Academic literature on the topic 'Feminine imperial figures'

Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970) and Yu Hong (b. 1966) are contemporary Chinese artists whose images of women reflect a complicated gendered perspective. This article focuses on Cui’s Ladies’ Room (2000) and Yu’s Female Writer (2004, from the series She). Both can be construed as feminist reinterpretations of Chinese works of the imperial era that represented idealized female figures from a male perspective. Ladies’ Room, a video that shows behind-the-scenes images of sex workers in a nightclub washroom, brings to mind earlier paintings that depict women in feminine space. Ladies’ Room, however, incorporates multiple female gazes: not only that of the artist but also those of the subjects, who look at each other and at their own mirror reflections. Female Writer, a diptych consisting of a photograph and painting of the writer Zhao Bo, recalls paintings from the “beautiful women” genre. Though both photograph and painting reflect Yu Hong’s point of view, Zhao Bo was permitted to select her photograph, and thus the work engages with both author’s and subject’s gaze. Ladies’ Room and Female Writer both reclaim female subjectivity as they present images of contemporary Chinese women while also grappling with problems of authenticity, the public/private dichotomy, identity, and self-expression.

Abstract A recurring subject of manhua (comics) in Republican-era China was the pipa player, a woman whose genealogy can be traced back to the disgraced and displaced subject of Bai Juyi’s ninth-century poem Pipa xing (Song of the pipa). This paper traces this woman’s development from her conception in Pipa xing and follows her as she is re-imagined by modern poets and manhua artists into a variety of figures, from scorned politicians to modern feminine archetypes. This paper argues that these artists leverage her precarity and anachronism to portray contemporary political turmoil and national insecurity, as they look back at China’s imperial past and towards its uncertain future. And instead of reifying the distinction between the prosody of classical and New Poetry, this paper finds classical poetics not only in poems themselves, but also in tropes and images that reveal how poets and poetry reckoned with the rise of new media.

Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908) is one of the most significant and controversial political figures in modern Chinese history, yet her comprehensive engagement with court art, a symbolic realm of sovereignty in China, remains understudied and is therefore deserving of close analysis. To examine her patronage of art, this paper scrutinizes Cixi’s involvement in the Wanchun yuan (Garden of ten thousand springs) reconstruction project and argues that it not only exemplifies her strategy of asserting political power through art but also provides a rare glimpse of how a patron’s creation and decoration of space can be read as a self-portrait.The author contends that, on the one hand, Cixi utilized the location and scale of her own palace the Tiandi yijiachun (Spring united between Heaven and Earth) as a symbol of her continuous power struggle with Qing imperial tradition; and, on the other hand, that the palace’s layout and interior décor also suggest Cixi’s feminine and religious identities.

AbstractMany have recognised poem 63 as a study in contrasts – light versus darkness, masculine versus feminine, rationality versus madness, animal versus human, culture versus nature. Caught between these polarities is the figure of Attis, removed from everything bright, male, sane, human, and civilised by one impassioned act. The poem suggests that it is partly the nature of the place, its quasi-Hippocratic airs, waters, and places, that emasculates Attis, making him like a notha mulier, iuvenca, and famula. This article will use ecofeminist theory – in particular, Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Mastery of Nature – to investigate the logic of domination running between the poem's polarities and to show how a foreign ‘Eastern’ wilderness effeminises Greek Attis. Moreover, it will be shown that the characterisation of Attis and the galli as a dux and his comites associates the story with the Roman imperial endeavour, suggesting that we can read the poem alongside others that portray conquest (11, 29) and the experience of young men abroad on provincial cohorts (10, 28, 47). In this way, Catullus implies that the imperial project is also made weak and feminine by its very contact with foreign places.

The aim of this paper is to bring to light through intertextual analysis some dimensions of continuity between the Hellenistic and Imperial theology of Isis and the figure of the Sacred Feminine as it appears in the Trimorphic Protennoia (NHC XIII 1). Instead of attempting to establish a diachronic (=historical) relationship of dependence between sources (e.g., borrowing, allusion, influence), this study establishes correspondences that can be traced on the literary level. Through a reception-oriented analysis, it will be possible to show the continuity between the Isiac religion and the late ancient mysticism of the Trimorphic Protennoia. A late ancient reader would have experienced the Nag Hammadi text in dialogue with Isiac traditions, and this literary dialogue with the Isiac religion would have nurtured and shaped their understanding of the sacred feminine described in the Trimorphic Protennoia.

