Books by Lilijana Burcar
https://zalozba-sophia.si/katalog/2022/kapital-in-reproduktivne-pravice
Knjiga Lilijane Burcar predstavlja jedan od rjeđih, sustavnijih i ozbiljnijih istraživačko-ana... more Knjiga Lilijane Burcar predstavlja jedan od rjeđih, sustavnijih i ozbiljnijih istraživačko-analitičkih poduhvata na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije koji se bavi problematikom odnosa kapitalizma i patrijarhata u bivšem socijalističkom sustavu i nakon njega. Ova studija nosi težinu pionirskog socijalističko-feminističkog istraživačkog podviga jer nam u velikoj mjeri pomaže popuniti šupljine u suvremenoj tekućoj teorijskoj produkciji koja je tematski usmjerena na odnos političke ekonomije socijalizma i emancipacije žena unutar socijalističkog sustava. Uz to, autorica svjesno kritizira liberalističke narative koji impliciraju da je jugoslavenski socijalizam bio tek prolazni „eksperiment”, a ne važan historijski događaj koji je implementirao ključne mehanizme emancipacije žena. Riječ je o istraživanju koje kombinira arhivski rad i problemsku interpretaciju locirane građe čime autorica donosi čitavi niz novih znanstvenih spoznaja i epistemoloških modela kojima prokazuje načine institucionalizacije i restauracije patrijarhata u kapitalizmu. Dodatni doprinos ove knjige sastoji se i u činjenici da prati suvremene svjetske teorijske doprinose u domeni radikalne društvene teorije i regenerira feminističku teoriju socijalne reprodukcije, napose u tzv. dvosistemskom ključu, koji polazeći od međusobnog odnosa produktivnog i reproduktivnog rada skicira logiku kapitalističkog načina proizvodnje i rodne podjele rada koja otuda slijedi.
dr. sc. Ankica Čakardić
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Društveni interes za objavom djela je golem ne samo zbog toga što knjiga nudi originalno, teorijski i arhivski utemeljeno „rodno čitanje“ kapitalizma (pa stoga posredno propituje ne samo što je rod i gdje se rodni odnosi sve manifestiraju nego i što je uopće kapitalizam), nego i zbog toga što tu složenu problematiku smješta u domaći, postjugoslavenski kontekst. Takva kontekstualizacija problematike, a s obzirom na socijalističku prošlost u regiji, nudi niz doista zanimljivih intervencija u uobičajena slična istraživanja odnosa rodnog i ekonomskog u kapitalizmu. Posebni je znanstveni doprinos knjige u tome što eksplicite upozorava na to da je, s obzirom na to da je za implementaciju kapitalizma nužna patrijarhalna subordinacija i rodno uvjetovana raspodjela moći na tržištu rada, tranzicija u kapitalistički sustav različito utjecala na žene, odnosno muškarce. Stoga ona posredno propituje vjerodostojnost osovinske ideje kapitalizma kao naprednog, razvijenog, na individualnim i ravnopravno raspodijeljenim pravima utemeljenog sustava, i kao takvog – najprimjerenijeg zapadnjačkim društvima u 21. stoljeću.
dr. sc. Danijela Lugarić Vukas
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Autor: Lilijana Burcar
Nakladnik: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku i Centar za ženske studije
Godina izdanja: 2020
Cijena: 150,00 kn
Sadržaj:
http://www.ief.hr/novosti/restauracija-kapitalizma-repatrijarhalizacija-drustva/
In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s Th... more In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major interpretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socioeconomic forces at work. The latter are laid out in documentary interchapters that constitute the backbone of dialectical montage, a narrative method used by Steinbeck to create a consciousness-raising novel. Documentary interchapters, as this paper argues, shed light on the integrated forms of systemic exploitation that agricultural workers face in capitalism. Overlooking the significance of documentary interchapters results in a reductive reading of Steinbeck’s classic, which in turn also undermines its consciousness-raising potential in our era.
