Not least among the many enigmas attending the origins and development of the first vernacular lyric in the European Middle Ages is the existence of at least twenty women poets who lived in southern France from about the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century and who participated in the highly conventionalized poetic system created by the troubadours, those humble poetlovers who sang to their beloved as domna, the superior lady. In periods when the tides of feminism are high these women's (...) class='Hi'>voices have insistently claimed our attention, as we try to understand their songs and puzzle over their very existence. Their poetic inventions require us in particular to pay close attention to the subtle, even elusive, concept of voice—its relation to the identity of the poet and the poem's speaker, the elements that characterize its expression, the multiplicity of images created by different voices, and so on. If we are willing to listen and analyze carefully, the trobairitz have much to teach us about the way women poets enter into and find their place in a traditional poetic system created by male poets. Their songs demonstrate with intricate complexity the way poetic fictions play with cultural, literary, and social definitions of man and woman, masculine and feminine; their poems offer valuable warnings about the pitfalls involved in generalizing women into woman. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the experiences of female leaders considering the interplay of gender, religion, and culture. Drawing on an inductive-qualitative study, the paper examines perceptions regarding the role of religion and cultural norms in women’s ascension into leadership positions in Jordan. The results indicated that Jordanian women leaders adopted an Islamic feminist worldview and did not embrace a liberal nor a socialist/Marxist feminist worldview. Women leaders seemed wanting to claim their religion back from those forces that are (...) reportedly holding their aspirations hostage to monolithic interpretations of religious texts. By constantly referring to their religion, female leaders wanted to be granted spaces of trust and responsibility in leadership positions that they did not see contradictory to the way they understood their faith. The paper provides insights into how women leaders understand prejudicial stereotypes and discrimination in their society, explaining how those are linked to patriarchal socio-cultural traditions emphasizing male control. (shrink)

This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as tools to illuminate the interstitial and perilous social space occupied by women and gay men (...) in South African Muslim society. The research dissects the poignant picture that Jacobs paints of marginal identities as they exist at the intersection of religion, gender identity and sexual identity, and ultimately exhibits that homophobia and gender inequalities are not necessarily intrinsic to Islam. The article adopts a cultural studies style literary analysis. In light of this theoretical approach, this article evaluates Jacobs’s novel in a manner that goes beyond its literariness and shows how it also acts as a form of social commentary. This article also shows how the novel problematises hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality within Islam by giving voice to women and gay men: identity categories which remain largely voiceless in the dominant representations of Islam. (shrink)

We adopt and extend the concept of ‘noncooperative space’ to analyze how (aspirant) black women intellectual activists attempt to sustain their efforts within settings that publicly endorse racial equality, while, in practice, the contexts remain deeply racist. Noncooperative spaces reflect institutional, organizational, and social environments portrayed by powerful white agents as conducive to anti-racism work and promoting racial equality but, indeed, constrain individuals who challenge racism. Our work, which is grounded in intersectionality, draws on an autoethnographic account of racially motivated (...) domestic violence suffered by our lead author. Our analysis suggests that (aspirant) black women intellectual activists must develop courage to sustain their ‘voice’ within noncooperative spaces. However, the three interlinked dimensions of noncooperative spaces—namely, deceiving design, hegemonic actors’ indifference to racism, and (some assimilated gatekeepers’) false equivalence—may gradually erode a black female scholar’s courage. This forces her ‘voice’ to vanish temporarily, or even permanently. Courage is thus fragile and depletable. Yet, courage can be regenerated, resulting in regaining voice. Consequently, we propose courageous collective action by white allies and black and brown individuals who voluntarily and officially cooperate within and across various spaces to achieve racial equality. (shrink)

