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The article analyzes the short story "Head and Shoulders" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Topics discussed include the interconnection between philosophical motifs and gender issues in the short story, the complexity in the relationship between the characters Horace and Marcia, and Fitzgerald's interest in ideas and philosophy as illustrated in the short story.

The author reflects on her experience of co-authoring the book "Modern Literatures in Spain" with scholar Luisa Elena Delgado. She discusses the significance of Delgado's participation in the project to the author's efforts in rethinking the discipline of Spanish studies. She explores Delgado's contributions to the book on literature in Castilian that showed the link between the Spanish literary canon and understandings of what the nation was or should be, which influenced gender attitudes.

A literary criticism of the novel "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield is presented. Topics discussed include Redfield's promotion of New Age ideologies, his reaffirmation of hegemonic American culture by using gendered and racialized tropes, and the portrayal of race, gender and salvation in the book.

After the naksa, Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan composed her famous "I Shall Not Weep," which she later included in her first resistance-themed collection: The Night and Knights. In this poem, Tuqan openly proclaims her intention to enter the male-dominated political arena and join the Palestinian poets of resistance. However, Tuqan's turn toward the nationalist cause did not come without a struggle. She had, for long, resisted this move as a performative denunciation of women's paradoxical location within the nationalist symbolic order. Focusing on The Night and Knights, this article traces the poetic representations of Tuqan's emerging attachment to the collective and investigates the meanings of her engagement with Palestinian nationalist discourse. I argue that while the construal of the gendered self in the collection illuminates the generative power that the Palestinian experience holds, it also reveals how Tuqan's location within various systems of power informs her strategies of representation and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the transgender themes in the short story "Enigmas" by Louisa May Alcott. Topics include the author's argument that the short story encourages the articulation of trans feelings which in turn suggests a more complicated representation of gender and sexuality in the work of Alcott, the critical attention escaped by the story despite the remarkable resemblances between "Enigmas" and Alcott's life, and the difference of the story from all of Alcott's other sensation fiction.

The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its "economy" and "forms" of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray's "the female imaginary", Deleuze's "becoming-other", Cixous's "écriture feminine", Lyotard's "the figural" and Derrida's "chora". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview with the poet Glenda George and Lewis Johnson (PhD student, University of Liverpool) took place over email during December 2021–March 2022. George discusses her early work in the British Poetry Revival, examining the impacts of class and gender on her experience as a writer. George describes her role in the development of the poetry magazine Curtains (1971–1978), discussing her translation process and her reason for translating the French avant-garde into English. George concludes by tracing her poetics from the 1970s and 1980s into the present, offering her views on contemporary poetry and poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ismat Chughtai was an Urdu-language writer in India whose affiliation with the Progressive Writers Movement sparked a lifelong tryst with socialism. This article examines the "material agency" found in household objects that help to co-create a society for women within their private gendered domains in which they hold power. The quilt and the diary – objects in Chughtai's short stories "The Quilt" and "Chhoti Apa" respectively – serve as biographical insight into the women's lives because they create a subjectivity that was previously denied to Muslim women by oriental ethnographic studies. The agency of the objects lies in their ability to morph their meaning according to contexts, revealing the socially constructed nature of identity of humans and objects, forged by wrestling with variables such as gender and sexuality. Chughtai's stories "unveil" Muslim women's daily performative acts of resistance in a decolonial discourse on material culture and postcolonial feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novel "Silas Marner," by George Eliot is presented. Topics discussed include the titular character's intimacy with gold coins as a reflection of desires that the author believes should be redirected toward the formation of family, the straightening of the character through his relationship with things, and the instability of the character's gender.

