Editorial [PDF]
Aaron Aquilina, Elsa Fiott: Lancaster University, University of Malta
Mothers, Daughters, and Damaged Legs: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk [PDF]
Jasmine Bajada: University of Malta
This article seeks to discuss the representation of the maternal body, specifically maternal suffering, and its powerful influence on the daughter through close analysis of the mother-daughter relationships depicted in Elena Ferrante’s and Deborah Levy’s works. By drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the way through which maternal flesh is rejected by the subject-in-process and constructed as other is outlined. The troubling inheritance of the female genealogy is discussed, using Luce Irigaray’s essay ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’ as an important point of reference with regard to the transmission of bodily paralysis from mother to daughter. In the literary texts analysed, the bond between mother and daughter is forged through maternal suffering, particularly the mother’s damaged leg/s. The daughter experiences “matrophobia” since she fears that she will become her mother, especially due to the porous bodily borders between the two. This anxiety manifests itself in a phantom illness; the daughter is haunted by her mother’s abject leg. Crucially, however, this phantom illness is also felt as a physical threat. Only through the daughter’s recognition that the maternal is also her own can she redeem the mother-daughter relationship.
The Culinary Coding of Gender Construction: Simplicity Rhetoric in Cookbooks from the Little Blue Book Series [PDF]
Lynne Deboeck: University of Utah
This article examines the use of rhetoric that emphasises simplicity with reference to home food preparation while also considering different possible motivations behind this use in order to bring the movement and juxtaposition of these categories to light. The Little Blue Book Series focused on improving peoples’ lives with easy-to-follow directions. Their mission enabled the creation of an abundance of simplicity rhetoric used in cooking instruction that contributed to the construction of gender for many middle-class, white, American women. Though the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company printed these types of booklets for over sixty years, I focus on the years of its greatest popularity, from about 1925 to 1940. The three books covered here were chosen because of their specific use of language within their cooking instruction. Specifically, I look at Gaylord Du Bois’s Simple Recipes for Home Cooking (No. 997, 1927), Albert Hohl’s The Simplified Cook-Book: Hints on Cookery (No. 1756, 1938), and Gloria Goddard’s The Perfect Pocket Cookbook (No. 1360, 1929). I also use other cookbooks of the era to further delimit the historical context as well as contemporary scholarship on cooking to assist in my analysis. I situate my study at the intersection of gender, food, and rhetoric studies.
‘This was the “I’m male and you’re female” territory’: Inserting Gender into the Historical-Political Binary in Anna Burns’s Milkman [PDF]
Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh: Dundalk Institute of Technology
Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) makes a significant intervention into narratives of the Northern Irish Troubles by inserting gender as a significant source of entrapment and coercion for women within the nationalist community. The novel depicts a society filled with borders and restrictions, where in the name of perpetuating tribal dualisms women in particular are silenced and forced into socially sanctioned roles. This essay analyses the tactics used by Burns and her unnamed protagonist to challenge the authority of those who have assumed control over the naming and narration of the past. It argues that, through the fragmentary style of her narrative voice, Burns introduces precisely the kind of subversive openness needed to challenge the privileging of the political conflict, deconstructing linguistic constructs in order to reveal widespread collusion in the silencing of women. The narrator gradually learns to identify her harassment at the hands of a local paramilitary strongman as sexual rather than political in nature, thus linking the novel with contemporary feminist activism which seeks to empower women to highlight the kind of predatory behaviour that went unchallenged until relatively recently, not least because women lacked the precise vocabulary to verbalise it.
Permission for Brutality [PDF]
Elizabeth Woock: Palacký University
This study examines how medievalist comics insist on their historical accuracy (implying that they represent authentic facts, rather than simulacra) and routinely present brutality and invisibility as linked with an authentic Middle Ages while also restricting fair representation to the world of fantasy. Witches and pagan magical beings are contextualised in a medievalist story world, and the patina of historicity of the story world dictates not only the presence or absence of these types of characters, but further predicates the representation of females and queer characters in general, especially their parts in the violence of the medievalised story world. While the magical beings are clearly simulacra, authors and readers seem to overlook the fact that the “brutal” Middle Ages are also simulacra. The positioning of equality and the presence of queer folk squarely in the fantastical story world, beside ostentatiously fantastical beings, creates a correlation for the readers and authors that equality and representation are, too, only simulacra.
The Technique of the Play-within-the-Play and the Empowerment of Female Audiences in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream [PDF]
Nizar Zouidi: University of Hail
The dialogic nature of the dramatic art allows the female characters of Shakespeare to challenge the stereotypes advocated by their dominant culture. Chaperoned and silenced, the Renaissance female audience may find solace in the freedom of the female characters of Shakespeare, whose plays deconstruct the common image of women by showing that they are never allowed to speak for themselves. The play-within-the-play technique allows the female characters of Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream a rare opportunity of assuming the role of both audience and critic. This allows them to challenge the male characters’ representational hegemony from a less vulnerable position than that of the character. This article demonstrates how Shakespeare uses his fictitious female audiences to address and critique the dominant patriarchal myths about the nature of women.
Selected Writings [PDF]
John Martin