Feminist Historiography

My PhD thesis explores the ways the attribution of women’s authorship is used in the construction and development of the Vārkarī bhakti tradition in order to ask what function the high visibility of female poet-sants (santakaviyatrīs) in the tradition might have played in the sampradāya’s self-understanding and presentation. The thesis investigates why there are so many women associated with the Vārkarī sampradāya, while the santakaviyatrīs and the compositions attributed to them are largely absent from contemporary devotional practices. I consider how gender attribution within the sacred biographies (caritra) and the compositions attributed to the santakaviyatrīs relates to the basic tension within the Vārkarī sampradāya, and within bhakti more generally, between complete devotion to God to the exclusion of all others and the worldly duties of a householder; the tension between sannyāsa and gṛhastha. Consequently, the thesis considers the elements that mark the Vārkarī sampradāya out as a householder tradition, as well as the importance of the sants and their attributed compositions to the devotional practices and the discursive formation of the sampradāya. The thesis contends that the presence of compositions attributed to women and caritras about women within the Vārkarī literary corpus is indicative of an argument for, and indeed exemplification of, the viability of the householder path by those who were involved in constructing the traditions of the sampradāya.

"The work of the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences [...] is to collectively create a new realm of cinema history, neither 'the' history, nor 'a' history, but a strange double world." These words are from Jane Gaines in her keynote address for the fifth Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held at the Stockholm University in 2008. This proceedings volume gives a representative picture of the breadth of the conference.

The rich and varied contributions address theoretical issues around this double world of "cinematification" and feminist historiography, advancing questions on the authorship of pioneering female filmmakers and the role of female stars in early cinema. Other topics explored include transnationalism, the performance of femininity, fandom and fashioning, and branding within the studio system. The diversity of subjects in this volume reveals both the complexity and the problems of the field of research that the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences represent. Not only do these papers deal with well-known, concrete issues within feminist scholarship, but they also consider a more fundamental question: that of the medium as such in its early years, and its conceptualisation within a feminist scholarly framework."

This contribution wants to retrace American feminist Betty Friedan’s fascinating biography and controversial reflection, adopting as focal point the book which allowed her to become a strong reference for the Liberal Women's Rights Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and at the same time made her an extremely discussed and criticized public figure within the new Radical Feminist Reflection: The Feminine Mystique (1964).
This brilliant work was able to bring to light the famous “problem that has no name”, the sense of frustration and incompleteness lived in ‘50s by many American middle-class women, placed in name of their docile and uncompetitive femininity within the domestic sphere of suburban reality, in order to ensure political and social stability to the so-called “American way of life”.
Can we really affirm that Betty Friedan has consciously removed part of her young radical engagement – as historian Daniel Horowitz affirmed in his Friedan’s provocative biography of 1998 – to embrace a more comfortable liberal feminist discourse? Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique «the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation», as it was by many defined? Is Friedan’s liberal analysis – aimed to examine the status of white heterosexual middle-class and educated American women – based on a primary exclusion according to class, race and sexual orientation? I will move from these still open questions to reconstruct the political debate which arose around Friedan’s work and her later commitment within the National Organization for Women (NOW), with a particular emphasis on the main criticisms to the structural limits of her political vision.

How can feminism draw productively on its own history, without passively conforming to expectations of the past, or elevating the past as a nostalgic ideal against which to measure and compare the present? Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History proposes an innovative 'polytemporal' model of historical time in relation to feminist historiography. Interweaving phenomenological, hermeneutical, and sociopolitical analyses, the book argues that historical time is generated through the mixing of different times and temporalities, including the time of the trace, narrative time, calendar time and generational time. It provides a philosophically thorough account of historical time as multilayered, multilinear and multidirectional, and shows how this understanding could enable a more fruitful approach towards feminist histories.