Os símbolos da República, constituída no Brasil em 1889, não indicam uma ruptura radical com o regime monárquico anterior, como foi o caso na França. As cores da bandeira imperial remetiam às cores dinásticas. Na República, sua estrutura foi mantida, sendo acrescentado o lema "Ordem e Progresso", o que atestava que os positivistas haviam conseguido impor sua interpretação do novo regime. Quanto ao Hino Nacional, a República não havia conseguido infundir uma nova versão, o povo tendo manifestado sua predileção pelo hino imperial. Quanto à alegoria da República, havia tentativas de representá-la por figuras femininas, demasiado próximas, no entanto, da Marianne francesa. A figura de Tiradentes tinha uma ressonância mais durável, porque permitia ligar várias dimensões da nação: a abolição da escravatura e a independência.

The present research blends archetypal and feminist perspectives, along with current research into the hemispheres of the brain, to investigate the psychological implications of the pursuit and attempted murder of Ambrosia, a nymph and nursemaid to Dionysus, by King Lycurgus of Thrace in Ancient Greece. A depth psychological story of psychic activism, feminine liberation, and transformation, “Ensnare” builds around a single image from a piece of Greco-Roman artwork—the attack and attempted murder of Ambrosia by Lycurgus, whose deeds evoke the destructive forces of literalism, monotheistic temperaments, intolerance to diversity, exclusively rationalistic attitudes, and patriarchal systems that deaden the imagination and imperil the unfolding of soul. Theoretically, this project of creative womanhood relies upon Hillman’s (1975) four modes of re-visioning psychology: personifying, or imagining things; pathologizing, or falling apart; psychologizing, or seeing through; and dehumanizing, or soul-making. Following Hillman, “Ensnare” invites the reader to find and make soul through a non-literal attitude of fantasying that creatively engages the imagination and images of female empowerment from the myth. The aim of this imaginal engagement with the mythological figures of Ambrosia, Lycurgus, Gaia, and Athene is to discover and partner with the archetypal presences who supported Ambrosia’s liberation as we work to bring the meaning of her initiatory experience to our own ideas and ways of being.

This review essay on Laurie R. Lambert’s Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Revolution (2020) considers the narrative and rhetorical strategies that Black women political figures use in their memoirs to represent US imperial presence and violence in the aftermath of the Grenada Revolution. As it highlights Lambert’s attention to Joan Purcell’s truncated temporal framing of the Grenada Revolution, the essay offers a close reading of Phyllis Coard’s memoir to elaborate the significance of temporality in literary representations of the revolution and to question how the memoir as a genre both elaborates and dulls trauma. Rather than emphasize and celebrate the exceptional quality of Black women political figures and their careers, the essay points to a close reading practice that more seriously considers Black womanhood and empire.

Neste artigo, apresentamos parte da investigação que temos feito acerca da fama de duas específicas personagens femininas do início do período imperial romano: Agripina Maior e Lívia Drusila. Para tanto, discutimos múltiplas apresentações dessas figuras nas narrativas de Tácito e Suetônio, posteriores ao período Júlio-Cláudio sob o qual tais mulheres viveram. Analisamos como a construção ou reconstrução da fama ligadas às duas personagens convergem, nos Anais e nas Vidas dos doze césares, para uma alteração das condições ético-morais dessas mulheres. A alteração da fama de ambas é ocasionada pela morte de seus respectivos maridos. Ao tornarem-se viúvas, ambas se transformam nas narrativas: o padrãogeral é que, de esposas virtuosas, elas passam a ser apresentadas como mães ambiciosas e movidas por vícios e poder. Neste sentido, delineamos, para estes dois casos, uma passagem da fama à infâmia por meio de balizas relacionadas ao matrimônio e maternidade. Palavras-chave: Exempla. Ética. Mulheres Júlio-Claudianas. WOMEN'S ETHICAL MODELS IN ANCIENT ROME: an analysis onthe construction of the fame of Livia Drusila and Agrippina Maior Abstract: This article presents part of the research wehave done on the fame of two specific female characters of the early Roman imperial period: Agrippina Maior and Livia Drusila. Therefore, multiple presentations of these figures are discussed in the Tacitus and Suetonius narratives after the Julio-Claudianperiod under which these women lived. It is analyzed how the construction or reconstruction of the fame linked to the two characters converge, in the Annals and the Lives of the twelve Caesars, for a change in the ethical and moral conditions of these women. The change in their fame is caused by the death of their respective husbands. When they became widows, they both became narratives: the general pattern is that fromvirtuous wives,they are presented as ambitious mothers, driven by vice and power. In this sense, it is outlined, for these two cases, a passage from fame to infamy through beacons related to marriage and maternity. Keywords: Exempla. Ethics. Julio-Claudian Women. MODELOS ÉTICOS DE LAS MUJERES EN ROMA ANTIGUA: un análisis de la construcción de la fama de Lívia Drusila y Agrippina Maior Resumen: Este artículo presenta parte de la investigación que hemos realizado sobre la fama de dos personajes femeninos específicos del inicio del período imperial romano: Agrippina Maior y Lívia Drusila. Con este fin, se discuten múltiples presentaciones de estas figuras en las narraciones de Tácito y Suetonio posteriores al período Julius-Claudius en que vivieron estas mujeres. Analizamos cómo la construcción o reconstrucción de la fama vinculada a los dos personajes convergen, en los Anales y en las Vidas de los doce Césares, para un cambio en las condiciones éticas y morales de estas mujeres. El cambio en sus famas es causado por la muerte de sus respectivos esposos. Cuando se convierten en viudas, ambas se transforman en narrativas: el patrón general es el de las esposas virtuosas, ellas pasan a ser presentadas como madres ambiciosas, impulsadas por vicios y poder. Así, delineamos, para estos dos casos, un pasaje de la fama a la infamia a través de balizas relacionadas con el matrimonio y la maternidad. Palabras Clave: Exempla. Ética. Mujeres Julio-Claudianas.

