La ciutat de les dames i Terra d’elles: dues utopies feministes en català

Elizabeth Russell sosté que les utopies escrites per dones són més transgressores «perquè desconstrueixen el concepte de perfecció» (2007: 21). En aquesta línia de crítica social i necessitat de reformes, quant al gènere femení, neixen, amb cinc segles de diferència, les dues obres estudiades aquí, Le livre de la cité des dames (1405), de Christine de Pisan, i Herland (1915), de Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Amb notables excepcions com La mística de la feminitat (1965), de Betty Friedan, i El segon sexe (1968), de Simone de Beauvoir, a casa nostra els discursos androcèntrics es ben cuidaren de negar l’entrada d’aires subversius que, per raons òbvies, poguessin esverar aquell àngel de la llar amansit i silenciat, per dir-ho a la manera woolfiana. Charlotte Perkins Gilman arribà per primera vegada a Catalunya i a la península ibèrica el 1982 amb la traducció al català de Montserrat Abelló per a l’editorial La Sal d’El paper de paret groc. En els mateixos anys vuitanta i per a la mateixa editorial Helena Valentí traduí al castellà El país de ellas (1987), obra que el 2002 traslladà al català Jordi Vidal Tubau en una edició a cura d’Eulàlia Lledó que porta per títol Terra d’elles. Poc després, el 1990, La ciutat de les dames, de Christine de Pisan, es pogué llegir en llengua catalana amb una edició i traducció de Mercè Otero per a la col·lecció «Espai de Dones» d’Edicions de l’Eixample. Aquest article presenta la recepció a Catalunya de dos clàssics del gènere de les utopies feministes, La ciutat de les dames (1990), de Christine de Pisan, i Terra d’elles (2002), de Charlotte Perkins Gilman, amb notes sobre la seva difusió al castellà i al gallec.

"Suffragettes of the Harem": The Evolution of Sympathy and the Afterlives of Sentimentality in American Feminist Orientalism, 1865-1920

This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.

ABLE-BODIED WOMANHOOD: DISABILITY AND CORPOREALLY EXCLUSIONARY NARRATIVES IN BLACK AND WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS DISCOURSES, 1832-1932

This project is a feminist disability rhetorical analysis of US black and white women’s rights movements from 1832-1932. Guided by Disability and Feminist Theory, it works to identify the presence and use of patterns of disability tropes in women’s rights discourses. From Lucretia Coffin Mott to Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Addie Hunton, this project interrogates the rhetorical work of dominant narratives and lesser known voices in women’s rights discourses. I argue that early black and white women’s rights advocates often utilized and repeated a disability rhetoric that relied on disability metaphor, narrative prosthesis, and corporeally exclusionary narratives in order to construct definitions of womanhood. Their insistence on cognitive ability as a marker of “fitness” and “ability” provided the foundation for rights arguments based on ableist assumptions of autonomy and citizenship. I also argue that this use of disability rhetoric relied on and furthered a pervasive ableist ideology present not only in many of these movements, but in US society. In the process, US black and white women’s rights discourses have continually elided women with disabilities from women’s rights discourses because their bodies (physically, cognitively, and/or psychologically) did not meet the ableist prerequisites set for claiming women’s rights during this time period.

Women and economics; a study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution,

Mode of access: Internet.

Foucauldian Panopticism: The Gaze in Selected 19th Century Literature

Throughout history, women have often been perceived as hysterical and weak. This perception has been reflected through the representation of women in literature which has resulted in a limited scope of female normality and morality creating characteristics fundamentally different than male characters. Though these characteristics have been contributed as natural female characteristics, the theories of Jeremy Bentham, a 18th and 19th century Englishman, can be applied as a possible reason for these reactions. Bentham’s Panopticon, the theory of punishment wherein a constant unseen gaze peers at inmates theoretically creating paranoia and psychological breakdown, creates characteristics similar to those that women in literature seem to exhibit. In this paper, I will outline the characteristics of three various characters in novels. First, I will review the Panoptic literature that has been written on The Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, then I will conduct my own analysis on The Governess in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre . In this analysis, I will consider the “gaze,” the symbolic Panopticon implemented by society, and argue how characteristics present in stereotypical representations of women are not inherent in women due to gender or sex, but because women are most objectified and thereby most affected by the Panoptic gaze of society.

A contribution to the taxonomy of aquatic and humicolous beetles of the family Hydraenidae in southern Africa / Philip D. Perkins, J. Balfour-Browne.

n.s. no.77(1994)