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The article explores the author's evolving relationship with feminism, highlighting how their upbringing in an Afrocentric and feminist household has influenced their academic work and teaching, particularly in articulating unspoken experiences. Topics include the complexity of rebellion in feminist contexts, the dual nature of the term "against" in relation to familial and societal dynamics, and the significance of nuanced articulation in feminist pedagogy and scholarship.

The article examines Daphne Marlatt's "Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now," highlighting its critique of neoliberalism and the role of memory in shaping urban and feminist politics in Vancouver. Topics include the relationship between urban development and capitalism, the significance of personal and public memory, and the potential of feminist critique to resist the erasure of histories of oppression.

The article discusses the complexities of shame within feminist critique, particularly in relation to Canadian literature and the broader cultural context of Canada's violent history. Topics include the distinction between being shamed and feeling shame, the productive nature of shame as an emotional response, and the challenges of engaging with cultural artifacts tied to problematic figures while maintaining a feminist perspective.

The article explores the intersections of gender, citizenship, and literature in Canada, emphasizing the need for ongoing feminist discourse in academic settings while highlighting the contradictions faced by individuals within these frameworks. Topics include the impact of historical colonialism onity, the critical examination of Indigenous masculinities, and the role of literature in shaping and challenging societal norms around gender and sexuality.

The article reflects on the author's personal journey with feminist theory and its significant impact on their life and teaching, tracing formative experiences with feminist texts from childhood to academia. Topics include the author's early encounters with feminism through literature, the challenges faced in academic settings related to feminist discourse, and the ongoing relevance of feminist theory as a guiding framework for community and justice.

The article discusses Deborah Levy's Real Estate and explores themes of sexism and the challenges faced by women in academia, particularly in the context of hostile encounters with male colleagues. Topics include the dynamics of willfulness in seeking change, the emotional labor involved in feminist scholarship, and the importance of creating a "willfulness archive" that documents resistance and resilience in the face of systemic sexism.

The article reports on the complex relationship between reparative scholarship and the institutional failures within Canadian literary studies, particularly in light of the controversies surrounding "CanLit." Topics include the challenges faced by Black, queer, and feminist scholars within academic institutions, the critique of traditional hermeneutics of suspicion, and the potential for a reparative theory of change that emphasizes complicity and relationships with texts and communities.

The author recalls her experience at an experimental writing conference in 2009 hosted by the University of Buffalo. It reports panel she participated in, titled "Inconsequentiality: Why It's Important," was organized by a friend and writer she admires. She presented alongside her then-spouse, a white male writer she did not know, and her work-in-progress, a novel called 'The Reconception of Marie.' The author describes herself and her novel as feminist, anti-authoritarian, and queer.

Feminist Book Fortnight was a signal event in the history of feminist publishing, but its history has not yet been written. Throughout the latter half of the 1980s, the Fortnight promoted feminist literature in the UK and Ireland and helped to sustain and power a revolution in feminist publishing. Drawing on the archives of Spare Rib magazine, this article analyses the often fierce tension between the Fortnight's activist aims and its commercial imperatives, and maps out the distinctive regionalism of this annual book trade promotion. Books and literature were of vital importance to the women's movement and Feminist Book Fortnight supported the expansion of the feminist literary marketplace outside London. As I will show, the Fortnight navigated not only between the activist margins and the commercial mainstream, but between isolated feminist outposts and metropolitan centres. Combining feminist digital geography with oral histories and literary analysis, this article concentrates not on women readers or authors but on the workings of the industry which mediated the production and consumption of feminist literature at this time. I argue that the Fortnight's complex renegotiation of extant publishing practices (Murray (2017): 814), both commercial and regional, constituted its most significant contribution to the larger feminist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the author's realization that, despite feminism being a foundational element in their work, it is only mentioned once in their book, emphasizing the need to recognize and articulate the feminist influences throughout their writing process. Topics include the significance of community in academic work, the challenges of acknowledging feminist influences, and the pervasive but often unspoken role of feminism in literary and cultural analysis.

