Academic literature on the topic 'Patriarchal binary oppositions'

This paper focuses on interpreting Margret Atwood’s outlook towards the affiliation of power between man and woman, and, likewise, the hidden meaning of her message(s) to women in general. These issues will be explained by interpreting or considering her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale as a pattern of oppositions. The conceptual tool that is used to uncover the keys for the questions of whether Atwood is with or against women and how she visualizes women’s experience and distress under the patriarchal rules are; binary oppositions and Derrida’s concept of différance. Using the binary oppositions Gilead’s central and restricted ideologies and the handmaids’ silent response become comprehensible. Then by reversing these binary conceptions, depending on Derrida’s concept, the incompatibles will be proved. Atwood’s depiction of woman is not always positive and not negative as well. Therefore, this paper assumes that women are being used and dehumanized in Gilead which gives hints for the author’s view of men’s inclination to imprison women and deprive them from their right to live a normal life. Furthermore, the binary thought depicts women as inert and powerless. The second part and after reversing the binary opposition we conclude that the handmaids and women in general are able to convert the hierarchical belief by taking on the same tool that has been used to oppress them.

Just another butch? A feminist reading of the HalewijnliedIn this article the authors argue that a form of covert feminism is present in the Halewijnlied (Song of Halewijn), an important Middle Dutch text. Utilizing the poststructuralist notion of écriture rather than lecture, the latent content of the text is explored, enabling the authors to (re-)construct the ‘meaning' of the text within the context of Kristeva's notion that the Virgin cult constitutes "a triumph of the unconscious in monotheism This "triumph of the unconscious "amounts to a form of female power which is the “underhand double of explicit phallic power" and sets up a temporary "commonality of the sexes" within the patriarchal system. By means of the personage of the Princess, Freudian displacement in terms of social sex roles occurs, negating some of the binary oppositions characterising the man:woman dichotomy. This process results in an 'androgenic’ space in which both sexes are temporarily set free from the sexual roles forced upon them by a patriarchal system.

The aim of this research is to apply deconstructive approach to a short story. For this purpose Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story “Saleema” is selected and analyzed. Through deconstruction the feminist reading of the story is dismantled and the power dynamics of the patriarchal Pakistani society are subverted. The research is anchored in Derrida’s concept of unreliability of language and Cuddon’s idea of reversal of binary oppositions. The paper finds that the protagonist Saleema is not as weak and oppressed as she is perceived to be, rather she is a resilient, independent woman who uses any means possible to get what she wants. The power and authority reside with her and not with any male character. The study is purely qualitative and exploratory in nature.

This article aims to analyze the struggle of Yogamaya, the lead female character of the novel Yogamāyā, by Neelam Karki Niharika. The novel based on the real life story of a rebel, Yogamaya, chronicles the incidents of her life that triggered her to cast off her feminine self and rebel for the establishment of a just society based on equity. The article examines those factors that force Yogamaya to rebel against the existing society and the process of her rebellion drawing insights form Helen Cixous and other feminists who find patriarchal gender roles based on binary opposition as oppressive, and suggest that women should act beyond gender binary and subvert the patriarchal norms and values that restrict them in every walk of their lives. I use transliteration and free translation while citing from the novel in the analysis. The finding of the article suggests that a number of factors instigate Yogamaya cast of her feminine self and emerge as a rebel. It helps to understand how Yogamaya subverts patriarchy within its bound exposing the inherent biasness in it.

This article analyses the erotic relationships between sexes depicted in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small things in the binary opposition: those based on bourgeois patriarchal dominance and that based on equality and mutual respect. It focuses on the relationship between Ammu and Velutha as love, in diametrical contrast with the former pattern, based on independent choices and guided and inspired by radical politics. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ctbijis.v1i1.10468 Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.1(1) 2013; 51-58

Patriarchal society regulates how women should behave and act. If a woman obeys the social rules, she will be labeled as a good woman. On the other hand, if a woman does not follow the social values, she will be immediately categorized as an evil woman and given negative stereotypes. This binary opposition between a good woman and a bad woman is often criticized by the feminists because they think this categorization burdens women. This issue is also highlighted by Hannah Kent in her novel Burial Rites (2013). This novel is set in a rural society in Iceland in the 19th century with its patriarchal values, focusing on a woman named Agnes that will soon be executed. This theme interested the researcher to study Burial Rites more deeply using feminist perspective. Characters, setting and point of view are the intrinsic elements discussed in this research. The result of the analysis shows that through these three elements, Burial Rites describes society’s stereotypes about ‘evil women’ and there is an effort from the author to deconstruct the stereotype through a female voice.