Journal of Gender Studies
With high heels brought back into fashion in the 2000s by the beauty-
industrial ... more With high heels brought back into fashion in the 2000s by the beauty-
industrial complex, health organizations have since reported an
‘epidemiology of high-heeled shoe injuries’, especially among young
women. Feminist theory in general, and literary criticism on gender, have
not yet systematically addressed the role high heels play in upholding and
naturalizing the construct of femininity. This article examines seemingly
diverse but complementary ways in which high heels function as one of the
contemporary devices of femininity in capitalist patriarchy, and argues that
the promotion of high heels has a direct stake in reconfiguring women, and
their bodies, as symbolically, and literally, tiny and unstable, as fragile and
helpless, and as sexually objectified and commodified. The article relies on an
interdisciplinary approach, which brings together feminist theory on body
and recent medical findings on the effects that wearing high heels has on
women’s health and motility. These are applied to the way the problematics
of high heels tends to be captured and exposed in socially engaged literary
works such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street , which serves as
a rare instance of a critically engaged literary piece on this matter.
Kot dokazuje zgodovina, so možnosti samouresničitve in načini delovanja posameznice odvisni od st... more Kot dokazuje zgodovina, so možnosti samouresničitve in načini delovanja posameznice odvisni od strukturnih dejavnikov, kot jih krojijo političnoekonomski sistemi, ki so vedno že družbeni. Socialističnega sistema in ureditve ni mogoče misliti kot zgolj vrsto mimobežnega eksperimenta, kot nam dopovedujejo propagandna občila tako imenovanih kapitalističnih demokracij, temveč kot pomembno in resnično točko v zgodovini. Socializem je med drugim nakazal in udejanjil ključne možnosti emancipacije žensk, je učna knjiga, na katero se bo v temeljnih izhodiščih treba ponovno nasloniti pri naslednji izgradnji nove in kolektivno izborjene družbe pravičnosti. Zato je tudi prihodnost moških in žensk feminizem, ki razume medsebojno strukturno zraščenost kapitalizma, imperializma, rasizma, nacionalizma in patriarhata in ki te podsisteme kapitalizma skupaj z njegovimi osrednjimi mehanizmi izkoriščanja in razlaščevanja ne le razgalja, ampak jih je prav zaradi razdelanih sinteznih uvidov sposoben tudi sistemsko presegati. Lilijana Burcar
Novi val nedolžnosti v otroški literaturi: kaj sporočata Harry Potter in Lyra Srebrousta? [A New ... more Novi val nedolžnosti v otroški literaturi: kaj sporočata Harry Potter in Lyra Srebrousta? [A New Wave of Innocence in Children’s Literature: Conservative backlash and the significance of Harry Potter and Lyra Silvermouth]. Lilijana Burcar. Ljubljana: Sophia, 2007. vi + 205 pages. 18 € (paperback).
The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a revival of the romantic trope of innocent child, which has staged its massive comeback through the backdoor of such bestselling mainstream children’s literature as the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. The book argues that the return of the innocent child is informed by the re-inscription and re-naturalization of rigid constructs of masculinity and femininity, which makes seemingly universal and simple field of innocent childhood in fact gender stratified and hierarchically organized. In this respect the return of the trope of innocent child in bestselling children’s literature is heavily underlined by the conservative backlash and comes at a crucial moment in history marked by a reorganisation of world economies, social structures and a turn to the ideological right.
The romantic paradigm of childhood innocence sets the child apart from the world of adults by sequestering it into a seemingly separate, static and timeless world of nature. As a result, the child is transformed into a blank and simple, transcendent entity that appears to be floating free of historically and socially specific determinants. The romantic view of children as incontestably good, untouched and inhabiting a world separate from the concerns of the adults, “obscures the ways in which the child participates in our social, historical, and economic matrices” (Flynn 160). At the same time it also obscures the ways in which the child’s complex, multifaceted identity is not only marked by class, gender, race, ethnicity and geopolitical place but is also “formed from [the child’s] being in the world and negotiating that world” (Flynn 160). The romantic imaginary of childhood innocence the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy reinstitute stands in stark contrast to the kind of economies of childhood that social realism and postmodernism in children’s and young adult literature endorsed in the late 1970s, 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. These literary approaches dismantled the romantic trope of innocence in favour of matter-of-fact exploration of social issues, structured inequalities, economic hardships, emotional crises and sexualities, which are all understood to be also an integral part of childhood realities. By inscribing the child once again as a liminal or symbolic border figure shorn of its social moorings and material specificities, the discourse of innocence dematerialises, sentimentalises and universalises the child, obscuring the understanding of how children’s subjectivities, just like those of adults, are being forged and reconstructed in the age of globalisation.
