Papers by U. H. Ruhina Jesmin
Routledge eBooks, Nov 19, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Nov 19, 2023
Routledge eBooks, Nov 19, 2023
Spectrum, Nov 17, 2022
The paper is a womanist study based on African-American novelist Alice Walker's 1970 novel, The T... more The paper is a womanist study based on African-American novelist Alice Walker's 1970 novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The study uses content analysis method, Walker's theory of womanism, and Judith Butler's theory of undoing gender performativity to explore how Walker's women characters dismantle gender specificity and establish women's space/voice. Walker's women characters perceive womanism as a defensive strategy and a healing force as they find it self-healing in restoring their mental health, self-respect, and identity. They do not believe in separation from their male partners; they stand victorious over the racist-sexist society by taking men as partners and by taking their own decisions regarding life and death. Womanism, as their philosophy of life, allows them space for raising voice, forming identity, uplifting status, and finding wholeness of their lives accompanied by men. Their womanist identities reflect a conscious/subversive act of transfiguring differentiation and give them a vision of women's space, a sense of hidden possibilities, and a sense of wholeness. They exercise their sexual freedom which poses a threat to the ideological and political basis of male supremacy. Their womanist performativity questions heteronormativities and stimulates social change. As such, their womanist identities speak more of a political preference than a mere sexual/non-sexual preference. The study explores how Ruth idealizes her womanist foremothers as her role models and takes her grandfather as her partner. She creates women's space/possibilities, weaves her future, and journeys towards wholeness. In fact, she defines herself as one of those possibilities which womanism opens up.
Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, 2020
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Jul 18, 2022
The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and homophobic society as por... more The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple (1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters, unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.
The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and
homophobic society as por... more The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and
homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker
and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple
(1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies
the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality
to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal
culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate
women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative
sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different
categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how
their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The
commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of
sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters,
unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and
homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.
RAUDEM. Revista de Estudios de las Mujeres, 2021
Maria Kiminta’s personal account, Kiminta: A Maasai’s Fight against Female Genital Mutilation, is... more Maria Kiminta’s personal account, Kiminta: A Maasai’s Fight against Female Genital Mutilation, is a survivor memoir which reveals her genital mutilation and her comprehensive range of vision on FGM in an audacious, argumentative, and persuasive fashion. It lucidly and pragmatically recounts her first-hand experiences as a Maasai FGM survivor; thus, it is an essential memoir on FGM advocating the global movement to eradicate the horrendous practice. The memoir is also significant in that it renders the readers the resources/arguments to realize the violence and depth of excruciating pain on female sex, to understand “loss to development as a whole” (Kiminta 2015: 44), and to support the movement. Her memoir focuses on a pivotal stage of her life, that is, her clitoridectomy and her holistic findings related to FGM as part of her anti-FGM activism in Germany. Her simultaneous placing of arguments and counter arguments to justify her claims/arguments with fact/data enables her to achie...
University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2021
This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersect... more This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersectionality, and womanism to explore the continuity of womanist ethos in select novels of the African-American novelist Alice Walker. It attempts to explore Walker’s use of womanism as an intertextual trope in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); Walker’s portrayal of Celie-Shug as a perfect womanist couple in Color Purple and their reappearance in Temple as mother trees; foremothers as role models in Third Life and Temple; Walker’s telling and retelling of Tashi’s life-long suffering from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Color Purple, Temple, and Possessing – the subject of this paper.
Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, 2020
The study locates an asymmetrical dialectic of oppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditi... more The study locates an asymmetrical dialectic of oppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. It reveals Nyasha, Tambu, Lucia, Maiguru, and Ma’Shingayi’s experiences with racist-sexist dimensions in the context of a typical Shona society in colonial Rhodesia and England. The study locates cultural and political inscriptions on women’s body and sexuality and the mutually-constitutive intersections which socio-culturally and politically regulate women characters’ beliefs and body. Nyasha goes against existing political dynamics and exhibits subversive body performativeness to claim/redefine her identity and sexuality. It bespeaks of an act of political warfare. She deliberately dismantles the barriers that prohibit entrance to domains reserved for specific gender and race. As such, Nyasha’s relation with her society and the hierarchical structure of race and gender in which her identity is embedded unequivocally signify political implications. This is because Nyasha’s race, ge...
