Women in art: the last taboo

The intention of this paper is to explore traditions and current trends in art with particular reference to the depiction of female experiences such as pregnancy, abortion, birth and motherhood. The inclusion and exclusion of such images in art history over time and across societies reflects prevailing attitudes, whilst affirming various stereotypical and gendered constructions developed and sustained within those societies. These constructions in turn relate to criteria defined by class, access to education and notions of femininity. Work by artists which feature aspects of these experiences (particularly childbirth), is considered taboo by many in a Western society which continues to render the essentially female experience as private, invisible and stigmitised and confuses the natural with the sexual. The work of undergraduate art students, inspired by the artwork of women artists who make explicit or are influenced by essentially female experiences, is discussed and attempts made to connect their work to the issues outlined.

(In)Complete acquisition of Turkish among Turkish German bilinguals in Germany and Turkey: an analysis of complex embeddings in narratives

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals canmvary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish�German bilinguals. The approach of the present paper is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish� German bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish�German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe.

‘Museums, Identity, and Warring Historians: Observations on History in Germany’

A review essay on debates in Germany about the creation of museums of German history

The absent body: representations of dying early modern women in a selection of seventeenth-century diaries

This article seeks to explore the absence of the body in the depiction of dying women in a selection of seventeenth-century diaries. It considers the cultural forces that made this absence inevitable, and the means by which the physical body was replaced in death by a spiritual presence. The elevation of a dying woman from physical carer to spiritual nurturer in the days before death ensured that gender codes were not broken. The centrality of the body of the dying woman, within a female circle of care and support, was paradoxically juxtaposed with an effacement of the body in descriptions of a good death. In death, a woman might achieve the stillness, silence and compliance so essential to perfect early modern womanhood, and retrospective diary entries can achieve this ideal by replacing the body with images that deflect from the essential physicality of the woman.