GENDER AND LITERATURE IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXTS
Workshop Four:
Gender and Representation
11-13 February 2004
Venue: Old Refectory, UCL
Project Leaders: Dr Nana Wilson-Tagoe (SOAS) and Prof Michael Worton (UCL)
Research Assistant: Dr Ross Forman
ABSTRACTS
Anna Apostolidou (Anthropology, UCL)
Negotiating Gay Male Identity in the Isle of Mykonos:
Antiquity, Cosmopolitanism, and Tolerance in Contemporary Greece
This paper deals with the mechanisms of selective appropriation of history in the
shaping of the contemporary icon of the gay-island Mykonos (through the use of
published, web-based material and immediate observation).
It focuses on the interaction between the homosexual visitors and the local
people and comments upon the commercialization of ‘gay-friendliness’, as it has
become one of the primary loci of profit gain for the last three decades. The
representation of the island through advertisement and tourist guides makes
repetitive references to a glorious ancient past and an intense cosmopolitan
present. However, the shopkeepers and club-owners give a different version as
to why Mykonos has turned into a ‘gay-land’.
The contextualization of the island in the wider nexus of homophobic Greece
becomes a starting point through which to interrogate issues of cultural norms
and subversive practices, historical narrative and utilitarianism, national identity
and globalized sensibility.
The second part of the paper problematises the gender and sexual orientation of
the researcher as it relates to the production of knowledge, when conducting
sexuality-related anthropological study. In an introspective attempt to place
oneself in the fieldwork site and analyze the representation mechanisms of
academic discourse, ‘straight subjectivity’ and ‘queer positionality’ become the
means of apprehending social structures and interpreting social practice. Being
an anatomically female person with a heterosexual sexuality influences to some
extend my hypotheses and perception in the field, but most importantly the way
I am being confronted by gay male informants. A critique of the anthropological
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reflexive legacy is attempted, using the interplay of cultural indexicality and
gender dissent.
Carole Boyce Davies (African-New World Studies, Florida International
University)
Recovering the Radical Black Female Subject: The Politics and Poetics of Claudia Jones
Recovering the radical black female subject is a deliberation on the
transnational/African diaspora subject whose movement outside of
circumscribing national space renders her nationless. Important figures like
Claudia Jones or Assata Shakur, and radical subjects are consistently deported to
another location conceptually and literally, outside the borders of thought and
scholarly understandings.
For example, it became standard practice for U.S. African-American feminist
scholars to reduce much of their analyses during the 1970's, 80's and 90's to either
a race and gender approach and/or a straight U.S. linear narrative. While such a
domestic, U.S. approach may have been appropriate in fleshing out the specifics
of U.S. African-American feminist political history, such a position remained
bordered within the U.S. narrative and thus accompanied the "deportation of the
radical black female subject" to an elsewhere, outside the terms of given U.S.
discourse.
In a similar way, Caribbean feminist work has tended also to be insularly local,
avoiding the reach of the Caribbean diaspora in Europe, America or elsewhere.
As a result, the migrating subject escapes as well a certain belonging in
Caribbean feminist history and definitely in the Caribbean male
intellectual/radical tradition.
Caribbean activists with the profile of a Claudia Jones in effect remain as sister
outsiders, as Audre Lorde described herself in a variety of discourses. And
because the genre in which she worked was journalism, and her approach
activism, she also does not get consideration within black British feminist
theoretics and other intellectual pursuits.
A growing body of scholarship is systematically addressing the specificities of
women‚s lives in myriad locations, identifying what the particularities of gender,
sex, sexuality, race, class and so on mean when looked at with different lenses or
at least when removed from the fixity. Cross-cultural/trans-national feminist
work then which accounts for some of these movements as they also attempt to
make connections, make meaning based on a variety of experiences and are
allied to radical intellectual/activist work from a variety of political positions
and geographical locations. This contribution, “Recovering the Radical Black
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Female Subject,” represents the introductory component of a much longer study
of the radical female subject, based on the poetics and politics of Claudia Jones.
Mary Brewer (Performing Arts, De Montfort)
(En)gendering Whiteness on the British Stage:
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine
The controlling images that regulate White identities, and those identities
racialized as ‘other’ within the terms of White discourse, emerge from within
historical representational structures that include theatrical modes of production.
Taking Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine as a case study, I demonstrate some of the
intersections between British socio-racial discourse and theatre practice. Cloud
Nine has been celebrated by feminist critics for the way it stages the relationship
between social and theatrical roles and gender, and for its analysis of the
intersection between class and gender subordination. However, critics have not
addressed the play’s racial politics with the same rigour as its representation of
sex-gender identities. While part of my aim is to offer a new interpretation of the
play, demonstrating how it reproduces Whiteness as an amorphous category, it
is my objective also to shift the ground of criticism, most of which reproduces
and universalizes its White perspective.
Raimi Gbadamosi (Fine Art, Kent Institute of Art and Design)
And Black Men Don’t Jump No More . . .
The black male has been reduced to pure spectacle by the mass media; this
spectacle is then internalised to become the template used to create the black
male self. Some of these prescriptions are not even immediately offensive, they
are even arguably of benefit for the black male, as they ostensibly reside in a
‘Britain’ constructed as urban, street based, and crime ridden. An imagined
exciting alternative to the ‘white’ mainstream. And there is a clear desire to
remove any threat from this surrogate.