Spivak refers to "originary queerness" as a concept she cannot yet theorize. If concepts convey and uphold heterogeneous lived experience, then the paradoxical missing-ness of a corresponding "what happened" augurs a form of understanding underived from information retrieval. In this spot lives our undifferentiated experience such that "one cannot imagine what one seems to know." Such imagining of what one (already) seems to know is the task of tarrying with difference "in its place." This essay reads the novel Shame to suggest that the question of originary queerness (what happened?) is an effort to "cross identity" for the heterogeneous. Shame's elite Pakistani women are apertures of difference in its place precisely because their fates are so stereotypically dismal. Instead of what is in the novel – the unequivocal gender coding that renders women monstrous or pure, grotesque or invisible, barren or fertile – they contest the narrator's illocutionary claim that "all stories ha[ve] to end together." Since none epitomize appropriate femininity, they refract sexual difference as lived failure to gesture to (an) un-exceptional originary queerness that does not queer places. In fact, places queer it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the contemporary gothic fiction "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Topics include the author's thought on the inclusion of gender non-conformity and reversal in the short story, the theme and basic plot of Hawthorne's short stories, and descriptions of Giovanni and Beatrice's characters in the story. Also cited is the nature of Beatrice's feminine appearance in the gothic fiction.

Both Heaney and McGuckian employ imagery of the female body in pain as a site of political violence in their works. The violence which led to over 3,600 deaths, haunts both poet's collections. The female body, in both representational and metaphorical ways, is skewed within Heaney's collection. While Seamus Heaney's poetry collection North opened up a space for highlighting the human cost of the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, the writing of gendered experiences reinforces traditional nationalist stereotypes which leave women silenced. Heaney's 'Bog Queen', for example, depicts the silent disintegration and absorption of a woman's body into the land, conjuring links between womanhood and nationhood. The development of gendered writing is explored here in relation to Medbh McGuckian's debut collection The Flower Master, which responds to this literary silencing. This collection introduces an embodied experience of nationalist womanhood, with women's experiences being written into the literary narrative of the conflict. The women speakers speak of the absorbed traumas of the Troubles; each becoming a kind of 'living' corpse. I argue that The Flower Master recalibrates the meaning of 'Mother Ireland' and situates the (living) female body as a medium for communicating the lived experiences of political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth century fiction about the sailing ships (around the Cape) that crossed the seas between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies between 1850 and 1890 are presented as micro colonies in the novels: a condensed version of colonial society. In the analyzed novels, women are represented as passengers who are finding their ways to exercise power in a colonial micro cosmos that is been dominated by white men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates gender in Middle English Pearl through language analysis in broader literary, cultural, and philosophical contexts, focusing particularly on the portrayal of the maiden, but taking into account also the dreamer-narrator and the Lamb. It is demonstrated that, far from being a consistently feminine figure, the Pearl maiden is a queer being, invested with masculine attributes as well. The article traces the reversals of normative gender patterns and sexual roles throughout the poem and attempts their interpretation. It questions, for the first time in Pearl criticism, the assumption that the maiden was a female person, probably the poet's daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview is presented with British author Bernardine Evaristo. Topics discussed include importance of writing balance between bringing readers in and challenging them to think differently; historical and geographic scale of novels; and exploration of gender, race, class and sexuality in myriad configurations through the protagonists and their orbits.

The article examines how Cold War historical events were reflected in the print and performance literature of that period, specifically Margaret Landon's "Anna and the King of Siam" and the 1951 Broadway production of "The King and I." Topics covered include an examination of the symbolism of having a house in reference to the Cold War issue of national security politics and the societal issue of gender, and the symbolism of the two main characters.