In 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft's travels to Scandinavian cities gave her new perspectives on the English and Continental bourgeois cultures with which she was acquainted. Her notions of the city as a source of inspiration for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are echoed in the epistolary writings of the Norwegian author Camilla Collett (1813–1895) and the novels of her countrywoman Amalie Skram (1846–1905). Collett and Skram were both frequent visitors to different European capital cities, and incorporated their impressions and experiences (...) of these cities. This resulted in innovative texts, with the individual in a new, modern environment, the city, as one of the central themes. For Collett, who can be regarded as a city correspondent avant la lettre, the city was also a yardstick for cultural progress. In her novels, Skram used the European city as a sort of laboratory of the modern era. Nevertheless, Collett's and Skram's ‘city texts’ are not the ones that have ensured that these two authors found their way into the literary canon. Collett became famous as the author of the first Norwegian feminist novel, whereas Skram is known as a Norwegian naturalist. Until recently, the prose texts in which Collett and Skram processed their urban experiences were either not discussed in Norwegian literary historiography, or were labelled as contributions to the morality debate that raged in Scandinavia at the end of the nineteenth century. In this article, I shall propose that Collett and Skram contribute to a distinctive yet unrecognized genre – female urban prose – which proffers new modes of thinking and writing about women's experience of contemporaneous bourgeois culture. (shrink)

The ‘intersectionality’ approach in feminist theory postulates that differences between women, such as age, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, etc. do intersect. However, intersectionality starts to get blurred when examined concretely because the list of differences is always endless. There is frequently silence about concrete questions such as: who defines when, where and which of these differences are rendered important in particular conceptions, and which are not? This article examines how categories of difference and identity interplay and intersect by analysing a (...) narrative life-interview with a female migrant to Vienna. It aims to make visible some of her specific identifications and differentiations and how these are located in time and space, by focusing on her self-presentation and the categories of difference such as gender, class and ethnicity that she introduces. Through this the article aims to contribute to discussions of the dynamism of subjectivities and power relations. (shrink)

This book offers inspiration and support to female faculty members in higher education who are at various stages of their professional development. Twenty-four educators share both their intuitive voices and practical knowledge on the topics of career development, balancing personal and professional life, cultural and individual identity, and spirituality.

Resumen: El presente artículo pretende analizar el discurso empleado por las voces líricas femeninas de las elegías anglosajonas medievales The Wife’s Lament y Wulf and Eadwacer. Mediante la idea de la conciencia del cuerpo femenino como origen de la écriture féminine propuesta por Luce Irigaray y Hélène Cixous, figuras principales del feminismo de la “diferencia” francés, se determinará que el uso discursivo empleado por las voces elegíacas femeninas diverge en cuanto al utilizado por voces elegíacas masculinas y que, de este (...) modo, supone un medio por el que hallar una identidad femenina propia más allá de los constructos de género patriarcales vigentes en la sociedad anglosajona medieval. Abstract: This article aims to analyse the discourse employed by the female lyrical voices in the medieval Anglo-Saxon elegies The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer. Through the idea of female body self-awareness as the origin of écriture féminine proposed by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, leading figures in French feminism of the sexual “difference”, we will determine that the discursive use applied by female elegiac voices diverges from that used by male elegiac voices and that, thus, it provides a means to find a female identity beyond the patriarchal gender constructs of medieval Anglo-Saxon society. (shrink)

The aim of the research was to know the perception of high-level volleyball players of the changes produced in the efficiency of the training process, after a match analysis intervention program based on the Constraint-led Approach. The sample consisted of 11 players from a women's volleyball team. The protocol of the intervention program consisted of providing objective, contextualised and systematic information to the coach that would allow understanding the different real game contexts. We used semi-structured interviews to assess players' perceptions. (...) The athletes perceived changes in training, both in their preparation and development, specifically in greater involvement and organisation in preparing the training; in an increase in the specificity and suitability of training tasks according to individual needs; in the representativeness of the restrictions of the game; in a more tactical approach; in the variability of task and in the accountability to achieve the objective proposed. In addition, in the preparation and development for competition, the players detected more game planning; a deeper analysis of the opponents; an objective selection of the most relevant data, an increase in the depth of match analysis and the inclusion of the weekly meeting with the use of video compared to the previous season. These results expose the benefits of coaches incorporate programmes to obtain objective information about the game in their training process. (shrink)