Crucially, while the revival of the discourse of innocence seemingly posits the child to be universally the same and gender neutral, a closer textual analysis of Pullman’s and J.K. Rowling’s works reveals a gender inflected patterning and stratification of childhood innocence. In the Harry Potter books the return of innocent child is staged through the annihilation of the knowing child, embodied in the figure of a girl child. A closer analysis of the Harry Potter formulaic books reveals that the innocent child is figured exclusively as a heroic, playful and naughty boy who is understood to be the embodiment of hegemonic-masculinity-in the making. The girl, cast as the knowing child, is featured as too straightforward, needing to be contained, silenced and erased or tamed and placed in the subservient position to the innocent boy child. Pullman’s trilogy, on the other hand, opens with the exploration of childhoods that are highly complex, while children themselves are shown not to be empty vessels but dynamic and socially conditioned psychological modalities. However, upon the introduction of a boy protagonist, the complexities of childhood are brought under the exclusive domain of the boy child. Simultaneously, the girl’s childhood is reconfigured to the extent that she now loses the status of an independent and shrewd girl. She is instead turned into the embodiment of a particular version of innocent child, that is, a prelapsarian and merely intuitive child. As a result of this transformation, the girl in Pullman’s trilogy is also pictured as a lost and helpless child in need of guidance. Turned into an obediently silenced, helpless and submissive girl child, she is featured as entirely dependent upon the thinking and actions undertaken by the rational boy child.
As the girl in the two worldwide best-selling children’s book series is effectively marginalized and given the status of at best supportive, but always already abjected other, her form of disempowerment is also cunningly paraded as a form of empowerment. Girl readers are thus seduced into accepting particular reading positions by means of which they are socialized to accept second-rate positionings as natural, believing them to be a form of their own empowerment in real life. In the age of neoliberal restructuring where women are, for example, granted access to the job market under ever more exacerbated terms of employment – that is, as increasingly flexibilised and casualised second-rate labour force stuck in deskilled labour-intensive or devalued service jobs - the naturalization of these second-rate positionings of young girls and future adults is even more disconcerting. Such a re-vitalisation of dichotomous and hierarchically organized constructs of gender in bestselling children’s literature at the turn of the 21st century goes hand in hand with the conservative backlash as it works to undermine the gains made by feminist interventions into the production of literature for children and young adults in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Papers by Lilijana Burcar
The year 2023 marks Michael ondaatje's 80th birthday, a landmark in the author's life and an occa... more The year 2023 marks Michael ondaatje's 80th birthday, a landmark in the author's life and an occasion for literary critics to look back and revisit what are perhaps some of the more troubling aspects of his literary production. ondaatje's poetry and fiction have received little attention from feminist literary critics, which is due to the author's conservative take on the figuration of female characters and representation of women. While some critics have proposed that The English Patient (1992), and therefore also by extension his novel Divisadero (2007), might signify a turning point in ondaatje's otherwise problematic gender politics, this article demonstrates that earlier patterns of women's objectification, sexualization and marginalization found in ondaatje's poetry and fiction persist in both of these seemingly more progressive works, albeit in new forms and disguises. This article also introduces a new concept to the field of (feminist) literary theory, the so-called blazon in prose.
The forgotten proletarian fairy tales of Hermynia zur Mühlen: Es war einmal … und es wird sein
The first literary tales emerged out of the 17th-century French salons, run by high-ranking arist... more The first literary tales emerged out of the 17th-century French salons, run by high-ranking aristocratic women, and served as a political manifesto. The salon women writers used the genre they created to promote a proto-feminist agenda. This included a rebellion against forced marriages and a withdrawal from the institution of marriage that circumscribed their freedom of movement, love, self-sufficiency and the right to their own literary voice. The female salon writers bestowed these rights on their fairy-tale female protagonists, creating a proto-feminist utopian world that sank into oblivion upon the authorsʼ exclusion from the canon.
