Download or read book Women of God and Arms written by Nancy Bradley Warren and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious and political spheres of the later medieval and early modern periods were tightly and indisputably interwoven, as illustrated by the papal schism, the Hundred Years War, the Reconquest of Spain, and the English Reformation. In these events as well as in the larger religiopolitical systems in which they unfolded, female saints, devout lay women, and monastic women played central roles. In Women of God and Arms, Nancy Bradley Warren explores the political dimensions of the religious practices of women ranging from St. Colette of Corbie to Isabel of Castile to English nuns exiled during the reign of Elizabeth I. Just as religious and political systems were bound up with one another, so too were the internal and external politics of England and several continental realms. Blood and marriage connected the English dynasties of Lancaster and York with those of France, Burgundy, Flanders, and Castile, creating tangled networks of alliances and animosities. In addition to being linked through ties of kinship, these realms were joined by frequent textual and cultural exchanges. Warren draws upon a wide variety of sources—hagiography, chronicles, monastic records, devotional treatises, military manuals, political propaganda, and texts traditionally designated as literary—as she examines the ways manifestations of female spirituality operated at the intersections of civic, international, and ecclesiastical politics. Her exploration breaches boundaries separating the medieval and the early modern, the religious and the secular, the material and the symbolic, the literary and the historical, as it sheds new light on well-known figures such as Joan of Arc, Isabel of Castile, and Elizabeth I.

Download or read book Unbecoming Female Monsters written by Cristina Santos and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the construct of female monsters as an embodiment of sociocultural fears of female sexuality and reproductive power. It examines the female maturation cycle and the archetypes of female monsters associated with each stage of development in literature, art, film, and television with a particular focus on Latin American work.

Download or read book Women in Shakespeare written by Alison Findlay and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive reference guide examining the language employed by Shakespeare to represent women in the full range of his poetry and plays. Including over 350 entries, Alison Findlay shows the role of women within Shakespearean drama, their representations on the Shakespearean stage, and their place in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.

Download or read book Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century Spanish Press written by Lou Charnon-Deutsch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or &"fictions of the feminine&": she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, Charnon-Deutsch argues, were a response to, and also helped to create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behavior and poses. Further, they comprised a reassuring &"between-male&" cultural medium that provided graphic validation of women's docile body for a culture enthralled with femininity. Integrating the fields of literature and cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch's approach to this subject is unique. Many of the images collected here are available for the first time, and they represent only a fraction of the two thousand images Charnon-Deutsch collected during her research. This book will appeal to students of Spanish cultural studies and gender studies, as well as to art historians.

Download or read book Figuring the Feminine written by Jill Ross and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2008-03-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective. Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.

Download or read book The Gender sexuality Reader written by Roger N. Lancaster and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Textbook on gender.

Download or read book Feminisms and Internationalism written by Mrinalini Sinha and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1999-08-25 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the theme of the history of internationalism in feminist theory and praxis, covering such topics as the historical concept of internationalism within feminism and women's movements; the nature of historical shifts within feminist movements, and challenges to internationalism within feminism by women of colour and by women from colonised or formerly colonised countries.

Download or read book Medieval Single Women written by Cordelia Beattie and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The single woman is a troubling and disruptive category. Does it denote all unmarried women, therefore creating a group which every female was part of at some stage in her life? Or, were the categories 'maiden' and 'widow' so culturally significant in late medieval England that 'single woman' was a residual category for women seen as anomalous? Was the category 'single man' used in an equivalent way and, if not, why? This study offers a way into the complex process of social classification in late medieval England. All societies use classifications in order to understand and impose order. In this book, Cordelia Beattie views classification as a political act, an act of power: those classifying must make choices about which divisions are most important or about who falls into which category, and such choices have repercussions. Defining how a group or an individual should be labelled, means variables such as social status, gender, or age, are prioritized. Rather than isolate gender as a variable, this book examines how it relates to other social cleavages. Using a variety of approaches, from social and cultural history, to gender history, and medieval studies, its original methodology offers an innovative approach to a range of historical texts, from pastoral manuals to tax returns, and guild registers.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages written by Kim M. Phillips and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval era has been described as 'the Age of Chivalry' and 'the Age of Faith' but also as 'the Dark Ages'. Medieval women have often been viewed as subject to a punishing misogyny which limited their legal rights and economic activities, but some scholars have claimed they enjoyed a 'rough and ready equality' with men. The contrasting figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary loom over historians' interpretations of the period 1000-1500. Yet a wealth of recent historiography goes behind these conventional motifs, showing how medieval women's lives were shaped by status, age, life-stage, geography and religion as well as by gender. A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages presents essays on medieval women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation to illustrate the diversity of medieval women's lives and constructions of femininity.

