• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.155-185
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• 2023

This paper aims to identify the shifts of masculine domination, illuminating Vietnamese men and women's actual position in society through surveying the mixed and hybrid characteristics described in the feminist texts in the early twentieth century. This paper concentrates on the feminist writings of the two exceptionally male intellectuals Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh (1882-1936) and Phan Khôi (1887-1959). in order to implement these goals, the paper first examines the popular phenomenon of ventriloquism among Vietnamese male intellectuals, whose dominant attitudes may still be unveiled in feminist texts. Secondly, the paper focuses on surveys of men's direct discourse in constructing the model of women's liberation. From these two contents, this paper answers the following questions: Why have Vietnamese men become feminists? What were the causes, purposes, and effects of this phenomenon? To look at the nature of Vietnamese feminism, this paper will show the shifts of masculine domination in Vietnam as another form of protecting men's privileges. All analyses in this study will ground discussion on the economic, political, and social contexts and conditions of Vietnam in the early twentieth century.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.133-160
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• 2022

This paper examines narratives of women's marginal position in Bao Ninh's Short Stories and Svetlana Alexievich's Unwomanly Face of War from a feminist narratological approach. In analyzing voices of marginalized women, direct and indirect descriptions of women's beauty and pain, and private-public narratives of women's love stories, this paper aims to identify presentations of women's real authority in the text written by a male author, Bao Ninh, and in the one by a female author. The paper argues that juxtaposing these texts reveals an overturn of the traditional conception of sexual and gender differences. Specifically, distinguishing between male/female discourse does not show powerful /nonpowerful language, but recognizes the real authority of each type of discourse based on sexual differences. The writing also illustrates that masculine language becomes powerless and deficient in the women's world; meanwhile, in writing about herself, woman establishes a type of a powerful feminine discourse, which blends both emotional, enthusiastic, and gossipy characteristics of female language and direct, rational, and strong ones of male language. Thus, the feminists' radical segregation on male/female discourses to overturn masculine authority and create a language for women at par with men has been clearly shifted when comparing the two writers' texts based on the juxtapositional model of the comparative literature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.5
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• pp.947-971
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• 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Washing-Day" (1797) has sparked a variety of feminist critical endeavors over the past two decades. While many feminist literary critics try to salvage the poem as a successful tongue-in-cheek riposte directed at the male dominant literary world, more rigorous Marxist feminists accuse Barbauld of being limited by her own middle-class woman's view on women's domestic labor. Legitimate as they may be, these readings fail to elucidate Barbauld's place in a larger literary and intellectual discourse during the eighteenth century. In this paper I read "Washing-Day" as a woman's georgic, a genre or mode concerned with agricultural labor, the public value of which was highly recognized in eighteenth-century England. Alluding to canonical texts by writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, Barbauld's "loaded lines" in mock-heroic form create a space in which the women's domestic labor of washing interrupts men's daily routines and disrupts their poetic assumptions. While she makes women's work visible, Barbauld also addresses its quintessential nature. Women's work is affective labor; women have to labor physically and mentally to produce the desired domestic comfort. By allowing the image of the soap "bubble" to echo with many "bubbles" in other writers' texts, from the soap bubbles the narrator used to play with as a child to the hot-air balloon "bubble" of the Montgolfier brothers, Barbauld pleasantly equates work and day-dreaming, men's toil and children's play, and finally public, scientific, and recognized labor and private, domestic, and imaginative activities.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.5
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• pp.885-906
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• 2009

In terms of class, race, or gender, critical literacy takes seriously the problem of inequality and injustice embedded in texts. Texts are considered as tools that are used for maintaining the status quo by constructing and communicating our identities, particularly in relation to others. While reading texts and identifying our roles in society, some feel empowered, and others, marginalized. Thus we need to challenge the characterization and the message included in those texts by asking problem-posing questions. In this paper I have demonstrated how to read and teach four versions of "Snow White" from a critical literacy stance. By the use of problem-posing questions, students are led to discover that one of Grimms' fairy tales, the original version of "Snow White," was written from the perspective of men with power, thus marginalizing women in general, as well as the seven dwarfs. Through a critical analysis of Snow White's personality, the typical theme of fairy tales - good is rewarded while evil is punished - should be challenged. In the animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, power is given to the marginalized people in the original, the seven dwarfs and women in general. In "Snow Night,"a feminist short story, women in general are empowered while men, who should be judged by their looks, are powerless. "Snow-Drop"reminds us of the original, but challenges stereotypes, prejudices, and the theme inherent in the story. In those three stories many parts from the original are rewritten from the perspectives of the marginalized, but still some people are described prejudicially. So students should be guided to write another story from a new perspective. When those four works were taught with problem-posing questions in a university, this approach proved to be quite successful: most students acknowledged the effectiveness of critical literacy in teaching literary works.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.269-293
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• 2014

Written as her last collaboration with the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell's The Verge is an exceptional play in that its formal experiment and modernist theme are clear of her general modernist ambivalence which combines a uniquely American and feminist expression of the modernist spirit with rather conventional forms. Following critics' brief and generalizing comments on the play's protagonist embodying modernist formalism and alienation, this paper offers a full and concrete survey detailing the tenets and the slogans of Modernism inlaid in the play. Its main argument is that Glaspell strategically deployed the metaphysics of egoism, anarchic hostility to the collectiveness of bourgeois society, and formalist preoccupation in Modernism in representing a female egoist's longing for a new order of society, illustrating an intersection between Modernism and feminism. It concludes that The Verge is an extremely rare case of modernist literature where a play, allegedly the least modernist genre of all according to Christopher Innes, exemplifies the "eloquent critical acts entangled in the creative work" which Michael Levenson lists as a distinct feature of modernist texts.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.510-520
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• 2018