Through the use of feminist historiography this article examines some of the myriad ways in which feminist praxis has pushed against, challenged, enriched, dismantled, assimilated or otherwise affected archival theory and practice. We contend that archival theory and practice have yet to fully engage with a feminist praxis that is aimed at more than attaining better representation of women in archives. We begin this piece by tracing the ways in which archives became embedded in feminist social movements and can be understood as critical tools and modes of self-representation and self-historicization. In the second section, we consider the explicit presence of feminist theory in archival studies literature and contemporary practice and the key focal points and arguments that have challenged traditional understandings of archival work around gender. We then address, in the third section, the expansive figure of the archives in humanities and social science literature. This piece contributes significantly to thinking on the ways in which these conversations in the archival turn can, at their best, expose blind spots within the archival literature and provide us with theoretical tools to tackle what we take for granted. Finally, we offer ways in which we see critical and intersectional feminist theory can contribute to existing archival discourse and practice, critiquing concepts that have remained unquestioned such as community and organization. This piece exposes the transformational potential of feminism for archives and of archives for dismantling the heteronormative, capitalist and racist patriarchy.

Las propuestas de publicación han de ser remitidas (en archivo adjunto, con formato PDF) a alguna de las siguientes direcciones electrónicas: [email protected], [email protected] Antes de aceptar una obra para su publicación en la colección INTERLINGUA, esta habrá de ser sometida a una revisión anónima por pares. Para llevarla a cabo se contará, inicialmente, con los miembros del comité científico asesor. En casos justificados, se acudirá a otros especialistas de reconocido prestigio en la materia objeto de consideración.

The key aspects of historical thinking and practice which are essential to an understanding of how historians come to terms with the past consist of, according to Alan Munslow, the epistemological model on which knowledge of the past depends, the role of referentiality in constituting the discourse of history, the literary procedures by which a discourse gives itself the status of science, and the deployment of theory and concept in creating meaning about the past. 1 Jacques Rancière uses the term poetics of knowledge to refer to the epistemological break of historical discourse. The poetics of knowledge is the study of the rules according to which knowledge is written and read, and is constituted as a specific genre of discourse. 2 Pothiti Hantzaroula Gender History and the Transformation of the Poetics of Historical Knowledge University of the Aegean HISTOREIN VOLUME 10 (2010) 49 historical change and their different kinds of determinations (class, national, race, gender, etc.) that function as explanatory factors. 4

Buddhist monastic law codes (vinaya) are rich sources for writing the history of the early nuns' community. If we hope to encounter these ascetic women of long ago as full real people, however, we must apply an intentional , transparent, critically informed, and sometimes interstitial reading strategy, not a theoretically naïve historiography cloaked in philological rigor. Confronting head on the issue of what the vinaya actually can tell us about the early nuns' community, this essay offers a survey of hermeneutical approaches in vinaya studies. It articulates a revised approach based on accepted strategies within vinaya studies enhanced by innovations in the fields of religious studies, gender studies, historical linguistics, comparative law, and dharmaśāstra studies. It also analyzes several vinaya passages based on this revised approach, including a text legislating the nuns' use of what appears to be an ancient tampon when they are menstruating. Finally, it offers observations about the possible relationship between nuns' vinayas as texts and the realia of the early nuns' community. These observations include the possibility that the ancient Buddhist nunnery was a place where monastic women exercised certain types of agency as practitioners, interpreters, and even authors of monastic discipline, despite their oft-mentioned subordin-ation to the male community.

Note de lecture croisée des deux ouvrages
Séverine Sofio – Artistes Femmes. La parenthèse enchantée, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles
(2016). Paris, CNRS Editions, 373 p.
Charlotte Foucher-Zarmanian – Créatrices en 1900. Femmes artistes en France dans les milieux symbolistes
(2015). Paris, Mare & Martin, 370 p.

Despite pioneering reclamation efforts, feminist rhetoricians have only scratched the surface of the multilayered historical reception and representation of Aspasia, a fifth-century BCE Milesian woman famous for the company she kept. Aspasia’s penchant for historical perseverance means that her recovery must extend far beyond the ancient world. Throughout the centuries roused by the so-called Woman Question, she was on the lips and brush-tips of many on the lookout for antecedent and analogous women to serve as models or antimodels. Focusing on nineteenth-century Europe, we illustrate her powerful presence in art. Our discussion showcases Aspasia conversing (Nicolas-André Monsiau), instructing (Honoré Daumier), and contemplating (Henry Holiday). In their work Aspasia resists attempts to mute her colors and reemerges as a painted lady.

