The article begins with an integrative theory of neurosis and with the notion of the “patriarchal mind,” which I conceive as the psycho-social foundation of what we call “civilisation” and proceed to characterize as a despotic and repressive activity of the father on the mother and on the child in the family, and also of an analogous relation between the intellect on the emotional and on the instinctual sub-selves in the individual mind. Next, I propose that patriarchy entails four (...) interrelated problems: violent authority; the eclipse of caring; the repression of instinct; and the invalidation of intuition; and point out that since these are evident in our well-recognized social problems, these may be traced down to the “patriarchal complex” that in turn defines patriarchal society. Finally, I develop the idea that not only is the patriarchal mind is embodied in each of the known interpersonal or character pathologies, but that each of these pathologies contributes to the systemic and cultural presence of the patriarchal mind. The corollary of this analysis is that the healing of both our interpersonal and social pathologies will depend on the healing of the patriarchal mind, which is conceivably possible to bring about through a specially designed education oriented to the balanced development of “three-brained beings,” in whom a balance has been achieved between the intellectual, emotional, and instinctive sub-selves that constitute our mind. (shrink)

This article examines how gender shapes the migration and settlement experiences of Mexican immigrant women and men. The article compares the experiences of families in which the husbands departed prior to 1965 to those in which the husbands departed after 1965 and argues that the lengthy spousal separations altered patterns of patriarchal authority and the traditional gendered household division of labor. This induced a trend toward more egalitarian conjugal relations upon settlement in the United States. Examining the changing contexts (...) of migration illuminates the fluid character of patriarchy's control in Mexican immigrant families. (shrink)

Katelis Viglas’ book: Jeremiah II Tranos. Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch (1536-1595) is a historical-theological description and analysis of the most important data and facts concerning the life and works of Jeremiah II Tranos, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 16th century. The book consists of a Prologue, which refers to the aim of the treatise and the method followed. In the Introduction there is a general outline of the era of Jeremiah II and its origins, as well (...) as a brief presentation of his contribution to the Greek Genus. The First Chapter is divided into three subchapters. The first subchapter provides a brief overview of the history of the birthplace of Jeremiah II, Anchialos, a city on the shores of the Black Sea, and describes patriarch’s character and education, along with an extensive reference to his teachers. In this subchapter information is included relative to Jeremiah’s life until his ordination as Metropolitan of Larissa. The second subchapter briefly narrates the glorious ordination of Jeremiah II to Patriarch of Constantinople. In the third subchapter of the First Chapter, the three breaks during Jeremiah II’ patriarchate –caused by the selfish ambitions of his competitors, who coveted the patriarchal throne– are recounted. The Second Chapter consists of four subchapters. In the first subchapter there are a brief reference to the life and religious beliefs of the founder of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and the interest and curiosity of the Lutherans in the situation of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The second subchapter of the Second Chapter contains biographical details of the Protestant scholar and philhellene Philip Melanchthon, and a reference to the first contact attempt of Lutherans with the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The third subchapter of the Second Chapter is divided into six other subsections. The first section of the third subchapter describes the way the relationships of the Lutheran theologians of Tubingen with Patriarch Jeremiah II developed and to the starting point of their correspondence. Yet, the Philhellenism of the German Hellenist Martin Crusius and the role he played in the correspondence are highlighted. The second section outlines Jeremiah II’ responses to each article of the Augsburg Confession send to him by the Tubingen theologians. The third section highlights the key points of the reply of the Tubingen theologians to the First Answer from Jeremiah II. The third section refers to the Second Answer from Jeremiah II. In the short fifth section there is a reference to the reply of the Tubingen theologians to the Second and the Third Answer from Jeremiah II. The sixth section provides information related to the publication of that correspondence. In the fourth subchapter of the Second Chapter there are general and evaluative judgments on the correspondence between Jeremiah II and the Tubingen theologians. The Third Chapter is divided into five subchapters. The first subchapter explains the ancient Roman calendars of Numa and Julius Caesar and their shortcomings. The second subchapter presents the findings of these imperfections by various scholars. The third subchapter describes the Gregorian Reform of the calendar. The fourth subchapter analyses the social situation within the Orthodox Church during the Gregorian Reform. The fifth subchapter aims to show the orthodox reaction of Jeremiah II to the Gregorian calendar and its causes. The Fourth Chapter is divided into two subchapters, of which the first is related to Jeremiah’s travels in Poland and the regulation by him of Church life in this country, while the second gives an overview of the circumstances, under which the foundation of the Russian Patriarchate took place. The Fifth Chapter is divided into three subchapters. The first subchapter examines Jeremiah II’s concern on various issues. The second subchapter deals with Jeremiah II’ concern on the education of the Greek Genus. The third subchapter explains the attitude of Jeremiah II towards the Pontifical Greek College in Rome. At the end of the treatise there is an Epilogue, with concluding remarks on the evaluation of the historical figure of Jeremiah II, his spiritual identity and the status of the Orthodox East under his leadership. An extensive Bibliography, a Chronology, an Index of Names, 21 Illustrations and 2 Maps, complete the book. (shrink)

In Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis, Michelle Madden Dempsey focuses on the dilemma prosecutors face when domestic violence victims are unwilling to cooperate in the criminal prosecution of their abusive partners. Starting from the premise that the ultimate goal should be putting an end to domestic violence, Dempsey urges prosecutors to act as feminists in deciding how to proceed in such cases. Doing so, Dempsey argues, will tend to make the character of the prosecutor’s community and state less (...) patriarchal and thus help stamp out domestic violence. This article analyzes two issues arising from Dempsey’s work: first, whether prosecutors can justifiably be viewed as representatives of their states and communities; and, second, how prosecutors committed to using their discretion to battle both domestic violence and patriarchy would go about determining in a particular case whether to pursue criminal charges against the wishes of a victim. (shrink)

That "The Classics of Western Spirituality" should regard the man Dante hailed as "beyond the human in contemplation," and St. Bonaventure believed to be the medieval rival of the greatest patristic contemplative worthy of a special volume is not surprising. Richard of St. Victor’s masterful analysis of the ascent of the mind to God in contemplative prayer and meditation, emphasizing the individual’s relationship to other individuals as the paradigm of how the Three Divine Persons are related in their inner life (...) of love, is at the same time of psychological interest for anyone attempting to identify and classify the various mystical states medieval philosophers felt were necessary to characterize their spiritual growth. Since the bulk of the present translation is devoted to Richard’s two major attempts to systematize the discipline needed to attain contemplation, known more generally as Benjamin Minor and Benjamin Major, one might wonder why the work is being reviewed in the present journal. But while the major interest of this volume will undoubtedly be for those interested in ascetic theology, for the influence of Richard on subsequent writers from St. Bonaventure to St. Teresa of Avila is profound, nevertheless the relatively short third portion of the work is of sufficient philosophical importance to merit at least a brief note, namely bk. 3 of The Trinity. One would hardly expect a work of this sort to come from the pen of a mystic, for what Richard sets out to do is nothing short of a purely rational or metaphysical analysis of the "Athanasian Creed," which was recited almost daily by the Canons of the Abbey of St. Victor during the twelfth century. Because the inner nature and life of the Trinity, unlike creation or the salvation history of God’s intervention in the affairs of man, is a necessary consequence of what medieval thinkers believed God to be, rather than what he chose to do, Richard was convinced that with sufficient ingenuity one could theorize fruitfully as to why God must possess the various attributes we believe him to have and which are set forth in the aforesaid "creed," which stresses both the unity of God, the divine nature and all the divine attributes, while continually reminding its confessor of the trinity of "persons." In the Anselmian tradition of "faith seeking understanding" Richard seeks "necessary reasons" why God should not only be one but three. Most medieval thinkers have considered the trinitarian character of the divine nature to be the most profound of all the mysteries of the Christian faith. While reason may at best refute objections to a trinity of persons in one divine nature, it can hardly be expected to provide positive support for the doctrine. Richard, on the contrary, believed that St. Anselm had found the key to the "divine processions" in the fact that God is perfect love, with all that this implies. It is obvious the experience of "love" as an interpersonal sharing of the deepest kind, something St. Paul enjoined upon the Christians of the "Church of Corinth," is a far cry from what Sartre seemed to have reached in writing L'etre et néant or what that term connotes to our age, but it is not unknown to contemporary psychologists. Duns Scotus described the "perfect lover" in a Richardian sense as "Perfecte diligens vult dilectum condiligi!" It is especially in bk. 3 of The Trinity that Richard argues that a personal nature that is "summum bonum" must contain more than one person, and need contain no more than three. For the philosopher of religion interested in Richard’s metaphysical analysis of the Godhead, it would be profitable to preface the reading of Zinn’s fine translation of bk. 3 with the selections from bk. 1.—A.B.W. (shrink)