An essay is presented which explores the life, career, and writings of American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Topics discussed include the literary influences of Rukeyser particularly poet T. S. Eliot during her education at Vassar College in New York, the way she reflected on her childhood and adolescence through poems featured in the poetry collection "Theory of Flight," and the life experiences and feminist activism of Rukeyser which contributed to her creative writings.

Focuses on developments in feminist literary scholarship citing the consequences of gender for the possibilities, meaning and function of women's cultural contributions to patriarchal societies. Emphasis on the German feminist fiction on Christina, the Queen of Sweden; Inclusion of more autobiographical writings and correspondence; Images of women in literature; Revival of historical fiction.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the diverse reflections of feminist scholars on the relevance and application of feminist theory in literary studies within Canada, highlighting themes such as feminism as praxis, and the patriarchal nature of academic institution.

The article discusses impacts of Digital humanities on Feminist Literary. Topics include digital feminist literary history through the Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in using semantic markup for online scholarship; Feminist analysis begins with a critique of past and present gender constructions and ideologies; and the feminist project of bridging from legacy vocabularies to new ones but also for basic digital literacy given that categories and the values they govern information system.

This article applies the concept of "transavantgarde" artistic criticism created by Achille Bonito Oliva to the Cuban poetry of the 1980s through the analysis of the book Imitaáón de la vida (1981) by Luis Rogelio Nogueras (1944-1985). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the debates about postmodernity, this paper discusses the reflection on repetition in form and content in Tres tristes tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Through an analysis of the leit motiv of spectacle, I explore the tensions between writing and the stereotypes of identity in the post-revolutionary Cuban context. Considering the theoretical approaches by Guy Debord, Yuri Lotman, Jean Baudrillard, among others, I analyze the configuration of a "spectacular semiosphere" where the characters define their submission or rebellion to a uniform and controllable setting. I argue that the novel problematizes the conditions of representation of a diversity of human types as point of departure to the acknowledgement of the limits of legibility of the 1960s Havana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the film "Book Club," starring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, and Candice Bergen, among others. The author explores the relationship between feminism and women's book clubs, discusses how television personality Oprah Winfrey influenced book reading for women on her talk show "The Oprah Winfrey Show," and examines the film's use of the book "Fifty Shades of Grey," by E. L. James.

This article contrasts the identity politics that took place in the last decades in Argentina with the passing of the Civil Marriage Law and Gender Identity Law with the literary imagination of texts from the same years, in which sexuality exceeds categorisations and presents an anomalous horizon. The first part of the text examines Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the anomalous as a tool to redefine queer sexualities without recourse to a transcendental norm. The second part of the article looks at the work of two writers, Naty Menstrual and Pablo Pérez, as examples of the logic of the anomalous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means of expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on 'fabulation' are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay reads as a moment of alliance – a moment of reading of two disparate things together. The event of alliance remains inspired by Gilles Deleuze's theorisations of becoming. This marks the coming together of unrelated things – one into the fold of another – without being subordinated in the process. It reads an anime, Kiki's Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989), with Deleuze and Guattari's writings on 'the girl' (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) – where the girl represented as 'real' in a fantasy meets the girl written as a metaphor in a theoretical intervention. This inflicts a sense of violence, of abstraction, to both the figures of 'girl'. On the one hand, Miyazaki's work, removed from the discourse of anime, is placed under a feminist scrutiny, while on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'girl', extracted from the logic of the original texts, is reinserted into feminist renditions. The two readings are coordinated by a specific intention. This is to imagine the feminist potential of the 'girl'. Occasionally the two works appear to talk to each other, yet sometimes they stand incommensurable. The texts animate each other without being subsumed by each other – inhabiting and following the movements to trace the other as fields of singularities which cannot be reduced to fixed identities or parallels. This transversal act of reading does not aim at coercing the Deleuzian notion of the girl upon Kiki, but rather looks forward to the conversations generated between the two narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author, a feminist literary critic, offers a personal narrative reflecting upon her life and work dealing with topics including her studies at Brooklyn College and the University of California-Berkeley, the influence the 1962 book "Silent Spring," by Rachel Carson had on her life, and her reflections on her book "Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education."