This article aims at describing women existence as reflected on Bride Song poem written by Christina Rossseti. Rossetti’s view on women’s lives was inspired much by her awareness toward the their conditions in Victorian’s era. In the meantime, women were shaped to be an individuals who fulfill the ideal standard as preferred by men. By Bride Song, Rosetti tried to break patriarchal domination toward women. She wanted to turn back the existence equivalence between men and women based on human rights. She also attemped to open the world’s perspective to accept women’s existence as important as men’s and not just a binary opposition of it. Women’s existence in Bride Song is not only a struggle against men’s domination in Victorian era, but it also has relevance with contemporary issues on women’s struggle to show their existence in this modern era.

In the old tradition of Nusantara literature, in this case Malay and Javanese, often represented a model of society that adhered to a patriarchal system. This system puts women at the subordinate level, under the domination of men. This phenomenon was also represented in one of the manuscripts of the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia collection entitled 'Hikayat Darma Tasiyah' with the script code W 124B. This study aims to deconstruct the point of view of reading the script using Derrida's deconstruction approach model, in order to obtain a new meaning which is binary in opposition to the general meaning produced from the point of view of structural readings. With deconstruction reading, the meaning of obedience and silence turns into acts of resistance, mistakes become rebellion, expulsion is precisely like liberation and so on. As a literary work that discusses the patriarchy system, Hikayat Darma Tasiyah is actually able to turn into a destroyer of the patriarchy system itself, only through deconstruction reading.

Monsters are perceived as humanity’s enemy that should be eradicated. However, based on Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory (1997), monsters play an important role in understanding humanity’s fears and anxieties. Monstrosity hinges upon the binary opposition of the Self and the Other, in which the Other is seen as a threat to the Self. With this in mind, this article addresses the female monsters of two medieval texts: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. This paper aims to examine the female monsters, Grendel’s mother and Morgan the Fay, as a cultural reference to unravel the patriarchal anxieties of the time. Grendel’s mother represents a threat to the homosocial hierarchal bonds of Medieval society. Meanwhile, Morgan the Fay signifies danger to knighthood, chivalry, and courtly romance. At the same time, this paper also aims to continue the critical analysis and literature of the female characters in both texts with a heavy emphasis on their Otherness.

This article explores the complex, “contact zone” nature of museums within the context of the current environmental crisis threatening our planet. Historically and even today, museums have engaged in a practice of “monocultural” thinking which is mired in a pretext to neutrality that has advanced the patriarchal capitalist neoliberal status quo and maintained a vision of a human/non-human binary of power, dominance, and control. However, there is also growing evidence that museums are shifting their approaches. Focusing on examples from Canada, we discuss how museums are using exhibitions and pedagogical and community outreach strategies to render visible deeply problematic and global “technofossil” practices, encourage activism through aesthetic engagement, encourage dialogue between community and industry as well as engage in imaginative decolonising initiatives that remap our understandings of who we are and where we need to go. We argue that in taking up environmental issues in politically intentional ways, museums create “oppositional views” that act as pedagogical sites of resistance.

