. We
welcome (20 minute) papers that include, but are not limited to, the following
themes:








Marriage and the domestic sphere including issues surrounding childbirth,
childcare, and household management
Women in public roles – local/transnational
Constructions of femininity within religious, ethnic and national discourses
The female voice reimagining/challenging/reiterating dominant modes
Women and popular culture – contributions and representations
Travel, international encounters, missionary work
Female madness, melancholy and hysteria
Heterosexuality and Queer theory
Steering Committee: Maria Deiana, Laura Gallagher and Rachel Wilson
Conference Programme at a glance
Friday 11 March
1.30-2 pm Registration
2-4pm
Parallel Sessions 1 & 2
Session 1(1)
Session 2 (2)
Images of Women
 Dr. Sharon Kivland
Manners vs. Madness
 Neil Watt
 Kate Terkanian
 Maeve O’Riordan
 Ashleigh Simpson
 Lucy Williams
 Dr. Moyra Haslett
4 –4.15pm Break
4.15-5.45pm
Parallel Sessions 3 & 4
Session 3 (1)
Session 4 (2)
Women in Fiction
 Alicia Spencer-Hall
Women as writers
 Rebecka Gronstedt
 Gabrielle Matthews
 Clare Gill
 Dr. Hannah Priest
 Niamh Dowdall
5.45pm Wine Reception
(1/2/3) = Seminar Room Number
Saturday 12 March
9.30-11.30am
Parallel Sessions 5 & 6
Session 5 (2)
Session 6 (1)
Constructions of Femininity within
Religious, National and Ethnic Discourses
 Neula A. Kerr-Boyle
Irish Womanhood
 Catherine McGurren
 Luciana Jinga
 Dr. Sorcha Gunne
 Belma Becirbasic
 Dr. Riona Nic Congail
 Alexandra De La Torre
 Laura Feely
11.30-11.45am Break
11.45-1.15pm
Parallel Sessions 5 & 6 & 7
Session 7(1)
Sessions 8 (2)
Mothers, Wives and Workers
The Body
 Kira Petersson-Martin
 Paddy McQueen
 Lucie Coley
 Michelle A. Mayefske
 Danielle Kooy
 Sue Westwood
Session 9 (3)
Marriage and the Domestic in International Contexts
 Roderick Galam

Katja Žvan-Elliott

Chun-Yu Lin
1.15-2.15pm Lunch
2.15-3.30pm Plenary Session - Professor Jennifer Scanlon (Canada Room)
3.30pm Closing Remarks
Friday 11 March
Session 1: Images of Women 2-4pm Seminar Room 1
Chair: Paddy McQueen, School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy,
QUB
Mes plus Belles
Dr. Sharon Kivland, Sheffield Hallam University
Since 2007 I have been working with ‘historical’ popular images of women, drawn from my
collection of French women’s magazines, published at particular moments of insurrection
(1848 – the revolution that, according to Marx, comes too soon, 1871 – the Paris Commune,
and 1968 – the May événements), or at other moments of significant social and cultural
change (centralisation of France in the 1950s, the move from rural communities). The
images are isolated from their backgrounds, reprinted, then coloured as faithfully as possible
according to their original colour, which becomes a strange maquillage, or indeed, in Joan
Riviere’s term, a veritable masquerade. And masquerade is a play on the imaginary, subject
to a market of sexuality, which masks the object. They become grotesque, even though I try
to work as carefully as possible, really doing my very best not to spoil them, like a teenage
girl in her bedroom, colouring in her idealised drawings of what she may wish to become. I
have to stop when I find myself applying too much colour, in too garish a shade, but a
discrete application seems sadly insufficient. I must arrest myself at the point of violence to
the image. A supposedly enticing picture (a woman lifting her hand to her face, turning her
head, her hair flicking back in the other hand), however banal, is very easily turned into
something ugly and clumsy, yet retains or reconstitutes a horrible attraction. It is
monstrous, of course, in its overdone appearance of femininity, and each betrays something
in its intersection with history.
My paper presents these works, entitled Mes plus belles, framed, so to speak, by a
psychoanalytic reading of certain representations of femininity, via Jacques Lacan, Colette
Soler, and Paul Verhaege. Certainly fantasy is situated in the becoming of subject, linked to
the dimensions of desire, enjoyment, and anxiety.
Why We Fight: Rosie the Riveter, the Pin-Up Girl and Post-War America
Kate Terkanian, University of Tulsa
In the aftermath of World War II, Americans felt a sense of uncertainty about the future.
Fuelling this sense of uncertainty was the notion that American society and individual
Americans had undergone a profound change, both physically and psychically. Women’s
social roles appeared central to America’s future, and the changes wrought by the war
heavily impacted these roles. Women would determine whether or not America flourished,
succeeded, or failed. The idealized version of women that returning soldiers carried home
complicated the establishment of a consensus on standards of behaviour. This paper charts
how masculine expectations emerged and collided with feminine ones over the course of the
1940s, and the disappointments this collision engendered.
The vision of a post-war America included the idea that the country would have the
opportunity to heal from the twin crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and
that women, and domestic life in general, were essential to achieving this goal. However
willingly women entered into this social bargain, they found themselves expected to fulfil
standards that were impossible to uphold. In order to explore the discourse on American
womanhood I will demonstrate how America’s search for a concrete ideology for which
soldiers were fighting led to the development of a perfected vision of post-war America.
This perfected vision in turn clashed with everyday realities as reflected in the currents of
public opinion about women’s roles expressed in movies, books, newspapers, and magazines
of the period.