Clanek problematizira Fryevo delitev na realisticno-mimeticno in fantazijsko-eskapisticno pisanje... more Clanek problematizira Fryevo delitev na realisticno-mimeticno in fantazijsko-eskapisticno pisanje ter pokaže, da v sodobnih fantazijskih romanih za mlado bralstvo v Britaniji poteka bitka za novo videnje subjekta.
Die vorliegende wissenschaftliche Monographie behandelt in 30 Beitragen Literarische Freiraume un... more Die vorliegende wissenschaftliche Monographie behandelt in 30 Beitragen Literarische Freiraume und bringt neue Erkenntnisse aus verschiedenen Gebieten der germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft in drei Abschnitten: der erste Teil greift in die Geschichte, der zweite erkundet die Gegenwart und der dritte blickt in die Zukunft.
Ars & Humanitas
Mladinske delovne akcije so bile ključnega pomena za izgradnjo in ohranitev neodvisnega gospodars... more Mladinske delovne akcije so bile ključnega pomena za izgradnjo in ohranitev neodvisnega gospodarsko-političnega sistema in s tem družbenega prostora, kot ga je predstavljala socialistična Jugoslavija. V prvi petletki po drugi svetovni vojni je bila še zlasti pomembna izgradnja novih prometnih žil, ki bi novonastajajočemu industrijskemu bazenu Jugoslavije zagotovile dostop do poprej slabo izkoriščanih in večinoma le izvoženih surovinskih bogastev. Na teh mladinskih gradbiščih so delovali tudi jugoslovanski umetniki in umetnice, katerih literarni in drugi prispevki med drugim dokumentirajo potek izgradnje objektov in njihovih najtežjih udarniških trenutkov, predvsem na železniških progah Brčko–Banovići in Šamac–Sarajevo. Kot taki so svojevrsten (literarni in zgodovinski) dokument svojega časa in geopolitičnega prostora v nastajanju, ki je danes zavoljo historičnega revizionizma skorajda v celoti izgubljen in ohranjen le še v nekaterih fragmentih.
arcadia
In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s Th... more In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major interpretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socioeconomic forces at work. The latter are laid out in documentary interchapters that constitute the backbone of dialectical montage, a narrative method used by Steinbeck to create a consciousness-raising novel. Documentary interchapters, as this paper argues, shed light on the integrated forms of systemic exploitation that agricultural workers face in capitalism. Overlooking the significance of documentary interchapters results in a reductive reading of Steinbeck’s classic, which in turn also undermines its consciousness-raising potential in our era.
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Books by Lilijana Burcar
dr. sc. Ankica Čakardić
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Društveni interes za objavom djela je golem ne samo zbog toga što knjiga nudi originalno, teorijski i arhivski utemeljeno „rodno čitanje“ kapitalizma (pa stoga posredno propituje ne samo što je rod i gdje se rodni odnosi sve manifestiraju nego i što je uopće kapitalizam), nego i zbog toga što tu složenu problematiku smješta u domaći, postjugoslavenski kontekst. Takva kontekstualizacija problematike, a s obzirom na socijalističku prošlost u regiji, nudi niz doista zanimljivih intervencija u uobičajena slična istraživanja odnosa rodnog i ekonomskog u kapitalizmu. Posebni je znanstveni doprinos knjige u tome što eksplicite upozorava na to da je, s obzirom na to da je za implementaciju kapitalizma nužna patrijarhalna subordinacija i rodno uvjetovana raspodjela moći na tržištu rada, tranzicija u kapitalistički sustav različito utjecala na žene, odnosno muškarce. Stoga ona posredno propituje vjerodostojnost osovinske ideje kapitalizma kao naprednog, razvijenog, na individualnim i ravnopravno raspodijeljenim pravima utemeljenog sustava, i kao takvog – najprimjerenijeg zapadnjačkim društvima u 21. stoljeću.