The paper attempts to explore notions of public-private dichotomy with reference to collective agency and inclusion. It looks at a women’s shelter run by a missionary wife Julie Gundert of the Basel Mission in nineteenth-century Malabar. The missionaries played a key role in the introduction of printing and the development of a modern public sphere in the region: a space, nevertheless, restricted to men from the educated elite classes. Julie’s shelter, meanwhile, provides an alternate cultural space where women, especially those (...) from the excluded communities, the disabled, the abandoned and the lowest classes and castes could come together. The shelter is seen as a location of intimate and privatised cultural contact radically different from that practised in the formal, restrictive sites of the emerging public sphere; a space where subaltern cultures challenged the status of the visible public sphere as the key platform for social-cultural inclusion and agency. (shrink)

I claim that Adriana Cavarero’s concept of sonorous voice is significant in feminist teaching because, as she argues, dominant concepts of voice refer to voice in semantic terms thereby discounting voice in sonorous terms. This process of ‘devocalization’, spanning the history of Western philosophy, devalues the uniqueness embodied in each sonorous voice effecting a bias against female-sounding voices. In light of women’s history and experience of being silenced, this devaluing of sonorous voice has distinct implications for feminist teaching. (...) A person’s actual sounding voice, which constitutes her or his uniqueness, is missing from prior considerations of ‘voice’ in professional ethics. Because establishing a voice of authority is a central challenge starting off as a teacher, devocalization makes this challenge greater for those with female-sounding voices who take on and try out the dispositions and attitudes of an authoritative professional. Using the example of a voice workshop I designed for pre-service teachers, I re-consider it in light of ‘devocalization’ and the frankness needed to practice feminism, asking if it is possible to be frank and sonorous using irony. I conclude that it is, that Cavarero’s philosophical practice is a model for feminist teaching, and I re-write the workshop with ‘bad intentions’; for and in more than one voice. (shrink)

A radical, compelling study of the female voice.,Multi-contextual theorist Gladwell puts forward,her analysis of the polemic of feminist rhetorical,discourse as it presents a fresh and vital,approach to an anatomy of female subjectivity,through precise listening and the audacity to,speak aloud.

Understanding female sexuality and mate choice is central to evolutionary scenarios of human social systems. Studies of female sexuality conducted by sex researchers in the United States since 1938 indicate that human females in general are concerned with their sexual well-being and are capable of sexual response parallel to that of males. Across cultures in general and in western societies in particular, females engage in extramarital affairs regularly, regardless of punishment by males or social disapproval. Families are usually (...) concerned with marriage arrangements only insofar as those arrangements are economically or politically advantageous, but females most often have a voice in arranged marriages. Extended families also concentrate on a couple’s future reproduction rather than on sexual exclusivity. Although marriage for females is often compromised by male or family reproductive interests (which may not in fact differ from female interests), females appear to exercise their sexuality with more freedom than has previously been suggested. Notions of human females as pawns in the male reproductive game, or as traders of sex for male services, should be dispelled. (shrink)

The increasing number and influence of women in society brings up several issues related to values and ethics. Looking at business ethics from the gender perspective made us ponder if it would be fruitful to analyse the feminine and masculine dimensions of decision-making style. The article follows the research tradition using the multidimensional ethics scale, and it aims at developing the scale to better include female decision-making. We came to the conclusion that, as the multidimensional ethics scale used in (...) measuring managers' moral decision-making is derived from modern ethical theories focusing on indications of masculinities more than femininities, the scale leaves feminine decision-making dimensions invisible. Our argument is that in seeking a deeper understanding of (female) managers' moral decision-making, we must find a broader basis for the analysis and develop the scale further so that it allows different voices to be heard and different dimensions to be seen. (shrink)