Gender in a Bottle: Femininity in US Perfume Advertisements, 1965-1975
Ashleigh Simpson, Queen’s University Belfast
In Trevor Millum’s study of advertising in women’s magazines, he summarised that
“advertisements do not reflect reality in any simple way . . . beauty as a particular
interpretation of appearance has a status, is an aspiration.” Fragrance advertisements offer
an exceptional medium for exploring the evolution of idealised femininity throughout the
turbulent Cold War period. Besides beauty, perfume ads show the evolution of mainstream
attitudes towards sexuality and romance, along with gendered patterns of behaviour and
lifestyle.
Adverts from the beginning of the stated period betray the influence of traditional
1950s values, preferring females to be submissive and their sexuality restrained. From 1968
onwards, the cumulative impact of feminism, civil rights and the counterculture forced
advertisers to reform their approach out of economic necessity. A new diversity
characterised how identities would be construed, allowing females to be portrayed as
individuals with independent needs, desires and interests. Having managed to liberate
themselves from the restrictive status of compliant sex objects, they remained unmistakably
more commonplace in advertisements for fragrances, regardless of which sex the marketing
targeted. The oppressive cooptation of feminism by consumer capitalist culture generated a
backlash against the changes produced in the late 1960s, reversing the long strides made by
women. As the 1970s passed, fragrance advertisements came to contribute once more to an
essentially submissive and conformist ideal of women.
_______________________________________________________________
Session 2: Manners vs. Madness 2-4pm Seminar Room 2
Chair: Rachel Wilson, School of History and Anthropology, QUB
‘Suicides and scented pink paper’: The heiress as a choice of marriage partner in
ascendancy Ireland, 1860-1920
Neil Watt, Queen’s University Belfast
The Victorian stereotype of the ideal woman was uncompromisingly specific. In accordance
with that stereotype it was the life plan of most women to marry, to become a mother and to
satisfy her domestic obligations within the home. Within a patriarchal society, it was
expected that women would retain a dependant status on her husband. However, this paper
will illustrate that such a stereotype was an ‘ideal’ unlikely to be fulfilled by a woman of
wealth and property. Financially independent, she often deviated from the marriage patterns
of her upper-class female counterparts, taking longer to marry, and opting for marriage
partners who could aid her in her business and property. It is clear that the women of this
study were freer generally to marry for affection, but also strategically, as they saw fit.
Unlike most of their upper-class counterparts, they retained a financial upper-hand over
their husbands, playing a leading role in not only family but also their own business affairs.
It is evident that the heiresses’ dominant financial position could emasculate their marital
partners, and cause a mixture of emotions – apathy, jealousy and at the extreme, depressed
and suicidal behaviour. Drawing on original Irish sources (some of which from private
archives), this paper will argue that the heiress was very far from the ‘ideal’ Victorian
stereotype society expected of a wife.
‘I gave the cook notice- she is too bad a cook for anything’ The ideal ‘lady’ as
shrewd employer. Managerial practices among women from landed
backgrounds. 1860-1914
Maeve O’Riordan, University College Cork
The Irish country house has been likened to ‘an island – and, like an island, a world’. During
this period, the prescribed ideal for women of the landed class allowed them few outlets
outside the estate walls. This paper will examine these women’s relationship with the
servants who shared their homes, and how they managed the day-to-day running of their
home. The successful management of house and servants was seen as a necessary part of the
landed woman’s role during the period. This paper is taken from a wider project which
examines the relationships of women from landed backgrounds in Munster during the
period 1860-1914. The project utilises surviving written material from a number of
Munster families in order to analyse these women’s lives.
The paper examines the challenges faced by landed women in their roles of manager
and employer. As the period progressed servant recruitment was increasingly difficult, but
there were still occasions where servants were deemed to be ‘like a sister’. This paper will
question the ease and freedom with which women recruited, managed and dismissed their
servants. It will also ask how much power this afforded them in their households. Did their
role as employer, make them a powerful partner in the estate, or was it more pressure than
they desired.
This paper, and wider project, addresses the dearth of research on women from this
class. It would add a valuable historical dimension to a panel discussing management or
power structures within the domestic sphere.
‘Indelicate in her language and indecent in her manner’ Lunacy, Class and the
Victorian Asylum as a moderator of ideal womanhood
Lucy Williams, Liverpool University
This paper explores the key role that notions of ideal womanhood took in defining and
responding to female lunacy in the Victorian period. Particular attention is given to the
importance class played in categorising some individuals as ‘madwomen’ and others as
simply biologically female and lunatic. By examining female lunacy through detailed
qualitative case notes as well as admission and discharge statistics it is possible to show how
concepts of domesticity, subservience and emotional vulnerability came to incorporate not
just what it was to be an ideal woman but in fact a mentally sound one. In particular this
paper examines a range of female cases from Bethlem Royal Hospital, Colney Hatch Lunatic
Asylum and Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Lunatic. By doing so it is possible to
illustrate how the complex relationship between class, gender, biology and the cultural
ideology of ideal womanhood saw certain groups of women defined as insane and detained
for little more than the use of ‘indelicate language’ and others spending less than twelve
months in an institution for the murder of their child. This paper discusses how the label of
madness and the asylum were flexibly employed for individuals by their communities. Most
importantly it considers how the categorisation and confinement of ‘madwomen’ was a social
tool, used to explain and regulate women, usually ideal creatures and ‘angels of the house’,
who had transgressed the most sacred of social and cultural expectations.
'The rise and fall of the learned lady in the eighteenth century'
Dr. Moyra Haslett, Queen’s University Belfast
This paper considers the mid-eighteenth century as a period in which the ‘learned lady’
became increasingly visible, and celebrated. George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great-B ritain (1755), Thomas Amory’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain (1755) and
The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and the public profile of
Elizabeth Carter all testify to the significance of the learned lady in the 1750s in particular.