Pregnancy-based employment discrimination has long been a topic of interest for gender inequality scholars and civil rights agencies. Prior work suggests that employer stereotypes and financial interests leave pregnant women vulnerable to being fired. We still know little, however, about women’s interpretations of their terminations and how employers justify such decisions in the face of arguably protective laws. This article provides much needed, in-depth analyses of such dynamics and a relational account of pregnancy-based employment discrimination claims. Elaborating on theoretical expositions (...) of power and research surrounding the patriarchal character of organizational life, we draw on unique quantitative and qualitative data from verified cases of pregnancy-based firing discrimination. Our analyses reveal a two-pronged legitimation process where employers symbolically vilified pregnant workers while simultaneously amplifying ostensibly meritocratic organizational procedures and concerns. Pregnancy discrimination plaintiffs attempted to counter employer arguments. Yet, their limited power within the organizational hierarchy along with the culturally resonant nature of employer logics—logics that seem gender-neutral but that reify gendered assumptions and prioritize business profit—place pregnant women at a considerable disadvantage. Without attending to such cultural and structural power imbalances and the relational processes that undergird them, pregnancy discrimination will remain a significant problem. (shrink)

My article discusses the character of Marla, the narrator’s lover, in the film Fight Club. Her only option, within the terms of the film’s logic, I argue, is to define her worth derivatively, by association with the narrator. Fight Club, then, despite its somewhat self-effacing attitude about the rejuvenation of masculinity that it portrays, reinforces a familiar patriarchal story: men’s sense of worth lies in their joint world-making activities. Women’s sense of worth lies in their attachment to individual (...) men who undertake these activities. My main argument builds upon three preliminary discussions. The first is a brief outline of the contours of the concept of self-respect. The second is an analysis of the links between gender, personhood and the grounds of self-respect. The third is an account of my approach to interpreting Fight Club given its many layers of irony. Drawing on these preliminary discussions, I examine two interpretations of the film’s social commentary— what I call the “gender-neutral” and the “gender-specific” interpretations. I show that on both of these readings the film implies that Marla, as a woman, must regain her self-respect through an intimate relationship with the narrator. (shrink)

Closely based on the dramatist’s personal experience, Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City offers a commentary on the life of the Protestant working class in the capital of Northern Ireland in the 1980s from a woman’s perspective. It shows the way eroticism is successfully used by the female characters as a source of emancipation as well as a means not only to secure their strong position in the private domain of the household, but also to challenge the (...) class='Hi'>patriarchal structures that prevail in the Irish public sphere. The analysis of the play proposed in this essay focuses on the contrast between the presentation of its male and female characters. I will demonstrate that, while the former group desperately cling to the idea of preserving the social status quo, the latter display a more progressive outlook on the social and sexual politics of the country. In particular, I will investigate how the tensions between the representatives of the two sexes reveal themselves in the corporal sphere. I will argue that, as opposed to the erotically-inhibited and physically-inarticulate male characters, the female dramatis personae take advantage of being more connected to their bodies and use their physicality in an erotic fashion to subvert the rules of the patriarchal system and its strict moral code that limits their social roles to those of respectful mothers, obedient sisters or virtuous wives. (shrink)

The _Platform Sutra_ comprises a wide range of important Chan/Zen Buddhist teachings. Purported to contain the autobiography and sermons of Huineng (638-713), the legendary Sixth Patriarch of Chan, the sutra has been popular among monastics and the educated elite for centuries. The first study of its kind in English, this volume offers essays that introduce the history and ideas of the sutra to a general audience and interpret its practices. Leading specialists on Buddhism discuss the text's historical background and its (...) vaunted legacy in Chinese culture. Incorporating recent scholarship and theory, chapters include an overview of Chinese Buddhism, the crucial role of the _Platform Sutra _in the Chan tradition, and the dynamics of Huineng's biography. They probe the sutra's key philosophical arguments, its paradoxical teachings about transmission, and its position on ordination and other institutions. The book includes a character glossary and extensive bibliography, with helpful references for students, general readers, and specialists throughout. The editors and contributors are among the most respected scholars in the study of Buddhism, and they assess the place of the _Platform Sutra_ in the broader context of Chinese thought, opening the text to all readers interested in Asian culture, literature, spirituality, and religion. (shrink)

El propósito de esta contribución es demostrar el aporte del pensarniento hobbesiano a la idea de la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres, y confrontarlo con el de su objetor B. Spinoza. En sus obras Elements of law y De Cive, Thomas Hobbes va a cuestionar la autoridad patriarcal y la desigualdad entre hombres y mujeres como expresión de una ley de la naturaleza. Por el contrario, va hablar del carácter convencional de la sujeción de las mujeres y va a exponer (...) que la familia funciona bajo la misma regla de operación de los estados, mediante el pacto. Este aparte hobbesiano parece haber reunido poca resonancia entre los filósofos posteriores, pues el único que lo tuvo en cuenta para contravenirlo fue B. Spinoza. Spinoza combatió el punto de partida hobbesiano de que la desigualdad existente entre hombres y mujeres es producto de una convención o acuerdo. Pero, tal vez a su pesar, convino que son la educación y la cultura los agentes de dicha diferenciación. This paper is aimed at showing Hobbes's contribution to the notion of quality between men and women, in opposition to Spinoza. In his books Elements of Law and De Cive, Thomas Hobbes challenges the allegation that patriarchal authoritarism and inequality between men and women are laws of nature. He assents the conventional character of women's submission, and contends tha the family functions under the same operational rule as the Stares: Agreement. This Hobbesian position seems to have had little echo arnong later philosophers, being Spinoza the only one who addressed it in order to criticize it .Spinoza opposed the Hobbesian view that inequality between men and women is the result of agreement; bur, perhaps or his own defeat, he accepted that the causes of the difference are education and culture. (shrink)

Women in patriarchal culture are treated unfairly and seen as second-class beings. Their presence is considered as something incidental and not essential. For this reason, this paper examines one of the short stories by Muna Masyari, a female writer from Pamekasan, Madura Sortana. Matchmaking and the myth of the Madurese have put Madurese women in a state of oppression and unfavorable conditions because of the binding culture that dominates women. Muna, using the Sortana short story as a means to (...) advocate for the value of feminism which in the context of Madurese culture is taboo to fight against. This study aims to explore the existence of women who are represented by female characters called Embu. This research method uses qualitative-descriptive research by analyzing the content of the story, looking at sentences and paragraphs related to the issue of the existence of women in Sortana short story. The theoretical concept used is existentialist feminism. From the results of the analysis, it is known that the gender injustice experienced by the Embu character in the short story is in the form of marginalization, subordination, and stereotypes. Meanwhile, through his actions, the Embu figure has the awareness to become the Self in order to be free from the Other. (shrink)

