Lost and Found? A Parable of the Architect (Male) and the Academic (Female)

The following text captures an interview, conducted over three evenings, between a practicing architect (male) and an architecture academic (female and feminist). This is a conversation between two long-standing friends who did their Part 3 professional exam together more than twenty-five years ago. Since then, they have taken different career paths and lived lives at different paces and in different places. Every so often they meet over coffee to laugh and argue about architecture, bemoan failures, and share successes.

The academic initiated the interview in order to hear an honest and open account of the career experience of a male architect. She hoped that their longstanding friendship would lead to less guarded responses. The answers to the questions were always going to be personally challenging to the interviewer and possibly to their friendship. The interview is a form of ethnographic study: a structured, qualitative process within a long term, immersed context. But when ‘the immersed context’ is a much-valued friendship, it is a precarious action. Nevertheless, for the future of gendered relationships both protagonists accepted the risks.

MEN WRITING WOMEN: “THE WOMAN QUESTION” AND MALE DISCOURSE OF IRANIAN MODERNITY"

In this dissertation I explore “The Woman Question” in the discourse of Iranian male authors. A pro-modernity group, they placed women’s issues at the heart of their discourse. This dissertation follows the trajectory of the representation of “The Woman Question” as it is reflected in the male discourse over the course of a century. It discusses the production of a literature that was anchored in the idea of reform and concerned itself with issues pertaining to women. These men challenged lifelong patriarchal notions such as veiling, polygamy, gender segregation, and arranged marriages, as well as traditional roles of women and gender relations. This study is defined under the rubrics of “The Woman Question” and “The New Woman,” which I have borrowed from the Victorian and Edwardian debates of similar issues as they provide clearer delineations. Drawing upon debates on sexuality, and gender, this dissertation illustrates the way these men championed women was both progressive and regressive. This study argues that the desire for women’s liberation was couched in male ideology of gender relations. It further illustrates that the advancement of “The Woman Question,” due to its continuous and yet gradual shifting concurrent with each author’s nuanced perception of women’s issues, went through discernible stages that I refer to as observation, causation, remedy, and confusion. The analytical framework for this project is anchored in the “why” and the “how” of the Iranian male authors’ writings on women in addition to “what” was written. This dissertation examines four narrative texts—two in prose and two in poetry—entitled: “Lankaran’s Vizier,” “The Black Shroud,” “‘Arefnameh,” and “Fetneh” written respectively by Akhundzadeh, ‘Eshqi, Iraj Mirza, and Dashti. Chapter one outlines the historical background, methodology, theoretical framework, and literature review. The following chapters examine, the advocacy for companionate marriage and romantic love, women and nationalistic cause, veiling and unveiling, and the emerging figure of the New Iranian Woman as morally depraved.

The representation of the northeastern migrant: interstices and culture in the figure of Francisco da Silva in "Liberdade", by Ruth Laus

It serves as the object of analysis of this article the representation of the northeastern migrant in the figure of the male character Francisco da Silva, protagonist of the short story "Liberdade", by Ruth Laus, as a fictional character who lives "in an interrogatory, interstitial space between the act of representation [...] and the presence of community itself" (Bhabha, 1998, p. 22) where he comes to enter and to settle. Chico, as he is known, embarks on a crowded truck, and his fate, like that of many other migrants, is the Southeast region of Brazil, where, between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, he chooses the sea. To the same extent, beyond the concept(s) of culture(s), and the need to (re)think the concept of [cultural] human community - here adding the cultural term to the proposal of Bhabha (1998), as a way of thinking about the role of the individual - are taken and analyzed, also, the cultural identity concepts based on the difference itself. It is thought in what way, then, and through what imposing character, the wealth and the values ​​of the Northeast, although managed to be spread on national home soil, yet not are conspicuous by their guarantee of permanence of its inhabitants in their homeland.