A compelling tale of exuberance and elemental life force, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has been subject to contradictory criticisms. Originally dismissed for not being serious fiction, being fundamentally apolitical and for its apparent disregard for the dynamics of black aesthetics, the novel has recently received more controversial readings. The novel is mainly viewed as a literature of protest that condemns interracial and intraracial oppression and discrimination and as an instance of black feminism in which women display pivotal interrelationships, achieve feminine bonding, and arrive at liberation through this sororal nexus. Some focus on the demand for an altered recognition of female voice, and others criticize Hurston's protagonist, Janie, for being a passive hero whose happiness is merely a function of her successive marriages. While benefitting from these critical readings, the present study aims at exploring a different aspect; Janie is viewed not necessarily as a colored woman oppressed by the limiting hierarchies of a patriarchal context, but, rather, as a strong-willed figure of authority who uses whoever she finds on her path to her own advantage in order to achieve her ultimate goal. Hers is a narrative of conscious and persistent defiance, resilience and dominance. Not only does Janie defy subjugation and objectification, she also gets to exercise power, autonomy and control through her avid eagerness for life. She transforms vulnerability and the demand for conformity into authority and dominance. And the vital drive that fuels her actions and decisions is her need for individual gratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anna Jackson's I, Clodia substantially develops Catullus's literary reception. The collection complicates understandings of both Catullus's poetic paramour Lesbia and the historical Roman woman Clodia Metelli. Jackson makes Clodia a poet; she thus becomes not just a receiver of the classical tradition but a participant in it. Clodia responds to Catullus's poems with her own commentary on poetry, her own set of poetic devices, and a complex inter- and intratextuality. Moreover, Jackson makes Clodia a sensitive and literate reader of Catullus. While her Clodia takes a biographical approach to his poems, reading them as responses to their romance, she is also as attuned to his inter- and intratextual poetics as any modern Latin scholar. The poetic sequence has socio-cultural as well as aesthetic significance; by reimagining the much-maligned historical woman Clodia as an intelligent reader and a talented poet, I, Clodia serves as a feminist text. I, Clodia can be seen as part of the recent tradition of women writers reclaiming and rewriting women from the ancient world, complicating the notion that women writers now operate in a 'post-feminist' landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to a series of articles published in the issue of the journal on inter-lingual translation in relation to the history of feminist discourse, activism, and literature.