Many of the conventions of received feminist historiography have already come under attack, be it the habit of counting "waves" in a way that would leave Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir unaccounted for, construing feminists as successive "generations" as though the only way to make sense of female political actors and thinkers would be through the roles of mothers and daughters, or the hypocritically "liberal" model of putting Western feminists at the core of the movement and then "generously" including "other" women. Browne's book, published in the congenial series "Breaking Feminist Waves," attempts to go beyond the negative work of questioning such patterns. In a reparative phenomenological spirit, she tends to the shattered elements of historiography and reassembles them into new constellations: Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History.

The political history of Western feminism is typically described as encompassing various “waves” of theory and practice, with each wave building on, but also going beyond, an earlier wave. Thus, the second-wave (1968-1980s) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the first wave (1848-1920) struggle for political rights by expanding the concept of rights and of politics itself beyond the confines of the formal political sphere; the third wave (1991-?) is seen as taking up and radicalizing the second wave’s concept of “women” as the political subject of feminism; and so on. Handy though this periodization may be, it has left many feminists wondering which wave they are in anymore. Some feminists argue that the various waves have given way to “intersectional feminism,” but that description does not address the fundamental question of what kind of critical political work the concept of a “wave” was supposed to do in the first place. It was not until 1968 that people started talking about feminism in terms of different waves, and that feminism came to be understood as having a history in this sense at all. This shift allowed feminists to root their political demand for change in a historical democratic struggle for social justice, not least as a way of countering the popular view of the women’s liberation movement as an impossibly utopian project made up by a bunch of crazy man-hating misfits. But this shift also entailed fundamental problems of modern historiography that continue to haunt feminism today.

This article re-reads from a feminist perspective and with the interpretative strategies of feminist criticism, two pieces of late-twentieth-century Hungarian literature, Sándor Weöres's Psyché and Péter Esterházy's Tizenhét ha yúk (Seventeen swans). Both books were wri en by men and both introduce a fi ctitious woman fi gure as the author, presenting the text as hers. Both authors also present this material in an archaised language. A multilayered analysis that tackles the implications of the gender shi between the real and the fi ctitious authors, the genre of the works, their peculiar language use as well as the historical dimensions of conjuring up women authors, leads me to conclude that Psyché and Tizenhét ha yúk may qualify as feminist textual practice. They open up the literary historical canon for women authors and, by actualising l'écriture féminine, let the female protagonists express themselves outside the bounds of phallologocentric signifi cation.

In Portugal, the participation of female architects in the development of the profession-in the broad sense of the word: project, research, education, criticism, and policy-is far from having been identified, problematized, and disseminated. The research project [email protected] (Women Architects in Portugal: Building Visibility, 1942-1986) strives to give visibility to female architects-revealing "who?", "when?", and "how?"-and contribute to expanding the history of Portuguese architecture, as well as developing feminist studies and ideas within the discipline. The strategies chosen to carry out this ongoing research intersect with feminist theories and epistemologies, outside and inside architecture. The issues raised require a critical understanding of the processes that sustain the silencing of female architects' voices, imposing limitations on how we understand the profession in its many facets. The feminist historical reflection that we propose is based on the idea that combining the production of knowledge and professional practices is crucial to change gender biases and women's oppression in both fields.

This article addresses the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s and its historiography from the perspective of its witness and researcher, Anna Rossi-Doria. In the first part, the essay investigates the Italian feminist movement in the late 1970s and its transformation in the subsequent decade. During this transition, the Italian Women’s Liberation Movement – which until then had displayed a strictly political character – emerged as a prominent cultural phenomenon, leading to the institutionalization of feminist studies in the 1990s. The second section concerns the recent historiographical debate on neo-feminism, with a focus on Anna Rossi-Doria’s cultural and political awareness and on the legacy of her research methods.