The paper will also sketch the ‘rise’ of this learned lady from Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal
to the Ladies (1694, 1697) and, in the increasingly satirical treatments of the bluestockings,
her ‘fall’ in the later century.
_________________________________________________________
Break 4-4.15pm
_____________________________________________________________________
Session 3: Women in Fiction 4.15-5.45pm Seminar Room 1
Chair: Laura Gallagher, School of English, QUB
“Woman as Screen – The Divine Visions of Saint Douceline”
Alicia Spencer-Hall, University College London
A medieval saint’s divine vision is rooted in her own body – she is able literally to see God
during orgiastic raptures, commonly brought on by self-mortification, or torture. By the
same token, seeing a saint’s body, even meditatively, allows the devout miraculous healings
and the blessing of God’s grace. The saint, or rather her raptures, visions, and bodily
suffering function as proof of God’s reality. Access to her body equates to access to God’s
grace. As an object of religious contemplation, the saint’s body, emptied of subjectivity,
functions only as a screen upon which divinity is projected – at the mercy of the voyeuristic
and colonizing gaze of the (pious) onlooker seeing God. In a society which rejected women
from official religious roles, and the Church declared women unfit for speaking, medieval
women were forced back to their bodies, denied their own (religious) identity. Becoming a
“screen” for God’s divinity, then, was not always a choice, but compulsory if a woman
wished to express her spirituality – but nor did this position rob such religious women
entirely of their agency. There was a limited power afforded by this position within society
– or rather, medieval holy women managed to derive a limited, but important power from
this position. This paper will examine the figure of the medieval female saint as “screen”, and
her polyvalent power relations with the religious community, with particular reference to
the 13th century Occitan Life of Saint Douceline.
“Afterwards Meg was accounted a proper woman”: Woman Warrior as an
Ideal in Early Modern England
Gabrielle Matthews, Oxford University
Woman warriors may be found in a great breadth of texts in early modern England,
including pamphlet literature, dramatic texts, and poetry. This paper examines the
construction of femininity in two pieces of popular literature. The ballad ‘The valorous acts
performed at Gaunt, by the brave bonny lasse Mary Ambre: who in revenge of her lovers
death, did play her part most gallantly’ was registered in 1629, though was known to have
been in circulation well before. The ballad, which scholars consider one of the ‘pop hits’ of
the time, is a short but pithy text by which to interrogate the construction of femininity.
The chapbook stories of Long Meg of Westminster first appeared in the 1590s and were
reprinted regularly through the late 19th century with surprisingly stable text. The
popularity of the Long Meg and Mary Ambree texts stand testament to the culturally
durable figure of warrior women, who are a leitmotif reaching from classical Amazons to
Wonder Woman. In both texts, accessing a typically ‘masculine’ mode/code of action is
about more than just being manly. I posit that warrior attributes enable the reader to
understand these women as virtuous people, lovers, wives and patriots in themselves, rather
than just as ciphers or mouthpieces for ‘masculine’ ideals. By examining two texts in
conversation, along with a few contemporary examples, I hope to shed some light on the
construction and understanding of ideal womanhood in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Gothic Lolitas: Infantilization and Idealization in Contemporary Teen Fiction
Dr. Hannah Priest, University of Manchester
‘Young Adult’ fiction is growing market, and one that appeals to both teen and adult
women. The most widely-read genre of YA fiction is the ‘dark romance’, particularly
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Scholars have begun to turn their attention to this genre,
but much of the academic focus is on the evolving figure of the vampire, specifically in
relation to sexuality and violence. However, this phenomenon also presents a particular view
of femininity, which relies on the infantilization, idealization and (potential) demonization of
the female protagonist. An unsettling textual comparison can be made between the
presentation of the female in Twilight and that found in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
‘Nymphet’, ‘jailbait’, fangbait’: the sexualized child is a danger to the man and a temptation
to the monster. Yet while Humbert Humbert is an aberrant criminal, Edward Cullen is an
object of desire. While Lolita is a damaged victim, Bella Swan is a sympathetic heroine. This
paper will explore the implications of this breed of sexualized, ‘infant’ heroines, exploring
the extent to which the new ‘nymphet’ can be seen as an empowering persona – or if, in fact,
it entails an internalization of Humbert-esque views of girl/womanhood. The title of the
paper refers to a concurrent growth in the popularity of ‘Gothic Lolita’ fashion (mostly
favoured by women over the age of 20), and this trend will be examined as a contrast to the
literary ‘fangbait’ heroine.
_____________________________________________________________________
Session 4: Women as Writers 4.15-5.45pm Seminar Room 2
Chair: Dr. Ramona Wray, School of English, QUB
“The ‘Rise’ of the Female Critic, 1673-1754”
Rebecka Gronstedt, Queen’s University Belfast
Literary criticism might be said to have become ‘institutionalised’ as a professional practice
in the eighteenth century: the emergence of the ‘professional’ literary critic, of the literary
review as a genre, the establishment of critical theory and the satirical figure of the spiteful
critic, could be dated to this period. The period also witnessed profound debates concerning
the nature and characteristics of literary criticism, and ultimately a division between popular
and scholarly criticism. While literary criticism had traditionally been characterised by its
display of classical learning and rational judgment, new kinds of criticism were to focus on
psychological or ‘affective’ criticism, hence the power of art to affect its beholders. This
emergent strain of criticism was significantly debated by women critics, hitherto largely
unregarded in accounts of women’s involvement in eighteenth-century literary culture.