The paper will therefore investigate the ‘feminisation’ of the black male body in
popular media (Music, film, and advertising); It will also analyse ‘hypermasculinity’ as a neutralising device.
The ‘legitimate’ areas where the black male is seen to succeed in; sport and
music, relies on the commodification of blackness in the first order, then the
neutralisation of the commodified maleness of the characters in the second. In
these areas, where the maleness of the spectacular object is overbearing, they are
treated as dangerous, and are promptly proscribed. One only has to look to what
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is immediately accepted of black urban culture by the white mainstream to see
this in play. In Rap music, Will Smith and MC hammer are two immediate
examples that spring to mind. The first was constructed as the clean cut boy who
abhors obscenity, the latter was the baggy-trousered buffoon. The former a
supposed contradiction, the latter the fulfilment of an accepted stereotype.1
This focus on the visible is what leads to the feminisation of the black male. Built
into this process is an act of neutralisation and containment which removes the
fear blackness generally inspires in whiteness, with the black male being a
particular focus. By contemporaneously rendering blackness as surface only, and
claiming this the more important aspect of a person, substance is removed from
the edifice. The ability to think, to plot, to seek revenge, which most white people
think is coming, is supposedly vented by ‘the singing and dancing’.
The accompanying argument—that black women are rendered sexless or are all
sex, the mammy or prostitute debate—undoubtedly remains, and functions as a
balance to the present position, the ‘simplistic’ binary positions taken:
male/female; white/black; whiteness/blackness; and the implicit power
relationships they incorporate is deliberate. It is these binaries that allow society
to maintain social order and retain the existing racial benefit structure, as
succinctly presented in Charles Mill’s The Racial Contract. Wishing somebody
else’s reality away in order to justify one’s own has not worked so far, it will not
work in the future.
Frances Harding (Africa, SOAS)
Seeking Ambiguities, Finding Affirmations: The Representations of Gender in African
Performances, Playtexts, Films and Video-movies
In this paper, I consider what changes have been brought about in
the representation of gender by the introduction of new
technologies and the changes in working practices that they have
required.
It has long been a matter of concern that the representation of
gender and gendered relationships within African performance
has not fully explored a range of behaviours but has been
predominantly limited to stereotypes.
This is often clearly seen in masquerade performance where
representation of the male and female is polarised frequently
according to biological features. This is evident in the Yoruba
1
Compare this to the acceptance of Vanilla Ice and Eminem.
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‘Gelede’ masquerade for the ‘propitiation’ of women as well as in
other masquerade performances.
The written playtext provided a new mode of creativity which,
with its role for the playwright, was a more ‘solo’ enterprise. New
or altered perceptions of individualised, not stereotyped,
relationships of gender might thus have been anticipated. Some
emerged—most noticeably Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa—but this was
to prove an exception rather than the rule.
When filmmaking became a new mode of creativity, once again,
possibilities for an altered, more sensitive depiction and
representation of gender relationships beckoned. Here, some
excellent work was made, noticeably for example, Mohammed
Chiouk’s The Citadel.
In a more recent genre deriving from technology, the ‘video-movie’ has provided
an endless, even relentless, forum for the presentation of relationships of power,
and those predicated on gender have constituted a major sector of that oeuvre. I
suggest that gender within the video-movie, embracing as it does, un-nuanced
representations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, has heralded the return of the uninhibited
stereotype.
Jessica Hemmings (English, Edinburgh)
Empowering Violence in Yvonne Vera’s Fiction
Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning
confront the contentious topics of infanticide and abortion. Apparent throughout
Vera’s fiction to date is an attention to the female body, specifically the violated
female body. Gender specific crimes against the body are often portrayed as a
form of empowerment kept alive by characters’ elected decisions to perform
further self-inflicted violations against the transgressed body.
Specifically Without a Name’s confrontation of infanticide and Butterfly Burning’s
depiction of self-induced abortion bring to light brutal and intimate realities of
contemporary fertility. Unsurprisingly, this violence is set in the confines of the
township. Nonetheless Vera implicates the rural land in this new relationship
with fertility, specifically in Mazvita’s rape in Without a Name where the rural
land supports and bears witness to her violation. As the narrator explains,
“Mazvita had a profound belief in her own reality, in the transformation new
geographies promised and allowed, that Harari’s particular strangeness released
and encouraged.” (Vera, 1996) Similarly, of her decision to abort her pregnancy
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Phephelaphi explains, “The mess and the untidy chaos. This whole action has
been about tidying up. Ordering the disorder.” (Vera, 1998)
In this context female fertility becomes problematic, something if not avoided
then at least controlled by any measure available. Vera’s characters offer
contentious and conflicted messages regarding fertility and, by implication, the
female identity. As a result, Vera’s fiction negotiates a space in which undesired,
albeit assumed, social memberships such as motherhood are exchanged for new,
if unsanctioned, ceremonies that reject future life in favour present survival.
Through a systematic rejection of biological fertility the most prevalent and
accessible role for women, even today, is rejected: motherhood.