This article addresses some of the opportunities and challenges the Afro-Caribbean American author faced whilst researching Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. Despite perceptual insiderness as an Afro-Caribbean person, the author’s positionality had multiple dimensions, often shifting within complex identity-related contexts. These ideas and concepts will be illuminated through analysing the complexity of transnationalism, class and transcendental identity as they intertwined whilst an oral history project progressed. Positionality is rarely totally binary and this article provides some insight into how perceptions of insiderness and outsiderness can influence oral history in terms of interviewing, analysis and dissemination.

This article discusses transgender history, and argues for a broad understanding of such. The first part contains a discussion on cis normativity and historical research, specifically within women’s and gender studies. Certain stereotypical explanations of gender transgressive experiences, in particular the so-called ”passing woman” are examined as part of a certain feminist heritage. In this particular line of research, cross-dressing is considered an emancipa- tory practice where cisgender women disguise themselves as men in order to escape the boundaries of patriarchal society. The article does not contest the occurrence of such experiences, but argues for more, and more nuanced, understandings of sex and gender.
The second part of the article considers five Swedish gender transgressive persons: Anders Magnus Åhrman (also Anna Maria, 1777-unknown date of death), Lasse-Maja (Lars Larsson Molin, 1785–1845), Aron Forss (1807–1854), Andreas Bruce (1808–1885), and Carl August/Helga Lundström (1862–1915). One of the key arguments is that such cases should not be analysed only on the basis of assigned sex. Such assumptions of sex and gender identi- ties are problematic in several ways. For example, they leave out important areas of research by viewing the experiences of trans- feminine persons as ”male”. Also, they ignore more complex and non-binary understandings that have been available for recogniz- ing, articulating and interpreting sex and gender before the 20th Century. Through other departures, the article argues, it is possible to more fully apprehend both the conditions of gender transgressions and the ways in which sex and gender have been understood through history.

Los diferentes movimientos emancipatorios de mujeres que se gestaron a partir de fines del siglo XVIII, impugnaron modos patriarcales de entender no solo en qué consisten los derechos, sino también qué estrategias utilizar a la hora de desplegar el activismo. Muchos de los reclamos que fueron conformando los inicios del movimiento-derecho a la educación, al sufragio, a la igualdad de salario-insistieron, por ejemplo, en diluir la configuración afectiva patriarcal encabalgada sobre y con la opresión patriarcal. Resulta pertinente, entonces, indagar en el modo en que los distintos movimientos de mujeres autodefinidos como emancipatorios alteraron qué entender como estrategia política, a partir de su certeza en que el orden patriarcal se legitima a través de una configuración afectiva específica que se pretendió inalterable. El objetivo de este trabajo es doble. Por un lado, argumentar que, desde sus comienzos, los movimientos emancipatorios de mujeres entendieron que, para ser exitosos y, sobre todo, perdurables, el camino requiere alterar la configuración afectiva patriarcal para generar otras posibles, capaces de desafiar la opresión fundada en un orden afectivo pretendidamente inalterable. El segundo objetivo consiste en argumentar que este proceso pone en funcionamiento una agencia afectiva específica, donde los afectos no son meros recursos para la acción, sino que señalan una relación tensionada, aunque productiva, en términos de capacidad de acción, entre afectos y emociones. Se trata de subrayar, a través de distintas estrategias, la contingencia e injusticia de la configuración afectiva patriarcal, para establecer otra dispuesta para la emancipación y desde allí intervenir en el mundo bajo una nueva lógica.

Ruth Mary Weeks , the nineteenth president and second woman president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), initiated an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum project for NCTE that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. As Weeks asserts, "Whatever the subject investigated, men must read and listen and speak and write about it. At the center of the integration movement stands English" (A Correlated 283). Weeks's words demonstrate the significance of English to such a curricular experiment. They also reflect Weeks's broad definition of English, which encompassed human communication: reading, listening, speaking, and writing.