Rather, a mode of writing which might have seen to be antithetical to women’s position – in
terms of their lack of formal education and the stigma of public display associated with
commercial publication – was adopted by a significant number of women authors: Aphra
Behn, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Griffith, Mary
Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays. This paper discusses the ‘rise’ of the female critic through
the specific examples of Behn, Haywood and Lennox and demonstrates that such women
writers, rather than being marginal figures within the development of literary criticism,
worked to establish modern critical practices and to stake a claim to the importance of the
female voice in the articulation of cultural value.
The New Woman and the New Journalist: Olive Schreiner, W.T. Stead and
the politics of publicity in the Review of Reviews
Clare Gill, Queen’s University Belfast
By the time he came to launch the Review of Reviews in January 1890, W.T. Stead’s
singular editorial persona was already well established in Britain as a consequence of his
publicity-laden stint at the helm of the Pall Mall Gazette. From the very first number, the
Review of Reviews embraced fully the cult of personality that pervaded the so-called New
Journalism of the period: through both the ever-detectable characteristics of its ebullient
editor, and through its stated affiliations with a range of contemporary celebrities from the
worlds of royalty, religion, politics and culture.
Through an analysis of the Review’s innovative use of both text and image, this
paper will explore Stead’s representation of one of the key personalities of his flagship
periodical: the New Woman writer, Olive Schreiner. Stead, who had a long-standing
propensity for hero-worship, enthusiastically championed the contentious author and her
works in the pages of his periodical, where Schreiner’s outspoken views on suffrage and
issues relating to South African politics were seen to accord with his own editorial line. In
addition to the standard treatment a reasonably high profile author could expect to receive
in the press at this time - book reviews, publishing announcements and advertising, for
instance - Stead also endorsed Schreiner’s personality and politics through the publication of
articles, essays, letters and numerous portraits that together served to keep her profile high
amongst his periodical’s readership. As this paper will argue, for the enigmatic yet divisive
New Journalist, Schreiner, the celebrated yet contentious New Woman, embodied fully the
spirit of Stead’s publication: she was the epitome of modern womanhood, the consummate
literary professional, and the ultimate exemplar of “good breeding” in the colonies.
“An unsuccessful appearance is more than a pity; it is a pathological document”:
Women writers and their clothes
Niamh Dowdall, Trinity College Dublin
Above are the words of Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen from a 1937 article entitled
“Dress” in which she expounded her views on the topic of dress and fashion. Her husband,
Alan Cameron, whom she had married fifteen years previously, had, by this stage,
transformed Elizabeth from a farouche young girl whose “clothes sense was very astray” into
a smart and stylish woman. Similarly, Dorothy Todd, editor of Vogue during a controversial
period in the 1920s, tried to effect the sartorial transformation of Virginia Woolf. Many
other women writers such as Rosamund Lehmann and slightly later Irish writers such as
Maeve Brennan, Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien show a strong interest in personal dress
and style which overflows into their professional writing.
This paper is interested in the extent to which women writers may be judged by how they
look and dress and how the employment of clothes and fashion in their writing may be
viewed not merely as an inevitable result of their femininity but rather as an appropriation
of their assumed natural interest in the subject. The paper seeks to align the concept of
women writers as designers and seamstresses of texts (in Woolf’s words, “plaiting
incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life”) with carefully constructed
and controlled personal sartorial images. It will investigate how this performance of being a
woman writer and an interest in sartorial issues may be used to trivialise a woman’s writing
and how this affects her engagement with literary modernism in the twentieth century.
__________________________________________________________
Wine Reception 5.45pm
With thanks to sponsorship from CAWP (Centre for the Advancement of Women in Politics)
Saturday 12 March
Session 5: Constructions of Femininity within Religious, National
and Ethnic Discourses 9.30-11.30am Seminar Room 2
Chair: Maria Deiana, School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, QUB
“A woman has to have a pretty little figure”: The slender body and
constructions of the ‘ideal woman’ in the German Democratic Republic, 19491989
Neula A. Kerr-Boyle, University College London
This paper will explore the role of the slender body in constructions of the ‘ideal woman’
within the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), 1949-1989. It will trace
generational shifts and investigate the complex interactions between pre-war cultural
legacies, new socialist ideas and values, and western cultural influence at the grassroots and
governmental level. It will argue that despite the official policy of sexual equality
(Gleichberechtigung), the GDR displayed the inherent sexism and double-standards typical of
a patriarchal society in which almost all key positions were occupied by men. It will be
argued that these double standards were inscribed into female body ideals. Furthermore, the
paper argues that, as in the West, the pressures of the double burden (housework and paidemployment) on women meant that the body increasingly became a primary site for the
expression of these pressures, particularly among educated, white-collar women who sought
to conform to a certain construction of ideal femininity within the restrictions of patriarchal
society.
The paper is based on archival research in the Federal Archives (Berlin), the
Institute for the History of Medicine (Charité, Berlin), the German Hygiene Museum
(Dresden) and the German Insititute for Nutrition Research (Potsdam-Rehbrücke). It also
draws on popular East German magazines, such as the women’s magazines Die Frau von
heute (Today’s Woman) and Für Dich (For You). Other sources include surveys and
interviews conducted in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig in 2009 and 2010.
Public Perception of Women Within the Romanian Communist Party (19441989)
Luciana Jinga, University of Angers, France
During my research in the field of Romanian communism in the second half of the XX th
century, I’ve noticed the great deal of interest historians give to the figure of Elena
Ceausescu. Wife of the communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, and the second in the state and
party hierarchy, she is seen as incarnation of all evil during the communist regime, the
principal and very often the only responsible for all the regrettable decisions.
An extent research in the communist archives, the press of those times and
autobiographies, corroborated with the music and movies of the time, showed that a myth of
evil women involved in politics existed prior to the installation of the communist regime.
This feeling grew rapidly after its installation, when the first women occupied key positions
in both stat and party structures. This prejudice not only did not disappear during the half
century of communism, but also was extended to practical all women involved in politics
and gained new forces during the Transition period.
