Browsing by Subject "Gender identity in literature"
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item "Die sanfte Bitte" ; women's writing on female gender roles in nineteenth-century Germany(2007-05) Richter, Daniela Maria, 1975-; Belgum, KitItem Fluidities of gender in Ezra Pound(Texas Tech University, 1999-05) Jang, Geun YoungThis study of Ezra Pound explores the locus of the fluidities in his poetic writings through the lenses of gender and sexuality Rather than fixed categories of the feminine or the masculine, I attempt to find the locus of the blurring of gender in Pound's poetry and poetics, and this blurring appears to be an ambivalence or ambiguity Chapter I introduces the fluidities into a critical tradition of Pound that considers him contradictory. I argue that his gender representation is fluid, somewhat ambiguous or ambivalent, in that he appropriates and deploys the feminine fluidities. In Chapter II, I argue that Pound's transition from soft to hard, rather than a real transition or eventual evolution, is an oscillation between the binaries of soft/hard, fluid/solid, feminine/masculine, 3.nd yin/yang. In the first section of Chapter III, psychoanalysis is presented as about the unconscious, sexuality, and, above all, the body which has been repressed, and the second section mainly discusses Pound's fluid experiments with gender (his use of personae) in terms of English and French feminist approaches In the first section of Chapter VI, I broadly explore androgyny in the modernist period, in order to discern and confirm the fluidities of gender in Pound, and these fluidities are examined in Pound's poetics, economics, and politics in the second section Chapter V is about his connection of the feminine with the Orient, seeing Pound's objectification of the feminine and Oriental Other as a paradoxical combination of absence and excess Pound's anti-Semitism is also explained as a mother sacrifice in terms of Kristeva's notion of the abject and Freud's totem Yet, as several critics note, this nothing and excess belong, rather than to the feminine or the Orient, to Pound, because he presents his own ambivalence and ambiguity through these mirrors of the Other. Chapter VI is about gender issues in Pound's scientism, the interrelated mechanisms of science and poetics in the vortex, the ideogram, and Pound's mysticism In Chapter VQ, citing Irigaray's notion of fluids, I conclude that Pound's appropriation of the fluidities results in his own nothing/excess, because these fluidities blur the boundaries of fixed categories such as poetics, economics, and politics. This blurring and transgression ultimately create his own marginalization and victimage.Item "Is dethbir disi" [It is appropriate (that she behave in this way)]: applying the lens of gender parody to Medb in the Old Irish Ulster Cycle(Texas Tech University, 2004-08) Dominguez, Diana VeronicaMedb of Connacht, a central female character of medieval Ireland's Ulster Cycle (a set of tales compiled between the eighth and twelfth centuries from earlier oral sources), is read traditionally from two critical approaches: as an example of a misogynistic, patriarchal Christian campaign to suppress and silence women in early Ireland, or as symbolic of a primordial, mythic pre-Christian goddess, exempt from patriarchal censure because her behavior is ascribed to her duties as a divine sovereignty figure who confers the right of kingship on the man with whom she mates. Even recent attempts at analyzing her character from an explicitly feminist perspective privilege one of these two traditional views, with the result that, either way, she is still read as "deviant." A reading of her behavior itself through a new lens is needed in order to transform Medb into a figure of independent agency and power. This study presents a comparative and comprehensive character analysis of the Connacht warrior queen across numerous tales, using rhetorical/discourse analysis strategies informed by the feminist theory claiming that gender is "performative" and can be used as a form of resistance to/subversion of patriarchal norms, as proposed by Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Jennifer Coates, Deborah Cameron, and Joan Radner and Susan Lanser. Analysis through such a lens allows for a deconstruction of traditional patriarchal gender assumptions in order to redefine the concept of gender and gendered behavior. The study includes a careful re-evaluation of historical sources, in Ireland and beyond, both prior to and contemporary with the literary period of the Ulster Cycle compilation. In addition, research is presented about the general social and legal environment of Old Ireland between the ninth and twelfth centuries that sheds light on the status of women and the subtle and overt ways in which women affected family structure, legal proceedings, and other power relationships, all of which have bearing on a reading of Medb that places her in a historical and political context. This study reveals that Medb can be read as a realistically, if dramatically, drawn character, rather than an anomalous and misogynistic invention that belongs in the shady, pagan, mystical past.Item Modernist masculinities in the works of D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce(Texas Tech University, 2004-08) Nicholson, Rebecca LynnNot availableItem Square pegs : the political function of ambiguous gender and sexuality in three novels from the Southern Cone(2008-05) Redmond, Erin Hilda, 1965-; Lindstrom, Naomi, 1950-The novels examined in this study -- Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (Argentina, 1976), Diamela Eltit’s El cuarto mundo (Chile, 1988), and Hugo Achugar’s Falsas memorias: Blanca Luz Brum (Uruguay, 2000) -- suggest the oppressive character of binary-based identity categories in the contexts of the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and of the neo-liberal regimes that followed them. This study’s queer theoretical perspective draws on performance theory as Sylvia Molloy adapts it in her idea of the pose, which she conceives of as the politically resistant, sustained representation of a culturally unclassifiable identity. Each chapter has a dual focus, involving analyses of political and religious discourses as well as close readings of the ways in which each novel counters the normative ideologies of the discourses that most inform its narrative through representations of forms of gender and sexuality that cannot be categorized in binary terms. The purpose of this study is to contribute a fresh theoretical perspective on El beso de la mujer araña and El cuarto mundo and to fill a gap in criticism through its analysis of the little-studied Falsas memorias: Blanca Luz Brum. The first chapter analyzes Molina, one of the novel’s two protagonists, as a representation of unnamable gender and sexual identities that undermines the ideologies of early Peronism and critiques oppression in the Argentina of the 1970s. Chapter II discusses how Eltit’s novel counters the naturalized gender opposition of political and religious discourses through its characters’ nonnormative identities as it points to the violence of the Pinochet dictatorship and the socio-economic inequities of later neo-liberal regimes. Chapter III analyzes Achugar’s protagonist, the historical figure Blanca Luz Brum, in terms of how she flouts the norms of femininity specific to early twentieth-century discourses in the Southern Cone. The Conclusion addresses the novels’ use of varying strategies to deconstruct normative identity categories, examines the different positions of politically resistant literature in dictatorship and neo-liberal contexts, and analyzes the implications of the texts’ relativism for political, social, and cultural change.