The Summer Without Men (2011) brings together several strands of thought that have characterized Siri Hustvedt's oeuvre, exemplifying most notably the manner in which Husvedt's fictional strategies are informed by her favorite conceptual triad of aesthetics, gender and psychiatry. The structure of transgressions in TSM is crucial to the text's peculiar enunciation of gender, and this paper seeks to explore the potential criticality to the term 'transgression' because it allows us to consider something like a 'partial subject' that escapes gender itself. Driven mostly by the centrality of mental illness and convalescence to the plot, my own animation of the term here is derived largely from Deleuze & Guattari's concept of 'partial subjectivation', from which I also borrow the possibility of thinking esthetically, rather than politically or representationally, about gender. This paper identifies to that effect, a series of Deleuzian 'becomings' in the novel which constitute its esthetics of transgression, forming its own peculiar treatment of gender as a creative flux rather than a juridical concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the representation of gender, self-identity, subjectivity, ontology, and patriarchy in the novels "Wild Seed," by Octavia Butler and "The Handmaid's Tale," by Margaret Atwood. Topics include the social issues like slavery and racial identification tackled in "Wild Seed," Atwood's presentation of such topics as the purpose of human life, free will, and women's rights in her novel, and how both novels address the roles of marriage and motherhood.

The purpose of this small-scale case study was to identify and analyze key patterns in terms of gender representation in children's books in one early childhood setting. Furthermore, this case study sought to understand the perspectives of early childhood educators on gender representation in children's books. The researcher employed multiple methods of data collection, including content analysis of 15 children's books, as well as reflective journal writing and professional conversation between eight educators from one early childhood center in Dublin, Ireland. Content analysis of children's books revealed distinct gender patterns that include underrepresentation of female characters and instances of gender stereotyping. Further findings indicate that educators exhibit a lack of awareness of gender patterns and attribute limited importance to gender representation in children's books. This research hopes to aid early childhood educators in becoming aware of gender stereotyping in children's books, enhancing observation and reflective skills, and creating a more inclusive learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "Jumping Monkey Hill" was inspired by its author's experience at the inaugural workshop of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003, during which, the writer says, she was faced with the lustful and patronizing attitude of the then-administrator of the award. Adichie's piece, by virtue of being a short story about writing itself, is a so-called "metafictional" text. It is on this self-reflexive quality that this essay focuses. More precisely, the article examines the interaction between reality and fiction in Adichie's story, paying particular attention to the ways in which the text uses techniques of mise en abyme to comment on gender subjection, colonially tinged condescension, and resistance to both of these forms of oppression. Ultimately, the essay argues that "Jumping Monkey Hill" can be read as a literary manifesto that incarnates its own theorization, a conclusion that is, however, shown to be problematic in more than one respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of screen adaptations based on Charlotte Brontë’s novelJane Eyre(1847). Looking at different cultures of feminism in the 1940s, 1980s and 2000s, it examines how the character of Jane has been diversely portrayed at times when gender norms were being rigorously challenged in the culture. The adaptations’ engagement with Brontë’s implicit feminism is examined in the context of each period’s prevailing feminist ideologies as well as in the practices employed by the film and television industries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novelDark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation inQueer Phenomenology(2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semioticchōracontinues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction inLa revolution du langage poétique– the fate of thechōrawas left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term inGender TroubleandBodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusivelyprohibitiveconception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal lawgeneratescertain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of thechorawith the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding thechōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semioticchōradoes indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by addingchōros, the masculine form ofchōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’sThrough the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 2006 to 2008 UK-based primary school teachers in theNo Outsidersproject explored possibilities for addressing sexualities equality in their classrooms. What all teachers had in common was a resource pack that included 27 children's books exploring themes of gender and sexuality diversity either directly or indirectly (i.e. by the presence of same-sex parents or gender non-normative characters). While such books have the potential to productively trouble the heteronormative spaces of schools by the mere presence of characters who do not conform to sex/gender/sexuality expectations, some of them have also been criticized for reproducing heteronormative family structures and implicit values and failing to go beyond ‘vanilla strategies’ that feel safe in primary school settings. The experiences and reflections of theNo Outsidersproject members can help educators plan not only which kinds of literature to use but also how to incorporate such texts into the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the expresion of gender and identity on narrative strategies, the consequences of colonization in Italy and Africa, and the neocolonial relations between Zimbabwe and Great Britain.