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do not (...) address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. (shrink)

As they say in the Scripture, the directors of AvtoZAZ and AvtoVAZ are baptized the same way, and both prefer the Mercedes. Mr. Gundyaev, better known as Patriarch Cyril, prefers the "Mercedes" Cadillac. And he himself, and his parable or canonical Bible did not read, or they are familiar with an exceptionally rare version of this book, where the main character does not seem to be Jesus of Nazareth, but Dracula in Leslie Nilsson's performance. The subordinates Gundyaeva and he (...) himself are the best experts in the world to discredit the image of Orthodoxy and the inevitable dispersal of believers in other faiths. (shrink)

This essay proposes a re-reading of the process of establishing the post-colonial nation-state in Algeria, and of the dynamics of citizenship in the light of gender, in order to illuminate the hesitations of the political class as to the meaning of the principle of universal emancipation and sexual equality in the private sphere of personal status. Whereas up to now readings studying the nature of the Algerian political regime and its ideological discourse have been solely concerned with denouncing the "moribund" (...) character of modernism and/or "Algerian-style" socialism, the argument will deal mainly with the private domestic sphere in order to expose ideological references and representations that are decidedly traditionalist, if not archaic, as regards gender relations in the Algerian family, idealized by the legislation underlying the Family Code (1984/2005). Finally a detailed review, based on an analysis by gender, of the minutes of parliamentary debates in the legislatures from 1982 to 1984 will demonstrate the highly patriarchal nature of the cultural representations of Algeria’s decision-makers, who are reluctant to extend "modernization" to the female population. (shrink)

Angels of Power, by Australian lesbian playwright Sandra Shotlander, illustrates political strategies described by American lesbian philosopher Jeffner Allen. In the play three female members of Australian parliament align to force regulation of new reproductive technologies. Using essentialist, materialist, liberal, and radical feminist arguments, the characters practice sinuous strategies through loading and layering female signs (intertextuality) in order to eradicate patriarchal signification and reenact a contemporary version of ancient Amazons taking over the Acropolis.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. China (...) has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

In Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, and her film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, she engages with the symbolism of The Red Shoes fairytale as first depicted in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale and later developed by the Powell and Pressburger film of the same name. In Bush’s versions of the tale she attempts to find a space of agency for the main female protagonist in a plot structure over-determined by patriarchal narrative and symbolic (...) logic. I will argue that it is through her own use of mystical symbolism — the Line, the Cross and the Curve — mediated through the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual — that she breaks the ‘spell’ of the red shoes story where the main female character can escape the gender specific ‘curse’ of the red shoes. (shrink)

Over the last few decades the arts and humanities have seen an increase in interest in questions surrounding gender. Not only did the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s see the growth of feminism as an academic discipline as well as a political movement, but in recent years there has been a huge expansion of research into Gender Studies, Queer Theory, and LGBT Studies. In essence, these disciplines all offer a critique of the system known as patriarchy, in which the ‘rule of (...) the father’ legitimates the exercise of political power and social control by men. In turn, this critique raises questions about alternatives to the patriarchal system, and it is in this context that some theorists and historians have been interested in the system known as ‘matriarchy’. In so doing, they are linking back to the work undertaken by such late nineteenth-century thinkers as the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan and, in particular, the Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen. From 1841 to 1845 Bachofen served as Professor for Roman Law at the University of Basel, and it is with the cultural and intellectual life of this city that his work is most often connected. Now Bachofen’s outlook is well summarized by the title of his 1861 work, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World. In it Bachofen proposed that humankind had undergone four phases of cultural evolution, which he described as hetaerism; matriarchy; the Dionysian; and the Apollonian. The contrast between the Dionysian and the Apollonian exercised an influence on another thinker connected with Basel, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche ; and it was in the Nietzschean circles of the early twentieth century in German-speaking Europe that Bachofen’s work came to the fore. That this happened was due in no small measure to the figure who stands at the centre of Chiara Gianni Ardic’s new study, whose title translates into English as The Flight of the Gods: Myth, Matrarchy, and Fundamentalism in Ludwig Klages. For it was the circle around the charismatic thinker Ludwig Klages, arguably the most significant figure in a group of thinkers and writers known as the ‘Cosmic Circle’, that Bachofen’s ideas found a fruitful reception. The significance of Klages in the history of philosophy has frequently been overlooked, deliberately ignored, or even actively suppressed; so it is extremely welcome that Dr Ardic has undertaken to research so thoroughly the interest in matriarchy demonstrated by Klages and the members of the circle around him. (shrink)

Rabbinic Judaism is often described as an exclusively male-dominated and patriarchal religious system. However, the structure of the core of this patriarchal religious system is deeply feminine, with a strong relational dimension. Torah studies, which only men had access to, are secondary in character: a life lead according to the commandments is necessary but not enough. God does not force humankind to subordination, but he gives answers to voluntary gifts. Man gives voluntarily, God answers voluntarily. The right (...) relation to God is not forced, determined or manipulative, but it builds on reciprocity and response. (shrink)

Melchizedek’s meeting with Abraham in the King’s Valley would mark the history of the chosen people. As king of Salem and priest of the Almighty God, Melchizedek meets the patriarch with bread and wine and then blesses him in the name of the God they both served. Assuming this liturgical ritual Abraham offers Melchizedek a tenth of everything, by this acknowledging and accepting his sacerdotal service. Even though at a first sight their gestures are somewhat natural, we will understand going (...) through our study that the attitude of each character implies a deeper significance. This is emphasized firstly in psalms, in the context of several Messianic sentences, which refer to an eternal priesthood that finds its origins not in the service of Aaron, but in that of Melchizedek. This text would generate and fundament later the Pauline discourse on the priesthood of Jesus Christ and implicitly of the Christians. The resemblance of Melchizedek with Jesus Christ is maximized by Saint Apostle Paul who states that the king of Salem was “without father or mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life”. Who is, in fact, this mysterious character? Why did the Hebrew want to identify him with a known biblical character? What are the reasons that determined the Christian authors to recompose the history of this character? These are just a few of the questions we intend to answer through the research that we are about to present. (shrink)

How can Africans escape the control of the complex power relationships established during Colonization and successfully achieve self-development? More importantly, and the primary concern of this book, can African female characters ever hope to arrive at such individuation given the dual challenges of the power structures defined and enforced by European colonizers and the patriarchal structures that contort issues related to gender? Tracing Personal Expansion reads late 20th Century works by African female novelists Buchi Emecheta, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Calixthe (...) Beyala as modern Bildungsromane, novels of self-development, to reveal the dynamics, complexities, and challenges the characters and authors experience. By exploring the possibility of self-development in African female protagonists, this engrossing work augments existing feminist critiques that have analyzed the possibilities and potentials for the individuation of mostly Western, mostly European female characters. (shrink)

The story of “Kutukan Dapur” by Eka Kurniawan presents a colonial setting: Dutch colonialism and postcolonialism in the image of two characters, Diah Ayu and Maharani. Maharani is in patriarchal shackles, which is ingrained in her family life and social structure. Meanwhile, Diah Ayu is in the bonds of Dutch colonialism, which is brought back by the author. Both are in a subaltern position but in different conditions. Based on this description, this research asks two questions which are analyzed (...) using Gayatri Spivak's subaltern theory, (1) what the position of Diah Ayu and Maharani in "Kutukan Dapur" short story, and (2) how the subaltern is constructed through the efforts of the two characters to get out of that position is. The method used is qualitative. The narratives are classified and analyzed to understand the subaltern's position and construction and its resistance efforts. This research indicates that Maharani and Diah Ayu are subalterns of Maharani dominated by patriarchy, while Diah Ayu is dominated by Dutch colonialism. Maharani fought back, but only with an idea or ideas. Unlike Diah Ayu, she is able to fight in a real form. However, as the author, Eka is trapped in a biased construction in addition to gender bias and representation. In subaltern studies, representation is only a tool towards more real domination. The two figures seem to be fighting against the power structure (colonial and patriarchal) but are still trapped in the dominance of the other. (shrink)