What I want to see is the mechanism behind the association women-evil. Were the
political conduct and / or women professional abilities less impressive than those of men
were? Is the Romanian public reaction a normal one for a Christian orthodox (misogynic)
society, where women imagine was a perpetual remembrance of Eve’s biblical seen? From
simple pawns without even the right to vote, women became important political actors. The
Romanian patriarchal had to sanction their audacity.
Inscription of post-war trauma: Raped women as national narratives.
Belma Becirbasic, University of Sarajevo
Since the war, there has not been a serious political debate in Bosnia and Herzegovina where
a social question regarding education, history, culture, economy, has not been
conceptualized in the terminology of war and genocide. Such a situation makes the ethnonational elites (Muslims, Croats, and Serbs) resistant to critics thus shielding rampant
corruption and political self-interest. The issues of how the war victims, moreover raped
woman, are being used politically, economically, culturally, and within the media to
perpetuate the further spread of nationalist politics in the context of the reconciliation
process is vital in understanding the inability of the entire Balkan region to move forward.
The inscriptions of national-chauvinism in the body in the post-war society of
Bosnia and Herzegovina have been reflected, among other things, through collective trauma
and re-patriarchalisation of discourse on raped women. The mark inscribed in woman (or
more exactly them as pillars of family, keepers of the nation) has been further strengthened
by lack of political acknowledgment of violence against woman. Collective trauma has been
created in such way only when the victim found out that she has not been protected by her
social matrix/collective; she is protected only to the extent that the political elites search for
the victims as the means of securing and defending national identity and when there is need
for promotion of dominant discourses. Society in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been
developing in such a way based on cognition of new category – the category of raped
woman; the fact itself that they have been categorized strengthens their stigmatization.
Cuando las mujeres hablan. When women talk: Colombian Women’s
Anti-War Movement.
Alexandra De La Torre, Queen’s University Belfast
When looking at women’s actions in support of peace building, the dichotomy of privatepublic represents a challenge to analyze how peace building initiatives led by women at the
grassroots level can influence peace processes on a wider scale. How can these actions, that
are grounded in the private sphere, be brought to the public sphere and contribute to peace
accords or to settlements in peace negotiations?
Feminists have suggested that the private is constructed as the women’s domain
where values are learnt and promoted, and the public, where politics take place, is
understood as the domain of men. If the public sphere is the space between private
and politics where deliberation and debate towards a healthy democratic system is
encouraged and promoted, then according to a feminist perspective, women are often
excluded from participating in the basic practice of democracy: public deliberation. How
does this statement, if correct, apply to women’s participation in peace building?
This paper aims to respond to these questions though the voices and actions of the
“el movimiento de mujeres en contra de la guerra”, the Colombian women’s movement
against war. Since 1990, a group of representatives of different women’s groups in Colombia
meet once a year to talk and demand a peaceful resolution of the conflict that during more
than a generation has affected the Colombian society. Their voices have been heard at a local
level even in areas where the government has lost its authority and are under the control of
paramilitary and guerrilla groups.
__________________________________________________________
Session 6: Irish Womanhood 9.30-11.30am Seminar Room 1
Chair: Dr. Moyra Haslett, School of English, QUB
“Women Crossing Borders”: Themes of Exile in Hush-a-bye Baby and After
’68
Catherine McGurren, Queen’s University Belfast
This paper examines films about women in Northern Ireland, focusing on Margo Harkin’s
Hush-a-bye Baby (1989) and Stephen Burke’s After ’68 (1993), which depict the lives of young
sexually active girls in Londonderry during the Troubles. This paper argues that these films
are what Hamid Naficy terms as ‘accented cinema’, the cinema of exile and Diaspora. Both
films engage with themes of territory and displacement, constructions of femininity within
nationalist discourse, and changing perceptions of Irish femininity. Women who cross
borders in order to have abortions have been called “Ireland’s hidden Diaspora”. Hush-a-bye
Baby engages with these subaltern women by portraying a pregnant Irish girl’s sense of
internal exile and her fear of rejection from conservative Catholic society. Although she
crosses the border into the “Free State”, Goretti finds no asylum, challenging nationalist
notions of Donegal as homeland. After ’68 explores the effects of nationalism on women.
The female characters are effectively placed under siege by the outbreak of violence on their
streets. This paper looks at how their internal exile is conveyed through their silence and
the female gaze. After Bloody Sunday, they go into physical exile in Donegal, leaving no
satisfactory end to the film.
The border is an important narrative trope which engages with questions of
marginality, women’s rights and alienation, as well as the nationalist issue of partition.
These strongly political films suggest that nationalism forces women into exile.
Ideal Women: Interrogating Femininity, Marriage and Career women in a
‘Post-Catholic’ Ireland
Dr. Sorcha Gunne, Warwick University
This paper is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Project Globalized Cultural
Markets: the Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference (Reference FFI2010-17282).
Though Irish women writes like Anne Enright, Enda O’Brien and Anna Burns
attract critical acclaim, there is also a popular and prolific army of Irish ‘chick lit’ writers
such as Maeve Binchy, Patricia Scanlon, Cathy Kelly, Marian Keyes, Sheila O’Flanagan and
Cecilia Ahern. Keyes, one of the genre’s most successful writers asserts that she writes
funny post-feminist fiction for post-feminist women. Conversely, sociologist Rontin Lentin
contends that she will be ‘a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy’. This paper interrogates
contemporary cultural constructions of Irish women and femininity. It questions whether
feminism is indeed anachronistic, as Keyes suggests, or if is there more of a need than ever
to revitalise feminism. This issue is particularly pertinent in contemporary Ireland and Irish
fiction, because of the problematic legacy of ‘woman’ in nationalist discourse. From 17th
century Aislings or ‘dream poems’ to Yeats’s Caitlín Ní Houlihan nationalist rhetoric in
Ireland has imagined ‘Ireland’ as embodied in the image of the ideal woman. Adopting a
cultural materialist approach that builds on the historical foundations of how the ideal
woman was conceptualised in relation to nationalist rhetoric, this paper examines discourses
of ‘woman’ and femininity in an increasingly secularised and changing Irish society. I
interrogate the recurring, though problematic, motif of the ambitious and often lonely
‘career woman’ and her journey to marriage that many of these novels portray. Is ‘chick lit’
really ‘post-feminist’ writing or is it reaffirming patriarchal norms?