New types of artificial intelligence products are gradually transferring to voice interaction modes with the demand for intelligent products expanding from communication to recognizing users' emotions and instantaneous feedback. At present, affective acoustic models are constructed through deep learning and abstracted into a mathematical model, making computers learn from data and equipping them with prediction abilities. Although this method can result in accurate predictions, it has a limitation in that it lacks explanatory capability; there is an urgent need for an (...) empirical study of the connection between acoustic features and psychology as the theoretical basis for the adjustment of model parameters. Accordingly, this study focuses on exploring the differences between seven major “acoustic features” and their physical characteristics during voice interaction with the recognition and expression of “gender” and “emotional states of the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) model.” In this study, 31 females and 31 males aged between 21 and 60 were invited using the stratified random sampling method for the audio recording of different emotions. Subsequently, parameter values of acoustic features were extracted using Praat voice software. Finally, parameter values were analyzed using a Two-way ANOVA, mixed-design analysis in SPSS software. Results show that gender and emotional states of the PAD model vary among seven major acoustic features. Moreover, their difference values and rankings also vary. The research conclusions lay a theoretical foundation for AI emotional voice interaction and solve deep learning's current dilemma in emotional recognition and parameter optimization of the emotional synthesis model due to the lack of explanatory power. (shrink)

This article uses the voices of women to investigate the horror of the cultural practice of female genital mutilation. Case studies graphically illustrate the way in which the bodies of young girls are literally moulded for male satisfaction, physical, religious and cultural. Female genital mutilation is a socio-cultural offensive against women and young girls which we would join with female theologians in condemning.

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter “what” she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, “Who is speaking?” and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, “It’s me.” Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with (...) the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the “devocalization of Logos,” as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a “politics of the voice” wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking. (shrink)

What makes a human voice agreeable is a matter of scientific discussion. Whereas prosody was shown to play a role regarding “male-female” attraction, the impact of frequency modulations in “non-sexual”, notably commercial, contexts has attracted little attention. Another point unaddressed in the literature is auditory sensitivity to short-term frequency modulations as current studies focus more on sentence. Thirty French female operators were recorded over the phone. All “bonjour” greeting words were classified in terms of frequency modulation linearity and (...) orientation at the syllable and word levels. Then, the different voices were played back to students and seniors who had to rate each voice according to their degree of agreeableness. Listeners preferred non-monotonous voices. Differences between age-classes were greater than between sex-classes. Results suggest that short-term frequency changes are important for auditory evaluation of voice agreeableness. This study opens new research perspectives concerning the importance of prosody during consumer-seller interactions. (shrink)

I claim that Adriana Cavarero’s concept of sonorous voice is significant in feminist teaching because, as she argues, dominant concepts of voice refer to voice in semantic terms thereby discounting voice in sonorous terms. This process of ‘devocalization’, spanning the history of Western philosophy, devalues the uniqueness embodied in each sonorous voice effecting a bias against female-sounding voices. In light of women’s history and experience of being silenced, this devaluing of sonorous voice has distinct implications for feminist teaching. (...) A person’s actual sounding voice, which constitutes her or his uniqueness, is missing from prior considerations of ‘voice’ in professional ethics. Because establishing a voice of authority is a central challenge starting off as a teacher, devocalization makes this challenge greater for those with female-sounding voices who take on and try out the dispositions and attitudes of an authoritative professional. Using the example of a voice workshop I designed for pre-service teachers, I re-consider it in light of ‘devocalization’ and the frankness needed to practice feminism, asking if it is possible to be frank and sonorous using irony. I conclude that it is, that Cavarero’s philosophical practice is a model for feminist teaching, and I re-write the workshop with ‘bad intentions’; for and in more than one voice. (shrink)

Roland Barthes was suspicious about the ability of music and voice to signify, as revealed in many of his writings. However, his somewhat limited views on music and voice need not to restrain from profiting his semiotic theorising and his reasoning, which can be adapted for musical instances in ways not envisaged by Barthes. The Neutral (Le Neutre) is a recurrent topic in Barthes’s oeuvre from his first book, Writing Zero Degree (1953) up to his 1978 lecture series on The (...) Neutral in Collège de France (published in 2002). This paper explores how Barthes’s Neutral may enhance a special kind of listening. The enigmatic sonorities emitted by the Invisible Choir in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) serve as the foil in this task, more precisely a phrase voiced by female altos and male tenors (“Nehmet hin meinen Leib [...]”, Act I). It is not its semantic content mediated by (written) language that is of interest here but how this phrase has been voiced, andfurthermore, how Barthes’s Neutral may be heard in and beneath it. Several commercially available live recordings made in Bayreuth have offered playground for listening to and for The Neutral. As my analysis shows, the audible Neutral is not a separate entity but works in conjunction with other modes of signification: visual, textual, biographical, spatial. (shrink)