dr. sc. Danijela Lugarić Vukas
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Autor: Lilijana Burcar
Nakladnik: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku i Centar za ženske studije
Godina izdanja: 2020
Cijena: 150,00 kn
Sadržaj:
http://www.ief.hr/novosti/restauracija-kapitalizma-repatrijarhalizacija-drustva/
industrial complex, health organizations have since reported an
‘epidemiology of high-heeled shoe injuries’, especially among young
women. Feminist theory in general, and literary criticism on gender, have
not yet systematically addressed the role high heels play in upholding and
naturalizing the construct of femininity. This article examines seemingly
diverse but complementary ways in which high heels function as one of the
contemporary devices of femininity in capitalist patriarchy, and argues that
the promotion of high heels has a direct stake in reconfiguring women, and
their bodies, as symbolically, and literally, tiny and unstable, as fragile and
helpless, and as sexually objectified and commodified. The article relies on an
interdisciplinary approach, which brings together feminist theory on body
and recent medical findings on the effects that wearing high heels has on
women’s health and motility. These are applied to the way the problematics
of high heels tends to be captured and exposed in socially engaged literary
works such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street , which serves as
a rare instance of a critically engaged literary piece on this matter.
The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a revival of the romantic trope of innocent child, which has staged its massive comeback through the backdoor of such bestselling mainstream children’s literature as the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. The book argues that the return of the innocent child is informed by the re-inscription and re-naturalization of rigid constructs of masculinity and femininity, which makes seemingly universal and simple field of innocent childhood in fact gender stratified and hierarchically organized. In this respect the return of the trope of innocent child in bestselling children’s literature is heavily underlined by the conservative backlash and comes at a crucial moment in history marked by a reorganisation of world economies, social structures and a turn to the ideological right.
The romantic paradigm of childhood innocence sets the child apart from the world of adults by sequestering it into a seemingly separate, static and timeless world of nature. As a result, the child is transformed into a blank and simple, transcendent entity that appears to be floating free of historically and socially specific determinants. The romantic view of children as incontestably good, untouched and inhabiting a world separate from the concerns of the adults, “obscures the ways in which the child participates in our social, historical, and economic matrices” (Flynn 160). At the same time it also obscures the ways in which the child’s complex, multifaceted identity is not only marked by class, gender, race, ethnicity and geopolitical place but is also “formed from [the child’s] being in the world and negotiating that world” (Flynn 160). The romantic imaginary of childhood innocence the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy reinstitute stands in stark contrast to the kind of economies of childhood that social realism and postmodernism in children’s and young adult literature endorsed in the late 1970s, 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. These literary approaches dismantled the romantic trope of innocence in favour of matter-of-fact exploration of social issues, structured inequalities, economic hardships, emotional crises and sexualities, which are all understood to be also an integral part of childhood realities. By inscribing the child once again as a liminal or symbolic border figure shorn of its social moorings and material specificities, the discourse of innocence dematerialises, sentimentalises and universalises the child, obscuring the understanding of how children’s subjectivities, just like those of adults, are being forged and reconstructed in the age of globalisation.
Crucially, while the revival of the discourse of innocence seemingly posits the child to be universally the same and gender neutral, a closer textual analysis of Pullman’s and J.K. Rowling’s works reveals a gender inflected patterning and stratification of childhood innocence. In the Harry Potter books the return of innocent child is staged through the annihilation of the knowing child, embodied in the figure of a girl child. A closer analysis of the Harry Potter formulaic books reveals that the innocent child is figured exclusively as a heroic, playful and naughty boy who is understood to be the embodiment of hegemonic-masculinity-in the making. The girl, cast as the knowing child, is featured as too straightforward, needing to be contained, silenced and erased or tamed and placed in the subservient position to the innocent boy child. Pullman’s trilogy, on the other hand, opens with the exploration of childhoods that are highly complex, while children themselves are shown not to be empty vessels but dynamic and socially conditioned psychological modalities. However, upon the introduction of a boy protagonist, the complexities of childhood are brought under the exclusive domain of the boy child. Simultaneously, the girl’s childhood is reconfigured to the extent that she now loses the status of an independent and shrewd girl. She is instead turned into the embodiment of a particular version of innocent child, that is, a prelapsarian and merely intuitive child. As a result of this transformation, the girl in Pullman’s trilogy is also pictured as a lost and helpless child in need of guidance. Turned into an obediently silenced, helpless and submissive girl child, she is featured as entirely dependent upon the thinking and actions undertaken by the rational boy child.