The Ideal Gaelic Woman of the Twentieth Century
Dr. Riona Nic Congail, St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra
The autobiography of Peig Sayers has come to symbolise the totality of Gaelic womanhood
in the early twentieth century. Critical ideology since De Valera’s era has consistently feted
the Gaelic-speaking poverty-stricken mother figure as representative of the truest soul of
the Irish people. Nevertheless, both Peig’s work and life remain at variance with the type of
Gaelic womanhood which numerous educated, middle-class women of the era promoted.
This paper will analyse these two conflicting types of Gaelic womanhood, which have been
consistently endorsed by influential groups in Irish society, and by women’s activists, since
the early twentieth century.
During the Revivalist era, Gaelic women such as Alice Milligan, Agnes O’Farrelly
and Mary Butler emerged as leading female cultural nationalists. They publicly engaged in
various areas of social and educational reform, published many literary works, and immersed
themselves in the activities of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the Suffragette movement, the Gaelic
League and the Camogie Association of Ireland. Through such organisations, and by
choosing symbolic role models for Gaelic women such as Gráinne Mhaol, the pirate-queen
who transgressed proscribed gender roles, the aforementioned women sought to reinvent
and empower other Irishwomen, in an effort to further women’s influence on the public
sphere in Ireland.
This paper will depict and contextualise the emergence of the Gaelic women’s
movement at the turn of the twentieth century, and reveal the incongruities between their
own construction of the ideal Gaelic women, and the versions put forward by other
influential sections in Irish society. The paper will draw upon archival and Irish-language
sources, and although the primary focus will be on the first half of the twentieth century,
more contemporary representations of Gaelic womanhood will also be briefly addressed.
Hijab in Irish Schools
Laura Feely, Queen’s University Belfast
My paper examines whether the Republic of Ireland should introduce a ban on the
headscarf-hijab into Irish schools. The headscarf-hijab debate has become a huge topic of
debate around the world. It has especially become topical in countries such as France and
the United Kingdom in the last decade. In 2008 the headscarf-hijab debate exploded in the
Irish media.
Important questions that are addressed in my paper are: what are the international
human rights obligations that Ireland must adhere to in relation to the wearing of the
headscarf-hijab in schools? How have France and the United Kingdom approached this
issue? How have the European Union responded to this issue? Are there any national laws
in Ireland to protect headscarf-hijab wearing citizens?
A recurring theme that runs through this dissertation is the notion of the
relationship between Church and State. It examines the role of the Catholic Church in Irish
schools and how this affects headscarf-hijab wearing citizens. Furthermore it explores how
France and the United Kingdom have approached this issue in light of their relationship
between Church and State. It will weigh up these two alternative approaches and examine if
Ireland can adopt their approach or learn from the mistakes they made.
This paper also examines the background and meaning of the headscarf-hijab in the Quran,
the historical, cultural and feminist perspectives of the headscarf-hijab. Overall it encourages
a positive integration of the Muslim women in Ireland and a respect for communities with a
distinct ethnic or religious identity.
__________________________________________________________
Break 11.30-11.45am
___________________________________________________________
Session 7: Mothers, Wives and Workers 11.45-1.15pm
Seminar Room 1
Chair: Dr. Elaine Farrell, School of History and Anthropology, QUB
“Mother Love:troubling mother-child intimacy”
Kira Petersson-Martin, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador
However natural motherhood may seem, having a child does not make one a mother (or, at
least, not a “good” mother). Instead, one must perform the role of the ideal mother: she
who devotes the vast majority of her time, energy and resources to her children. This form
of maternal love is not a reciprocal love, because it is premised on the notion of allconsuming sacrifice for the child. There is no room for sexuality in this ideology. Sexual
desire (the search for pleasure) is the antithesis of selflessness. In this conception of
motherhood, then, mothers are not (or should not be) sexual - but sexual they are.
The feelings surrounding motherhood are often similar to those surrounding
romantic partners. It has been posited that this maternal sexuality (the pleasure of being in
the maternal body, with the child) is not perverse, but may in fact be morally good,
satisfying both the mother’s and child’s desires to touch and be touched. An analysis of
mothering that attempts to engage with women’s feelings surrounding their bodies,
children, and sexualities may shed some light on the complexity of the erotic dimensions of
maternity.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of sensual and/or erotic
elements of mothering, especially in relation to breastfeeding, and offer insights into the
potential for a reciprocal-sensual understanding of the mother-child bond.
“Women as workers and Men as care givers: Framing gender in EU
employment policy”
Lucie Coley, Queen’s University Belfast
The EU’s relationship with gender equality has become an area of great debate (see Rossilli
1997, 2000, Lewis and Giullari 2005, Walby 2004). Specifically the way in which the
definition of gender equality has been fixed, stretched, shrunk and bent by political processes
(Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009) so as to offer ‘continuous challenges to the concept’
and contribute to its development as a site of ‘contestation and conflict’ (Verloo and
Lombardo 2007, p24). Hence contributing to the debates on gender equality and the EU
assists the feminist political project in identifying new ‘possibilities and limitations of
framing processes by exploring (...) opportunities that are opened up for the promotion of
equality’ (Lombardo, Meier and Verloo 2009). In view of this one reaches the crux of this
paper and reflects on the following questions; how is gender equality in the EU
conceptualised? What are the limits to the EU’s relationship with gender equality?