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences
The paper attempts to explore selected African American women writers’ (Zora Neale Hurston, Maya ... more The paper attempts to explore selected African American women writers’ (Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker) self-discovery, celebration of their selfhood, and sense of wholeness in their auto/biogrAfrical discourses. Instrumental rhetoricity of the autobiographers reflects politicization of black women’s struggle, cultural (de)construction, and feminist/womanist (re)construction. Instead of fitting into heteronormative discourses and a process of cultural assimilation, and of adhering to cultural codes of femininity, these writers transgress traditional norms of behavior. Through autobiographical manifestos interwoven with self-defining identity and artistic transgression, they powerfully assert notions of collective female agency and embrace their new-found identity as feminist/womanist/queer. As an agent of awareness and proclamation, their (except Hurston’s) powerful rhetoric is infused with their triple consciousness of being a black woman with African background and cultural pride. They illustrate an interconnectedness of racism and sexism which causes double oppression on black women. They boldly raise racial issues of universal significance, stick to their authentic selves, and reaffirm their agonizing black history/past as they journey toward maturity and wholeness. Their discourses reflect an interweaving of past and present, individual and community, and personal and political changes which lead them toward an esthetic paradigm of wholeness.
Research Article published by Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, SPRINGER NATURE, ©Fudan University , 2022
The paper attempts to explore selected African American women writers’ (Zora Neale Hurston, Maya ... more The paper attempts to explore selected African American women writers’ (Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, and Alice Walker) self-discovery, celebration of their selfhood, and sense of wholeness in their auto/biogrAfrical discourses. Instrumental rhetoricity of the autobiographers reflects politicization of black women’s struggle, cultural (de)construction, and feminist/womanist (re)construction. Instead of fitting into heteronormative discourses and a process of cultural assimilation, and of adhering to cultural codes of femininity, these writers transgress traditional norms of behavior. Through autobiographical manifestos interwoven with self-defining identity and artistic transgression, they powerfully assert notions of collective female agency and embrace their new-found identity as feminist/womanist/queer. As an agent of awareness and proclamation, their (except Hurston’s) powerful rhetoric is infused with their triple consciousness of being a black woman with African background and cultural pride. They illustrate an interconnectedness of racism and sexism which causes double oppression on black women. They boldly raise racial issues of universal significance, stick to their authentic selves, and reaffirm their agonizing black history/past as they journey toward maturity and wholeness. Their discourses reflect an interweaving of past and present, individual and community, and personal and political changes which lead them toward an esthetic paradigm of wholeness.
University of Bucharest Review, 2020
This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersect... more This study uses the relational content analysis method and theories of intertextuality, intersectionality, and womanism to explore the continuity of womanist ethos in select novels of the African-American novelist Alice Walker. It attempts to explore Walker's use of womanism as an intertextual trope in The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Meridian (1976), The Color Purple (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992); Walker's portrayal of Celie-Shug as a perfect womanist couple in Color Purple and their reappearance in Temple as mother trees; foremothers as role models in Third Life and Temple; Walker's telling and retelling of Tashi's lifelong suffering from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Color Purple, Temple, and Possessing-the subject of this paper.
Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature
The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, bears witness to intersectional axes of socioeconomic , cu... more The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, bears witness to intersectional axes of socioeconomic , cultural, and political power relations behind violence against women (VAW) and sex trafficking in Cambodia. The book calls for human rights activism on prevention and response to VAW and sex trafficking. The book recounts Mam's first-hand experience as a sex slave. It is an essential book on sex trafficking in Cambodia and is significant as it is a global health concern and a human rights issue. Mam escaped sexual slavery and involved in human rights activism and now campaigns against sex-trafficking. Her story is definitely a story of power relationships of dominance and subjugation. Her ethnicity, social status, and gender constitute an interlocking system of violence against her. Political aggression gave rise to displaced aggression on poor minority. Violence rates against poor sex slaves were higher than women of higher status and high-income. A war-torn country, like Cambodia, creates economic and political crises and patriarchal state policies perpetuate VAW. An intersection of oppression cannot be denied. Politically tolerated sex trade intersects with VAW. Cambodia had a turbulent history due to Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. The oppressive regime caused severe food crises in 1979. Poverty, lack of education and employment, and lack of healthcare made people, especially women and children of minority groups, vulnerable to an unimaginable extent. Sex work was an economic alternative to women of poor groups. Mam, born around 1970 at Bou Sra village during Cambordia's genocidal civil war, belonged to a Phnong Buddist ethnic minority at the countryside in Northeastern Cambodia. Her parents left her when she was still a small child in 1970. There is an interlinking point between her personal experience and larger socio-political upheavals, such as American bombing of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War and terrible years of Khmer Rouge regime. Mam's biological parents were an old tribe of mountain people who were lower in social class than the mainstream Khmer people dominating the lowlands of Cambodia. It shows a matrix of domination from larger political to social and then to personal levels.
Explorations:A Journal of Language and Literature, 2020
The study locates an asymmetrical dialectic of oppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditi... more The study locates an asymmetrical dialectic of oppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. It reveals Nyasha, Tambu, Lucia, Maiguru, and Ma'Shingayi's experiences with racist-sexist dimensions in the context of a typical Shona society in colonial Rhodesia and England. The study locates cultural and political inscriptions on women's body and sexuality and the mutually-constitutive intersections which socio-culturally and politically regulate women characters' beliefs and body. Nyasha goes against existing political dynamics and exhibits subversive body performativeness to claim/redefine her identity and sexuality. It bespeaks of an act of political warfare. She deliberately dismantles the barriers that prohibit entrance to domains reserved for specific gender and race. As such, Nyasha's relation with her society and the hierarchical structure of race and gender in which her identity is embedded unequivocally signify political implications. This is because Nyasha's race, gender, and sexuality constitute her social and political identities.
The paper is a comparative study on narcissistic personalities and consequences of their actions ... more The paper is a comparative study on narcissistic personalities and consequences of their actions in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949) and Saul Bellow's novella Seize the Day (1956). Relational content analysis method is used to explore different degrees of narcissism in the characters ñ the subject of this paper. The research aims at analyzing narcissistic traits, such as obsession with fostering a self-image, denial, preoccupation with unrealistic grand fantasies of success, obsession with superiority and fear of inferiority, and feelings of specialness in connection with the characters of Willy Loman and his sons in Miller's play and Dr. Adler and his son in Bellow's novella. Their desperate and excessive attempts to attain their desired image and to get approval of self-worth in society detach them from their true identity and make them lead a life of failure, alienation, and helplessness as well as suffer from an existential crisis. The narcissistic characters lack empathy and capability of establishing healthy relationships with others they are associated with even as regards parental and conjugal bonding. Instead of healing them, such bonding actually turns out to be a form of bondages that victimizes them. A materialistic and capitalistic society like that of the twentieth century New York was no less for their suffering on both the personal and professional levels. Their fallacious perception of the American Dream is also associated with their narcissist vision of denying their poor status, which was in perpetual conflict with
their make-believe images.
Keywords: Narcissism, American dream, capitalism, denial, fantasy, obsession
The study attempts to explore the intersections of race and sex in connection with the cultural a... more The study attempts to explore the intersections of race and sex in connection with the cultural and political paradigms of female genital mutilation (FGM) in African American novelist Alice Walker's 1992 novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. FGM involves inter-relatedness of race and sex in its implementation and sustenance in the name of cultural relativism and political freedom. Tashi's genital mutilation, her lifelong physical and psychological complications, her murder of the circumciser M'Lissa and her execution in the novel question the pervasive influence of both gender and racial specifications. The culturally motivated specifications are essentially political as they control the lives of women or more specifically black women in society. Great liberators and political leaders use FGM as a political tool to advance black community's cause for political freedom from the Europeans/whites. Liberation is only meant for the black men, not black women. Black women are merely used as cultural defenders. It indicates historical and political exclusion of black women like Tashi from the dominant male culture.
