Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets by Anna Clark (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Questions of Sexual Identity and Female Empowerment in Fan Fiction
This Master's thesis discusses questions of sexual identity and female empowerment in fan fiction. Fan fiction is created by the fans of a source narrative to expand on the original material and resolve its shortcomings. Because of its transformative nature, fan stories are unsanctioned and non-profit. Since fan fiction is not restricted by the commercial market, it offers a prime opportunity to examine the unadulterated psychology of its authors. The vast majority of fan writers in the most popular digital archives today are women belonging to completely different cultural, social, and religious backgrounds. Thus, the female identity is extremely relevant to comprehend fan fiction and its themes. Several fan fiction tropes are analyzed in this work, but particular attention is given to questions of gender roles, sexual identity and female empowerment. Slash and femslash fan fiction are closely analyzed, as the protagonists of these genres are queer. The abundance of such stories inspires hope for the development of queer-friendly communities across the globe, while the significant number of well-crafted women characters suggests that the precepts of feminist activists have successfully reached part of the younger generations. Fan fiction is also an informative genre, explaining delicate topics such as sexism, consent, psychological illnesses, homophobia and abuse. This educational potential can reach the level of any formal speech or essay due to the wide scope and appeal of fan fiction in comparison with other instructional material. For these reasons, this thesis advocates the entry of fan fiction in the academic world as a worthy object of study.
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2020. Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives
Balirano, G. / Palusci, O. (eds) 2020. Re-Configuring Gender in Science Fiction Narratives. ContactZone 2 [Special Issue]. ISSN: 2723-8881., 2020
The current issue of ContactZone deals with the way in which the very notion of binary subjectivity, slowly gives way to inclusive narratives, giving life to new characters that naturally inhabit the scenarios of contemporary science fiction through unstable roles and completely ‘de-generated’ narrations of identity. An important contribution to the cultural turn in sexual inclusiveness through the staging of ‘non-binary’ characters in the genre was first given by the special issue On Science Fiction and Queer Theory (Science-Fiction Studies, March 1999) and later by the collected essays Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, edited by Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon in 2008, both opening and tracing an innovative and stimulating critical discourse. As the editors state in their introduction (Pearson et al. 2008: 5): "If we then take as the central task of queer theory the work of imagining a world in which all lives are liveable we understand queer theory as being both utopian and science fictional, in the sense of imagining a future which opens out, rather than forecloses possibilities for becoming real, for mattering in the world". As the papers included in this issue explore the discursive and linguistic dimensions of the representation of sexualities in science fiction narratives, understanding the construction of such discourses necessarily requires an interdisciplinary approach, which ranges from literary criticism, critical discourse analysis, gender studies, corpus linguistics to sociolinguistics. In order to develop a comprehensive perspective on the topic investigated, four essays are devoted to fiction (both novels and short stories), one to plays, and one to a canonical TV series such as Star Trek. While ContactZone is aimed at an international community of scholars and well-informed readers, we do not want to forget our being rooted in the Italian academic context; at least three full-length volumes devoted to Anglo-American science fiction by women should be mentioned: Oriana Palusci, Terra di lei. L’immaginario femminile tra utopia e fantascienza (1990), Eleonora Federici, Quando la fantascienza è donna. Dalle utopie femminili del secolo XIX all’età contemporanea (2015) and Anna Pasolini and Nicoletta Vallorani, Corpi magici: Scritture incarnate dal fantastico alla fantascienza (2020). This is the reason why all six papers are written by Italian scholars, who are willing to measure their competence against a vast and expanding international critical body.
2021
In recent years, slash fanfiction has become a place for trans and non-binary inclusivity in romance narratives. Slash creates a safe space for queer and non-binary fans to express their sexuality and gender identity, thus encouraging the normalization of non-heteronormative people and lifestyles. The first chapter of this thesis, dedicated to the slash fanfiction author, examines the interwoven relationships between the fan, the piece of media (or, canon), and contemporary social outcries for LGBTQ+ inclusivity in romance narratives. Combining both Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Kristina Busse’s Framing Fan Fiction, I define the fluid relationship between author and reader, and who actually has authority over the text at hand. The second chapter analyzes what these fan authors are writing and how they have methodically created worlds that not only show trans and non-binary characters, but normalize their lives, bodies, and relationships. Through the fan-generated genre k...