This paper will be divided into three sections. The first will give a brief historical
overview of gender equality and the EU, highlighting key aspects of the EES. The second
section will present the key frames found in the employment strategy. The final section will
draw some conclusions in regards to the conception of gender equality in EU political
discourse and its wider implications.
“Invoking the Maternal: Canada’s Legal Understanding of Pregnancy”
Danielle Kooy, Trinity Western University, Canada
The 1920s mark a period of significant moral, social, and political change in Canada.
Mothers became central figures in feminist franchise discourse and in political mandates to
“civilize” the nation. Through this process, a maternal iconography, that was both racially
and economically driven, was firmly entrenched in the public conscious and buttressed by
developing medical knowledge of pregnancy. The law was equally influenced by this
discourse. In the growing feminization of reproductive crimes and with the changes to
reproductive and child welfare laws during the 1920s, the maternal image was written into
Canadian legal discourse.
This paper argues that over seven decades later, the language and assumptions of
the maternal image are still prevalent in Canadian legal decisions, particularly in pregnancyrelated cases. The Supreme Court’s opinions in Dobson and Winnipeg are two such examples.
Respectively, the two cases evaluated a pregnant woman’s duty of care to her foetus in the
instance of negligent driving, and the extension of parens patriae to include the state’s right
to detain a pregnant woman, a chronic substance abuser, to protect the foetus. While the
courts affirmed the integrity of a pregnant woman’s body, it also invoked the maternal
imagery that found its historical occasion in the 1920s. The literature has noted the use of
gendered stereotypes in Canadian pregnancy-related legal decisions, but has generally
ignored the value in situating legal decisions within a larger historical context. This rubric
not only exposes the court’s reliance on stereotypes from the turn of the twentieth century
in pregnancy-related cases, but gives pregnancy a history, thus challenging the assumption
that pregnancy is ahistorical or an unchanging biological process.
___________________________________________________________
Session 8: The Body 11.45-1.15pm Seminar Room 2
Chair: Shinhyung Choi, School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy,
QUB
Subverting the Ideal: Loren Cameron and the Beautiful Monster
Paddy McQueen, Queen’s University Belfast
This paper uses the self-portraits of Loren Cameron to critically explore the ideals of
masculinity and femininity and the ways such ideals can be re-worked to highlight the limits
of an effectual politics of recognition. Specifically, it describes how Loren Cameron, a
transsexual who has photographically documented her transition from 'male' to 'female',
displays traits which would conventionally be considered ideal if contained within an
unambiguous gender presentation (i.e. if possessed by either a 'man' or 'woman'). This
blurring of gender ideals locates Cameron's body as a political site/sight which explicitly
draws attention to the norms of gender that govern everyone's sense of gender. The paper
argues that such norms require the abnormal – the un-ideal – in order to establish
themselves as the natural, normalised mode of gender presentation. Hence, the monstrous
will always accompany the ideal, and the affirmation of the latter necessarily requires a
negation or degradation of the former. Cameron's work is valuable precisely because it
draws attention to the ways our conceptual categories dictate what we consider ideal only at
the cost of designating the monstrous. This claim is elaborated through a discussion of
Judith Butler's notion of the abject – the idea that established subject-positions require the
repudiation of unviable (disavowed) identities. Viewed from this perspective, the increasing
political demand for recognition (i.e. the respecting or valuing) of one's identity is rendered
highly problematic. Specifically, the affirmation of an identity must necessarily involve the
disavowal of alternative identities. Thus, any attempt at celebrating an ideal notion of
woman or femininity will reproduce relations of degradation and subordination.
The ‘Ideal Whore’: the role of women in hardcore pornographic film
Michelle A. Mayefske, University of Limerick
*Please Note - This paper includes graphic, sexual images*
Using psychoanalytic theory, this paper interprets the portrayal of the female body as
featured in American hardcore pornographic film. Specifically, it focuses on the marginalized
woman, the whore.
This paper looks at how women are portrayed as whores whose bodies are reduced
to their “holes”: vagina, anus and mouth. Women’s lack of a male penis is emphasized
throughout pornographic film as they are being reduced to their orifices. The image
depicted of the female body is a lack of the male organ which must be “fixed” or at least filled
to maximum capacity.
This paper illustrates how pornographic films fetishize the orifices of the whore by
using three main methods. Firstly, a phallocentric discourse is used to depict the bodies of
women as nothing more than their holes. This language emphasizes the primacy of the male
organ while limiting the female body to a lacking absence. This discourse occurs in captions
presented in the films and is spoken by male and female performers. Secondly, the films
provide a depiction of the female body which emphasizes its absence and emptiness. Viewers
are frequently reminded of the hollowness of women’s bodies. A third way in which women
are reduced to their orifices is when the films highlight the passivity of the female body.
Women are often depicted as having the passive aim of being penetrated. Through
phallocentric discourse and limiting the image of women to lack and passivity, the films
succeed in depicting the ‘ideal whore’ as nothing more than her holes.