As the girl in the two worldwide best-selling children’s book series is effectively marginalized and given the status of at best supportive, but always already abjected other, her form of disempowerment is also cunningly paraded as a form of empowerment. Girl readers are thus seduced into accepting particular reading positions by means of which they are socialized to accept second-rate positionings as natural, believing them to be a form of their own empowerment in real life. In the age of neoliberal restructuring where women are, for example, granted access to the job market under ever more exacerbated terms of employment – that is, as increasingly flexibilised and casualised second-rate labour force stuck in deskilled labour-intensive or devalued service jobs - the naturalization of these second-rate positionings of young girls and future adults is even more disconcerting. Such a re-vitalisation of dichotomous and hierarchically organized constructs of gender in bestselling children’s literature at the turn of the 21st century goes hand in hand with the conservative backlash as it works to undermine the gains made by feminist interventions into the production of literature for children and young adults in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Papers by Lilijana Burcar
dr. sc. Ankica Čakardić
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Društveni interes za objavom djela je golem ne samo zbog toga što knjiga nudi originalno, teorijski i arhivski utemeljeno „rodno čitanje“ kapitalizma (pa stoga posredno propituje ne samo što je rod i gdje se rodni odnosi sve manifestiraju nego i što je uopće kapitalizam), nego i zbog toga što tu složenu problematiku smješta u domaći, postjugoslavenski kontekst. Takva kontekstualizacija problematike, a s obzirom na socijalističku prošlost u regiji, nudi niz doista zanimljivih intervencija u uobičajena slična istraživanja odnosa rodnog i ekonomskog u kapitalizmu. Posebni je znanstveni doprinos knjige u tome što eksplicite upozorava na to da je, s obzirom na to da je za implementaciju kapitalizma nužna patrijarhalna subordinacija i rodno uvjetovana raspodjela moći na tržištu rada, tranzicija u kapitalistički sustav različito utjecala na žene, odnosno muškarce. Stoga ona posredno propituje vjerodostojnost osovinske ideje kapitalizma kao naprednog, razvijenog, na individualnim i ravnopravno raspodijeljenim pravima utemeljenog sustava, i kao takvog – najprimjerenijeg zapadnjačkim društvima u 21. stoljeću.
dr. sc. Danijela Lugarić Vukas
Filozofski fakultet
Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Autor: Lilijana Burcar
Nakladnik: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku i Centar za ženske studije
Godina izdanja: 2020
Cijena: 150,00 kn
Sadržaj:
http://www.ief.hr/novosti/restauracija-kapitalizma-repatrijarhalizacija-drustva/
industrial complex, health organizations have since reported an
‘epidemiology of high-heeled shoe injuries’, especially among young
women. Feminist theory in general, and literary criticism on gender, have
not yet systematically addressed the role high heels play in upholding and
naturalizing the construct of femininity. This article examines seemingly
diverse but complementary ways in which high heels function as one of the
contemporary devices of femininity in capitalist patriarchy, and argues that
the promotion of high heels has a direct stake in reconfiguring women, and
their bodies, as symbolically, and literally, tiny and unstable, as fragile and
helpless, and as sexually objectified and commodified. The article relies on an
interdisciplinary approach, which brings together feminist theory on body
and recent medical findings on the effects that wearing high heels has on
women’s health and motility. These are applied to the way the problematics
of high heels tends to be captured and exposed in socially engaged literary
works such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street , which serves as
a rare instance of a critically engaged literary piece on this matter.
The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a revival of the romantic trope of innocent child, which has staged its massive comeback through the backdoor of such bestselling mainstream children’s literature as the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials. The book argues that the return of the innocent child is informed by the re-inscription and re-naturalization of rigid constructs of masculinity and femininity, which makes seemingly universal and simple field of innocent childhood in fact gender stratified and hierarchically organized. In this respect the return of the trope of innocent child in bestselling children’s literature is heavily underlined by the conservative backlash and comes at a crucial moment in history marked by a reorganisation of world economies, social structures and a turn to the ideological right.
