The focus of this article is two texts, ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ (1982) by Alice Walker and Disgrace(1999) by J.M. Coetzee, both of which present ethical problems for the reader. The texts share a common event, an incident of black-on-white, male-on-female rape. In each case the white woman keeps silent about the rape and the narrative is troubled by that silence. I read the dilemma of these texts as at once ethical, political and aesthetic and I explore (...) that multi-faceted problem through three perspectives – the issue of silence, the narrative structures of the texts and the impossibility of resolution. The texts repeatedly question my reading position, not least in that they both suggest that the silence of the white woman might, in certain circumstances, be a condition for political progress. (shrink)

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's (...) bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe. (shrink)

In this article we focus upon the embodiment of vulnerability as an area in which medicine, society and the humanities can be profitably conjoined. We illustrate our argument with two interrelated case studies of narratives of the embodiment of ageing and longevity. First, we draw upon Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case (1926) as a locus for debates about human longevity. Second, we discuss 70-year-old Janáček’s decade of unrequited love for a woman 37 years younger than himself, through an examination (...) of their intimate letters. We suggest that both the opera and elements of Janáček’s biography illuminate the passionate emotions that are often hidden behind ‘the mask of ageing’. Finally, we propose that a focus on the embodiment of vulnerability is a productive catalyst for research on narratives of ageing. (shrink)

This article analyses Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, discussing its use of the female body as a text and, more specifically, as a palimpsest. The article aims to demonstrate that the novel's genderless narrator uses the beloved's body as a palimpsest since in trying to celebrate it, s/he is unable to depict it as it is and merely inscribes a set of meanings onto it. The female body is described through two major sets of images: as a landscape, via (...) a colonial language, and as a diseased body, via an anatomical language. The article discusses this particular use of the female body as a traditional way of describing it, which is confirmed by the novel's wide use of literary references from canonical texts. The novel, then, appears to be positioned outside a feminist or lesbian tradition, since it is not able to represent the female body in a new and fertile way and draws too much on an all-male literary tradition, configuring itself as a palimpsest just like the body it is trying to describe. (shrink)

This article is concerned with Jeanette Winterson's use and reworking of post-modern concepts of the body in her novel Written on the Body. Feminist appropriations of those concepts can be problematic: they tend to focus on the way in which a coherent body image is constructed and then imposed on the body parts, whereas many feminist theorists continue to emphasize the wholeness and integrity of the female body. Written on the Body offers constructive ways of theorizing the female body within (...) a postmodern framework, because it is shaped by concepts of wholeness and fragmentation at the same time. Winterson develops a critique of androcentric science and medicine that strives to know the female body by dissecting it, analogous to the way modern society compartmentalizes human lives into neat manageable units. Against this, a concept of wholeness is strategically employed. Likewise, Winterson criticizes the equation of the female body with a penetrable surface. The androcentric concept of sexuality that associates penetration with the exploration of hidden depths and the achievement of power and knowledge is unmasked as necrophiliac. However, by constructing a lover/narrator whose gender remains undeclared, Winterson manages to unsettle perceptions of gendered difference. The text produces different meanings depending on whether the narrator is read as a man or a woman, and sexuality requires a basic human sameness from which a host of differences emerge that may or may not be gendered. In Written on the Body, Winterson disturbs fixed boundaries and rigidly gendered identities that objectify the body in order to build up a concept of the body that is fluid and leaves room for changes and mergings with other bodies, where bodies are held together not by a stable body image and a gendered identity, but by forces of connection and interaction between parts of the body. (shrink)

Whether in the growing awareness of the origins of supermarket meat or the emergence of meat art, carnality appears to be something increasingly under question. Yet, despite meat carrying connotations that offer provocative connection with feminist concerns regarding the body, consumption and the cultural representation of women, meat consciousness has been only sporadically explored in existing feminist theory. Struck, however, by the comparisons between the dissected Body Worlds corpse and the filleted flesh of meat that are levelled most particularly at (...) female bodies on display, I examine in my article the bodily relations constructed in the Body Worlds exhibition by positioning the Body Worlds cadaver as a grotesque ‘meaty’ body under the broader rubric of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Within such webs of alimentary exchange, pleats of meaty matter may bring about localised eruptions of traditional and bodily engagements – including that of the gendered gaze – that entwine the possibility of pleasure, wonder and fascination into each act of inter-bodily engagement. Through this entrance into the very bowels of Body Worlds, my article ultimately asks what, as a feminist, it means to become meat conscious. (shrink)

This article illuminates Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1896) as a major contribution to fin-de-siècle Gothic culture. Cymbeline (1896) was one of the most popular Victorian Shakespeare productions, running to wild acclaim for more than seventy-two performances. In Cymbeline’s sexually-charged bedroom scene, Imogen, played by beloved Victorian actress Ellen Terry, was preyed upon by Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo. Terry and Irving were at the zenith of a twenty-year partnership at London’s Lyceum theatre, and Victorian Britain’s greatest star actors. Ellen (...) Terry’s Imogen became an ideally desirable heroine for both audiences and critics of Victorian Shakespeare. Simultaneously, Cymbeline, and the acclaimed performances of Terry and Irving, became a source for literature’s most famous Gothic vampire novel: Dracula, published by Bram Stoker in 1897. Bram Stoker was Henry Irving’s business manager, and intimately involved with Irving and Terry’s professional lives at the Lyceum theatre. This article reveals the relationship between Shakespeare and Dracula, especially Ellen Terry’s Imogen as an inspiration for Lucy Westenra. Textual evidence includes Terry’s correspondence and unpublished promptbooks, as well as Stoker’s biography of Henry Irving, and facsimile notes on Dracula. Examining Cymbeline (1896) and Dracula (1897) offers a new reading of Dracula, given Cymbeline’s obsession with liminal states and female vulnerability. Moreover, Victorian responses to Ellen Terry’s Imogen in the bedchamber scene highlight fin-de-siècle eroticisations of the sleeping woman, and Victorian fantasies of sexual access to the actress. Examining Terry’s reception illuminates the disjunction between performed female passivity as Imogen, and the professional, creative activity that underlined Terry’s stage practice and agency as a Victorian actress. (shrink)

Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst share a long-standing collaboration that has lasted from Dunst's adolescence onwards and into mature womanhood. As a former child star, Dunst has grown up in front o...