BiblioVault - Books about Feminist

Mama's Gun

Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression

Marlo D. David

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

In Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Marlo D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding “negative” images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and “baby mamas,” Mama’s Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership.

Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire’s Push, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from “ideal.” David’s study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.

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Mammographies

The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives

Mary K. DeShazer

University of Michigan Press, 2015

While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction.

Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

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Marianne Moore

Questions of Authority

Cristanne Miller

Harvard University Press, 1995

Not confessional or autobiographical, not openly political or gender-conscious: all that Marianne Moore’s poetry is not has masked what it actually is. Cristanne Miller’s aim is to lift this mask and reveal the radically oppositional, aesthetic, and political nature of the poet’s work. A new Moore emerges from Miller’s persuasive book—one whose political engagement and artistic experiments, though not cut to the fashion of her time, point the way to an ambitious new poetic.

Miller locates Moore within the historical, literary, and family environments that shaped her life and work, particularly her sense and deployment of poetic authority. She shows how feminist notions of gender prevalent during Moore’s youth are reflected in her early poetry, and tracks a shift in later poems when Moore becomes more openly didactic, more personal, and more willing to experiment with language typically regarded as feminine. Distinguishing the lack of explicit focus on gender from a lack of gender-consciousness, Miller identifies Moore as distinctly feminist in her own conception of her work, and as significantly expanding the possibilities for indirect political discourse in the lyric poem. Miller’s readings also reveal Moore’s frequent and pointed critiques of culturally determined power relationships, those involving race and nationality as well as gender.

Making new use of unpublished correspondence and employing close interpretive readings of important poems, Miller revises and expands our understanding of Marianne Moore. And her work links Moore—in her radically innovative reactions to dominant constructions of authority—with a surprisingly wide range of late twentieth-century women poets.

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Marianne Moore, Subversive Modernist

By Taffy Martin

University of Texas Press, 1986

Myth and misconception have obstructed a clear understanding of the poetry and person of Marianne Moore. In this groundbreaking study, Taffy Martin delves beneath the layers of myth and recaptures the excitement that Moore's contemporaries, particularly William Carlos Williams, felt when they encountered her poetry. She reveals that, far from being a stanch upholder of Modernist order and stasis, Moore continually undermines the stability of her own medium, language. Unlike the writings of other Modernist poets, such as T. S. Eliot, who tried to create islands of order in the seas of twentieth-century fragmentation, Moore's work shows surprising awareness of that fragmentation. In this way, she anticipates the thematic preoccupation of Postmodernist writers and critics. In Marianne Moore, Subversive Modernist, Taffy Martin combines traditional scholarship and contemporary critical theory to create a feminist reading of one of the twentieth century's most difficult poets. In so doing, she places Moore in the tradition of Modernism, defines Moore's quarrels with it, and thus produces a broader understanding of both the poet and the movement. Drawing on Moore's unpublished correspondence, her reading notebooks, and her workbooks, as well as feminist criticism's attention to writers who elude traditional critical approaches, this excellent study provides much-needed insights into the Modernism, life, and art of Marianne Moore.

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MIDDLE PASSAGES AND THE HEALING PLACE OF HISTORY

MIGRATION AND IDENTITY IN BLACK WOMEN'S LITERATURE

ELIZABETH BROWN-GUILLORY

The Ohio State University Press, 2006

Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature brings together a series of essays addressing black women’s fragmented identities and quests for wholeness. The individual essays concern culturally specific experiences of blacks in select African countries, England, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. They examine identity struggles by establishing the Middle Passage as the first site of identity rupture and the subsequent break from cultural and historical moorings. In most cases, the authors themselves have migrated from their places of origin to new spaces that present challenges. Their narratives replicate the displacement engendered by their own experiences of living with the complexities of diasporic existence. Their female characters, many of whom participate in multiple border crossings, work to define themselves within a hostile environment. In nearly every essay, the female characters struggle against multiple yokes of oppression, giving voice to what it means to be black, female, poor, old, and alone. The subjects’ migrations and journeys are analyzed as attempts to heal the “displacement,” both physical and psychological, that results from dislocation and relocation from the homeland, imagined variously as Africa.

This volume reveals that black women across the globe share a common ground fraught with struggles, but the narratives bear out that these women are not easily divided and that they stand upon each other’s shoulders dispensing healing balms. Black women’s history and herstory commingle; the trauma that ensued when Africans were loaded onto ships in chains continues to haunt black women, and men, too, wherever they find themselves in this present moment of the Diaspora.

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Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change

Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Smith, Jennifer

Bucknell University Press, 2019

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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mPalermu, Dancers, and Other Plays

Emma Dante

Swan Isle Press, 2019

Emma Dante’s passionate and brutal plays stem from a need to confront important familial and societal realities in contemporary southern Italy. Her twenty-first century tales challenge stereotypes of the country and stage acts of resistance against the social, political, and economic conditions of Sicily. The seven works in this anthology paint a complex image of the peninsula through stories of disenfranchisement, misogyny, deep-set bigotry, and religious hypocrisy that reveal economic disparities between the north and south of the country, oppressive gender relations, and deep rooted mafioso-like attitudes. Dante’s lyrical and visceral storytelling oscillates between the humorous and the tragic aspects of everyday life, undertaking an irreverent subversion of the status quo with its extreme physicality and unsettling imagery.

This exquisite first English translation of Emma Dante’s work enables English-speaking readers, theatre scholars, and directors alike to encounter character-driven “civic theatre” with its portraits of individuals existing at the fringes of Italy. Ultimately, it allows us to “listen” to those who are not given a voice anywhere else.

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