Margaret Hillenbrand (Chinese, SOAS)
Misogyny and the Occupied Nation: The Early Postwar Narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô
This paper examines a string of shorter works produced by Ôe Kenzaburô
during the period 1958-9, in which the author takes as his subject the sociopsychological fallout on Japanese male youth of the American Occupation of
Japan and its troubled aftermath. In this self-contained series of narratives, which
culminates in the novella Warera no jidai (Our Era), Ôe devises an explicitly
sexual metaphor for the power alignments of the post-war era. Specifically, he
uses the motif of a ménage à trois —whose component parts are usually an
intellectual youth, an older prostitute, and an American GI—to suggest
elliptically the traumas of defeat, foreign occupation, and unequal military
alliance with the US. As I hope to show, however, the sexual paradigm that Ôe
devises in these texts to illuminate contemporary Japanese reality follows its own
internal logic; and these stories, which are designed as fictionalised critiques of
Japan’s relationship with hegemonic American power, end up reading more
fluently as denunciations of sexual labour and the figure of the prostitute.
In this paper, I will begin by outlining the immediate historical background
which gave rise to this set of narratives, sketching the role played by prostitution
in Occupied Japan, and describing popular attitudes towards those prostitutes
who catered to GIs during the early post-war era. Next, the paper will tackle the
question of why the tripartite relationship between foreign clientèle, local
prostitutes and Japanese youth presented itself to Ôe as so apposite a metaphor
through which to stage his critique of contemporary geo-political realities. The
paper will then go on to demonstrate how Ôe’s commitment to depicting the
plight of male youth under this new post-war order assumes powerful narrative
energies of its own. Here, I argue that Ôe’s sense of impotent outrage leads him,
almost inadvertently, to focus less on articulating the dynamics of Japan’s
relationship with America than on scapegoating the women who mediate the
awkward space between US power and Japanese compliance.
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Richard Leppert (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Minnesota)
Hearing Gender
The construction and stabilization of the sign “Woman” in Western modernity
was supported by a vast array of visual art on musical themes and by music
itself, opera especially. The problematics of gender were perceived to be
substantially more urgent when racial difference entered into the equation. My
paper will suggest some of the ways in which women and the gendered Other
have been imagined in the sights and sound of music, concentrating on the
nineteenth century, that is, the period of modernity that coincides, on the one
hand, with the defining of increasingly fixed gender boundaries, and, on the
other hand, with the zenith of European imperialism and colonialism.
The nineteenth-century understanding of “woman” was to a significant degree
the product of sight--of looking, and of being looked at. More than this, the sight
of women’s bodies was commonly accompanied by a sonoric referent. Indeed,
the female body in essence was theorized as music. Under the conditions of
bourgeois patriarchy, within which women were defined by principles
governing domesticity, two contradictory (and by now amply studied) categories
of woman were constructed, namely, the privatized angel in the house, not
subject to the pleasured gaze, and her radical public opposite, the prostitute
(often conflated with the racial Other). In representation, “woman” was either
the sacred Madonna or the profane Venus; general suspicion held that she was
both. In turn, suspicion, which fed both fear and loathing, was also the fantasy
and the guarantee of her transfixing look (not for nothing was the old Medusa
trope given renewed life). Whatever constituted the feminine hung in the
balance, alongside urgent questions concerning identity, sexual difference,
desire, pleasure and, of course, power.
My paper will draw on period visual representations of the woman/music trope,
as well as orientalist operas in which gender concerns constitute a defining
element not only of the narrative but also—and indeed principally—of musical
sonority itself.
Nicola Mai (Sociology, London School of Economics)
Transnational Media and Migration: The Re-negotiation of ‘Youth’ Gendered Identities
within Albanian and Cuban Migratory Flows
The main aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of the different
and multiple ways in which the consumption of transnational media—in
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particular television—was implicated in the emergence of ‘migratory’ lifetrajectories and ultimately in the migration of young Albanians and Cubans to
Italy and the USA, respectively. More specifically, my analysis will analyse the
‘migratory project’ of Albanian and Cuban young people by focusing on the way
the imagined potential to enjoy differently gendered lifestyles is implicated in
their desire to migrate. By ‘migratory project’ I am referring not so much to
actual geographical displacement as to the wider discursive processes and
practices of cultural consumption through which young Albanians and Cubans
imagine themselves with reference to new visual and narrative resources.
Within this wider scenario, the paper will first identify the canons of masculinity
and femininity and the individualised lifestyles which are consistent with them
as they are presented by Italian and American media. In a second section, I will
analyse how these visual and narrative accounts about being a ‘man’ or a
‘woman’ in the West are selectively and strategically appropriated by Albanian
and Cuban young people in order to respond to their aspirations to new
individualised life-trajectories at home. Finally, I will try to understand the way
the aspiration to differently gendered models of personhood and lifestyles is
implicated in the imagination and enactment of migration.
Drawing on original ethnographic material gathered in Albania and Cuba, the
paper will address the relation between media consumption, identity formation
and mobility with reference to the dynamics of ‘late modern’ individualisation at
work within both the ‘sending’ and the ‘receiving’ societies involved in the two
media/migration flows under examination. The interconnection between
transnational media consumption, the emergence of migratory and
individualised life-trajectories and migration will be analysed with reference to
the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of the post-colonial relations
shaping Italian-Albanian and Cuban-USA transnational spaces. Finally, the
comparison between the Albanian post-communist scenario and the Cuban case
will enable me to analyse the different experiences of communist modernisation
and post-modernisation in the two countries and the way the relation between
media consumption, mobility and identity formation emerged accordingly.