In her astute study of contemporary Arab women writers, Anastasia Valassopoulos begins by noting the pitfalls of much existing criticism of writers such as El Saadawi and Djebar in the West. Citing Amal Amireh’s article on the fraught history of the reception of El Saadawi in Egypt and in Europe, Valassopoulos comments that Arab women’s literature tends to be seen as ‘documentary’, and this obscures the ‘core issue of representation’ as it is explored and challenged by women writers. In the (...) face of this omission, the present article explores a selection of works by El Saadawi and Djebar from an aesthetic perspective. El Saadawi and Djebar use literary writing as a means to escape the constraints placed upon them by patriarchy, as well as by colonialism, and uphold creativity and poetry as a possible release from imprisonment. This article also uses Glissant’s and Bhabha’s concepts of literary opacity and the right to narrate as a partial framework for a reading of the relation between writing, freedom and aesthetic form in the works of El Saadawi and Djebar. El Saadawi and Djebar purposefully deploy a form of self-effacement, both in their autobiographical representations and in their portraits of female characters, also akin to Trinh Minh-ha’s strategy in Woman, Native, Other. Minh-ha’s dissemination of the writing voice, and the affirmation of collective solidarity between multiple but internally fragmentary feminist positions, serves, then, as a further theoretical backdrop for El Saadawi’s and Djebar’s use of opacity and the right to narrate as tools in an active feminist resistance to sexist and racist discourses. Both El Saadawi and Djebar use their writing to conceive women’s liberation from various forms of imprisonment, and they figure women’s fractured, convoluted and at times opaque self-expression as a direct form of resistance to both patriarchal and colonial oppression. (shrink)

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different (...) fictional men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them. (shrink)

This essay examines the character of biblical Yael oscillating between two patriarchal mythical images of femininity, as portrayed by Gilbert and Gubar—“the angel” and “the monster.” The argument arising is that the transition between these two polar and opposite characters occurs as an extreme response to oppression and injury, followed by a subversive and defying transformation. The essay points to the manner in which Yael’s story, which embodies this transformation, demonstrates how the female body is at the center (...) of this conversion, not only as a site for patriarchal control and taming, but also as embodying a text of protest and opposition to this oppression. Yael’s story, as illustrated by this analysis, is revealed as a subversive tradition with radical feminist insights. (shrink)

Expecting Saving Mr. Banks to be a jolly jaunt about the creative development of the movie Mary Poppins (1964), I found myself waiting endlessly for the “jolliness” to begin—it never did. In fact, rather than joy, there was an ever-present sensation of tension as I watched the film. Having moved house myself in recent days (during a Queensland heat wave), the scenes of the Goff family leaving their home and trekking across hot, dusty Queensland were very emotional. However, seeing the (...) family patriarch Travers Goff (played by Colin Farrell) swig from an alcohol flask in a desperate manner told me that his was no “routine” family move. And, certainly, arriving at their destination—a dilapidated ranch home—shed even more light on the Goff family’s predicament: alcoholism and the cycle of employment and unemployment. Further, it is the downstream consequences of the family predicament that fuel the identity and behaviour of Mary Poppins—a fictional character created by Travers’ daughter, a. (shrink)

This article explores different feminist care discourses and their ethical implications and relates them to the biblical ethos of loving one’s neighbour. The latter is presented as a rich tradition of socio-historical, theological and ethical relevance for contemporaneous debates on the transformation towards a caring society. Nevertheless, it needs tobe liberated from patriarchal attitudes and other exclusive hermeneutics in Christianity (which is exemplified in a case study of Protestant moral discourse and societal practice) as well as from ignorance and (...) prejudice in secular social science, humanities and public discourse. Hence, the article suggests rediscovering the biblical contexts and political implications of the commandment to love thy neighbour: its character as diversified social rights inspired by the Exodus, the concept of sanctification as attention to the world we live in and the prohibition of images as a resource for the development of humane respectful attitudes (integrity of the “other”) and politics of care. (shrink)

Hua-yen Buddhism, the pre-eminent philosophical form of Buddhism in early T'ang dynasty the China, was instrumental in laying the conceptual foundations for virtually all subsequent East Asian Buddhism. This Hua-yen legacy includes Ch' an/Zen and Pure Land, the non-philosophical forms of Buddhism that came to dominance in the centuries to follow. In this sense, Fa-tsang (643-712), the third patriarch and foremost philosopher of Hua-yen, can be considered one of the forefathers of East Asian Buddhism today. By focusing on one element (...) in Fa-tsang's thought, this essay attempts to articulate the overall character of Hua-yen thought and, in the process, to shed light on its connection to other dimensions of the Buddhist tradition. -/- In Fa-tsang's monumental Wu-chiao chang (Treatise on the Five Teachings ), the mental image of a house is taken to model the dharmakãya universe as a whole. On Fa-tsang's account, since any one part of the house - his example is a rafter - is a condition for the house as a whole, that one part through its complex relations encompasses the whole house and is therefore able to reveal it comprehensively. What he calls the "one flavor" of the dharmakãya can be fully tasted in any one part. Adopting Fa-tsang's sytematic principle and taking the concept of bodhicitta as the focal point study, this essay attempts to show the "one flavor" of Fa-tsang's Buddhist thought through the treatment he gives to the traditional idea of the "thought of enlightenment.". (shrink)

Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Shiva Hemmati This paper examines Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre through Irigaray’s notion of feminine divine in order to argue how Charlotte Brontë’s main characters achieve their autonomous gendered identity by expressing their erotic desire. It discusses the resistance of Charlotte Brontë’s female protagonist, Jane Eyre, to the dichotomies of active subject/passive object, self/other, body/mind, passion/intellect, and the domination/submission through her ethical and intersubjective relationship (...) with Rochester, her counterpart, rather than being an object of his desire. It is argued how Jane challenges these dualities of patriarchal society and the logic of the same by expressing her erotic nature. Where the patriarchal society tries to confine women in the patriarchal culture, Brontë develops Jane within and against those confines and allows her to experience her female desire by exploring the internal and external nature. Jane’s liberation from the dualities can be read through the lens of Irigaray’s feminine divine which focuses on women’s autonomous gendered identity and creates a balance between their passion and reason. Charlotte Brontë indicates how women are able to achieve individuality, social standing, and subjective identity by expressing their female desire. (shrink)

