{"title":"Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves","authors":"Antonia Wimbush","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"115 37","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141125727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“remember that a white woman is a white man”: Ronelda S. Kamfer’s Black Feminist Poetry as Corrective to the Race Logic of White Afrikaans Literary Feminisms","authors":"Bibi Burger, Azille Coetzee","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The creation of the Afrikaner volk and the violent appropriation and institutionalization of the Afrikaans language as white cultural property around the beginning of the twentieth century in South Africa was a patriarchal project from the outset. The canon of Afrikaans literature reflects both the erasure of Black subjects from the official history and recorded footprint of the language as well as the failure of white Afrikaans feminism to challenge these erasures and patriarchal structures of white power. In this essay we argue that Ronelda Kamfer’s poetry collection Chinatown (2019) functions as a powerful corrective to literary Afrikaans whitestream feminism and that Kamfer’s defiant relational intersectionality enables an alternative way of world-making beyond the disciplinary mechanisms and exclusionary technologies of white colonial patriarchy.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":" 56","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140991291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The “Totally ’80s” Eating Matters of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life","authors":"Claire Seiler","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay brings the discourse of “weak theory” to bear on Lyn Hejinian’s feminist experimental poem of the 1980s, My Life. It argues that the eating matters of My Life—the poem’s steady references to eating, cooking, grocery shopping, dieting, and so forth—open up a fresh account of the poem’s feminist and cultural historicity. Bracketing accustomed readings of the poem as exemplary of poetic postmodernism or as what Hejinian calls an “open text,” the essay situates My Life instead in the 1970s-80s emergence of anorexia as both a popular and a theoretical keyword. It revalues the range of eating matters that shape the feminist poetics of Hejinian’s best-known work.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"118 31","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140680888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postromanticizing the Nigerian Nation in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me","authors":"Cristina Cruz-Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay analyzes representations of (anti)romantic relationships and episodes of “forced intimacy” in Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s Stay with Me (2017). I will establish a parallelism between the intimate and romantic relationships described in the novels and the social and political evolution of the Nigerian nation, placing the focus onto the female protagonists and their obligation to conform to preestablished feminine and heterosexual models in agreement with Nigerian traditional practices. Through the analysis of the affective and sociocultural evolution of these women, I aim to prove that there is a direct association between demystified representations of the nation and a disillusionment with the romantic ideals of the couples featured in the novels. I will refer to their evolution as “postromantic” since it transcends the performativity linked to romanticization.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"63 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140730188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disability and Superability: The Spectacle of Extra/Ordinary Bodies in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book","authors":"Fu-Jen Chen","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores how Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989) showcases and anticipates cultural imaginaries surrounding Asian bodies as repositories for fantasy and affect. From the fragmented body of the suicidal protagonist to the spectacle of the Siamese conjoined twins, Kingston stages diverse bodily tropes that reflect racist, sexist, and ableist perceptions throughout history. The protagonist Wittman Ah Sing, embodied as a postmodern “Monkey King,” represents a neoliberal subjectivity marked by adaptive resilience. In contrast, the Siamese twins enact intersubjective connections, catalyzing the protagonist’s communal theater production. The play’s communal vision challenges the ideological norms of the “Normate” and resists complicity with global capitalism. Ultimately, the acknowledgment of shared struggles amidst radical divisions and recognition of our participation in ideological fantasies fosters collective solidarity and a radical critique of the capitalist system.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"14 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140745897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narrative Performances of Mothering in South Asian Diasporic Fiction","authors":"Christopher Hogarth","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"122 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140747118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anarchist Domesticities: From DIY Culture to DIY Politics in Consent Zines","authors":"Frankie Hines","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contemporary radical and anarchist movements have made the home a central site of political contestation in ways that mirror a return to domestic spaces in recent critical thought. This essay argues that an “anarchist domesticity,” which is marked by an awareness of violence’s omnipresence, finds its clearest expression in anarcha-feminist zines about responses to sexual assault and interpersonal violence. The essay reads these “consent zines” first as texts that reconfigure zines’ do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos as a DIY politics and thereby seek to intervene directly in political struggles; and second as texts marked by encounters with traumatic experiences, which provides an alternative explanation for their fragmentary form. As articulations of radical domesticities, consent zines are, I argue, literary texts that speak to vital contemporary political issues.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"9 S1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140232597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Breaking the Narrative Pattern: Motherhood Tropes in Norwegian Migrant Literature","authors":"M. Barkve","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article focuses on three motherhood tropes, which became narrative convention in Norwegian migration literature in the period 1986–2010. I categorize these motherhood tropes as: (1) the cultured mother; (2) the creative mother; and (3) the appropriation of Henrik Ibsen’s infamous character Nora Helmer. Illustrating these tropes shows a critique of motherhood found in some of Norway’s migration literature. However, Mala Naveen’s novel, Desiland (Desi Land), published in 2010, incorporates and challenges these three motherhood tropes by breaking with convention. I argue that Naveen performs disidentification, or an identity in difference, and calls for a renegotiation or remapping of the current paradigm of Norwegian migration literature, which limits minority women’s artistic representation.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"22 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140247907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Talking to Our Sons: The Power of the Reproductive Sphere in Agnès Agboton’s and Najat El Hachmi’s Autobiographies","authors":"Julia Teresa Utiger","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In their autobiographies Más allá del mar de arena (2005) and Jo també sóc catalana (2004), Agnès Agboton and Najat El Hachmi narrate their diasporic experience of living and mothering in Catalonia. In both cases, the narrators address their sons. The close connection between the mothers (narrators) and their sons (addressees) establishes an intimate space of power which is analyzed through Irene Gedalof’s concept of the reproductive sphere. This essay proposes that the authors of both texts establish mothering in the diaspora within autobiographical narratives as a site of negotiation, creation of identity, and intervention both for the addressees and for a larger audience.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140245884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feminist Matters: The Politics of Eating in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus","authors":"Njeri Githire","doi":"10.1093/cww/vpae006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpae006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using food as a narrative device in her critically acclaimed debut novel Purple Hibiscus (2003), Adichie offers a markedly feminist critique of the legacies of neocolonialism on Africa’s ability to choose its own destiny. Indeed, Adichie’s exploration of food as the locus of hospitality and hostility and the dining table as a fraught and shifting site of power and its contestation yields a commentary on the domestic arena as a metaphor for the national sociopolitical and economic situation. More specifically, Adichie links notions of food control and tyrannical power to prevailing patriarchal systems that expose women and children to violent injustices and to material and spiritual want. She depicts colonial and fundamentalist religious institutions as inimical to women’s participation in political and economic processes.","PeriodicalId":291192,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Women's Writing","volume":"22 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140077377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}