Interdisciplinary eJournal of Gender Studies

Deczki, Sarolta (ed.). 2023. Krimi [Crime Fiction - Journal Review]

2024-05-14T13:56:04+02:00

Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men [2022 - Book Review]

2024-05-14T14:03:55+02:00

"So now I'm embroidering a working black hole"

2024-05-14T11:07:50+02:00

In Memoriam Ilonka Kovács

2024-05-14T11:18:11+02:00

Preface

2024-05-14T11:01:09+02:00

News

2024-05-14T14:13:28+02:00

Intersectionality and Social Psychology: Identity Crises and Coping Strategies of Roma LGBTQ+ People in Hungary

2024-05-14T11:22:49+02:00

Several Hungarian and international comparative studies have shown that Roma people or LGBTQ+ people in Hungary are subjected to high levels of prejudice and discrimination. However, if one happens to be a Roma LGBTQ+ person, their lived experiences of prejudice are much less addressed. The significance of this type of 'cumulative disadvantage' was first highlighted by the feminist critique of the 1970/80s (Crenshaw, 1989; 2001; Hooks & Lutz 1993; Hooks, 1989), which took issue with mainstream feminism’s tendencies of homogenizing women and pointed out inequalities that existed between women. (Sebestyén, 2016; Kóczé, 2009). This case study adopts an intersectional approach to the key concepts of social psychology, such as social identity (Tajfel, 1978), prejudice (Allport, 1999), social representation (Moscovici, 1961), threatened identity (Breakwell, 1986), and coping strategies (Breakwell, 1986) through the analysis of six interviews with Hungarian participants who identify as Roma LGBTQ+ people, focusing on their experience of prejudice and their coping strategies.

Social Non-Reproduction in Michelle Obama’s and Zsuzsanna Orsós’s Autobiographical Narratives and Their Health Education Projects

2024-05-14T11:33:56+02:00

Chantal Jaquet, in Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-reproduction (2014, 2023), creates a new philosophical concept, that of the trans-class. Trans-classes can be defined sociologically the transition between two classes but which do not reliably belong to either group. According to Jaquet, although class non-reproduction disrupts the regular process of social reproduction, it does not call into question the phenomenon of reproduction but rather reinforces it by showing the limits of the identity of the groups involved in the transition. The process of social non-reproduction is revealed in the life histories of trans-classes. Jaquet interprets the experience of trans-classes in terms of a complex network of political, economic, social, family and individual interests and goals, mainly in relation to autobiographies and auto-ethnography. This paper adopts Jaquet's notion of trans-classes to study Michelle Obama's autobiography Becoming and Zsuzsanna Orsós's autobiographical narratives in interviews made with her, focusing on the role of race, class, gender, family, schooling in the process of their social non-reproduction. This essay establishes the determinants of the two narrators' trans-class positions and asks how being a trans-class plays a positive role in Obama and Orsós's health education projects.

The (Transformative) Power of Words. Ethical and Moral Aspects of Juan Mayorga's play, The Golem

2024-05-14T11:46:10+02:00

This paper aims to present a possible interpretation of Juan Mayorga's play, The Golem, which was first performed in 2022. This work has been described by critics as the Spanish playwright's darkest and most difficult to interpret. The title itself refers to a well-known myth from sixteenth-century Jewish folklore, that of the Golem, a creature made of clay that can come to life when a sacred word is put into its mouth. The myth has been the subject of many literary adaptations – e.g., in the novel by Gustave Meyrink, and in a/the poem by Jorge Luis Borges –, and Mayorga's drama joins this circle. The play, which explores philosophical, moral and political issues, presents an alternative world that seems both present and real, in which the Spanish author invites the reader/viewer on an intellectual journey into the darkest recesses of the subconscious. The Golem is a deeply political play about the ethical and moral-philosophical aspects of transformation, what we do with words and what words do to us.