One particularly interesting example can be found in the character M'Baku, a mountain warrior whose abstention from meat runs afoul of stereotypes about what a vegetarian looks like and, in so doing, challenges racist iconographies of Black masculinity. As Carol Adams argued in her landmark work, The Sexual Politics of Meat, in the United States, meat‐eating is a highly visible reminder and reinforcer of patriarchal dominance. Erik Killmonger comes to Wakanda as a conqueror, taking up his late father's (...) mission to end the country's isolationist foreign policy and stage armed insurgencies the world over. The irony of Killmonger's plan, wielding the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, is palpable. Killmonger's violence is similarly deliberate and, in its own way, is meant to honor the rage, yearnings, and aspirations of all those subjugated to, and displaced and discarded by, colonialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the OdysseyErwin F. CookLillian Doherty. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. viii 1 220 pp. Cloth, $37.50.Siren Songs makes a significant contribution to feminist literature on Homer. Most importantly, Doherty is able to show in detail how the very sensibilities that make Homer appealing to the modern reader can seduce the (...) unwary into accepting the poem’s androcentric frame of reference. If her book’s ideological model based on gender and class hierarchy leads to repeated imprecisions and reductionism, this affects its argument in detail, but not in outline.Doherty’s methodology is objectivist, assumes an essentialist definition of the female, and consciously avoids positioning the Odyssey in the context of archaic Greek gender constructions. One place where she at least acknowledges that the Odyssey originated in a specific culture exposes a problem some will have with this book: “It may be objected that my conclusions are hardly surprising given the aristocratic focus of early Greek epic and the patriarchal norms of archaic Greek society. In this context, it may be urged, the surprise is to see lower-class and female characters even this fully represented” (170). She responds that her conclusions refute arguments by Farron and Rose that in giving prominence to female and lower-class characters Homer makes an antiaristocratic statement. This tactic runs the risk of reducing her own efforts to a book-length refutation of a pair of articles.Many Homerists will also be surprised to read that “the production and reception of a narrative text is never a direct act of communication between the author and the external audience but a ‘bracketed’ or mediated communication” (87). Thus, the poem’s external audience is not “composed of living human beings, who have read and judged the epic since its creation, but... a hypothetical audience posited by the epic narrator” (19). Further, no true repetition exists in literature (182–83). These assertions derive from critical approaches to the modern novel, and although true to a certain extent of all literature they are arguably least true of poetry composed in performance using metrical formulae.Chapter 1 surveys scholarship on whether Penelope recognizes Odysseus before the mnesterophonia. Doherty argues that Penelope’s motivation remains obscure because of an accumulation of narrative indeterminacies created by multiple focalization (45–46; though cf. her apparent assumptions on 143). She lauds Felson-Rubin and Winkler for their insistence on regarding Penelope as an agent capable of acting in her own self-interest, and equal to her husband in metis. Yet they ultimately fail to stand outside the poem’s androcentric frame of [End Page 461] reference and to see that Penelope’s excellence is based on traits she shares with males. It thus becomes necessary to establish narrative openings that expose “instabilities within ideology” (52) or permit the reader “to project active and even subversive female subject positions” (63). Narrative redundancies serving to reinforce the androcentric frame must also be acknowledged, however, for opening the text may inadvertently render its androcentric frame more palatable.Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct the poem’s internal and external audiences. Doherty argues that these audiences included women. Although Eumaeus’ ability to evaluate the beggar’s storytelling ability proves he is no stranger to epic performance, he “must be considered an ‘overhearer’ rather than a member of the regular audience” (72–73). Eumaeus can, however, support a very different view of class relationships in Homer: when Telemachus appears unexpectedly, Eumaeus kisses his eyes and greets him as a father greets a long-absent son, and Telemachus addresses him as atta; Eumaeus is able to buy a slave on his own; and he may have an advisory role at court since he says he used to question people claiming to have seen his master.The Nekuia is central to Doherty’s project in these chapters. Odysseus’ decision to pause after his catalogue of women divides the Nekuia “roughly along gender lines, and draws attention to the fact that the internal audience of Phaeacians is also marked for gender” (67). In her approval of Odysseus’ tale, Arete... (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractThis essay reads expressive work by Peju Alatise as an experimental Afro-matriarchal visual language emerging from Nigeria. Initiating a conscious confrontation of neo-colonial patriarchy in contemporary African art, Alatise develops a radical womanist voice to question the monologue of Afro-patriarchal pronouncements around which globalization is emerging from the former western colonies in Africa. The essay positions Alatise in historical perspective perpendicular to her body of work, highlighting her contribution to the vocabulary of emergent Afro-matriarchal aesthetics germinating in the Third (...) world. The playful imaginary leap in Alatise's work is unpredictable, as her characters jump across traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, installations and performance arts. The transdisciplinary creativity coming from Alatise's resistance is not simply reactive: she espouses cultural initiatives grounding a difference that is independent of patriarchal cultural hegemony. Her work is therefore a proactive engagement engendering the foundations of an Afro-matriarchal discourse in Nigerian art, while contributing to a genre reexamining the colonial politics of women configuration of space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 71-98MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Hospitality after the Death of GodTracy McNultyPierre Klossowski's fiction has been only sporadically published in English, and largely dismissed as perverse erotica or soft-core porn. When his 1965 trilogy Les lois de l'hospitalité was partially translated in English (under the title Roberte, ce soir & The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes), its Library of Congress classification characterized it simply as "erotic (...) fiction—French." Even in France, Klossowski has become the very signifier of perversion. His artwork graces the cover of Serge André's L'imposture perverse and of numerous erotic novels, he has been "diagnosed" as a pervert by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and unironic readers of his Sade mon prochain hail him as Sade's disciple and heir.1Admittedly, the larger stakes of Klossowski's work are easily obscured by its free adaptation of the stock themes of libertine literature. His fictional works, like his visual compositions (essentially representations of rape scenes, often on historical themes—Diana and Actaeon, the Rape of Lucretia), explore the conflict between a woman's chaste moral attitude and her gradual surrender to an assailant's advances. The Laws of Hospitality concerns the erotic awakening of "hospitality" in a woman, which exposes a contradiction within her moral character and reveals her symbolic identity to be without foundation. Its protagonist Octave, who bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, is a collector of artworks that eroticize the moment of moral hesitation experienced by women submitting to the sexual advances of a chance stranger—or even a "spiritual" apparition. His "laws of hospitality" are the fruit of his desire to experience this operation firsthand; they name a practice wherein the master of the house "offers" his wife to fortuitous guests, in order to savor the moment of her surrender.However, the stakes of Klossowski's "perverse" meditations are very different from the Sadeian project of uprooting religious morality. Sade challenges the patriarchal and religious authorities of his day by demonstrating that the paternal signifier on which their laws are based is without foundation. In proving that the law cannot hold [End Page 71] up against the repeated assaults of libertinage, he mounts a systematic deconstruction of the symbolic order of language by the real of jouissance. But although Klossowski may share Sade's perverse drive to "humiliate the law with the object,"2 his target is not the signifier as such, but rather the imaginary consistency afforded by what he calls the "grammatical fiction of the 'I,'" the illusion of autonomous personhood. The "object" he confronts it with is not the natural "truth" of jouissance, but rather the feminine object who disrupts the identity of the "master" who offers her.Klossowski's reflections on the special status of femininity in Enlightenment culture—at once marginal and singularly "extimate"—have never been fully appreciated, despite their enormous interest for the study of culture. In a way unique among contemporary authors, Klossowski sheds light on Jacques Lacan's enigmatic insight that the cultural importance of the feminine object consists in its sublimated status as an "object raised to the dignity of the Thing" [Lacan 112]. His fiction underscores the close ties between the feminine and what Freud called das Ding, the Thing uncannily internal to subjectivity that Lacan later identified with the function of the Nebenmensch, as the apotheosis of the Christian idea of the prochain, or neighbor [Lacan 151–52].Although Klossowski's erotic scenario invites comparisons with Sade's and Fourier's utopian calls to dissolve the privative boundaries between subjects, what he understands by "hospitality" is not the abolition of personal identity, but rather the staging of its internal contradiction.Hospitality, at the Limits of the LawThe act of hospitality—whose theological and philosophical origins this former Dominican novice and Latin scholar was intimately acquainted with—concerns a very particular tension. Etymologically, the host is the "master," the one who "eminently personifies" identity: not only his own identity, but also that of the group in whose... (shrink)

The criticism of “traditional,” “toxic,” or “patriarchal” masculinity in both academic and popular venues recognizes that there is some sense in which the character traits and tendencies that are associated with masculinity are structurally connected to oppressive, gendered social practices and patriarchal social structures. One important theme of criticism centers on the gender distribution of emotional labor, generally speaking, but this criticism is also particularly meaningful in the context of heterosexual romantic relationships. I begin with the premise (...) that there is a gendered and asymmetrical distribution in how much emotional labor is performed, but I also consider that there might be meaningful and informative distinctions in what kind of emotional labor is characteristically performed by different genders. Specifically, I argue that the social norms around stoicism and restricted emotional expression are masculine-coded forms of emotional labor, and that they are potentially prosocial. Responding to structural and interpersonal asymmetries of emotional labor could well involve supplementing or better cultivating this aspect of male socialization rather than discarding it. (shrink)