In this article, I claim that Shakespeare moves beyond the archetypal early modern definitions of land, and the maps that represent it, as benefitting from masculine intervention and argue that he envisions unnecessary masculine interventions regarding the performativity of the feminine in terms of landscape and cartography to be harmful to both the perpetrator and object of the intervention. He acknowledges that there is a connection between how his male characters—specifically, fathers—define their nations and their daughters, but warns that demonstrating a lack of trust or understanding in the agency of women and attempting to overwrite them the way boundaries are changed on a map results in tragedy for all involved. I use Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender to demonstrate that such masculine interventions often cannot differentiate between normative and subversive acts, which compounds the dangers of such interferences. Using both his early and later plays, specificallyTitus AndronicusandThe Tragedy of King Lear, I show that Shakespeare portrays the desire to treat women as territories or blank maps and to deny his female characters the ability to make their own choices as problematic and dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the political discourses on chivalry and gender inLibro del Caballero Zifarand provides textual evidence in support of the theory that María de Molina was an original patron of this anonymous work from the cathedral school of Toledo. Using the portrait of the queen in the prologue as a point of departure, this study explores the intertextuality ofLibro del Caballero Zifarand contemporary royal chronicles, elucidating the manner in which the political discourse of the former supports the political propaganda of the latter, ultimately creating a legitimizing discourse for María de Molina's rule as queen of Castile-León at the turn of the fourteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the link between nationalism, as expressed by the Burman state and ethnic and student opposition movements, and the emergence of a multiethnic women's movement engaged in resistance activities. In focusing on women's involvement in oppositional nation-making projects, this article aims to broaden our understanding of gender and conflict by highlighting women's agency in war. Drawing on interviews carried out with founding members of the women's movement, non-state armed groups and others active in civil society, the article investigates how a gendered political consciousness arose out of dissatisfaction with women's secondary position in armed opposition groups, leading to women forming a movement, not in opposition to conflict per se but in opposition to the rejection of their militarism, in the process redefining notions of political involvement and agency. By invoking solidarity based on a gendered positioning, rather than on an ethnic identity, the women's movement resisted the dominant nation-making projects, and created a nationalism inclusive of multiethnic differences. Burmese women's multiple wartime roles thus serve to upset supposed dichotomies between militancy and peace and victim and combatant, in the process redefining the relationship between gender, nationalism and militancy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines two English translations ofDon Segundo, a novel written by Ricardo Güiraldes. One of the so-called ‘telluric novels’ of Latin America, this work has been regarded as one of the masterpieces of the area.Don Segundo Sombrais the story of homodiegetic narrator, Fabio Cáceres, a well-educated man who narrates events that happened to him as an adolescent reaching manhood in the Argentinean Pampas. The text reflects a quintessential view of masculinity that is filled with individuals showing clear negative attitudes towards women, as well as an apparent male chauvinist point of view. The only two English translations of this work, by female translators Harriet de Onís and Patricia Owen Steiner, provide slightly but crucially different interpretations when translating this early twentieth century manly Argentine tale. The analysis conducted in this article is of a descriptive nature, and it intends to point out decisions made by the two translators in order to determine if a particular tendency can be detected. An analysis of the renditions of key passages will reveal differences in the translators’ perceptions of the gendered ideology embedded in the fictional men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an oblique homage to Frantz Fanon, this article is a cultural historian’s reading of Doris Lessing’s famous 1950 novel,The Grass is Singing.I approach it as an engaging and sophisticated exploration of gendered racial whiteness, manifest in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia towards the end of colonial rule. I suggest that central to Lessing’s novelistic project is a thinking through of how it might be possible to envisage ‘knowledge’ (truth) if it were to be freed from ‘race’. Arguably, the novel is a fictional embodiment of the thesis that the dismantling of racial whiteness provides the precondition for new thought to happen, both in an epistemological and ethical sense. Deliberately open-ended, and taking as its starting point Lessing’s narrative procedure in the opening pages, the article situates ‘knowledge’ in relation to the emotions and psychic life of characters. In opposition to the imperatives of instrumental reason,The Grass is Singingarguably champions an ethics of ‘principled unknowability’, in which the location of the unconscious is never far away, and the Manichaean certainties of colonial-era whiteness are revealed as pathologically overdetermined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past three decades, nationalism has been a topic of great interest among scholars in the field of Thai Studies. Most of these scholars have, however, neglected the issue of gender in their examination of Thai nationalism. This article addresses this oversight by examining Thawiphop (Two Worlds) and Khu kam (Sunset on the Chao Phraya), two of the most popular novels by Thommayanti. As a well known nationalist and self-proclaimed feminist, Thommayanti has united the topics of gender and nationalism in these two works by representing female protagonists who strive to play an active role in the nationalist effort. Close examination reveals, however, that the nationalism of both protagonists is based on the psychoanalytic structure of the family romance that ultimately leads to a subversion of their agency. Thus, despite Thommayanti's attempt to depict strong and independent women in her novels, her characters ultimately fall short of transcending their subordinate roles in the discourse of nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a brief commentary on some of the themes of the previous essays in this journal by way of a classic Renaissance Italian poem about masculinity and its various ‘mutations’, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A specific genre of early-modern domestic-management handbook devoted to the running of cardinals' households enjoyed widespread popularity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Such households were staffed by dozens of male servants whose requisites and tasks were minutely described in this literature. This article uses the descriptions of the types of men who should be hired for service posts in ecclesiastical households to analyse the construction of gender in the papal capital. It argues that the clerical ideal of manliness was an emergent but not hegemonic style of masculinity in Baroque Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