Amna Malik (History and Theory of Art, Slade, UCL)
Veiled Insights: Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women of Allah’
Shirin Neshat’s ‘Women of Allah’ is a series of photographs of veiled women,
mostly Neshat herself, with women’s poetry written over the photographic
surface of bare skin: hands, feet, face, that the sharia allows veiled women to
expose. The two poets cited in this series are Farrough Farozad and Tahereh
Saffarzadeh. The former was killed in the mid 60s in a car accident but her poetry
made an immediate impact in pre-revolutionary Iran for its seductive tone and
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subject matter. The emotional and sexual characteristics of her writings are still
rare in Iranian women’s literature. By contrast Saffarzadeh’s poetry celebrates
martyrs in the Iran-Iraq war and is emphatically pro-revolution Iran. The poet
was one of few women who stood for parliament to represent women’s issues
after the revolution and voluntarily veiled herself prior to it.
The way in which Neshat combines arabic script, guns and the veil is crucial to
the impact of this series of images, and engages with notions of visibility and
unspoken desire. Although often taken to be rather austere images they are
actually quite seductive.
My interest in this body of work lies in the fetishistic nature of the veil and
photographic practice, and the address to different spectators: Persian, western
and Islamic through textuality and visuality.
Nicola Miller (Latin American History, UCL)
Gender and Intellectuality in Twentieth-Century Latin America
Intellectual women in twentieth-century Latin America were rarely
acknowledged by their contemporaries as intellectuals. They were denied the
authority of the intelectual comprometido, who claimed to represent the
pueblo/nación. Even a highly distinguished woman such as Chilean poet Gabriela
Mistral, who established an international public platform to campaign on all the
main issues of the day, was routinely represented not as a socially committed
intellectual, but as the eternalised ‘Mother of America’. This paper explores
women’s responses to the role of public intellectual, based on rationalism,
secularism and nationalism, from which they were excluded. The discussion
draws on three case studies: Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Lydia Cabrera (18991991; Cuban scholar) and Teresa de la Parra (1890-1936; Venezuelan writer).
These three women all confronted comparable conditions of cultural
modernisation; they all knew each other; and they all sought to challenge the
model of the intelectual comprometido, which became the dominant version of
intellectuality in the region from the 1920s until well into the 1960s. Each sought
to represent intellectuality differently from this norm. Their various critiques, a
common theme of which is the misguidedness of the intellectual’s claim to speak
on behalf of other people, offer many insights about the vexed question of how to
operate as a socially responsible intellectual.
Richard Mole (Mellon Fellow, SSEES, UCL)
(Homo)sexuality, Ideology and Politics in Russia:
Between the National Self and the Western Other
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The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between ideology and
sexuality in Russia from a social science perspective in a bid to examine the way
in which Russian sexual identity is presented as distinct from and often in
opposition to Western sexuality. After a brief introduction in which I examine
hetero- and homosexuality from within a Social Identity Theory framework, I
will chart shifts in attitudes towards sexuality and, in particular, homosexuality
under different political regimes in Russia: monarchist absolutism, Soviet
communism and ‘liberalism’. By focusing on the evolution of gay and lesbian
identities in Russia following the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, I
seek to highlight the age-old debate in Russian history between Westernisers and
Slavophiles and examine the relationship between national and sexual identities.
Janet E. Montefiore (English, Kent at Canterbury)
Damned to Alterity: Dante versus Mary Shelley and Others
In Canto xxvi of Dante’s Inferno, the wanderer Ulysses, trapped forever in a horn
of flame, famously relates his last restless journey to damnation. This paper looks
at three classic first-person narrative texts in different genres: Derek Walcott’s rewriting of Ulysses’ journey in ‘The Schooner Flight’ (The Star-Apple Kingdom,
1979) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817)—and examines the different ways
that they locate their representation of what it means to be a free subject through
allusive re-writing/ readings of the ‘Ulysses Canto’. Derek Walcott’s journeying
hero represents both a reversal of Ulysses ‘mad flight’ and a strong critique of
the hubris of European explorers. In Mary Shelley’s novel the male creator of
monstrous life replays Ulysses’ fatal speech to his companions in his dying
exhortation to the homosocial male community of the ship in quest of the NorthWest passage, underlining the humanly destructive nature of his ambition;
Shelley’s re-reading of Dante being part of her gender-based critique of male
power and knowledge. The principal theoretical issues raised by the relation
between these texts are to do with the extent to which different subject positions
and locations shape representations of gender, and the question of how far the
concepts of intertextuality reveal shifting gender perspectives on literary history.
P.F. de Moraes Farias (Centre of West African Studies, Birmingham)
Gender and Power in Medieval West-African Epigraphic Texts
Arabic inscriptions dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth century AD (fifth to
ninth century AH) are reported from a number of sites in the Republic of Mali,
namely Essuk (in the Tamasheq-speaking Adagh area north of the Niger) and
Saney, Gao, and Bentyia (in the Songhay-speaking areas along the Niger). These
inscriptions include the oldest internally-dated writing known from West Africa.