Christa Wolf is one of several female writers from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) whose writing reflects an interest in gendered experience. These socialist writers mostly rejected identification as feminists, avoiding association with what they considered to be a bourgeois and capitalist movement. However, by far the most internationally successful of these writers, Christa Wolf, has been consistently marketed and read in English translation as a feminist author. Where the writing of others such as Irmtraud Morgner is perhaps regarded as too deeply embedded in a socialist consciousness and remains largely untranslated, Wolf’s texts have found favour in English because of their apparent compatibility with ostensibly universal narratives of experience. This reframing at the heart of Wolf’s international success exposes tensions between her socialist humanist interest in questions of gender and a normative Anglophone narrative of western(ised) feminism into which she is appropriated by translators, readers, publishers, reviewers and the academy. These tensions are particularly visible in the 1984 English-language translation and reception of Wolf’s ‘Cassandra’ (1983). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalist Gail Sheehy’s Passages (1976) was the first book to successfully promote ‘midlife crisis’ in the United States as a feminist idea, which described middle life as the point when men and women abandon traditional gender roles. Psychological experts responded with a male-centred definition of middle age, which banned women from reimagining their lives. Presented and received as more scientific, this became the dominant meaning of ‘midlife crisis’. This paper reverses histories of ‘popularisation’ by tracing how an idea moved from popular culture into academia. It examines the gender politics of scientific demarcation and shows that the midlife crisis has historical roots in debates about gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates a rapid shift in Japanese reception of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex through analysis of two interpretations of the text published in 1953 and 1960. The first, by the male academic whose translation influenced generations of Japanese readers, effectively ‘domesticates’ Beauvoir’s text by blunting its feminist message. The second, by a renowned female author of avant-garde fiction, adapts Beauvoir’s arguments to the Japanese context to show how they can form a basis for feminist praxis. This shift in interpretation is found to result from a postwar increase in Japanese women’s access to higher education, leading to greater representation of feminist perspectives in intellectual discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the close reading of two essays published in 1988 by Afro-Brazilian black movement activist and feminist Lélia de Almeida Gonzalez (1935–1994), this article examines the author’s translation of her political ideas between different audiences (academic and activist) and languages (Portuguese and Spanish), which leads to the constitution of one essay as black and implicitly male (because it is unmarked by gender), and the other as black/indigenous and feminist. Gonzalez chronicles her own condition of liminality in-between related but distinct social struggles by employing the neologisms ‘amefricanity’ and ‘feminismo afrolatinoamericano’. These allow her to place the emphasis on multiplicity and diversity, whilst strategically engaging with the longstanding Spanish American continentalist rhetoric around a supposedly homogeneous Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the writing experiments conducted in Milan by a group of working-class housewives in the 1970s. These women took advantage of the opportunity won by trade unions (so-called ‘educational right’) to go back to school and engage again with education. Their course was taught by Lea Melandri, a prominent figure in the feminist movement who placed student writing at the heart of her teaching method, revealing housewives unexpected talents. Writing proved to be a powerful medium to reflect on their daily lives. Through a highly self-reflexive approach, they were able to deconstruct and criticise their role in society, denouncing, on the one hand the deprivation of freedom they suffered because of their circumstances, and on the other, the injustice of a system where the reproductive tasks they performed were invariably undervalued as ‘non-productive. This led them to problematise the tricky border between the private and public sphere, though this was never a painless or consistent process. Analysing a combination of archival, video and oral sources, my aim is to shed light on the turning-point represented by this experience both for these women’s lives and for our understanding of second-wave feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What little critical consideration there is of Bessie Marchant’s World War I fiction for girls reads the four novels,Molly Angel’s Adventures(1915),A Girl Munition Worker(1916),A VAD in Salonika(1917), andA Transport Girl in France(1919), as demonstrating new opportunities afforded women by the war’s social upheaval. This, however, reveals a lack of familiarity with Marchant’s late Victorian and Edwardian empire adventures for girls. Marchant’s heroines are British girls in various outposts of the empire who find themselves helping incapable or incapacitated fathers, or rescuing eligible young men, by breaking with the conventions of domestic femininity. There is some lip service paid to the latter, but often the most traditionally feminine girls in Marchant’s novels are subverted. The heroines who take on traditionally masculine roles are by contrast celebrated for their grit. This article examines female agency in Marchant’s World War I fiction against her empire adventure stories, including earlier ones such asJuliet the Mail Carrier(1907) and ones published during the war years, such asThe Gold-Marked Charm(1915). Rather than a departure from earlier girls’ adventure fiction, the World War I novels are an extension of the empire adventure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a brief overview of the sixteenth-century feminine reception of the Orlando Furioso, poem by Ludovico Ariosto. Topics discussed include information on views of Isabella d’Este, best-documented female reader of the poem, Ariosto' s poem through library inventories and correspondence records; indebtedness of early modern feminist writers to Ariosto’s poem; and merits of fictional character, Bradamante and Marfisa in poem.

A literary criticism of the novel "The Rebels, or Boston before the Revolution," by Lydia Maria Child is presented. Topics discussed include the exploration of fragmentary ruins and historical narrative and its connection with the novel's historiography and political concept, the relation between masculinized history and feminized fictional realm, and the exploration and portrayal of the characters.