InThe Winter's Tale, the theme of jealousy is encoded in terms of word/image dynamics: men speak at and about women, who are treated as passive images. The character of Hermione, who appears to die before being magically restored to life, greatly complicates this normative binary. This article thinks through the implications of Hermione's representation by applying W.J.T. Mitchell's observations about the ideological motivations present within the relationship between spoken discourse and visual representation. For Mitchell, the word/image distinction functions to naturalise social inequalities, such as gender binaries. This is especially true in the Renaissance, when women were expected to be “chaste, silent, and obedient.” But as Mitchell demonstrates, the word/image binary is inherently unstable and therefore susceptible to destabilisation. The article looks specifically at how Hermione's status as a living statue, or speaking image, challenges the discursive assumptions of male power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A comic strip is presented that deals with depictions of gender in webcomics.

This article discusses the representation of gender and nationality in the historical fiction of Hilda Vaughan, a Welsh woman writing in English during the early twentieth century. It offers a detailed discussion of her second novel, Here are Lovers (1926), but also makes reference to other texts. These texts are located within the historical context of the interwar period when nationality was a key issue for both feminist campaigners and emerging Welsh nationalist politics. The article draws upon the theoretical work of Williams and Foucault and argues that Vaughan's fiction offers a particularly sustained exploration of the gendering and classing of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Tongues of glaciers” explores the creative collaboration of visual artist Roni Horn and poet Anne Carson around Horn’s acclaimed Vatnasafn/Library of Water (2007), an installation sited in a former community library in western Iceland. In twenty-four floor-to-ceiling transparent glass columns, Horn displays and archives water in which the telluric and linguistic sediment of glaciers has been deposited. Carson and her husband, Robert Currie, wrote the poem “Wildly Constant” here when Carson was writer in residence in 2009. A homage to and meditation on the Library of Water that reverberates through many other poetic and creative collaborations in subsequent years — including musical performances — the poem is the occasion for an examination of the complex, generative interplay of word and image. The authors’ analysis details the intricate formal interweaving of poem and visual artwork, the inspirations and reference points for both art forms — including the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Anna Freud, Marcel Proust, and especially earth artist Robert Smithson’s essays. Their reading of Horn’s and Carson’s works seeks to understand their extended conception of “writing” and “drawing,” the vagaries of gender, and the ecology of water. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the book "Fortress in the Rice" by Benjamin Appel, focusing on how it portrays the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines during the 1940s and 1950s. Other topics include information on Appel's research in the social and racial issues in the Philippines, how class and gender are represented in the book, and how the U.S. public's lack of knowledge of U.S. involvement in the Philippines impacts the popularity of the book.