They are the only extant body of historical material demonstrably produced by
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people living in the region in that period, hence a primary source of the greatest
interest. When one compares their discursive forms to their counterparts in the
Islamic epigraphy of North Africa and other regions, significant differences
emerge. Also, the information conveyed by the Malian inscriptions differs at
crucial points from what is stated by external sources such as the treatise
compiled by the Andalusian writer Al-Bakri in the eleventh century, and by later
internal sources such as the Timbuktu Chronicles (written in the seventeenth
century).
A striking feature of the epigraphic evidence from Saney and Bentyia is the
attention it pays to female offices and to purely matrilineal, and mixed (matripatrilineal), genealogies. Among the royal inscriptions from Saney, several
commemorate officeholders represented by the Arabicised feminine title Malikat
(“Queens”, singular Malika). Working from unexamined presuppositions about
the gendering of power in that society, modern historians have re-represented
these Malikat either as wives of kings or as genealogical links in a female line of
transmission along which power passed from king to king. The paper rejects
these explanations through an analysis of the medieval epigraphic evidence
itself, and also in the light of modern ethnographic data. It argues that the
Malikat enjoyed high social status for reasons other than marriage to kings or
transmission of kingship from maternal uncle to nephew. Rather, those women
held royal offices in their own right, and their series must be conceived of as
parallel to, but relatively autonomous from, the Muluk (“Kings”, singular Malik)
series.
Sharon Morris (Slade School, UCL)
The Subject of Claude Cahun : The Nude and Self-exposure
Claude Cahun, artist and writer, omitted from the history of surrealism until the
publication of François Leperlier’s research in 1992, is now known for her oeuvre
of photographs of herself. Cahun scholars have categorised all these
photographs as ‘self-portraits’, except the photo-collage plates for Cahun’s book,
Aveux non avenus, 1930, which are attributed jointly to Cahun and her partner
and lover, Suzanne Moore.
Who, then, is behind the camera ; who arranges the pose ; who frames the image?
These ‘self-portraits’, which Leperlier analyses as narcissistic and auto-erotic, can
also be interpreted as the terms of lesbian desire. Analytically, these
photographs can be understood as expressions of Moore’s desire for Cahun and
Cahun’s desire to be desired.
Cahun’s ‘self-portrait’, Que me veux-tu?, 1928, ‘What do you want of me?’,
explicitly poses the question of desire in relation to the ‘you’ of mirrored
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reflection. Doubled, the shaven heads do not meet each other’s gaze. It is a
moment which raises the impossibility of recognition. Characteristic of all her
work, Cahun plays with the signs of sexual difference. Freud’s 1923 account of
the Œdipus complex describes the outcome as a nexus of identification and
desire for both parents, which Freud attributes to pre-œdipal bisexuality. It is
this inherent instability of identification and desire by which Cahun teases the
viewer.
The ‘nude’, as genre, appears only once in her oeuvre : Cahun lies face down on
sand draped with sea-weed, Self-portrait, 1930. However, the photo-collages of
Aveux non avenus recycle a range of her self-portraits as terms of the body
dispersed across the page. Arms, legs, lips, and faces are isolated and reassembled. It is here, in the cut of the collage and the dissolving boundaries of
montage that the play of signs signifies the erotic body, a body not ordered
according to the phallus as theorised in Lacan’s model of desire.
The final photo-collage depicts the letter ‘œ’ floating free from the œdipal family.
A tree, growing out of a navel, bears one flower and four ‘fruit’ - a hand, lips, ear
and an eye - parts of the body which are both the organs of eroticism and
communication.
Cahun re-signifies the monolithic ‘nude’ of desire, by showing us the dissipated
body of jouissance, the erotic excess which exceeds both categories of genre and
gender.
Andrea J. Nouryeh (Speech and Theatre, St Lawrence University)
Daughters as Female Husbands or Idegbe: The Tragic Loss of Autonomy for a Modern
Igbo Woman in Tess Onwueme’s The Broken Calabash
Karen Sacks in her book Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality,
argues against Western assumptions that women are universally subordinated
across the globe. She gives one such example of Onitsha Igbo women of wealth
by their own trading successes can repay the bride wealth that their husbands
have given for them and thus be granted a divorce and insure their
independence or because they have no male siblings can inherit their family’s
wealth. Such women can become female husbands—engage in woman
marriage—and thus control the domestic labor of their wives who bear children
for them. In this way they are able to gain heirs for whom they serve as legal
fathers and thus become the heads of their own households. Similarly, Ifi
Amadiume in Male Daughters, Female Husbands points out that among the Igbo
people language is flexible in terms of gender: there are no gender specific
subject, impersonal, or possessive pronouns; monadu (humankind) does not
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 13
imply a male hierarchy in usage; and words like onye be (wife) or di-bu-no (family
head or husband) are genderless expressions that indicate subordination or
domination within the family structure. She states that “This linguistic system of
few gender distinctions makes it possible to conceptualize certain social roles as
separate from sex and gender, hence the possibility for either sex to fill the role”
(90). While these social and linguistic practices challenge Western feminist
assumptions, neither of these studies obviate the fact that for the bulk of Igbo
women who live according to traditional expectations, the patriarchy rules their
lives and often offers them little relief from oppression.