Roland Barthes was suspicious about the ability of music and voice to signify, as revealed in many of his writings. However, his somewhat limited views on music and voice need not to restrain from profiting his semiotic theorising and his reasoning, which can be adapted for musical instances in ways not envisaged by Barthes. The Neutral (Le Neutre) is a recurrent topic in Barthes’s oeuvre from his first book, Writing Zero Degree (1953) up to his 1978 lecture series on The (...) Neutral in Collège de France (published in 2002). This paper explores how Barthes’s Neutral may enhance a special kind of listening. The enigmatic sonorities emitted by the Invisible Choir in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) serve as the foil in this task, more precisely a phrase voiced by female altos and male tenors (“Nehmet hin meinen Leib [...]”, Act I). It is not its semantic content mediated by (written) language that is of interest here but how this phrase has been voiced, andfurthermore, how Barthes’s Neutral may be heard in and beneath it. Several commercially available live recordings made in Bayreuth have offered playground for listening to and for The Neutral. As my analysis shows, the audible Neutral is not a separate entity but works in conjunction with other modes of signification: visual, textual, biographical, spatial. (shrink)

Roland Barthes was suspicious about the ability of music and voice to signify, as revealed in many of his writings. However, his somewhat limited views on music and voice need not to restrain from profiting his semiotic theorising and his reasoning, which can be adapted for musical instances in ways not envisaged by Barthes. The Neutral (Le Neutre) is a recurrent topic in Barthes’s oeuvre from his first book, Writing Zero Degree (1953) up to his 1978 lecture series on The (...) Neutral in Collège de France (published in 2002). This paper explores how Barthes’s Neutral may enhance a special kind of listening. The enigmatic sonorities emitted by the Invisible Choir in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) serve as the foil in this task, more precisely a phrase voiced by female altos and male tenors (“Nehmet hin meinen Leib [...]”, Act I). It is not its semantic content mediated by (written) language that is of interest here but how this phrase has been voiced, andfurthermore, how Barthes’s Neutral may be heard in and beneath it. Several commercially available live recordings made in Bayreuth have offered playground for listening to and for The Neutral. As my analysis shows, the audible Neutral is not a separate entity but works in conjunction with other modes of signification: visual, textual, biographical, spatial. (shrink)

A feminist phenomenological analysis of voice, rooted in both the feminist understanding of the role of voice in identity, agency, and the creation of meaning, and the phenomenological thematization and theorization of phenomenal, lived experience, leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of the materiality of the voices with which we speak, and their role in both subjective and intersubjective experience. Starting from an analysis of the intertwined associations and imageries of the feminine, voice, and embodiment, I discuss (...) the denaturalization and abstraction of voice in standard narratives of voice and voice metaphorization, and the corresponding forgetting of the living, bodily voice. In looking to recall a re-naturalized and immanent corporeality and retrieve the material voice through an account of embodied vocality, I consider examples of the power and immediacy of the corporeal voice in the female operatic voice, and in contrast, the compromised agency and attenuated (inter)subjectivity which attends the impaired or lost physical voice. These vocal counterpoints of presence and absence are often separated by corporeal disturbance or limitation, underscoring the importance of corporeality and the material voice as intermediary between the individual and the social world. This sets the contours of a phenomenology of embodied voice and vocality, holding implications for accounts of identity and intersubjectivity, gendered vocality and expressive agency, and an intercorporeality mediated by the living material voice. (shrink)