Separately and together we offer our memories of howGender, Place and Culturecame into being. In so doing we seek to make available the kind of histories that often remain hidden from view. At the same time we illustrate the fallibility of memory and the conditions of possibility that frame what we can narrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Marina Carr's first four plays: Low in the Dark (1989), The Deer's Surrender (1990), This Love Thing (1991) and Ullaloo (1991). It aims to show how Carr seeks to eschew the mimetic conventions of what can be seen as a dominant, patriarchal theatre establishment, marking (and possibly maintaining) her marginal position as a theatre-maker at the time. I argue that Carr, at this point in her career, was engaged in distinctly feminist theatre practices. Materialist feminist discourse provides a useful framework for understanding what the emergent dramatist was trying to achieve and the meaningful possibilities of her work. A study of this phase of Carr's career, encompassing all four works preceding The Mai, has not been offered in research on the dramatist to date. In addition to expanding the history of feminist theatre practice in Ireland, it promotes an enriched understanding of Carr's theatre as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents authors views regarding impact of political crisis on South Asian men and masculinities that resulted in redrawing mapping. Topics include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, political crisis functions as a framing device and comparative analyses of South Asian men and masculinities.

A central element of Amitav Ghosh'sSea of Poppiesis the manifestation of gender at sea, which distorts dualistic notions of domestic and commercial spheres of influence. The centrepiece of Ghosh's novel – a ship – seems initially presented as a predominately masculine and heteronormative space, but for the presence of a few Indian passengersen routeto Mauritius. However, an examination of the social dynamics on board theIbisreveals that both passengers and crew are engaged in a variety of attempts to utilize and express their gender and sexuality in ways that undermine the hegemonic narrative described by Celia Freeman, in which the sphere of international commerce is ‘masculinized’; for example, the manner in which members of the crew use gendered items of clothing to navigate their way around the enforcements of normativity, and create spaces in which gender and sexual fluidity are possible. The liminal, multicultural world of the sailboat opens up queer possibilities inaccessible on land due to the prevailing impositions of empire. Taking into account Jesse Ransley's claim that ‘the gendering of the maritime sphere as male, and the construction of male versus female… is modern, Western and dualistic’, I argue thatSea of Poppiesis concerned with the ways that love, sexuality and gender effectively shape international politics and trade. Ghosh's depiction of the way romantic love operates within the world of nineteenth century maritime trade – specifically with regard to the character Baboo Nob Kissin – works at once to destabilize Western constructions of masculinity at sea, and to undermine assumptions of an innately secular Western queerness – assumptions Jasbir Puar dubs ‘homonationalism’, and denounces for their role in twisting the ideals of LGBT liberation to further the goals of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses a study which examined how gender is portrayed and represented in popular children's literature from 1974 to 2014. Topics discussed include the amount of females and males that appear in the stories, the decline in the prevalence of women in stereotypical roles in 2012, and the need for further action on creating more gender equality in children's picturebooks.