Our essay will be focused in the epistolary relation that Elise Reimarus (1735-1805) maintained with Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) and F.H. Jacobi (1743-1819) because of the discussion begun by Jacobi after claiming G.E. Lessing (1729-1783) to be a “spinozist”. The analysis of Reimarus’ intervention will be divided in two parts: in the first one, we will shortly contextualize de discussion by giving the tenets of Lessing’s thought that justify Jacobi’s claim; secondly, we will offer an sketch of Elise’s biography in order to proceed afterwards to judge her role within the debate. (i) By showing the way Elise took part in such intellectual affairs and (ii) by noting the relevance of her contributions, (iii) we will close the essay with a reflection on what tools and strategies are to be considered in order to include women when writing history of philosophy and thought.
Key words: spinozism, fatalism, E. Reimarus, M.Mendelssohn, F.H. Jacobi.

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

Though largely debarred from public rhetorical performance as adult women, young women in the nineteenth-century US received rhetorical training and performed their original compositions before large public audiences as high school students. Their access to the academic platform stemmed in part from their politically contained position as students and “girls” in this context. But students used these opportunities to intervene in political debates and to comment on their experiences as women and students. These rhetorical interventions represent an important part of our rhetorical history, shedding light on a significant rhetorical opportunity for many young women across the US.

Co-authored with Melanie Bell, Christine Gledhill, Shelley Cobb, Rashmi Sawhney, Laraine Porter, Ulrike Sieglohr. While 1970s/1980s feminist film theory questioned the representability of women within a male-dominated industry, renewed interest in early film history revealed unexpected numbers of women film makers. The international Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), an ever-growing database housed at Columbia University, New York, documents research into the pioneering work of women in cinema's first crucial decades as it became a mass and transnational medium. A surge of monographs has followed, focusing on women's diverse careers, the gendering of film studio organization and practices, and the cultural impacts of female audiences, campaigners, journalists, and critics. These discoveries are emerging in festival and film theater programming, film education, and local cultural activity. In Britain, the Women's Film & Television History Network-UK/Ireland, encourages r...

Mektubunda gerçek adını kullandıysa, çevirmen adının ve soyadının harflerini doğru çevirdiyse, matbaada bir baskı hatası olmadıysa adı bu: Sırpuhi Markaryan. 1909'un Mayıs ayında, Kadıköy'de, o yıllarda ilk kocasının adını kullanan Halide Salih'e (Halide Edip) bir mektup yazdı. Markaryan'ın mektubunu bitirmesi dört gün sürdü. Sonra bir çevirmen buldu. Ermenice yazdığı için metni Osmanlı Türkçesine tercüme ettirdi, Tanin gazetesine yolladı. Hepsi bu. Sırpuhi Markaryan hakkında bildiklerim 26 Mayıs 1909'da Tanin'de yayınlanan mektubuyla sınırlı.i

Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Examines the rhetorical construction and circulation of San Jose's "Winchester Mystery House" to consider the role of spatiality in shaping women's public memory. Built in the late 19th-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonymy for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. I argue that the image circulated of Winchester in her own time and into the present is a result less of what she did, believed, said or didn't say and more a result of the public's reading of the spatial rhetorics of her house itself, that unlikely domestic space. The house challenges our limited notions of space-particularly domestic space-with implications for other sites of women's public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor (that is, speaker or, as the case may be, builder).

Responding to specific contemporary challenges posed by ecological threat, decolonial movements, global capitalism, and the ensuing entanglement of gender, ethnicity and class, feminist perspectives have recently integrated notions of intersectionality and positionality, while revising materialist and semiotic trajectories and developing material culture approaches. The expanding spectrum of feminist concerns has concomitantly put the historiography of feminism to the test, leading to the uncovering of blind spots and biases. Under a self-reflexive lens, persisting anglophone and Western foci, as well as universalising presumptions of an undifferentiated gender experience across class, ethnic and national divides, have come to the fore. Against this backdrop, a renewed historiographical engagement with Western second-wave feminism requires a questioning, rather than a replication, of homogenising epistemic categories and comprehensive narratives. 1 It is in this vein of thought that the volume Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi, edited by art historians Francesco Ventrella and