The ‘ideal woman’ is not old: the marginalisation of older women
Sue Westwood, Keele University
The ‘ideal woman’ is not old. As women age and move away from the imagined (sexualised,
youthful) ‘ideal woman’, they are increasingly marginalised (Arber, 2006). The manner,
shape and outcome of their marginalisation are contingent on temporal and spatial location
and the intersections of race, class, sexual orientation and (dis)ability, across the lifecourse
(Arber and Evandrou, 2003; Daatland & Biggs, 2006). While there are some cultural
contexts wherein matriarchal societies privilege the ageing woman, it is more common than
not for older women to experience disadvantage compared with older men (Lloyd Sherlock,
2004). Women lack the economic and political power enjoyed by men in (early) later life
(Estes, 2005). Women tend to live longer than men (although the gap in mortality rates is
narrowing), but at greater risk of poverty, ill-health and disability in older age (Harper,
2006). Older women lack visibility and representation in the arts, media and employment
(Featherstone and Wernick, 1995), being subjected to, for heterosexual women, the dual
forces of ageism (Byetheway, 1995) and sexism (Cuddy and Fiske, 2004; Ray, 2004), and for
lesbians and bisexual women, the additional forces of heterosexism, heteronormativity and
sexual prejudice (Manthorpe, 2003; King, 2006). The populist media are scathing in their
judgements about whether women are ageing well and punitive towards women who
transgress gender norms linked to age. Increasing numbers of women are utilising antiageing strategies to try and retain the appearance of youth for as long as possible, which
ultimately must fail (Gott & Hinchliffe, 2003). This paper will consider the implications for
older women’s citizenship in a society which idealises gendered, sexualised, youthfulness.
___________________________________________________________
Session 9: Marriage and the Domestic in International
Contexts 11.45-1.15pm Seminar Room 3
Chair: Conor Smyth, School of English, QUB
On Their Own: Filipino Seafarers’ Wives and the Feminisation of
Responsibility
Roderick Galam, Cardiff University
This presentation reports on fieldwork conducted in the Philippines among Filipino women
married to seamen. It looks at what it is like to be left behind and how the wives’
experiences of not having their husbands around for long periods of time redefine the roles,
responsibilities, and tasks they perform. As women and mothers left behind ‘to look after the
fort’, they become even more closely associated with the domestic and reproductive sphere
even while many of them are also in full-time employment and even though they take over
the roles and responsibilities of their husbands. In this sense, this paper provides empirical
discussion and examination of what has been called ‘the feminisation of responsibility’.
Finally, drawing from the experiences of these women when their husbands were on shore
leave, it attempts to add a new dimension to this concept to encompass these women’s
attempts to make their husbands appreciate the work they do by making their husbands
share in the housework, if not ‘surrendering’ housework to them. The ‘feminisation of
responsibility’ might thus also include the potential for a feminist negotiation of power
within families.
The 21st century ideal woman in a Moroccan Berber community.
Katja Žvan-Elliott, Oxford University
Married with children, pious, hardworking, reserved, homebody, and patient are some of the
adjectives used by people in a rural Moroccan community when describing their ideal
woman. On the surface these ideals seem to be engraved in stone but many fear the
imminent effacement of this model. One would almost expect that the education of girls,
promotion of the “modern” ideal woman as personified by the urban elite, and the ubiquity of
modern technology, caused the death of the “conservative” ideal woman. Yet, how much is
the ideal affected by these developments and should the “old” really be worried by the
“young” leading a feminist revolution? Indeed, literacy among women is increasing and girls
use social networking internet sites to interact with men; however, underneath these
modern commodities girls and women aspire to the same model of the ideal woman as their
mothers did - that of a moral housewife and a mother.
The paper will argue that women in this provincial community are re-imagining
traditional constructions of femininity rather than challenging them outright. They use
literacy to help their children with homework and participate in household management but
not to pursue a career or move away from their families. Thus, their aim is to uphold the
virtues of the rural ideal woman and local traditions but revamp them in a way to improve
the life of family members. The data used for the paper was collected during my PhD
fieldwork in the academic year of 2009/10 in a Berberspeaking High Atlas community in
Morocco.
Immigrant women in Taiwanese families: wife, mother, daughter-in-law,
worker?
Chun-Yu Lin, Lancaster University
Based on participated observation and interview with the immigrant women, this paper was
designed to explore how South East Asian and Mainland Chinese immigrant women’s role
and position in Taiwanese patriarchal families, in particular whether their positions are
influenced and in some cases controlled by their family members. From the multi-faceted
dimensions: wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and worker, this paper considers how the
governing power from family impacts on those women’s lives, and how those women use
different strategies to negotiate around the different aspects of the role. Here, the power
from family and control over the immigrant women is related to Chinese culture's deep
structure-patriarchal convention. Under the traditional patriarchal convention, those women
are expected to be homemakers, they are supposed to take the responsible for the
housework, help their husband’s business, have children to continue husbands’ families, and
serve their parents-in-law, as well as many married women. However, the immigrant
women usually are the only person who original from other countries, they are perceived as
the lowest position in their families, and viewed as outsider. The findings suggest: First, the
patriarchal convention makes many South East Asian and Mainland Chinese immigrant
women lived together with their in-laws, and it makes the four roles among wife, mother,
daughter-in-law, and worker are intertwined. Second, we should consider the wider
structural factors when we look into those immigrant women’s lives, rather than confine
study to individual elements, or simply attribute to ‘destiny’. Third, the immigrant women
are active subjects, rather than victims.
___________________________________________________________
Lunch 1.15-2.15pm
________________________________________________________________________________
Plenary Session: Professor Jennifer Scanlon 2.15-3.30pm
Canada Room, Lanyon Building
Chair: Professor Yvonne Galligan, School of Politics, International Studies and
Philosophy, QUB
The ‘Uncanny Stranger on Display’: Women, Language, and Ideal
Femininities
Professor Jennifer Scanlon, Bowdoin College, Maine
__________________________________________________________
Closing remarks 3.30pm
Page for Notes
Page for Notes
Page for Notes
Page for Notes