Masquerade And Femininity

Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers introduces the reader to the diversity of women’s writing in Poland and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries in the light of the notion of masquerade. The present articles scrutinize particular works by women writers (Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia, Irina Odoevtseva, Vera Pavlova, Narcyza Żmichowska, Maria Komornicka, Irena Krzywicka and others) and the strategies of masquerading female experience. Taken together, the articles draw attention to the feeling of an inexpressible gap between the living body (and its everyday life experience of pain and suffering or happiness and pleasure) and the culturally constructed, powerfully imposed code of expression that readily makes use of various masks, guises and acts of pretending, applied especially cleverly in literary works. The concept of masquerade illuminates the complexity of what we call “femininity” by combining two sides of the divide: the real feelings and the constructed expressions. This volume uses both feminist and non-feminist approaches to women’s writing and sheds new light on the themes of femininity, woman’s identity, experience, masks, body, gender relations, nature, culture and authorship. Masquerade and Femininity brings together East European literary studies and gender studies, offering a comparative perspective on literature, literary theory and cultural phenomena in Poland and Russia, and featuring a range of both eastern European and western scholars. In its pages, the reader is invited to move beyond Russian literature and language into a dialogic approach between Slavic literatures. This book will also contribute to filling the comparative gap which is still relatively unexplored not only with regard to the application of western scholarship to East European studies, but also with regard to the dialogue between Russian and Polish scholarship.

Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period&—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney, masquerade is double-sided. It is represented in some cases as a disempowering capitulation to patriarchal strictures that posit female subordination. Often within the same text, however, masquerade is also depicted as an empowering defiance of the dominant norms for female behavior. Heroines who attempt to separate themselves from the image of womanhood they consciously construct escape victimization. In both cases, masquerade is the condition of femininity: gender in the woman's novel is constructed rather than essential. Craft-Fairchild examines the guises in which womanhood appears, analyzing the ways in which women writers both construct and deconstruct eighteenth-century cultural conceptions of femininity. She offers a careful and engaging textual analysis of both canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century texts, thereby setting lesser-read fictions into a critical dialogue with more widely known novels. Detailed readings are informed throughout by the ideas of current feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman. Instead of assuming that fictions about women were based on biological fact, Craft-Fairchild stresses the opposite: the domestic novel itself constructs the domestic woman.

Masquerade, both literal and metaphorical, is now a central concept on many disciplines. This timely volume explores and revisits the role of disguise in constructing, expressing and representing marginalised identities, and in undermining easy distinctions between 'true' identity and artifice. The book is interdisciplinary in approach, spanning a diverse range of cultures and narrative voices. It provides provocative and nuanced ways of thinking about masquerade as a tool for construction, and a tool for critique. The essays interrogate such themes as: *mask and carnival *fetish fashion *stigma of illegitimacy *femininity as masquerade *lesbian masks *cross-dressing in Jewish folk theatre *the mask in seventeenth and eighteenth century London and nineteenth century France *the voice as mask.

Chynoweth asserts that the feminist message is false. His topics include the roots of the falsehood, which stem in part form the 1964 Civil Rights Act's Title VII, the right order of the human sexes, the role of art and culture, marriage, biblical paradigms, and his interpretation of Catholic thought. His chapter entitled "History as a Society Column for Lovely Ladies--'Herstory'" is interesting as is his summary of thought on egalitarianism from Aristotle to Bryce and Stephen. The bibliography is shorter than one would expect. Hamilton Books is an imprint of the University Press of America. Annotation :2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book draws on a unique theoretical framework informed by clinical case studies, Fanonian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and decolonial feminism, to examine the concept of adornment in African cultures. The book discusses the construction of aesthetic feminine ideals and the evolution of such ideals within the history of colonization, decolonization and globalization. Through the analysis of adornments including accessories, hairstyle, clothes and fabric, the author demonstrates how they can reflect social status, and also addresses its symbolic function in rituals. At the level of the individual, it draws on clinical case studies to examine the Lacanian theory of adornment and masquerade of femininity, and the extent to which this echoes ambivalent attitudes towards women in society at large. In doing so it provides a nuanced analysis which reveals how body adornment can be a paradoxical demonstration of both strength and weakness. Building on the author’s previous work in this area, this book offers an important contribution to current debates in psychoanalysis, cultural studies, critical race theory and decolonial feminism.

In this work of feminist film criticism, Mary Ann Doane examines questions of sexual difference and knowledge in cinematic, theoretical, and psychoanalytic discourses. "Femmes Fatales" examines Freud, the female spectator, the meaning of the close-up, and the nature of stardom. Doane's analyses of such figures as Pabst's Lulu and Rita Hayworth's Gilda trace the thematics and mechanics of maskes, masquerade, and veiling, with specific attention to the form and technology of the cinema. Working through and against the intellectual frameworks of post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, Doane interrogates cinematic and theoretical claims to truth about women which rely on judgements about vision and its stability or instability. Reflecting the shift in conceptual priorities within feminist film theory over the last decade, "Femmes Fatales" addresses debates over female spectatorhsip, essentialism and anti-essentialism, the tensions between psychoanalysis and history, and the relations between racial and sexual difference. Doane's nuanced and original readings of the "femme fatale" in cinema illustrate confrontations between feminism, film theory and psychoanalysis. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in women's studies, communications studies and film theory.

In this trenchant inquiry into the state of feminism, Angela McRobbie breaks open the politics of sexual equality and 'affirmative feminism' and sets down a new theory of gender power. Challenging the most basic assumptions of the 'end' of feminism, this book argues that invidious forms of gender re-stabilisation are being re-established. Consumer and popular culture encroach on the terrain of so-called female freedom, appearing supportive of female success, yet tying women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. With a scathing critique of 'women's empowerment', McRobbie has developed a distinctive feminist analysis that she uses to examine socio-cultural phenomena embedded in contemporary women's lives: from fashion photography and the television 'make-over' genre to eating disorders, body anxiety and 'illegible rage'. A turning point in feminist theory, The Aftermath of Feminism will set a new agenda for gender studies and cultural studies.