Published in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. Eds. Elizabeth Kaplan, Patrice Petro, Kristin Hole and Dijana Jelača. New York: Routledge., 2016.
THE CONFLICT OF TRADITION AND MODERNITY IN FICTIONAL WOMEN
Research Scholar --An International Refereed e-Journal of Literary Explorations, 2014
In conventional societies like India's, for woman to liberate herself from the overbearing patriarchy and to find her own voice to express her thoughts, to invent her own ways to manage her 'self' is a long and grueling journey against female-subservience, self-sacrifice, and selfdenial. Several stories of the well-known Urdu writer Ismat Chugtai and of renowned Indian writer in English Shashi Deshpande are concerned not only with social and psychological problems affecting middle-class Indian women, but bring about the complexity of their situations and their changing attitudes to and their abilities in confronting those situations. Their stories reveal the manifestation of woman's diplomatic ways of negotiating with her life in order to gain autonomy over her body and mind, to have the freedom to decide her own identity released from all conditionings, freeing her from sex-determined roles and performances, in spite of what she has to many times face as consequences. In many of the stories of Chugtai and Deshpande, it is evident that while for men power means the ability to impose one's self on another, for the female protagonists it is the ability to defend one's self from such imposition The paper analyses the fictional characters of Chugtai's 'Ghungat' and Deshpande's 'An Antidote to Boredom' as harbingers of change who do not necessarily let their 'beings' become 'identities' dictated by some of the gender ideologies and hierarchies that are embedded in the very fabric of life.
Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat, 2020
This essay makes a contribution to the contemporary struggle against gender violence with an analysis of Toni Morrison's Home (2012) and Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012). The article presents a transethnic comparison combined with an intersectional feminist motivation to highlight the complicity of racism and sexism, and it articulates a theorization of relationality as the way to counter the dissociation derived from violence. Arguing for the pivotal role of the women of color whose bodies are violated-sterilized, raped-in the texts, it offers a close reading of the indirect account of violence, the conflicted male characters, ambivalent symbols and open endings, and the connection to African American and Ojibwe myth. The article leads to the conclusion that relationality is the best response to the systemic violence of the coloniality of gender.
Popular Culture Research Centre International Conference “See and Be Seen: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Storytelling and Identity in Popular Culture”, Auckland University of Technology, Australia /online, 13-14 September, 2022
It has improved, but…" Readings of Representational Changes in the Superhero Genre through Black Widow 4.30pm-4.35pm: Comfort Break 4.35pm-4.40pm: Day One Closing (Stream 1) Day Two: Wednesday 14 th September, Popular Culture Research Centre, AUT The following sessions will be held virtually via Zoom, and in New Zealand timings (GMT+13). Format: 15-minute presentations in succession, followed by 15 minutes of collective questions and discussion. Each session will include parallel panels, hosted virtually in different streams with a comfort break in between. 9.35am-9.40am: Day Two Opening
THE VALUE OF FANFICTION: FEMALE EMPOWERMENT, IDENTITY BUILDING, AND RESISTANCE
This study takes an autoethnographic approach that uses a piece of fanfiction and the author’s experience as both a fanfiction writer and a professional writer for television, to demonstrate how writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community empowers women to express identity on their own terms and to resist the patriarchal impositions of mainstream media culture. Martin Buber’s dialogic ethics serve as an ethical foundation for comparing and contrasting the fanfiction and mainstream media systems for female writers. Fisher’s (1987) narrative paradigm and Hecht, Warren, Jung, and Krieger’s (2005) communication theory of identity provide a theoretical framework for investigating the benefits of fanfiction as a way for female storytellers to explore themes and issues that are important to them through their creative work and through communicating within the female-driven fanfiction community. This study finds that writing fanfiction is a more effective means of creative freedom and empowerment for women than working within the parameters of the mainstream media’s profit-based economy. Furthermore, though it has traditionally been derided by the mainstream and fanfiction communities alike, writing Mary Sue fanfiction, in which the main character is an idealized version of the author, is an especially effective way for women to use fanfiction to empower themselves creatively, build identity, and resist the stereotypes and patriarchal limitations of the mainstream media. Keywords: fanfiction, fandom, writing, autoethnography, identity, feminism, gender, media, Doctor Who