This study explored the phenomenon of heterosexual women embracing Boys' Love manga within the heteronormativity context from a feminist psychological perspective. Specifically, the issue of genre characteristics of Boys' Love manga, women's psychological mechanism of reading Boys' Love manga, and the functions and effects of embracing Boys' Love manga were discussed. As a theoretical framework of analysis, I started from the classical psychoanalysis and critically adopted the concepts of the various camps of feminism, queer theory, and Huizinga's Homo Rudens. The results show that Boys' Love manga can be classified as a sub-category of the romance genre, which fulfills heterosexual women's desires of eternal love and equal partnership. From these wish-fulfilling fantasies, heterosexual women attempt to be decontextualized from the heteropatriarchism, to enjoy distancing and voyeuristic separation from the characters in the texts, and to disturb the dichotomous gender system through gender reversal identification. These processes, which can be regarded as a women's play challenging sexual rigorism, ultimately bring about an awareness of the female sexual subjectivity.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.554-567
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• 2012

It can be suggested that social geography in the 2000s in Korea has achieved a considerable development, dealing with various theories and issues. This suggestion can be identified first of all with the publication of several texts of Social Geography in this period. For important theoretical discussions, the neoliberal glocalization process of capitalist economy has promoted geographical researches from the perspective of political economy, and the development of information and communication technology, increasing foreign immigrants, environmental problems such as the global warming, and social participation and empowerment of women in Korea have increased social geographical concerns with and theoretical discussions on informational society and city, multiculturalism and/or transnationalism, political ecology and environmental justice, and feminism. This paper provides a review on these major issues in recent theoretical discussions in social geography in Korea, and suggests a brief comment on its future development.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.339-365
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• 2011

Charlotte $Bront{\ddot{e}}^{\prime}s$ novel Jane Eyre has long been doted on as one of the canonized texts of British literature since its publication. Seemingly, this romantic novel has nothing to do with plantation based on slave trade. However, paying a keen attention to the fact that Jane's enormous inheritance results from wine plantation at a colony, this essay re-interprets Bertha's drinking and madness as evidence of imperialism. For the porter/jin Bertha and Grace Poole enjoy might have some suspicious connection with wine, the very root of Jane's great expectations. Jean Ryes' Wide Sargasso Sea, writing Jane Eyre back, records Bertha as "a white resident of the West Indies, a colonizer of European descent" (326). However, Jane Eyre, in my interpretation, describes Bertha pretty much as a black Creole. At any rate, the view that the white West Indians are tainted by miscegenation proves contemporary racism and is reflected in the text through Bertha and her mother's intemperate drinking and madness. Drinking and madness are stigmatized as the evidence of the so-called "bad blood"; embodying the stereotypes of drinking, madness, and sexual corruption, Creoles, the very inescapable product of imperialism, provide a convenient excuse for justifying imperialism for purity, civilization, and moral cleanness. In this way, Jane Eyre needs to be re-interpreted politically and historically in the context of colonialism. British imperialism pursues a tremendous amount of profits through grape plantation and wine trades; however, it cleverly leaves in the colony the associated images such as intemperate drinking and madness. Bertha, transferred from Jamaica to Britain, takes in these negative images of "savageness." Transcending the narrow confines of feminist criticism obsessed with doubling between Bertha and Jane, this essay, accordingly, reads Bertha the prisoner in the attic as the captive for perpetuating imperialism. This reading hinges upon interpreting Rochester and St John as colonizers bearing the so-called "white men's burden" to cultivate and civilize savages much like crops such as grapes and sugarcane in the colonial plantation.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.349-383
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• 2019

This paper examined the meaning and task of romance research with a focus on Reading the Romance(1984) by Janice A. Radway. This book, which analyzes romance texts by examining the situation and meaning of reading romance by women readers integrating between cultural studies and literary studies, is one of the most popular studies on the romance genre. Radway scrutinized the practical significance of reading romance in a community of women readers. Through a study involving questionnaires and in-depth interviews, she found that for women, romance reading is a 'compensatory fiction' that brings happiness and emotional redemption through a sense of liberation achieved by escaping from patriarchal daily life. The romance that women prefer is composed of 4 stages and 13 divisions: 'Encounter → Attest → Recovery → Happy End'. It also maintains a formula that begins with an immature female character's identity crisis and ends with a blissful union that recognizes the intrinsic value of the main character, who has turned into a man who is considerate of the women. Therefore, romance plays the role of pursuit of the 'female utopian fantasy' and at the same time a reconciliation of women to patriarchy. Feminist critics of the day criticized this argument. However, reading romance is a 'feminine reading', and romance is literature about the functional relationship between women's lives and patriarchy. Yet the interpretation could differ depending on the different viewpoints and definitions of the women's utopian fantasy. In recent years, the conditions of female reader's lives, awareness and imagination have been changing rapidly. As a result, the female utopian fantasy has also changed significantly. Nevertheless, women's lives in the real patriarchal system are still contradictory, and their adventurous imagination is spreading in alternative spaces such as the subculture. In this regard, the question is about the definition of romance and the meanings of romance research are still important task.