En la extensa obra de Pablo Montoya, la mujer está lejos de constituir un personaje secundario, aunque se perciba como 'irrepresentable'. Madre y hermanas son las representantes femeninas por excelencia: son seres constantes observados por hombres sorprendidos que no logran comprenderlas. La madre es el origen y lo estable; con su deceso inicia el desmoronamiento de las estructuras sociales. Otras, son vagos recuerdos, pero mujer y revolución son causas perdidas. La mujer no es una Lilith reivindicadora, sino una Eva dócil que se sacrifica por el otro. Si el hombre encarna la acción, la mujer está centrada primordialmente en una estrategia acomodaticia y de sacrificio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the struggle for gender inequality and violence against women in North America and the literary activism to counter violence against Native North American women and colonialism itself.

The article examines the representation of displacement and dispossession in American author Demetria Martínez's book "The Block Captain's Daughter." Topics covered include ways in which the book's narrative advances transnationalism and feminist approaches to issues of space, place and subjectivity, the history of dispossession and displacement in New Mexico, and an exploration of the structures of Chicano or Chicana history via everyday interactions, relationships and culture of people.

Fifty Shades of Grey—often classified as “mommy porn”—is far from a joke when considering its widespread cultural appeal. The trilogy populated theNew York Timesbestseller list for months and also influenced the sexual entertainment industry. Given its prominence, scholars have sought to understand audiences’ connection to the series, finding thatFifty Shadesfans are using the narrative to navigate the post-feminist realities of hook-up culture. In this paper, I argue that existing research on audience engagement withFifty Shadescould go further since these studies are geared toward an audience largely crafted by marketers (heterosexual women who do not practice BDSM in their relationships). Using ethnographic observations and interviews inside a bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism (BDSM) community, I argue that sinceFifty Shadescontinues to frame BDSM as a stigma, it obscures the important ways that BDSM communities work to create a culture of active consent. This is problematic because if audiences are turning to books likeFifty Shadesas a form of “self-help,” as post-feminist scholars suggest,Fifty Shadesultimately reifies the fact that consent, negotiation, and communication remain unexamined topics in “vanilla” versions of sex and love. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines feminist personal zines. Particular focus is given to how this relates to the notion of "meta-text," or an intentional rhetorical move that both contributes to and obstructs the main narrative. Additional topics discussed include DIY and punk history and historians, zines including "Everyday Pants," by Ramsey Beyer and "Everything.Is.Fine," by Nyxia Grey, and insights on the design of these zines, including their use of handwritten notes and drawings.

The article presents criticism on the 1942 book "Laura," written by Vera Caspary. Particular focus is given to how the book relates to feminism and the detective genre. Additional topics discussed include the character of the detective Mark McPherson, the book "The Secrets of Grown-Ups," an autobiography of Vera Caspary, and explorations of masculinity in Caspary's work.

In this article I analyze Soraya Juncal's Jacinta y la violencia and its arrangement of matters of class, race, and gender. I argue that it conveys a conservativepartisan idea, and I find that whereas it is feasible to link the novel to a Feminist aesthetics, it is really hard to go any further, politically wise, because the story is dedicated to perpetuate oppressive systems. I chose the Theological Virtues (Faith, Charity, and Hope) as deconstruction devices because it is not possible to trace intersectional matters in Jacinta y la violencia, without understanding them in a context of an utterly Catholicized nation that sees everything in essentialist ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empowerment of women is meant to give equal opportunities for women in all fields of life which have been denied to them for a long time under patriarchal traditions. Elaine Showalter points out that in the 1960's, many movements advocated emphatically for women's liberation from traditional norms. Ramesh K. Srivastava in his A Christmas Gift and Other Stories gives expression to three categories of women-Crusaders, Activities and Resistors-who come out openly to champion the cause of their equal rights and succeed in their mission. Jyotsna, Romilla, Narayani and Vimla Tiwari in the first instance have been portrayed as crusaders who brought about a lot of change in both urban and rural areas. Garima, Karmaibai, Shyamali and Madhurima in the second category actively exhibit their capability and show that they are in no way less than their male counterparts. In the third category, Neeru, Saloni, Pratima and Mithua resist vigorously their suppression by male members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]