XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)

PANEL: FEMINIST AND GENDER STUDIES (Coordinator: Rosario Arias Doblas)

SESSION 1

Coconut by Kopano Matlwa: Race and Gender as a Stigma in Postapartheid South Africa
Rosa María Díez Cobo (University of Leon)

‘A Stranger to Herself’: The Pedagogical Presence of the Other in Paula Meehan’s Poetry
Pilar Villar Argáiz (University of Granada)

SESSION 2: ROUND TABLE

Queer Violence
Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez (UNED)
Participants: Ana Zamorano (Chair) (UNED), Juan Carlos Hidalgo (University of  Sevilla), Juan Antonio Suárez (University of Murcia), Pedro Férez Mora (University of Murcia)

SESSION 3

Creativity and the Figure of the Woman Writer in Michèle Roberts's Fiction
Sonia Villegas López (University of Huelva)

‘A private ceremony of remembering’: La huella de la memoria y la enfermedad en The Sea de John Banville
Marta Cerezo Moreno (UNED)

FEMINIST AND GENDER STUDIES
ABSTRACTS

Coconut by Kopano Matlwa: Race and Gender as a Stigma in Postapartheid South Africa
Rosa María Díez Cobo (University of Leon)
South Africa can be considered the most stable country in the African continent from an economic and political perspective. However, the insidious breach of social inequality and the residual racism that still pervades present South African society has deterred the steady progression of this young democracy. The situation of women in particular is equally alarming as South Africa heads the international rankings of gender violence. Against this conflictive background, Kopano Matlwa’s debut novel Coconut (2007) explores the distress suffered by two young black women who feel socially impelled to speak, behave and, ultimately, “become” white. What Matlwa emphasises through her protagonists is that the trauma stamped by Apartheid, a daily reminder of how being black was so inferior, has not been yet superseded in South Africa. This novel proposes a subtle analysis of the pervasive, often subconscious process by which black population feel pressed to fit in Western aesthetic and cultural parameters. My paper offers an exploration of this narrative as contextualised in the troubled social panorama of contemporary South Africa.
Keywords: South Africa, Kopano Matlwa, Coconut, "Post-Apartheid", Racism

‘A Stranger to Herself’: The Pedagogical Presence of the Other in Paula Meehan’s Poetry
Pilar Villar Argáiz (University of Granada)

In this age of globalization, interracial and cross-cultural encounters have become common aspects of everyday life. This paper aims to examine how Paula Meehan engages in this global discourse of interculturality by articulating aspects of cross-cultural and inter-ethnical exchange. I subsequently link to the context of 21st century Ireland Meehan’s openness to cultural diversity and her alertness to the voices of the marginalised. The first section discusses Meehan’s subversive representations of the ‘internal’ Others of Irish society. Her depictions of otherness challenge the often rigid boundaries which define national and ethnic identities and open a liberating place which successfully accommodates diversity. The second section focuses on Meehan’s attempt to move away from the ethos of individual egotism which marks contemporary life. In particular, she advocates a model to confront the experiences of ‘foreigners’ based on the self-exploration of one’s own subconscious. In line with Kristeva’s argument, Meehan implies that discovering the ‘stranger’ hidden in oneself is an essential prerequisite to accept, in an unconditional and genuine way, the presence of external ‘Others’ in Irish society. While this can easily be dismissed as an abstract utopia, Meehan’s ideal becomes ethically and politically relevant in the contemporary context of a multi-cultural society open to large-scale immigration.
Keywords: Paula Meehan, Irish women’s poetry, Julia Kristeva, Interculturalism, Conviviality
 
Queer Violence
Juan Antonio Suárez Sánchez (UNED)
Participants: Ana Zamorano (Chair) (UNED), Juan Carlos Hidalgo (University of  Sevilla), Juan Antonio Suárez (University of Murcia), Pedro Férez Mora (University of Murcia)
This roundtable will deal with the meaning and "cultural work" of various modalities of violence in queer literature and visual culture. We will leave aside homophobic violence (easily interpretable as an attempt to punish the outsider and to enforce the norm at all costs) to explore the far more ambiguous, but equally text-generative, violence that arises in the queer field. This violence can be read as reactive or critical. It is reactive when it responds to queer-phobic violence, and may then be seen as a survival strategy or as a way to return to the sender what this last first dished out. And it is critical--in the etymological sense of the word as "undoing" or "untying"--when it exposes the constitutive role of violence in various configurations of intimacy or in processes of community formation (frequently based on marginalization and exclusion). While never turning "good"--can violence ever be good?—violence acquires then an ethical overtone that demands a careful reading and contextualization. This roundtable will be devoted to a number of brief such readings with the purpose of examining these larger questions. It will open with a (quick) theoretical overview of the role of violence in a number of recent examples of queer theory (Judith Butler, Tim Dean, Michael Warner, Lynda Hart, Gayle Rubin, Lee Edelman). A second intervention will explore the figure of the violent woman--often a violent lesbian or sexual non-conformist--from the perspectives of writers and thinkers such as Pat Califa and Camille Paglia. It will examine the rejection provoked by women as subjects of violence, both inside and outside queer communities. Moving from women to men and from literature to visual culture, a third intervention will explore how recent film uses gay s/m to deconstruct and parody violence, and the leather look and "leather culture" to expose masculinity as drag and "masquerade". The round table will close with a fourth intervention that will explore Dennis Cooper’s poetry, where male-male violence enters into complex interactions with seduction, sexuality, subcultural marginality, and youth.
Keywords: Queer Theory, Masculinity, Femininity, Violence

Creativity and the Figure of the Woman Writer in Michèle Roberts's Fiction
Sonia Villegas López (University of Huelva)
The figure and role of the woman writer has been commonplace in the literary production of the half British-half French novelist and poet Michèle Roberts. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on two of her novels, The Visitation (1983) and The Mistressclass (2003), published within a span of twenty years, which to my mind best exemplify the author’s argument about the relationship between body and text. I argue that they also show Roberts’s evolution from the form of the bildungsroman chosen by many women novelists in the 1970s to a more hybrid literary form whose conventions are closer to those of historical fiction or fictional (auto)biography. Both novels focus on the experience of the woman writer and dissect the concept of creativity from a gendered perspective, also attending to the implications of the “reading like a woman” and “reading woman” debates, and the relationship between body-life-story.
Keywords: Authorbiography, creativity, writing the body, reading like a woman

 ‘A private ceremony of remembering’: La huella de la memoria y la enfermedad en The Sea de John Banville
Marta Cerezo Moreno (UNED)
Las líneas centrales sobre las que se apoyará mi estudio de la obra de Banville se insertan dentro de un marco teórico que engloba aspectos básicos de los Disability Studies y de los Gender Studies y que utiliza como eje el concepto de ‘la huella’. El análisis de la huella como una de las metáforas centrales de The Sea nos permitirá adentrarnos en el estudio en profundidad de las implicaciones de esta noción tanto en Ricoeur como en Lévinas, observados ambos desde parámetros distintos pero a su vez complementarios, que nos permitirán desentrañar la configuración narrativa que Banville nos transmite sobre la experiencia de la enfermedad y posterior proceso de envejecimiento de sus protagonistas.