The romantic paradigm of childhood innocence sets the child apart from the world of adults by sequestering it into a seemingly separate, static and timeless world of nature. As a result, the child is transformed into a blank and simple, transcendent entity that appears to be floating free of historically and socially specific determinants. The romantic view of children as incontestably good, untouched and inhabiting a world separate from the concerns of the adults, “obscures the ways in which the child participates in our social, historical, and economic matrices” (Flynn 160). At the same time it also obscures the ways in which the child’s complex, multifaceted identity is not only marked by class, gender, race, ethnicity and geopolitical place but is also “formed from [the child’s] being in the world and negotiating that world” (Flynn 160). The romantic imaginary of childhood innocence the Harry Potter books and Pullman’s trilogy reinstitute stands in stark contrast to the kind of economies of childhood that social realism and postmodernism in children’s and young adult literature endorsed in the late 1970s, 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. These literary approaches dismantled the romantic trope of innocence in favour of matter-of-fact exploration of social issues, structured inequalities, economic hardships, emotional crises and sexualities, which are all understood to be also an integral part of childhood realities. By inscribing the child once again as a liminal or symbolic border figure shorn of its social moorings and material specificities, the discourse of innocence dematerialises, sentimentalises and universalises the child, obscuring the understanding of how children’s subjectivities, just like those of adults, are being forged and reconstructed in the age of globalisation.
Crucially, while the revival of the discourse of innocence seemingly posits the child to be universally the same and gender neutral, a closer textual analysis of Pullman’s and J.K. Rowling’s works reveals a gender inflected patterning and stratification of childhood innocence. In the Harry Potter books the return of innocent child is staged through the annihilation of the knowing child, embodied in the figure of a girl child. A closer analysis of the Harry Potter formulaic books reveals that the innocent child is figured exclusively as a heroic, playful and naughty boy who is understood to be the embodiment of hegemonic-masculinity-in the making. The girl, cast as the knowing child, is featured as too straightforward, needing to be contained, silenced and erased or tamed and placed in the subservient position to the innocent boy child. Pullman’s trilogy, on the other hand, opens with the exploration of childhoods that are highly complex, while children themselves are shown not to be empty vessels but dynamic and socially conditioned psychological modalities. However, upon the introduction of a boy protagonist, the complexities of childhood are brought under the exclusive domain of the boy child. Simultaneously, the girl’s childhood is reconfigured to the extent that she now loses the status of an independent and shrewd girl. She is instead turned into the embodiment of a particular version of innocent child, that is, a prelapsarian and merely intuitive child. As a result of this transformation, the girl in Pullman’s trilogy is also pictured as a lost and helpless child in need of guidance. Turned into an obediently silenced, helpless and submissive girl child, she is featured as entirely dependent upon the thinking and actions undertaken by the rational boy child.
As the girl in the two worldwide best-selling children’s book series is effectively marginalized and given the status of at best supportive, but always already abjected other, her form of disempowerment is also cunningly paraded as a form of empowerment. Girl readers are thus seduced into accepting particular reading positions by means of which they are socialized to accept second-rate positionings as natural, believing them to be a form of their own empowerment in real life. In the age of neoliberal restructuring where women are, for example, granted access to the job market under ever more exacerbated terms of employment – that is, as increasingly flexibilised and casualised second-rate labour force stuck in deskilled labour-intensive or devalued service jobs - the naturalization of these second-rate positionings of young girls and future adults is even more disconcerting. Such a re-vitalisation of dichotomous and hierarchically organized constructs of gender in bestselling children’s literature at the turn of the 21st century goes hand in hand with the conservative backlash as it works to undermine the gains made by feminist interventions into the production of literature for children and young adults in the 1980s and the 1990s.
contemporary devices of femininity in capitalist patriarchy, and argues that the promotion of high heels has a direct stake in reconfiguring women, and their bodies, as symbolically, and literally, tiny and unstable, as fragile and helpless, and as sexually objectified and commodified. The article relies on an interdisciplinary approach, which brings together feminist theory on body and recent medical findings on the effects that wearing high heels has on women’s health and motility. These are applied to the way the problematics of high heels tends to be captured and exposed in socially engaged literary works such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street , which serves as
a rare instance of a critically engaged literary piece on this matter