Download or read book Contemporary Mexican Women Writers written by Gabriella de Beer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexican women writers moved to the forefront of their country's literature in the twentieth century. Among those who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s are Maria Luisa Puga, Silvia Molina, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Angeles Mastretta. Sharing a range of affinities while maintaining distinctive voices and outlooks, these are the women whom Gabriella de Beer has chosen to profile in Contemporary Mexican Women Writers. De Beer takes a three-part approach to each writer. She opens with an essay that explores the writer's apprenticeship and discusses her major works. Next, she interviews each writer to learn about her background, writing, and view of herself and others. Finally, de Beer offers selections from the writer's work that have not been previously published in English translation. Each section concludes with a complete bibliographic listing of the writer's works and their English translations. These essays, interviews, and selections vividly recreate the experience of being with the writer and sharing her work, hearing her tell about and evaluate herself, and reading the words she has written. The book will be rewarding reading for everyone who enjoys fine writing.

Download or read book Virginity Lost written by Laura Carpenter and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes information on abstinence, abstinence focused sex education, African Americans, Asian Americans, birth control, born again virginity, chastity, coming out, conservative Christians, definitions of virginity loss, double standard, Latinos, Latinas, oral sex, race, ethnicity, rape, religion, secondary virginity, stigma, technical virginity, etc.

Download or read book Echoes of Women s Voices written by Kelley Harness and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harness argues very convincingly that through their patronage of the figurative arts, musical theater, and early opera, the Medici women reinforced their position and their image as powerful women and capable rulers.

Download or read book The Sex of Knowing written by Michèle Le Doeuff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michèle Le Doeuff is a leading French philosopher, and one of the most important feminist thinkers writing today. The Sex of Knowing , Le Doeuff's most significant work to date, provides a comprehensive account of her views. This is the first English translation of her inspiring book. Le Doeuff's target is the continuing tendency to think that men are more rational, more analytic than women, a tendency that persists in spite of our thinking we know better. She argues that the conceptual links between masculinity and rationality are deeply rooted in the public imagination and institutions of learning, and continue to have devastating effects on what women are able to achieve. To shed light on the depth and persistence of the problem, Le Doeuff leads us on provocative archeological journey through the great texts and authors of the past and present from Plato and Descartes to Evelyn Fox Keller and Kate Millett in search of the origins and extent of a set of contemporary reflexes that hold misogynistic thinking in place both in the larger society, and within science and philosophy. An ambitious and highly persuasive book, The Sex of Knowing received widespread critical attention in the French press. Lorraine Code and Kathryn Hamer's superb translation is sure to have a similar impact on English speaking audiences everywhere.

Download or read book Accessories to Modernity written by Susan Hiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period. As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it. Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.

Download or read book Virgin Envy written by Jonathan A. Allan and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don’t do, or don’t want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today’s world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.

Download or read book Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature written by Linda Lomperis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature forges a new link between contemporary feminist and cultural theory and medieval history and literature. The essays establish crucial historical connections between feminist theorizing about the body and specific accounts of gendered bodies in medieval texts.

Download or read book Feminizing the Enemy written by Sidney Donnell and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donnell engages gender theory and cultural studies in order to shed light on cross-dressing- a common though poorly understood practice- in plays performed in Spain and Colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author shows how certain naturalized assumptions about masculinity and femininity are unmasked through the cross-dressed performance of works attributed to Lope de Rueda, Morales, Lope de Vega, Monroy y Silva, and Calderon.