This thesis aims to problematise the hegemonic set of relations that has been aligned to gender and sex within the framework of binary thought when reading Woolf’s narrative of gender. Woolf’s elusive and intense style, the plasticity and ambivalence of her language and her complex, polyhedric characters make of Virginia Woolf’s literature a literature of her own; a radical literature that is able to draw new undefined landscapes, unsettled territories, dislocating and challenging routes mapped out through her experimental method, her crossing of generic boundaries, and her fluid and limitless characterisations. This project focuses on Woolf’s male characters as a reaction to the constraints that gender studies have generally imposed upon her writings. Two main objections have been considered; on the one hand, much of the critical effort related to gender and Woolf’s writing has focused on femininity, by ignoring her radical male characters. On the other hand, despite vast female-centred studies and the small amount of studies focused on masculinities there is a number of scholars who have dealt with rigid and fluid male characters (studies that assimilate Woolf’s work on masculinities to the discourse of patriarchy, war, imperialism and fascism; psychoanalytic perspectives on gender; studies that focus on homosexuality; and studies that focus on androgyny). However, most of these approaches to masculinities in Woolf have inscribed gender/sex in rigid binary taxonomies. My reading of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s collaborative body of work (their fluid conception of individuation and their concept of difference-in-itself) together with my reading of Men’s studies (Connell, Kimmel, Segal) and Difference Feminism (Irigaray, Jardine, Braidotti, Grosz, Olkowski, Colebrook) constitute the theoretical framework for this thesis in order to explore Woolf’s masculinities beyond gender/sex binary oppositions. This thesis has aimed to contribute to the field of Woolf Studies with an analysis of both Woolf’s criticism of rigid discourses of masculinity and by proving Woolf’s radical concept of gender and her proposal of alternative gender behaviours. My two case studies have been Septimus Warren Smith and Orlando. I have proved these two novelistic characters to be polymorphous and multilayered figurations of gender and paradigmatic examples of the Deleuzo-Guattarian process of becoming-woman (Septimus as the empty BwO and Orlando as the full BwO). Finally, this thesis evaluates the impact that Woolf’s visionary narrative of gender has had on more contemporary narratives. In order to analyse a more contemporary response to Woolf’s narrative I chose to work with two cinematic texts. This project focuses on Marleen Gorris’s Mrs Dalloway (1997) and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) as new texts that extend, reread, implement and reappropriate Woolf’s work to respond to different social demands in relation to gender. It analyses the extent to which the gender narrative of these two cinematic texts fail or succeed in projecting radical figurations of masculinities beyond man/ woman, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual taxonomies. This thesis approaches literature conceptually, from a philosophical perspective. An interdisciplinary methodology has been used. The whole nature of the project is interdisciplinary in its focus on both different media, novels and film adaptations, and in the crossing of literature, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. The main focus throughout is Virginia Woolf’s novelistic narrative of gender and two late twentieth century approaches to Woolf’s gender narrative carried out by two film adaptations of Woolf. The analysis of Gorris’s and Potter’s adaptations has been purely narratological. Formalist devices of the cinematic media have been used in narrative terms. That is to say, I have analysed the transformation, adaptation, amplification, or re-evaluation that these two more contemporary cinematic narratives have carried out from Woolf’s complex narrative of gender at two specific contexts with given social demands.
Aquesta tesi analitza la narrativa de gènere que Virginia Woolf articula a partir de les seves novel•les i la compara amb la narrativa de gènere de dues adaptacions cinematogràfiques més contemporànies (Potter, 1992; Gorris, 1997), centrant-se en l’anàlisi dels personatges masculins. Aquest projecte explora la crítica que Woolf adreça a la representativitat rígida de la masculinitat, així com la seva proposta de construccions de gènere alternatives. Per tal d’atendre aquestes alternatives, la tesi defineix un marc teòric que combina la filosofia sobre el procés d’individuació de Gilles Deleuze i Félix Guattari, el feminisme de la diferència (Grosz, Olkowski, Colebrook) i la teoria i crítica de les masculinitats (Connell, Kimmel, Segal). La tesi postula la radicalitat de la visió de gènere de Woolf, en tant que demostra el seu trencament amb el pensament binari. Septimus Warren Smith i Orlando, els dos estudis de cas, representen exemples paradigmàtics d’una concepció de gènere polimòrfica, fluida, múltiple, i polisexual. És així com la tesi avalua l’impacte de la visionària narrativa de gènere de Woolf sobre narratives més contemporànies. Les adaptacions cinematogràfiques Mrs Dalloway (Gorris, 1997) i Orlando (Potter, 1992) són analitzades com a textos que extenen, rellegeixen, implementen i reapropien els textos de Virginia Woolf per tal de respondre a les demandes socials específiques del seu temps.