This paper investigates the interaction of gender, disability and education in rural Iran, which is a relatively unexplored field of research. The responses of 10 female students with disabilities from Isfahan indicated that the obstacles they faced included marginalization, difficulties in getting from home to school, difficulties within the school building itself, and discrimination by teachers, classmates and school authorities. The data collected for the study contain a wide range of conservative gendered discourses, and show how traditional gender beliefs (...) interact with disability to aggravate the problems faced in education by young women with disabilities. It is hoped that the findings will raise awareness among policy-makers of the many formidable obstacles that make it difficult for young women with disabilities to achieve their full potential in education. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of mentoring and networking in the career development of global female managers. The paper is based on data collected from interviews with 50 senior female managers. The voices of the female managers illustrate some of the difficulties associated with informal organisational processes, in particular mentoring and networking, which hinder their career development. The findings confirm that female managers can miss out on global appointments because they lack mentors, role models, sponsorship, (...) or access to appropriate networks – all of which are commonly available to their male counterparts. The interviewees suggest that men, as the dominant group, may want to maintain their dominance by excluding women from the informal interactions of mentoring and networking. The findings further suggest that if females had more access to networks and mentors they could be socialised in both the formal and informal norms of the organisation and gain career advantages from these. The managers reveal that they encounter additional barriers in ‹a man’s world’ and remind us that there is still much to be changed. (shrink)

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter "what" she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, "Who is speaking?" and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, "It's me." Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with (...) the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the "devocalization of Logos," as the invariable privileging of _semantike_ over _phone_, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a "politics of the voice" wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather _who_ is speaking. (shrink)

Michèle Roberts: Female Genius and the Theology of an English Novelist Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, feminist analysis has tended to assume that the conditions of male normativity—reducing woman to the merely excluded "Other" of man—holds true in the experience of all women, not the least, women in the context of Christian praxis and theology. Beauvoir's powerful analysis—showing us how problematic it is to establish a position outside patriarchy's dominance of our conceptual fields—has helped (...) to explain the resilience of sexism and forms of male violence that continue to diminish and destroy women's lives because they cannot be seen as questionable. It has also, I would argue, had the unintended consequence of intensifying the sense of limitation, so that it becomes problematic to account for the work and lives of effective, innovative and responsible women in these contexts. In order to address this problematic issue, I use the life and work of novelist Michèle Roberts, as a case study in female genius within an interdisciplinary field, in order to acknowledge the conditions that have limited a singular woman's literary and theological aspirations but also to claim that she is able to give voice to something creative of her own.The key concept of female genius within this project draws on Julia Kristeva's notion of being a subject without implicitly excluding embodiment and female desire as in normative male theology, or in notions of genius derived from Romanticism. Roberts' work as a writer qualifies her as female genius in so far as it challenges aspects of traditional Christianity, bringing to birth new relationships between theological themes and scriptural narratives without excluding her singular female desires and pleasures as a writer. This paper—as part of a more inclusive, historical survey of the work of women writers crossing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and Christian theology over the last several centuries also asks whether, in order to do proper justice to the real and proven limitations imposed on countless women in these fields across global and historical contexts, we need, at the same time, to reduce the Christian tradition to something that is always antithetical or for which women can take absolutely no credit or bear no responsibility. (shrink)

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through (...) botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind. I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture. (shrink)

In the wake of the brave voices of the #metoo movement, Buddhist responses to sexual abuse have led to important questions about Buddhist sexual ethics and the female consort in Tibetan cultures. One issue raised by current debates is the question of who is an appropriate consort, a discourse that has historical precedent. These debates highlight the gaps left by the understudied history of consorts in Tibetan tantric communities. This research addresses that history through a study of (...) class='Hi'>female consort discourse in key scriptures of the Great Perfection from the fourteenth century. The text studied is The Ḍākki’s Path and Fruit, which is part of a corpus known as The Seminal Heart of the Ḍākinī. The scriptures are analyzed in terms of taxonomic discourse, interpreted with attention to structures of knowledge production as described by Foucault. It addresses the discursive transformations that facilitated the inclusion of women in the androcentric world of esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Overall, the argument is made that this scripture sheds light on how knowledge of women and sexuality was constructed in a web of ever-changing, contradicting, competing discourses that reflect an ambivalent misogyny that simultaneously promoted and subjugated women. (shrink)

These essays apply influential, pathbreaking psychological studies about women's lives to literature. In their analyses of fictional portraits, contributors both challenge and confirm psychological theories about female identity, about 'connection/separation' as developmental catalysts, and about the impact of gender on 'voice,' moral decision-making, and epistemology in relation to classical and contemporary literary texts, written by both women and men.