Considering how power relations govern the construction of race and gender, this article looks at the ambivalent relationship between the Magistrate and the "barbarian" girl in J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), exploring intersections between imperialism and gender and negotiating how issues of representation are implicated in questions of identity construction. It highlights how identities inflicted by gender are constructed in imperial discourse: first by the colonizer who speaks the language of power and inscribes on the colonized meanings serving imperialism; second by the humanist colonizer who fails to relate to the other on equal terms except for a position of "feminized" weakness; and third by the resistant colonial subject eluding imperial constructions yet still manipulated in language. Between the discourses of pain and humanism, the colonized body remains a malleable yet impenetrable object of colonial discourses. Coetzee subverts dominant gender boundaries, aligning oppressive patriarchal practices with imperialism while undermining hegemonic ideologies that construct gender through the figure of the enigmatic other.

L'objet de notre thèse est l'étude de la représentation des femmes impériales du Haut-Empire romain dans les récits grecs et romains allant du premier siècle avant J.-C. jusqu'au début du Ve siècle. Alors que l'historiographie romaine a consacré fort peu d'attention aux faits et gestes des Romaines pendant les premiers siècles de la République, l'éclatement des guerres civiles permet à quelques aristocrates romaines de jouer un rôle dans la sphère publique. Rôle très défavorablement perçu par certains membres de l'élite masculine. Alors qu'Auguste exalte, à l'issue de cette période troublée, le modèle de la matrone chaste et soumise, les femmes de sa famille font leur entrée sur la scène du pouvoir. Dès lors, un certain nombre d'auteurs élaborent un portrait de ces figures, de leur vivant et après leur mort, et ceci jusqu'à la période de l'Antiquité tardive. Les femmes étant exclues des charges politiques, comment ces auteurs perçoivent-ils l'influence ou le pouvoir que certaines d'entre elles ont exercé ? Il apparaît que si les femmes impériales ne constituent pas un objet d'étude en soi, leurs figures se sont avérées fort utiles pour caractériser un ou plusieurs princes. En effet, les femmes de pouvoir, et principalement les impératrices mères, sont perçues comme des éléments perturbateurs dont les actes menacent la personne du Prince et l'intégrité de l'Empire. Les auteurs anciens s'appuient notamment sur les identités et la/les mémoire/s féminine/s, telles qu'elles ont été mises en scène par le pouvoir impérial et certaines de ces femmes, pour illustrer la menace qu'un certain nombre d'entre elles ont fait peser sur le Prince. D'autre part, l'élaboration de ces portraits vise à illustrer l'incompatibilité entre femmes et pouvoir, alors même qu'un certain nombre de ces figures ont administré les affaires de l'Empire au nom de leur/s fils
The purpose of our thesis is to consider the representation of Early Roman Empire imperial women in Greek and Roman narratives dating from the first century B.C. until the 5th century A.D. Roman historiography payed scant attention to women during the first centuries of Roman Republic, but the start of civil wars allowed several aristocrats to intervene in public sphere. Partly disapproved by some members of the senatorial elite. While Augustus exalts, at the end of this difficult period, the model of the chaste and submissive matron, the women of his family are destined to play a part in public sphere. Consequently, a number of authors draw a portrait of these figures, in their lifetime and after their death, until Late Antiquity. Since women are excluded from political responsabilities, how these authors consider the influence or power that some of them exercize ? It appears that, if imperial women don't constitute an object of study, their figures, and, most of all, theirs of the empresses mothers, were very useful to characterize one or several Princeps/principes. Quite often, these women are considered as disruptive elements for the integrity of the Empire and as threats for the person of the Princeps. Discursive strategies that every author uses are based in particular on feminine identities and memory/ies developed by imperial power, in order to prove that some of these women constituted and still constitute a threat for the Princeps and for the integrity of the Empire. On the other hand, these portraits aim at illustrate the incompatibility between women and power, while some of these figures administered the affairs of the Empire in the name of their son/s