Tess Onwueme, award-winning Nigerian feminist playwright, articulates the
dilemma that is inherent in the seemingly less rigid subjugation of women in
Igbo society by focusing on the role of idegbe or male daughters in The Broken
Calabash. In wealthy households where there is only one daughter and no male
heirs, it is the child’s privilege to be treated as if she is a son. She is educated,
pampered, and given access to a university education, all attributes that prepare
her for leadership or, at least, a Western style image of herself as a modern
liberated woman. Yet, it is also the expectation that this daughter will never
marry a man to whom she has developed an attachment. She would have to
remain in her father’s home and bear children into her patrilineage or become a
female husband and engage in woman marriage where her wife would bear the
children whom her father would subsequently claim as his own. This paper will
explore the central conflict of Onwueme’s drama where a young woman’s selffulfillment as promised by modernity in post-colonial Nigeria is thwarted when
she learns that she must fulfill her traditional role as a male daughter.
Unprepared for this Igbo cultural expectation and faced with her parents’
thwarting of her plans to marry her university sweetheart, she challenges her
father’s privilege over the fate of her body and destroys her family. In this play
Onwueme’s feminist agenda is to give voice to the subjugation of women despite
a language that does not recognize gender differentiation, and to uncover the
silenced oppression of daughters who are only children, whose primary function
is to satisfy their fathers’ need for a male heir, and whose bodies, therefore, are
not their own.
Wen-Chin Ouyang (Near and Middle East, SOAS)
Tradition and Rebellion: Representation of Women’s Madness in Classical Arabic and
Chinese Literature
Madness, as a condition and concept, has eluded definition. It has been
juxtaposed to reason as unreason, to borrow Foucault articulation of the
problem, and can range, in medical or philosophical treatises, from complete and
permanent loss of touch with what is perceived as reality, to temporary cases of
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 14
delirium, hysteria, melancholy and deadly love. In some instances, foolishness
and stupidity would be considered forms of madness as well. Whether madness
is seen as caused by illness in the heart or the liver, or disharmony in the
humours, it is necessarily structured as that which is not reason. Reason itself is
structured around a paradigmatic framework that inscribes proper code of
conduct for thinking and living in community. Madness is, unsurprisingly, any
form of deviation from this code of conduct.
In cultures where codes of conduct are gendered, in that propriety for women
does not necessarily coincide with that for men, representations of madness, it
follows, is gendered. Causes and expressions of women’s madness are not the
same as those of men. Marriage Fate to Admonish the World, a seventeenth-century
Chinese novel, provides a clear differentiation between men and women’s
“madness.” A man’s madness, one may argue, lies in his abandonment of
Confucian ethics manifest in his immersion in a life of decadence instead of
pursuit of government appointments and familial prosperity, while a woman’s
madness is located in her violation of obedience to and support of her husband.
Similarly, madness is defined as that which is not Islam in Arabic-Islamic
literature. Paradoxically, madness is the space in which rebellion against
prescribed code of conduct, often inscribed into what may be termed ‘tradition,’
can take place. Literary representations of madness, of both men and women,
are often subversive. In classical Arabic literature, madness caused by excessive
passion—when feeling overwhelm s thinking—in stories of deadly love, Masari‘
al-‘ushshaq, is transcendental. Prescribed code of conduct becomes the
transgressor, not the mad man or woman. This is especially true of madness
engendered by a passion for the Divine. Madness of both men and women
becomes reason itself. Gender is of no relevance in such cases because sexuality,
which governs the harmony and continuity of community, is no longer an issue.
Nanneke Redclift (Anthropology, UCL)
The ‘Subversive Stitch’ in Old Worlds and New: Comparative Issues in Gender and
Representation
Theories of representation are implicitly theories of the relationship between self
and world and the discourses, texts or objects through which this is constituted.
One of the contributions of gender analysis has been to point out the manylayered nature of these constructions, which are often marked by silencing,
exclusion or symbolic violence.
Edwin Ardener’s concept of ‘muted groups’ (1975), for example, captured the
fact that women’s particular experience was not always expressed or expressable
in terms of dominant public models, either those internal to a society or those
that the observer might create. Thus, representations are never innocent, or
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 15
readable simply at face value, but always in danger of being marked by a double
distortion.
Rozsika Parker’s history of the role of embroidery in articulating an ideal of
feminine value, and of the ways women themselves used irony and parody, from
within the genre itself, to challenge its limitations provides a classic example of
this multi-valence and mirroring (1984). Her study of the European domestic
domain provides the starting point for this paper, which examines the
applicability of such an approach in comparative context. Drawing on fieldwork
from southern Mexico, the discussion considers the rich regional tradition of
embroidery as an embodied skill and explores its role in defining women’s moral
worth. It looks at the changing position of embroidery as it faces two ways, both
to the past as it regenerates specific symbolic, conceptual and cosmological
understandings linked to gendered ethnic identities, and to the present and
future within new trans-national markets. In doing so it raises wider questions
about the standpoints from which representations are analysed.
Christopher Robinson (Christ Church, Oxford)
Kathœy, Transvestites and the Representation of Gender in Francophone Literature
Much Western social anthropology theorises transgendering /transvestism on
basis of anthropological observation of other cultures. Evidence proposed
supports the view that the Western binary system of gender, closely tied to a
particular view of sexual functions, is merely one example of how gender is a
socially constructed concept used for purposes of social control. This paper looks
at some ways in which transvestism/ transgenderism has been presented in (or
excluded by) Francophone literature, historically and at present, and what this
might imply about concepts of gender, sexuality and social control. It then
considers how a comparison/contrast with the Thai kathœy might throw light on
what actually is going on in the French representational system.
