(1996). The violence of gendering: Castration images in Angela Carter's The magic toyshop, The passion of new Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf”. Women's Studies: Vol. 25, No. 6, pp. 549-570.

The violence of gendering: Castration images in Angela Carter's The magic toyshop, The passion of new Eve, and “Peter and the Wolf”

The thesis investigates a diverse range of feminist postmodern philosophy, distinguished by its varying rearticulation of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism and feminism’s own position vis-a-vis that debate. Drawing on postmodernism’s primary tenet that substantive, binary identity categories comprise discursive, performative constructs, feminist postmodernism theorises a range of strategies for their subversive re-performance. This is realised in the mobilisation of parodic, “failed” repetitions and identities embodied, for instance, by transsexual, transgender, and transvestite personae. Hence the reformulation of postmodern versions of agency, resistance, and choice. 
In the second instance, the thesis examines the combination of feminist postmodern philosophy with the narrative techniques of postmodernism and its sister genre, the fantastic mode. As a heterogeneous, open-ended, self-reflexive form, the “postmodern fantastic” challenges conventional realism and its correlative sovereign subject. The postmodern fantastic is redeployed by feminist practitioners, whose inscription of both textual and topographical re-performance, such as is manifest in the cyborg and the grotesque, represent the literary counterparts of feminist postmodern agency. 
The above provide critical contexts for a reading of four late-twentieth-century women writers, focusing in particular on their intervention in the modernism/postmodemism debate and their deployment of the feminist postmodern fantastic as a means of destabilising sexed, gendered, and sexual identity. The selected authors Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, Jeanette Winterson, and Angela Carter represent distinct and diverse, culturally specific, literary and feminist traditions, reformulating the relationship between modernism and postmodernism in different ways and with varying degrees of success. They coalesce, however, in their contribution to the feminist postmodern fantastic. It is the general purpose of the thesis to demonstrate how this particular mode embodies one of feminist postmodernism’s most powerful means of literary and ideological critique

The feminist postmodern fantastic : sexed, gendered, and sexual identities

Examines novels by Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter that contain myth fragments of mermaids and sirens. Postulates the origin of the myths as stemming from the ambivalent relationship that male infants form with the mother, and discusses how these authors deconstruct the binary oppositions that disadvantage women.

/pdf/mermaids-and-sirens-as-myth-fragments-in-contemporary-aq2ywi7yvc.pdf

Mermaids and sirens as myth fragments in contemporary literature

The paper studies the construction of a specific lesbian identity in the literary production of Chicana lesbians, analyzing its feminist roots, its use of diverse literary forms, the role of theory and the importance of the body, as well as the presence of butch/femme roles; it later examines the devices employed by the authors to reject the persistent accusation that their identity constitutes a treason to their community. These devices include challenging the lesbophobic and antifeminist politics of the Chicano movement, analyzing family relations and rewriting Mexican patriarchal myths.

/pdf/lesbianismo-y-literatura-chicana-la-construccion-de-una-23pnq7114q.pdf

Lesbianismo y literatura chicana: la construcción de una identidad

The oppression of women in the novels of Sembene Ousmane and Tsitsi Dangarembga

Part 1 Introduction: the background to contemporary feminism contemporary feminism - the woman's view of the world contemporary feminism and sexuality feminism and literature women's changing experience contemporary women's writing. Part 2 Versions of the real: contemporary uses of realism Margaret Drabble - modifications of realism - "The Waterfall" and "The Realms of Gold" Drabble - novelist of women's experience Drabble and feminism - "The Middle Ground" Anita Brookner - "Providence" and "Hotel du Lac" A.S.Byatt - "Still Life". Part 3 Fictions and sexual politics: personal and political Zoe Fairbairns - a feminist dystopia - "Benefits" Pat Barker - modified realism - "Union Street" and "The Century's Daughter" Fay Weldon - feminist satire - "Down among the Women" Weldon - novels of the 1980s - "Puffball" to "Leader of the Band". Part 4 Myths, dreams and nightmares: beyond everyday reality Angela Carter's early work - "The Magic Toyshop" Carter's rewriting of fairy-tales - "The Bloody Chamber" Carter's female comedy - "Nights at the Circus" Emma Tennant - "The Bad Sister" and "Queen of Stones" Sara Maitland - "Virgin Territory" Alice Thomas Ellis - "The Sin Eater" and "The Birds of the Air".

Flora Alexander

Papers

Contemporary women novelists