Based on the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible treats a historical event that could be considered overflowing with patriarchal oppression. Despite the author’s clear disapproval of the historical cruelty, the play continuously reveals patriarchal structures and shows misogynist tendencies in its depiction of women. This essay suggests that the two main female characters Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Proctor function as representations of binary oppositions based on the patriarchal assumption of two categories of women: the ‘bad girl’ and the ‘good girl,’ which both reinforce the idea of women as unnuanced objects rather than multifaceted subjects. By arguing that Abigail and Elizabeth represent the binary pairs ‘selfish/sacrificing’ and ‘promiscuous/frigid,’ the essay finds that the two women are depicted as ‘either/or’ and that the unnuanced portrayals result in an unsympathetic reading of them. Finally, the essay concludes that regardless if the woman is a ‘good girl’ or a ‘bad girl,’ she is socially punished or given unflattering characteristics in order not to compete with the male protagonist in terms of reader sympathy.
Arthur Millers pjäs The Crucible skildrar häxprocesserna i Salem 1692-1693, en historisk händelse som kan anses vara genomsyrad av patriarkalt förtryck. Trots författarens uttalade förakt gentemot häxprocessernas grymhet finns det tydliga och återkommande patriarkala strukturer i den stundom misogyna pjäsen, särskilt i dess kvinnoporträtt. Denna uppsats visar hur de två kvinnliga huvudkaraktärerena Abigail Williams och Elizabeth Proctor fungerar som representationer av binära motsatser baserade på den patriarkala idén om två kategorier av kvinnor: den ’dåliga flickan’ och den ’duktiga flickan’, vilka förstärker synen på kvinnor som onyanserade objekt snarare än mångfacetterade subjekt. Genom att argumentera för hur Abigail och Elizabeth representerar de binära paren ’självisk/självuppoffrande’ och ’promiskuös/frigid’ finner denna uppsats att Abigail och Elizabeth är porträtterade som ’antingen/eller’ och att den onyanserade karaktäriseringen resulterar i en osympatisk läsning av dem. Slutligen påvisar uppsatsen att oavsett om kvinnan är en ’duktig flicka’ eller en ’dålig flicka’ blir hon socialt bestraffad eller försedd med osmickrande karaktärsdrag i syfte att inte konkurrera med den manliga protagonisten om läsarens sympati.

Fairy tales are usually described as short narratives that end with happily-ever-afters, imposing patriarchal ideologies. The Grimm’s fairy tales serve as the foundation of many other stories which promote stereotypes like woman passiveness, submissive beauty, while men are put on a pedestal for being active and violent at the same time. Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber depicts patriarchal oppression in classic fairy tales by challenging what can be identified as patriarchal binary oppositions with a strategic subversion of gender roles. Through problematizing and critiquing the patriarchal fairy tales, Carter’s texts can be read through the lens of écriture féminine. Following Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture féminine, outlined in “The Laugh of the Medusa”, this essay explores how Carter’s  “The Lady of the House of Love'' can be read as a narrative that has strong echoes of the kind of female writing Cixous advocates. Moreover, this essay argues that  “The Lady of the House of Love” contradicts the Western myth of femininity by resisting, exploring, even undermining the patriarchal representation of woman as “heroine”-the fairy tale princess who needs a man to save her -and “femme fatale.”

The LGBT community in Turkey faces a system of structural discrimination. It is not afforded the same rights as those of the hetero-normative majority of Turkish society, and most fundamentally, there exists a reciprocal relationship between the actors of the hetero sociopolitical sphere of state and non-state actors and the sphere of "homo-society". This relationship feeds into and is fed by the culture of patriarchy replicated in the homosexual sphere and the language of sexual binary opposition inherent in - but not unique to - the Turkish public domain to create a society in which structural discrimination and violence against sexual minorities is the norm. The existence of a strict patriarchy in the sphere of "homo-society", manifested through language of sexual binary opposition, provides the framework for structural discrimination against sexual minorities by the Turkish state and its tools of enforcement, as well as the nonstate actors of the public domain at large. This systematic discrimination against the LGBT community reinforces the patriarchy in LGBT spheres and categorizes its members as sexual deviants existing outside of the circle of hetero-normativity, and it has ultimately become entrenched into the Turkish cultural psyche.

This chapter offers an analytic model for understanding conflict and coalition on the terrain of race by discussing racialization and racial stratification. In this analytic model of first-, second-, and third-order racial analyses, the first-order binary model restates the duality of the primary racial opposition in U.S. history—black and white—and recognizes that many analyses of racial and ethnic conflict follow this basic majority–minority binary opposition. Meanwhile, second-order binary analysis stays within a group-to-group binary framework, but looks at the relationship between minority A and minority B. The chapter then shows how an understanding of racialization and racial stratification lends itself to third-order multigroup analysis. It concludes by discussing the limits of building coalitions in a purely oppositional mode, and explores the need for building common cause that extends beyond opposition to white capitalist patriarchy.