Although students equipped with the concept of gender equity may be better prepared to participate in a democratic society, gender is not a given but a construct, formalising a discourse in a non-arbitrary way through a matrix of practices. The study reports how two male Taiwanese university students, Jay and Dick, responded to female-centred texts to construct their concept of gender equity. Data sources include reading journal entries and oral interviews. The results indicate Jay’s inquiry positions regarding gender equity allowed him to re-evaluate himself as a male reader, leading him to changed perspectives and a new understanding about his implicit beliefs toward gender. In contrast, responding to female-centred texts became a site of struggle for Dick, revealing gaps and contradictions within his conventional insights on gender equity. The results also inform us that male and female students need effective ways of constructing gender roles in responding to texts and talk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article seeks to address the plural forms of class 11/10 nouns in Meru dialects. These are Bantu dialects spoken in the eastern province of Kenya. The dialects build the plural forms in this class in various ways. Sometimes the entire word is treated as a root and in other cases the word is considered to have two parts: a prefix and a stem. Forms that are considered to have a prefix and a stem can be further restructured. In some cases the singular forms have an underlying stem initial palatal consonant which is deleted in the surface phonetic form but surfaces in the plural, and in other cases the words are treated as having a stem initial vowel. It is interesting to note that this noun class restructuring can occur in one and the same dialect whereby a single lexical form has its plural realized in two or three different ways. The article will, therefore, not only seek to discuss different ways of forming the plural in this gender but also outline clearly the motivations behind such changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gender bending has been a staple of the medium of shōjo manga, Japanese girls’ comics, as best exemplified by cross-dressing “girl knight” characters and “Boys Love” stories, whose plots focus on romance between effeminate beautiful young men. The imaginary space created through the representation of these figures shares many traits in common with another typical feature of shōjo comics, namely their exoticisation of Europe. Both have been used as simultaneously escapist and subversive strategies, as a refuge from contemporary social norms and a platform for critical reflection. In this article, I aim to problematise our understanding of the connection between gender bending and exoticism in shōjo manga through an analysis of the representation of one specific aspect of European culture – namely, the Christian religion – in the genre of Boys Love manga. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between gender, emotion and normative ideals is a prominent theme in British sensation fiction of the 1860s, and a central concern in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862). But despite critical assent concerning the importance of emotions in the text, there are no focused studies of their meaning and narrative function. This study explores how representations of anger and shame convey gender specificity, and how the way characters express and perform emotions interplays with constructions of social power in the novel. Braddon's work contains more examples of women than men exhibiting signs of anger and more instances of men than women showing shame, which means that anger might be understood as a female and shame as a male quality in the text. The contexts where these emotions occur indicate the opposite, however. Women displaying anger are shown to transgress gendered conduct codes, whereas men mostly experience shame because of women's misbehaviour and as their guardians. Although the distribution of instances when male and female characters show anger or shame could initially be understood as a manifestation of the disruptive qualities of the sensation genre, such an interpretation is undermined by the gendered relations between emotional expression, power and control in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mary Robinson's Vancenza (1792) has received almost no critical attention, despite its popularity at the time it was written. The Gothic framework of Vancenza is employed to explore the fact that female transgression in the eighteenth century was seen as so damaging to the social order that it can continue to inflict pain and suffering on a second generation. Robinson plays with the conventions of the Gothic novel, presenting a range of pseudo-villains and evaded acts of violence, only to reveal that the true Gothic narrative of the novel is a part of the novel's history, not its present. In displacing the Gothic narrative to the past, Robinson shields her heroine, Elvira, from the seduction narrative while emphasizing the impossibility of her escape from the tragic denouement of her mother's seduction narrative. Robinson allows Madeline Vancenza, the archetypal Gothic victim, a voice, uncovering her repressed story from concealment, only to emphasize women's utter powerlessness in the face of patriarchal power. Vancenza is a profoundly pessimistic novel in its representation of the social order—Robinson's bleakest statement on the lack of options available to women in a world where the stain of female transgression cannot even be washed away by death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the rime spirituali of Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) have benefited in recent years from increased critical examination, her rime amorose have gone largely unstudied. This lack of attention is due at least in part to a lack of excitement, as modern scholarship has come to consider her early secular verse to be competent but conventional, a brand of Petrarchism that is at once passively receptive and abstractly decorporealizing. This essay aims to show that Colonna's is a reputation unjustly earned and that her rime amorose are not as 'traditional' or frigid as has typically been posited. On the contrary, her verse can be wonderfully bizarre and experimental, especially in terms of gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]