This paper intends to explain the problem of structural injustice. The Rawlsian theory of justice is problematic due to the reality of positional differences. The assumptions of Rawls are put into question. Oppression, according to Iris Marion Young, is social in character. Fair opportunity is not enough. To elaborate this critique, this study presents the exclusion of individuals with handicap, the problem of global justice, and the situation of women in patriarchal cultures. Some social rules and the behavior (...) of people discriminate the powerless. For instance, particular standards in society promote the high sense of respectability for professionals but not the respect for the equal dignity of persons. Procedures, laws, and policies manifest the prejudice against others. Beyond Rawls, the pursuit of justice and democratic inclusion, it is argued, requires overcoming unjust structures. (shrink)

One of the chief difficulties we encounter as modern readers in perceiving the artistry of biblical narrative is precisely that we have lost most of the keys to the conventions out of which it was shaped. The professional Bible scholars have not offered much help in this regard, for their closest approximation to the study of convention is form criticism, which is set on finding recurrent regularities of pattern rather than the manifold variations upon a pattern that any system of (...) literary convention elicits; moreover, form criticism uses these patterns for excavative ends to support hypotheses about the social functions of the text, its historical evolution, and so forth. . . . The most crucial case in point is the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances. Three times a patriarch is driven by famine to a southern region where he pretends that his wife is his sister, narrowly avoids a violation of the conjugal bond by the local ruler, and is sent away with gifts. Twice Hagar flees into the wilderness from Sarah's hostility and discovers a miraculous well, and that story itself seems only a special variation of the recurrent story of bitter rivalry between a barren, favored wife and a fertile co-wife or concubine. That situation, in turn, suggests another oft-told tale in the Bible, of a woman long barren who is vouchsafed a divine promise of progeny, whether by God himself or through a divine messenger or oracle, and who then gives birth to a hero. Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of, among other works, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre and Defenses of the Imagination. He has written a general literary study of biblical narrative, of which this essay forms a chapter. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to highlight the neglected fundamental notion of Motherhood as an ethical principle within Chinese philosophy, particularly in Taoism. Traditionally, it has been relegated to the realm of the Yin-Principle or the Feminine, serving as a complementary as well as opposite pole to the Yang- or Masculine-Principle. However, this interpretation would lead to the narrowing of the primordial essence and potentially misinterpret the fundamental ethos of Taoism. This exploration has implications that reach beyond its very theme. (...) Through the discussions within contemporary Confucianism surrounding concepts like Tian-Xia (天下, All under Heaven), Qinqin (亲亲, Family), or role ethics, it becomes evident that a patriarchal emphasis often prevails, overshadowing the maternal character of Chinese Philosophy and Culture. In contrast to monotheistic traditions where an almighty God creates ex-nihilo (out of nothing), Chinese mythology, as seen in the stories of Pangu and Nüwa, depicts an archaic development of the cosmos, distinct from the creation myths found in Western religions. Notably, the goddess Nüwa is credited with the creation of human beings. In the following, I will explore the ethical dimensions of motherhood within Chinese philosophical traditions, notably within the intertwined contexts of Confucianism, Sinicized Buddhism, and particularly Taoism. Through this examination, my objective is to scrutinize the ethical and cultural underpinnings of Confucianism by juxtaposing the interplay between Confucian tenets like Ren (仁, benevolence, humanity) and self-cultivation with maternal ethical principles. This will underscore the differences between maternal and paternal roles within familial relationships and unveil the implicit authoritarianism inherent in Confucian paternalism. (shrink)