Book Reviews by U. H. Ruhina Jesmin
Book Review , 2021
Maria Kiminta’s personal account, Kiminta: A Maasai’s Fight against Female Genital Mutilation, is... more Maria Kiminta’s personal account, Kiminta: A Maasai’s Fight against Female Genital Mutilation, is a survivor memoir which reveals her genital mutilation and her comprehensive range of vision on FGM in an audacious, argumentative, and persuasive fashion. It lucidly and pragmatically recounts her first-hand experiences as a Maasai FGM survivor; thus, it is an essential memoir on FGM advocating the global movement to eradicate the horrendous practice. The memoir is also significant in that it renders the readers the resources/arguments to realize the violence and depth of excruciating pain on female sex, to understand “loss to development as a whole” (Kiminta 2015: 44), and to support the movement. Her memoir focuses on a pivotal stage of her life, that is, her clitoridectomy and her holistic findings related to FGM as part of her anti-FGM activism in Germany. Her simultaneous placing of arguments and counter arguments to justify her claims/arguments with fact/data enables her to achieve an objective tone in her memoir. In so doing, she indistinctly divides the memoir into seven parts, such as her clitoridectomy at the age of ten in Kenya, causes behind FGM practice, strategies to execute FGM, impacts of FGM, points of claim and counter claim, hindrances to implementation of anti-FGM Acts, and her recommendations.
University of Bucharest Review, 2020
Rewriting , Re-imagining the Past (I)
Explorations: A Journal of Language and Literature, 2020
Somaly Mam’s 2008 memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, bear... more Somaly Mam’s 2008 memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, bears witness to intersectional axes of socio-economic, cultural, and political power relations behind violence against women (VAW) and sex trafficking in Cambodia. The book calls for human rights activism on prevention and response to VAW and sex trafficking. The book recounts Mam’s first-hand experience as a sex slave. It is an essential book on sex trafficking in Cambodia and is significant as it is a global health concern and a human rights issue.
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Papers by U. H. Ruhina Jesmin
homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker
and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple
(1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies
the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality
to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal
culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate
women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative
sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different
categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how
their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The
commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of
sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters,
unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and
homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.
their make-believe images.
Keywords: Narcissism, American dream, capitalism, denial, fantasy, obsession
Book Reviews by U. H. Ruhina Jesmin
homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker
and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple
(1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies
the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality
to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal
culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate
women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative
sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different
categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how
their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The
commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of
sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters,
unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and
homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.
their make-believe images.
Keywords: Narcissism, American dream, capitalism, denial, fantasy, obsession
Bringing together comparative perspectives, intersectionality, and interdisciplinarity, it uses feminist methodology and mixed methods, with ethnography of central importance, to provide holistic, grounded theorizing within a framework of transformative research. Taking female genital mutilation, a topical, contested practice, and making it a heuristic reference for related procedures makes the case for global action based on understanding the complexity of harmful cultural practices that are contextually differentiated and experienced in intersectional ways. But because this phenomenon is enshrouded in matters of sensitivity and prejudice, narratives of suffering are muted and even suppressed, are dismissed as indigenous ritual, or become ammunition for racist organizing. Such conflicted and often opaque debates obstruct clear vision of the scale of both problem and solution.
Divided into six parts:
• Discourses and Epistemological Fault Lines
• FGM and Related Patriarchal Inscriptions
• Gender and Genitalia
• Female Bodies and Body Politics: Economics, Law, Medicine, Public Health, and Human Rights
• Placing Engagement, Innovation, Impact, Care
• Words and Texts to Shatter Silence
Comprised of 24 newly written chapters from experts around the world, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of nursing, social work, and allied health more broadly, as well as sociology, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.