This chapter explores the twinned emergence in the British novel of a critique of plantation slavery and commercial imperialism with a proto-feminist questioning of the ‘commerce of the sexes’. The discourses of racial and sexual oppression resonate with one another, helping to establish connections between inequalities at home and the sufferings of distant others. It has been argued that novelistic representations of violence and suffering are central to an ‘imagined empathy’ which in turn assisted the development in the eighteenth century of humanitarian sentiment. While it might be charged that the mid-eighteenth-century novel failed to grant full humanity to the enslaved and that it was somewhat instrumentalist in its handling of slavery reform, it can be demonstrated that the versatility of the figure of slavery enabled fuller characterization of the colonized and enslaved, as well as the more explicit imagining of colonial violence.

This book is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. The book offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media — from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction — the book shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart. Each chapter focuses on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. The book argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization. The book integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the “fallen woman” drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. The book invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo asserts the importance in shifting attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and US imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, and natural dancers, and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and hip-hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of hip-hop’s regulation, the “euphemism,” as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism—the zombie, hero, robot, and judge—constitute a way of seeing Filipino hip-hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and US global power.

The book examines, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how these inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The book also examines concrete representations of deviant female characters, with a focus in the figure of the syphilitic prostitute and the physically decayed aged women, in a variety of literary texts such Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. The analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of present materiality/social construction disability theories, the book concludes that femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterize the new literary heroes in paradoxical contrast with the Spanish apex of imperial power. The broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of established masculine truths such as physical and moral integrity and religious and ethnic intolerance.

This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the “N/native” as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Šá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The “N/native” moves between “born in” and “first in” in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as decolonizing nations, “Native” is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the “native” inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors’ identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the “N/native” to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women’s/feminist production were then, and are in today’s versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms.

This paper demonstrates the operation of feminine imperial flânerie, or engagement with the imperial figure in the context of the traditionally male urban pastime of leisurely street-walking, in Virginia Woolf’s short story “Street Haunting” and Una Marson’s poem “Little Brown Girl” as they register related responses to a socially abject identity ever-hovering on the horizon of each writer’s attempts at self-identification as gendered subjects in their work. Specifically, the abject figure serves as a litmus test for each androgynous narrator’s choice to either assimilate with or self-differentiate from traditional national masculine perspectives of hegemonic cultural and political discourse. Each writer’s either sympathetic or distancing treatment of the imperial abject subject in the context of a potentially liberating flâneurial setting thus enacts a specific response to the question of British women modernists’ own degree of otherness as newly arrived observers under the auspices of the national patriarchal imperial complex.

This chapter expounds on the legacy Nomura Bōtō left. Bōtō was initially portrayed as a mother of the loyalists or a valiant woman. However, Ogawa Sumako raised an argument on how the new age sparked a tendency to edit the history of Bakumatsu into the history of Restoration. Bōtō was then included in the pantheon of heroines in the Imperial Restoration. The historiography in the early years of Meiji was marked by the progressivism of the so-called enlightenment thought. Bōtō's martial spirit is always balanced with virtues considered feminine. The chapter highlights the significance of Bōtō's figure as a loyalist during and after the war.

The opening prelude of Appalling Bodies establishes some of the contours for the interaction between biblical studies and queer studies in this project by briefly introducing both areas and their broader contexts. The prelude surveys key ideas about the Roman imperial context, the development of queer theory, and the letters of Paul. Readers who are unfamiliar with one or more of these domains become further acquainted with key concepts including ancient views of penetration and receptivity, and feminist conceptualizations of kyriarchy, intersectionality, and history, particularly as they might help us create alternative angles on the subjects marginalized within Pauline epistles and interpretations. In doing so, the prelude sets up the audacious juxtapositions of these domains in the chapters to follow, providing new insights on those targeted by figures of vilification in the first and in the twenty-first centuries.

This chapter reflects on the experiences of the authors during a combined three decades of research in Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh, highlighting their shifting and contingent subject positions as they moved through urban spaces in the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with various interlocutors during their dissertation research. It examines how prevalent ideas about identity in North American and European societies, which have heavily influenced postcolonial and postmodern anthropological attempts to be more inclusive and attentive to subject position, are also forms of baggage that academics bring to the field. The chapter draws on feminist and postcolonial traditions of reflexive ethnography that have deconstructed the figure of the social scientist as a neutral and unmarked observer. It also looks at the production of the Gulf expat as a symbolic field in which imperial histories, concepts of race, neoliberal urban development, and nationalism intersect. By exploring the role of Gulf expats as both migrant laborers and participants in labor exploitation and class hierarchy, the chapter encourages an approach to labor and migration in the Gulf that highlights the region's connection to global networks rather than one that reproduces tropes of its supposed exceptionalism.