In his work "Religion and Church in the History of Ukraine," V.Lipinsky primarily answers the question: Did Volodymyr the Great accept Christianity in the time when Byzantium was still in connection with Rome and the prince was "Uniate", but "Orthodox"? Volodymyr the Great accepted Christianity in time when there was no official gap between Byzantium and Rome, but the relationship between these two Christian hierarchies was already very tense from the days of Photius, which is about a century before Vladimir (...) baptism. The controversy over the primacy between the Pontiffs and the Constantinople Patriarchs did not accept yet the character of the complete rupture and these two hierarchies, arguing with zeal among themselves, all of them mutually recognized. In this mutual recognition of the church hierarchy, there was a connection between the two churches, which already differed considerably in their spirit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Work of Alterity: Bataille and LacanJean Dragon (bio)The topic of alterity may appear at first to be beyond the scope of Bataille’s work, but it is from such questioning that his practice of writing takes its full contours and questions the renewal of literary textuality.Strangely, Bataille fights against writing, an attitude that shows a will to disappear in order to reach sovereignty. Writing, in such a context, supports (...) not only certain useful figures for his particularly heterogeneous works but also the presence of alterity. Feminine imagos, set as the literary equivalent of the eradication of meaning and words, act as levers from which a character produces itself or rather disarticulates and vanishes.Bataille’s fight against writing shows strong similarities to some Lacanian notions: the subject, pleasure (“jouissance”), and, of course, woman. Before trying to map out this perilous comparison—there is no possible perfect transition between the two—we must first extract the significant elements that make it possible. To this end, we propose some reflections on Bataille’s concepts of Oedipus and castration. In so doing, we will be in a better situation to link Lacan and Bataille’s works but also to understand where Lacan has been inspired by Bataille and how Lacan distinguishes himself in his interpretation of the imaginary, the symbolic, the Law, and feminine imagos—especially in the way Lacan, contrary to Bataille, “eradicates” alterity.These questions are necessary steps in opening up a reflection inspired by the work of Bataille and in our desire to actualize purposes yet also extend unresolved polemic effects which this paper can only partially address. To present the necessity of such polemical reflections fits Bataille’s thought as well, which refuses to conclude and takes its meaning from throwing away all possible speech.Feminine imagos are an essential leitmotif in Bataille’s narratives and, more importantly, a cohesion factor for his thought that transcends all domains of writing to give a foundation to the works. 1 With themes such as transgression, subversion, and the [End Page 31] renewal of the Law, we reach an aporia not only of Bataille’s text but also, as Susan Rubin-Suleiman puts it, of literary modernity:What does appear to me certain is that there will be no genuine renewal, either in a theory of the avant-garde or in its practices, as long as every drama, whether textual or sexual, continues to be envisaged—as in Bataille’s pornography and in Harold Bloom’s theory of poetry—in terms of a confrontation between an all-powerful father and a traumatized son, a confrontation staged across and over the body of the mother.[86–87] 2Indeed, if we look at the autofictional purposes and the literary production of Bataille, we must underline an “aporia” in the subversive nature of his texts. This challenge to Bataille generally focuses on his literary works without considering his theoretical works beyond some “canonical” titles. Nevertheless, the lesser-known texts may offer another reading of Bataille’s eroticism and defuse criticism strictly centered on the supposedly pornographic and phallocentric content of novels like L’histoire de l’oeil and Madame Edwarda.Before branding the works of Bataille as “sexist,” we must consider that he was one of the first male authors of his generation to denounce the “castration” dominating society and individuals. Mario Perniola, discussing a text of Georges Bataille, 3 emphasizes his condemnation of imperialism behind the use of many terms: “the imperialist image of the eagle, even when it presents itself with the attributes of revolution, unsuccessfully hides its Promethean and Icarian pretensions.” 4 This interpretation finds an echo in another text of Bataille, “L’oeil pinéal,” where Bataille directly links the castration to the myth of Prometheus: “the legend of Prometheus is linked to the castration complex,” 5 says Bataille. Perniola’s words point directly to the patriarchal order upon which this imperialism lies, disguising itself as revolution; they show Bataille’s profound disagreement with such a social and individual foundation.It is also difficult to affirm the predominance of a phallocentric stance in Bataille. The oedipal figures, for example, are much too paradoxical in their modes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Texts and Icons in Heidegger’s Metaphysical TraditionMichael James Bennett (bio)[End Page 26]This essay is about texts that draw attention to themselves as texts, that is, as material, graphical figures, rather than as more or less efficiently pellucid semantic relays. In other words, it is about what happens when texts behave like images. In what follows I examine a series of philosophical contexts where this question appears to be at (...) issue. I claim that one way of understanding what’s going on in these contexts is that here the image-form of a text becomes a kind of icon. I begin by reflecting on a prejudice that belongs, according to Heidegger, to the “history of metaphysics”: the notion that it would be better, clearer, and less ambiguous to replace all reliance on images with self-effacing, transparent words. My goal here is to demonstrate the existence of an alternative historical trend that defends an opposite view. I compare a defense of iconography by Byzantine patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople, as well as the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, with works by two latter-day Heideggerians, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, who respond to the inherited problematic of non-referential, iconic texts. These responses suggest that non-semantic image-creation, as much as non-semantic verbal play, is the pre-conceptual condition of conceptuality. This essay presents a new way of understanding the philosophical issues that connect ancient and medieval discussions about icons and images with twentieth-century concerns about language.In her study of medieval European manuscript illumination, Animating the Letter (1999), Laura Kendrick emphasizes the non-semantic character of illuminated texts. Kendrick argues that the basic distinction between text and image is fundamentally at stake in illumination, and that the distinction is inherited from the Christian church fathers who opposed text and image, privileging the former and denigrating the latter. According to this traditional view, texts are better suited than images to a consideration of the divine on account of writing’s ethereal quality, its “transparency,” which leads the reader beyond the material sign to the immaterial concept. The problem with images, on the other hand, is their materiality, which may lead viewers down a dark path toward an ultimately heretical veneration for the mere image instead of for its referent. It seems to me that we find in Kendrick’s argument an exact homology with the discourse on the icon in the Byzantine Christian church. Emperor Constantine V, for instance, at the time of the “first iconoclast crisis” (the mid-eighth century CE), expresses wariness about the potentially heterodox metaphysics underpinning iconophilia. He objects to icons on the basis that their veneration would be acceptable only if the icon were to share the essence of that of which it is an icon (God), but that this is impossible; infinite divine nature cannot be encompassed within the finite line of human composition. The Byzantine iconophile’s response to this objection is not to deny the infinite, uncircumscribable nature of God, but to affirm that the icon, bound though it is to the register of images, nevertheless does not function in the same manner as an ordinary image. That is, the icon does not refer to its model by means of resemblance alone. In the language of Nikephoros of Constantinople (758–828 CE), the character of the icon consists in consubstantiality (homoousia) prior to resemblance (homoiōsis).1 [End Page 27]The problem of the limits of reference unites the discourse on the icon and the flourishing of the illuminated text. Just as the icon does not refer in the normal way to its referent, so Kendrick contends that the “animated letter” is not reducible to its pure semantic quality, is not to be understood as if it were just a kind of significative relay through which a sublime quantity of something called “meaning” is obliged to pass. “Meaning,” conceived of in what I am inclined to call the narrowly economic sense as the cargo of material vehicles called “words,” meaning that is gambled in words and then “cashed out” again, is not always what is at stake when one writes. Something else is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Language of Reciprocity in Euripides' MedeaMelissa MuellerEuripides' Medea is a character who is adept at speaking many languages. To the chorus of Corinthian women, she presents herself as a woman like any other, but with fewer resources; to Jason in the agōn she speaks as if man to man, articulating her claim to the appropriate returns of charis and philia. Even when she addresses herself, in the (...) great monologue, two distinct voices appear, that of the pitiful mother who loves her children and, opposed to this, the voice of the heroic warrior who demands revenge.1 The subject of this article will not be the versatility of Medea's speech, per se. Rather, I will consider the narrower but related issue of how—with what words and weapons—Medea enacts her revenge on Jason.Christopher Gill recently has argued that Medea's revenge is the final episode in the series of exchanges of charis between husband and wife.2 The exchanges began long ago in the mythical past, when Medea first helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece.3 My argument, building on that of Gill's, is that the language of charis extends in this play to the material medium of the heroine's revenge. The "textiles" given by Medea to Creon's daughter are, I suggest, a significant component in the play's construction of Medea's agency and her participation in relations of philia.4 What can the objects that Medea uses as instruments of vengeance tell us about the identity of this heroine and the active role she [End Page 471] creates for herself?5 Why, more specifically, does Medea use gifts—a crown (plokos) and a robe (peplos)—to kill Creon and his daughter?6 By reading the gifts themselves in relation to the preceding agōn and Aegeus episode we will arrive at a more complete picture of the issues at stake in Medea's revenge.7To do this we will need to take into account several preliminary considerations. First of all, gifts are not given in isolation.8 There is always some reference to past acts of generosity as well as to future obligation when an offer is made. In Medea's case, the plokos and peplos—gifts given to her by her grandfather, Helios—are implicated in her own genealogy and, as I will argue, in her history with Jason. Standing as symbols of the autonomous power that Medea once used to give herself away in marriage, these objects are called upon once again, in this play, in order to punish Jason for his violation of philia.Secondly, the giving of gifts and the revenge take place in the context of two marriages: the marriage of Jason to Medea, and subsequently, his marriage to the princess of Corinth. In the final section of this article I will argue that Medea manipulates wedding gifts and imagery in such a way that the fulfillment of her revenge is conditional upon (and coextensive with) the unraveling of both of these marriages. The approach I am taking toward Medea's revenge therefore raises the important issue of female subjectivity in Greek tragedy, especially in the context of marriage. Recently, Victoria Wohl, Kirk Ormand, and Nancy Rabinowitz have given subtle and thorough consideration to the problems that arise in reading female subjectivity within the constraints of male authorship and the patriarchal systems of exchange of Greek tragedy. [End Page 472] I am for the most part in agreement with their description of marriage in tragedy as a homosocial institution: the exchange of women solidifies social and economic bonds between men—and therefore, should be read from this perspective.9Nevertheless, I believe that the Medea offers an interesting and significant challenge to this generalization. For it is precisely containment by a patriarchal system (and husband) that Medea seems to defy. Medea speaks a language of reciprocity that is usually spoken between men only, and she negotiates an uneasy balance for herself (in the agōn) between the roles of marital and aristocratic philia (as discussed below). When her claims to philia are not heard there, she stages another scene of exchange—this time... (shrink)

Cultural Writing. Asian American Studies. Translation. This version of the Tao Te Ching extrapolates the premise that wise development of Psyche means downplaying ego's role. Lao Tzu uses a telegraphic style, a kind of Basic Chinese. Once we identify the Chinese character Lao Tzu has used, we must ask how to understand that concept, Chinese or not. If Lao Tzu writes, "Know male, but keep to female," what does this mean in terms of Psyche? What indeed is a sage (...) or a wise man? Allen provides a fresh answer, a vision of wisdom that patriarchal scholars disregard--ego-transcendence in favor of the creative unconscious. (shrink)

This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a (...) sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal. (shrink)

Non-heterosexual men have long existed on the social and cultural margins. Gay and bisexual male characters in literature, too, have done so for many generations. This essay explores the construction of gay masculinity in the short story “Brokeback Mountain” in relation to the “imaginative leap” that its author, Annie Proulx, undertook in order to conceptualize and represent this noteworthy form of marginalized otherness. It demonstrates that, despite the story’s various refreshing elements, “Brokeback Mountain” ultimately relies far too extensively on the (...) logic of melodrama when telling the tale of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love in 1963 and continue their sexual relationship over the course of two decades. As a result, this story ends up positioning its two queer protagonists as enemies of the patriarchal social order and the larger society within which it so comfortably exists, implicitly perpetuating both heterosexism and homophobia as it does its cultural work. (shrink)