The transvestite in French society, historically, is associated with two quite
different figures, the androgyne, and the cross-dresser proper. In the nineteenth
century the legal system comes into action to provide strict controls on all gender
blurring, which is seen as a socially disruptive individual choice. In contrast, the
role of the kathœy in Thai society is a social creation. Pre-modern Thai society had
a three-gender system – male, female, kathœy – and that this system was
relatively stable until the mid 1960s. The related issue of the homoerotic
attraction posed by the beautiful man has a comparably long representational
history. The basis of Thai categories is still binary, since woman and kathœy are
subsets of the gender female, which is not linked to sexual assumptions in the
Western way. The creation of the category kathœy is designed to prevent the
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 16
bisexual activity which appears to be a natural part of Thai culture from
destabilising the social structure.
Representation of transvestism and androgyny in pre-twentieth-century
metropolitan French is non-judgmental and not necessarily related to sexual
practice, but in some cases indicates refusal of social conformity. In later 19th
century literature the issue of social control has become central and the tie with
sexual ‘identity’ fixed. Possibly as a consequence in twentieth-century
metropolitan French literature transvestism becomes a marker of rebellion,
though it is arguably controlled by what it is rebelling against. Transvestite and
transgender figures are rare in post-liberation literature, which would seem to
imply self-censureship. In French-Canadian literature there is a different pattern
– transvestism initially constitutes an act of rebellion but comes to be viewed as
an act of conformity.
Conclusions: does the Thai model throw any light on what is and is not said
about gender through the presence (and absence) of transvestites in gay writing
in France? The Thai model suggests that transvestism/transgendering is a form
of social control which assigns a clear gender role to those males who would
otherwise appear to be weakening the category of masculinity by adopting types
of external sign identified as markers of the feminine in Thai culture.
Transvestism as represented in metropolitan French literature on the contrary is
ostensibly a marker of refusal of social control, although some Canadian writing
marks a shift from rebel to conformist. The self-censureship of metropolitan
French writing with regards to transvestism may reflect an unacknowledged
need to conform to the Republican principle of unity of values.
Maki Sakai (South East Asia, SOAS)
Images of Motherhood in Vietnamese Oral Poetry “Ca dao”
Ca dao is a genre of Vietnamese folk poetry, which has various forms, such as
labour songs, love songs, lullabies and proverbs. Ca dao explains ordinary human
life from a number of perspectives, including instructions on morals and norms,
indications of climate and agriculture and descriptions of human relationships.
In particular, women’s lives and feelings are expressed abundantly. Since these
poems about women are various, ranging from the emotions of a young girl to
sufferings of a widow’s life, analysing Ca dao from a gender perspective can give
us a profound understanding about Vietnamese women.
In this paper, I focus on the position of motherhood in Ca dao. In order to
investigate how mothers are represented in the poetry, I examine what is the
ideal mother, what is the perfect relationship between a mother and her children
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 17
and how are mothers viewed by their children, society members and by
themselves. I also compare representations of motherhood in Ca dao to that
provided by religions (Buddhism, Confucianism) and anthropological research
in South East Asia.
Eva Sansavior (French, UCL)
The Interview as Autobiography: Authorship and Identity in the Interviews of Maryse
Condé
Maryse Condé’s prolific career spans some twenty-five years. Although she is
originally from Guadeloupe and is often discussed as a ‘Guadeloupean writer’,
Condé’s reputation as an ‘important writer’ has largely been consolidated in the
United States and in France where the author has been awarded a number of
literary prizes. One of the distinguishing features of the Condé’s career has been
the significant number of interviews that she has accorded in a variety of media
in both the United States and France.
While her interviewers have covered a range of themes, it is noteworthy that of
many of these have engaged the author in a process of reflection on the influence
of her own life experiences on her fiction. In addition, in Condé’s work as a
writer and a critic she has combined this ongoing concern with highlighting the
importance of ‘the personal’ for her fiction with mediations on the role of the
writer.
Through an analysis of a selection of Condé’s interviews, this paper aims to trace
the connections between ‘the personal’, ‘the writer’ and the interview. I draw on
the theorisations of Lejeune and Christopher Johnson to consider ways in which
the interview may be treated as a literary genre and propose a reading of the
interview as ‘autobiography’. In particular, I examine the implications of reading
Condé’s interview as ‘autobiographical’ through an exploration of the themes of
authorship, authenticity and identity.
Judith Still (French, Nottingham/Institute of Romance Studies, London)
Hosts and Hostesses, Or Are Women Ever at Home in Representation?
This paper will draw on Luce Irigaray’s theories of sexuate language
development. She argues that sexual difference is strongly marked in discourse;
for example, boys tend to focus on the one, or the relation of the one to the many,
whereas girls are more interested in one to one relations. Boys, she claims, make
sentences in which subjects relate to objects, whereas girls privilege intersubjective relations which enable a culture of two subjects. It is the masculine
model that is culturally dominant. This work will be set alongside recent work
by Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous on sexual difference in language. This
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 18
work on sexual difference will be used to inform an analysis of Derrida’s work
on hospitality in order to question the roles of host, hostess and guest in
language and representation.