What does the Woman want? Transformations in Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden

2024-05-14T11:55:40+02:00

Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (2021) retells Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from The Canterbury Tales. As the play is not yet available in Hungarian, among the goals of this study is the presentation of Smith’s writing style to the Hungarian reading public. In the introduction to her play, Smith self-reflexively recounts the birth of the adaptation: its arousal from misunderstanding a Twitter post and poor airport Wi-Fi connection during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the present study, I focus on how Chaucer’s original story is transformed in Smith’s text, its adaptation to the social conditions of our life. The fourteenth-century location is transferred to the modern-day Kilburn district of London, where Alvita tells her story in a pub, rethinking her relationship with herself and men, her identity, with a focus on what a woman (could) want(s) in life and the role of a woman in the institution of marriage. The play has received mixed critical reviews, and this study also reflects on the different critical interpretations.

Transformations of memory and discursiveness in the works of Marga Minco

2024-05-14T12:07:51+02:00

I analyze three works by the Dutch holocaust survivor, Marga Minco (1920–2024). They are "Het adres” [The Address] (1957/2003), the short novel Het bittere kruid [Bitter Herbs] (1957/1979) and the children’s story, Kijk 'ns in de la [Just Take a look in the drawer] (1963). I shall examine the activation of transformations, the ways the author turns elements of her personal life first into autobiographical fiction and then to a humorous, absurd tale. I draw on Ernst van Alphen's 1999 article "Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory and Trauma", in which he argues that experience, memory and trauma are discursive in nature. He distinguishes four symptoms of discursivity, i.e. four representational problems of the holocaust: the confusion of subject and object positions, the complete denial of the subject position, the incompleteness of narrative frames, and the complete denial of narrative frames. I explore these positions in the short story "Het adres" and in the short novel Het bittere kruid. Finally, I examine the process of reconstruction that results in the elimination of the symptoms of discursivity in the children’s tale.

Bibliodiversity - Diversity in the Book Market

2024-05-14T12:30:35+02:00

In 2010, the European Writers' Parliament adopted a declaration in favour of bibliodiversity. In the more than a decade since the adoption of the declaration, known as the Istanbul Declaration, bibliodiversity seems to have been favoured, with a wide variety of books being published by a wide range of publishers and authors. However, it is worth taking a closer look at the process of publishing in the 21st century, and not only in Europe, since the very concept of bibliodiversity is linked primarily to a group of South American publishers who, as early as the 1990s, were already taking a stand against the globalisation of the book market. Small publishers, small presses publishing fiction, regional authors, translations of literature in small languages, all require a specific analysis. Feminist literature, women authors and gender-related texts are also a separate category. In my study, I will try to shed light on the feminist aspects of bibliodiversity in addition to presenting its aspects.

Producing Bodies: Interpreting Attila Veres's Short Story Transistor

2024-05-14T12:39:16+02:00

In this paper, I examine the short story „Transistor” from Attila Veres's collection titled The Restoration of Reality (Agave, 2022) and its intertextual links with another short story in the collection, titled “Person Assigned to Keep in Touch.” Veres's short stories question the notion of reality, presenting competing or parallel realities and multiple Hungaries with the tool of the literary fantastic. In this multiplied (textual) world, the „Transistor” exposes the vulnerable situation of the marginalised, economically exploited people and the (almost) impossible option of breaking out. The characters living in poverty are forced to „work” in factories where the workers are eating a mud-like substance, which is transformed by the metabolism of their bodies into some substance used for creating a link between different worlds. The protagonist is a woman who is not only producing the substance but is also capable of creating connections between different worlds. In my analysis, I focus on the ways in which the woman protagonist's body is exploited and I discuss the transformative possibilities for breaking out of the vulnerable world of poverty. I will use the second short story to show how the power machine obscures forms of collective and self-exploitation the processes of transformations of the subject into a machine in the interest of capitalism.