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own (...) creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth R. Seeskin THE COMEDY OF THE GODS IN THE ILIAD "... no animai but man ever laughs." Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, 673a8-9 No reader of the Iliad can fail to be struck by the great extent to which social relations among the gods resemble those which obtain among men. Zeus, the oldest and strongest of the Olympian deities, rules as an absolute monarchor patriarch. The "council" meetings over (...) which he presides are not unlike those which occur on earth. Like Agamemnon, he must assert his authority from time to time; and, like any mortal king, he must deal with problems relating to jealousy, adultery, dishonesty, and revenge. To the extent that the gods differ from mortal heroes, those differences are similar to the ones which separate mortal heroes and commoners. The gods occupy the highest place on the scale of excellence, beauty, and social status, mortals with divine ancestry occupy the next position, and so on down the line. Although the above picture is accurate in many respects, there is something about it which is bound to leave one cold, for, unlike his mortal heroes, Homer's gods often appear as clowns. One need only recall scenes like Hephaestus' bumbling attempt to wait on the other immortals (1.584 ff.), Hera's seduction of Zeus (14.157 ff.), or the famous theomachy (21.385 ff.) to see that, ironically, humans frequendy are more dignified than the gods they are trying to please. It was scenes like these which caused Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, to remark that Homer appears to have made his men gods and his gods men (sec. 9). Now any long story is bound to contain comic relief. But for many authors (Shakespeare, for instance), comic relief is supplied by those whose social status is lower than that of the main characters, e.g., grave diggers, nightwatchmen, country bumpkins, or pettythieves. As Aristotle argued in the Poetics (sec. 2 and 5), comedy is an imitation of men worse than the average. In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer does use Thersites 295 296Philosophy and Literature for comic effect; yet this scene is noteworthy for being the only one in the book which supports Aristotle's contention. In practically every other case, comedy is supplied by characters better than the average: it is supplied by the gods. Moreover, in the few cases where mortal aristocrats are involved in comic situations (e.g., the rambling speeches of Nestor), the teasing tends to be extremely mild. Farce and slapstick are reserved almost exclusively for the inhabitants of Olympus. Plato, for one, was outraged by passages where the gods look ridiculous and wanted them excised from the text. Not surprisingly, there is a tradition of modern scholars who feel a similar sense of outrage. Walter Leaf, for example, maintained that the theomachy is poorly written and thus not the work of Homer.1 Gilbert Murray argued that several of the scenes in question are in bad taste, exemplify the spirit of Milesian skepticism, and, again, are not the work of Homer.2 Wilamowitz constructed an elaborate theory which claimed that these passages are the work of a later rhapsode who probably was associated with Archilochus.3 Finally, George Calhoun, who exposed the flaws of those just mentioned, concluded that such passages show the influence not of a later period of skepticism but of an earlier, less refined period and were composed merely to please Homer's audience.4 Since it is not my purpose to enter the long debate over the authorship and unity of the text, let me state the guiding assumptions of this essay dogmatically. First, the passages in question are not interpolated and serve important artistic functions. Second, for whatever reason Homer decided to include them, their presence raises profound moral and religious questions. From the outset, it is clear that any anthropomorphic conception of the gods will have to fail in one important respect. The gods are immortal, humans are not. Thus even the lowliest human can do something which no god can—risk his life. For all of their quarrels, deceptive schemes, and forays into the thick of the fighting, the gods are... (shrink)

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the role of the feminine principle in the cosmogonic ideas of the Slavic peoples and the philosophy of the Ancient East, in particular, India and China, to the establishment of common and distinctive features of female personification. The authors conclude that the ancient tribal culture, which was based on the logic of nature, the maintenance of the world in unity and the balance of opposites, was much more favorable to women than (...) monotheistic religions, which affirmed the sinful nature of women. Ideas about the origin and development of the universe occupy a central place in the mythological heritage, in the cosmic processes and powerful forces of nature, the unbreakable harmony of male and female principles can be traced, where male energy consists in the idea of fertilization, and female energy – in birth and creation. In every mythological system, there is a character of the Mother Goddess, who acts as a co-creator of the world and living beings, but with the establishment of the patriarchal system, the mythological paradigm undergoes changes, and the female principle is gradually recognized as secondary, or it was completely leveled in the processes of world creation. The archetype of the Great Mother reflects the functioning of human values and runs through the entire history of philosophy and culture. (shrink)

Manila is one of the world’s most fragmented, privatized and un-public of cities. Why is this so? This paper contemplates the seemingly immutable privacy of the city of Manila, and the paradoxical character of its publicity. Manila is our prime exemplar of the 21st-century mega-city whose apparent disorder discloses a coherent order which we here call ‘neo-patrimonial urbanism’. Manila is a city where poor and rich alike have their own government, infrastructure, and armies, the shopping malls are the simulacra (...) of public congregations once found in cathedrals and plazas, and where household order is matched by streetside chaos, and personal cleanliness wars with public dirt. We nominate the key characteristics of this uncanny approximation of chaotic and discordant order – a polyphonous and polyrhythmic social order but one lacking harmony – and offer a historical sociology, a genealogy that traces an emblematic pattern across the colonizing periods of its emergent urban forms into the contemporary impositions of gated zones and territories. The enduring legacy of patrimonial power to Manila is to be found in the households and on the streets that undermine and devalue public forms of social power in favour of the patriarch and his householders (now relabelled as ‘shareholders’ in ‘public companies’) at the cost of harmonious, peaceable and just public order. Such a state of affairs is not only destructive of the historic built environment of the city, especially its public parks and plazas and heritage districts, its streets, footpaths, public transport and utilities, but is directly injurious of its citizens. To address the question of Manila’s private order and public chaos is to reopen the quest for the good city as the just polis. It is also to take us beyond arguments of indigenous versus colonial forms of urbanism that are mired in nationalist and modernization ideologies respectively, and it is to reject the reductive logics of globalization arguments that Asian mega-cities are but variations of American logics of urbanism. (shrink)

The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself.Medea's role within feminist literary reception and women's literature cannot be overlooked (...) because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be attributed to misogynist perceptions of Medea as the vilest of women, because she committed the most despicable of all crimes — killing her children, the patriarchy's heirs — to take revenge on Jason, the husband who abandons her in Corinth (her place of exile) to marry Glauce, King Creon of Corinth's daughter, for reasons of political expedience.As a writer with her roots in the former East-German regime, Wolf perceives the Medea story as an account of a woman with both extraordinary powers and human shortcomings, who is misunderstood by the Colchians and the Corinthians alike. Wolf explores the distorted patriarchal motives for their loathing of Medea and Medea's ultimate powerlessness to do anything more than accept her tragic destiny. In doing so, Wolf does not attempt to manipulate the Medea story to suit the one-sidedness of some more radical feminist ideologies. (shrink)

Scripture, the creeds, and tradition have provided the raw material that theology has attempted to refine. The contribution of much recent theology comes from new insight into these materials by women, blacks, and the Third World, often as examined by analytic tools derived from post‐Christian ideologies. The theology of Rosemary Ruether stands out because of her choice of sources, among which she includes documents excoriated as heretical by what she calls the patriarchal orthodoxy of the early Christian church. Because (...) of this it is useful to examine this type of theology in relation to other theological inquiries of recent years. The thesis of this paper is that, in her ability to incorporate source material hitherto regarded as heretical, Ruether has demonstrated the scientific character of this kind of theology. (shrink)