Derrida takes up Levinas’s assertion that ‘the essence of language is friendship
and hospitality’ although he also asks whether absolute hospitality must
suspend the relation to language. He writes of hospitality as a structure informed
by sexual difference, for example:
This is a conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric. It’s the familial despot,
the father, the spouse and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the
laws of hospitality. He represents them and submits to them to submit the others
to them in this violence of the power of hospitality, in this force of ipseity […]
The problem of hospitality [is] coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always
about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s identity, one’s space, one’s limits,
for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home. (Of Hospitality.
Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 2000, pp. 149,151)
I shall take examples of autobiographical and fictional representations of
hospitality (including Derrida’s autobiographical writing) to show the ways in
which host and guest play out sexual difference.
Carrie Tarr (European Studies Research Centre, Kingston)
Gender and the Family of Maghrebi Origin in Contemporary French Cinema
This paper takes as its starting-point the significance of different subject positions
and cultural locations in the production of representations of gender in French
cinema. In particular it compares the ways in which feature films by white
French women and women of Maghrebi origin inscribe the different sociocultural positioning of men and women of Maghrebi origin in relation to the
immigrant Maghrebi family. It focuses first on Chaos (2001) by feminist
filmmaker Coline Serreau, whose critical representation of the dysfunctional
immigrant family arguably re/produces essentialist Eurocentric stereotypes of
Maghrebi others, and compares it with films by Zaïda Ghorab-Volta, Rachida
Krim and Yamina Benguigui which, whilst remaining critical of the excessive
patriarchal authority invested in the father, clearly locate their representations,
including shifting gender roles within the family, in the history of French
colonialism and immigration.
Divya Tolia-Kelly (Cultural Geography, Lancaster)
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 19
Representing Post-colonial Memory-history on Canvas: South Asian Women and the
‘Describe a Landscape’ Project
In January 2002, the Cubitt Gallery in Islington, held an exhibition of paintings
by the artist Melanie Carvalho. Some of these canvases were produced in a
collaborative research project entitled ‘Describe a Landscape’. This set of
canvases had been previously exhibited at the annual conference of the Royal
Geographical Society supported by UCL (Department of Geography). This
collaborative project between Carvalho and myself examined the ‘ways of
seeing’ landscape that was present in the community of South Asian women
living in Britain. It was also an attempt to make tangible the narratives of
memory-history that operate within the South Asian community.
The paintings produced are considered visual narratives of the negotiation of
migration of British citizens from the colonies to Britain. This post-colonial South
Asian population living in Britain experience the British landscape through a
lens of having been citizens in East Africa, India, Yemen and Pakistan (to name
but a few). This group’s initial dis-enfranchisement from a sense of Englishness
and English landscape has resulted in new configurations and relationships with
the British landscape. These configurations are expressed in this landscape
project as mediations between different cultures of identification and being.
Memory, aesthetics and textures of nature are discussed in the paper as
important components of South Asian engagements with landscapes in Britain
and abroad, through which is constructed a social history and social identity.
These landscape visualisations are significant in their power to illustrate the lens
through which the women’s identification with landscape and nation is figured.
This paper presents the canvases as a means to explore the dynamics of these
forms of memory- history that are present within migrant communities and their
stories which are often excluded or marginalized in formal narrations of history,
and heritage. The canvases explore the grounded processes of identification that
take place in the post-colonial imaginary, as situated in the U.K. These
representations of the South Asian imaginary are tangible counter-narratives to
representations of post-coloniality encountered within academic literatures and
practices.
Nana Wilson-Tagoe (Africa, SOAS)
Psychoanalysis, Gender and Narratives of Women’s Friendships in the Writing of Ama
Ata Aidoo and Yvonne Vera
Since Freud and since the emergence in Western feminism of lesbianism as a
distinct sexual identity, the concept of women’s friendships has been somewhat
overshadowed by questions of sexuality. The cognitive, emotional, social and
psychic ramifications of these friendships appear now to be less important than
Gender Workshop Four Abstracts 20
notions of sexual attachment and sexual identity. Thus, commentators on Ama
Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy are more likely to examine the friendship of Sissie
and Marija in terms of Sissie’s rejection of lesbianism or her affirmation of a
distinctly heterosexual identity. Yet in African cultural and social contexts the
concept of women’s friendships denotes much more than a private, personal and
sexual attachment. Often interwoven with the norms of kinship affiliation, such
friendships present an open arena for a variety of intimacies and expressions that
are crucial for constructions of women’s identities. African women writers have
enlarged the metaphorical possibilities of these friendships in narratives that
interrogate images of femininity, dramatise splits in women’s identities and
reveal cultural, social and sexual anxieties of contemporary African women.
My paper argues that psychoanalysis provides a conceptual and interpretive
framework for moving beyond the surface content of these friendships. Because
it signals ways of approaching absences, silences and gaps in texts, it reveals
relations between social reality and the individual unconscious and forces us to
question overt meanings in texts. My focus on Our Sister Killjoy uncovers layers
of personal and emotional needs that connect two women beyond notions of
difference and the drama of sexual rejection. In Changes I explore women’s
friendships as multiple negotiations of sexual power and desire in a changing
world, and in Yvonne Vera’s Stone Virgins I examine the psychoanalytic
significance of sibling friendship beyond the usual connotations of kinship.