Profane Triptych. Hybrid Bodies and Mediality in Anna Nemes’s Works

2024-05-14T12:48:55+02:00

The focus of the present study is the profane triptych constituted by the body representations of painter and film director Anna Nemes. The different medial strategies and representational systems of fine art, documentary and feature filmmaking depict different body perceptions while creating a rich network of meanings. The heterogenic proliferation of flesh is an ever-continuous mutational process, leading to a hybrid, amorphous and transgressive new aesthetics in close relation with contemporary cultural theories, especially posthumanism and new materialism. The inherent monstrosity of the flesh in Nemes’s description of the body deconstructs the traditional logocentric approach of Western philosophy. New materialism therefore proves to be more than adequate theoretical framework for her extensive representation of the non-linear plasticity of flesh. The oeuvre of Nemes incorporates multiple representational strategies based on the different mediums of painting, documentary and fictional filmmaking, affecting the appearance of this monstrosity. While the rhythmic temporality of the paintings enables the complete deanthropomorphization of the hybrid bodies, the inherent objectivity of the film image limits this process in documentary Beauty of the Beast to showing female body builders as lines of flight (ligne de fuite) beyond the conventional ideals of Western beauty. The feature film Gentle, as the middle panel of the imaginary triptych, provides the synthesis of the above approaches. The fictional narrative enables access to the individual. At the same time, the temporality of the conventional narrative film works against the deconstructive process. Therefore, Gentle does not result in a complete, perverse deconstruction of a hybrid aesthetics but, by choosing a female body builder’s body, it may convey the subversive notion of the ever-present flesh.

The Queer Body of the Whale

2024-05-14T13:12:42+02:00

In many ways, Darren Aronofsky's The Whale is the antithesis of queer film conventions and could even be called an anti-queer film. In the first part of my essay, I will analyze the film from a queer perspective; in the second part, I will explore its English language critical reception. Finally, I will explain why the film cannot be included in the queer canon. The protagonist, Charlie, fails as a husband and father, as a queer partner and as a man, he cannot fully embrace any of the different positions and cannot integrate them. The homosexual and heterosexual moments of his life are separated in time and space, with failure and grief leading to shame and depression, compulsive eating, and humiliation. Charlie commits suicide by gradually eating himself to death. Through his character and story, I will explore the intersectional representations and problematic pathologizations of fatness and gender orientation, internalized homophobia, queer shame, the trauma and regressive state of the desexualized body deprived of the phallus, and the desire to return to heteronormativity, all issues that define the film's narrative. The film has been received by critics mostly with reservations or outright negativity because of its problematic portrayal of both fatness and queerness, out of negative clichés and stereotypical traits. It is not only Charlie who fails, but also the director, Aronofsky. In my essay, I summarize why the film fails to meet the expectations of critics and audiences, and why it has no place in the queer canon.

Lycanthropies: Posthumanist Aspects of Fictitious and Medial Transformations in the Animated Film Wolfwalkers

2024-05-14T13:22:48+02:00

This paper offers a posthumanist reading of the fictitious and medial transformations in the animated film Wolfwalkers (2020). According to the analysis presented, the fictitious transformations occur in the protagonist of the film, the young Robyn, who arrives in Ireland with her hunter father to destroy the last local wolf pack. However, the adventurous girl soon befriends Mebh, the descendant of an ancient tribe of wolfpeople. Due to an (unintentional) wolf bite, she also gains the ability to transform into a wolf while her human body is asleep. The paper construes Robyn as a sympoietic entity which rejects humanist dualisms and hierarchies and instead embraces and comes into being as a result of the fluidity between the human and the animal, the natural and the cultural, the feminine and the masculine. Besides the transformations that occur at the level of the narrative, the study also examines the transformations at the film’s visual level. The medial transformations play a key role in imagining the posthuman subject and that subject's worldview. Robyn’s character development and changing views are reflected in the film’s hybridisation of different animation styles (hand-drawn and digital animation), animation trends (European linear-figural and popular American tradition), art historical inspirations (petroglyphs; ancient Celtic, American Indian and European art; medieval illuminations and tapestries; modernism and art nouveau), artforms (watercolour paintings and woodcuts), as well as the hybridisation of different line works, shapes, and colour palettes. These technologies render the medium itself sympoietic.