Merry Christmas! December 30, 2007
Posted by irina in Uncategorized.add a comment
Hi, everyone! Merry Christmas from me too!
Thank you all for the interesting discussions and for the wonderful atmosphere of the classes! It was great to meet you! I don’t know if I will be seeing some of you again, but it will be really nice to keep in touch, so here is my e-mail: irina_kyulanova@hotmail.com
Good luck with all your projects and a very happy New Year!
Irina
Merry Christmas December 19, 2007
Posted by Jolanda in Uncategorized.add a comment
Whoops, I haven’t even said a proper goodbye… I’m sorry about that.
*waves* GOODBYEEEEE!!! *waves*
Thank you for the discussions and explanations that I sometimes needed so badly 
I wish you all a very merry Christmas and see you next year!
Jo
Third-wave hyve December 18, 2007
Posted by Kristine in gender notes.add a comment
As of today, new on Hyves: the third-wave-hyve: http://www.derdegolf.hyve.nl/
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year;-) December 15, 2007
Posted by michellewillems in Uncategorized.add a comment
Taking the lead from Aleida I too would like to thank the class for the very fun and exciting discussions that we have had. It was a pleasure to think, discuss, debate, interact and just be with this group. Richard and Irina, a special thanks to you for the pleasant team work on getting our final presentation done. I wish you all success with rounding of this course and in all your future endeavors.
Michelle
December 14, 2007
Posted by aleida9 in Uncategorized.add a comment
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed doing this course with all of you. You impressed me with your clever thoughts and you have made me a wiser person. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
aleida
Final discussion question December 14, 2007
Posted by Kristine in household notes.add a comment
If you have time for a final discussion question, then, to round off this course, you could delve back into the archives of this blog. Find your answer to the very first discussion question, where I asked you how you think the concept of gender can be used in the analysis of literature. Your answers start on this page - you may need to click on “newer posts” to find your answer.
Read your answer from September, and then ask yourself: in what ways would my answer be different now, at the close of the course?
This is not a compulsory assignment, but if you find the time to write that post somewhere between Christmas and the beginning of the new semester, I think that it would be a good way to round off the course, and to reflect on your own learning process in the past semester.
Essay word limit and virtual thanks December 14, 2007
Posted by Kristine in household notes.add a comment
For those of you who left early: we decided in class that essays can be longer than the 3.000 words on the syllabus. You can go up to 4.500 words if you need to. That does not mean that a 4.500 word essay is better than a 3.000 word essay — use the amount of words that you need to discuss your topic in!
The essays are due on Friday 25 January.
I just want to say again that I really enjoyed teaching you. It was thanks to your active participation in class and on the blog, your willingness to expose yourselves to difficult theory, and to find your own place in feminist theory that the course was such fun to teach. Because you were the first group to take this course, it was a journey of discovery for me as well as you. I am going to use your ideas and suggestions to improve the reading list for next year, and I am definitely going to have three-hour sessions to have more time for discussion in the seminar!
Keep your eyes peeled for the online blog evaluation next week — I would really like to know more about how you experienced that part of the course. This blog is not going anywhere, so keep visiting, post your ideas for your essay and anything else that you want to get off your chest.
Merry Christmas everyone!
10. Gender and body experience December 14, 2007
Posted by nicoline in Uncategorized.add a comment
I am glad that we could still post our ideas on week 10, because I think it is a very interesting assignment. Especially because we had to look at a painting of Queen Elizabeth, because I am interested in the way she has been and is still being portrayed. Sometimes she is being presented as a masculine queen and descriptions of her are often masculine, but in some novels she is presented as a feminine, sexual being and I believe she is presented like this in the movie
Elizabeth as well. But I will not get into this subject, because I could probably fill several pages with my thoughts on this matter. However, as I am already talking about
Elizabeth I would like to start by analyzing the painting in which she is presented here. Young says that ‘women do not make full use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities’ and she says that ‘women are generally not as open with their bodies as are men in their gait and stride’.
Elizabeth is standing in this painting and her body is not closed at all. Almost her entire body is facing towards the left side of the painting, but her torso is turned towards us. We see both her shoulders and they are not hanging, they are strong and open to carry any kind of weight and Young would say that this is very masculine. Young does, however, say that her theory does not apply to all women and I think that
Elizabeth is one of these women Young’s theory does not apply to. I do believe that we have to take in account that
Elizabeth was an extraordinary woman who lived in a man’s world who had to act like a man so I would not draw the conclusion that Young’s theory cannot be used in early-modern art. It is in my belief that
Elizabeth is not a good example to use here, because she is not a stereotypical woman and Young is talking about them. If you look at Frans Hals’ painting I do not believe it is easy to apply Young’s theory here, because I believe there was a different perception of masculinity in the
Netherlands in that time. You could argue that the Cavalier looks quite feminine in the way he dresses, very colorful, and his face looks feminine to me, because I believe it is too beautiful. This is of course my prejudiced personal opinion that flawless, healthy looking faces are feminine. If you look at his body language, however, you could argue that he does not hide his body and that he is probably not afraid to show it, because his arms are not crossed. What I find interesting, though, is that we do not see his entire torso and that he leans a bit to the right (to the left of the painting) as if he does shy away from the foreground. It could be argued that women are more likely to act like that. However, the Cavalier does look down at the spectator and I do believe that is a male thing to do (especially in those days). Young’s theory is again problematic to use for this painting, because I believe that men and women behaved differently then than now, but if you would change the word ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ I believe Young’s theory could be used even in the early-modern times. The Mona Lisa is a painting that could have been painted to confirm Young’s assumptions on female body language, because I believe that this painting shows the woman that Young is talking about. This woman appears to be innocent and lenient and her hands are crossed in front of her body which gives us a sign that she is as closed as Young suggests many women in our time are. I would like to say though that she does come across to me as a strong woman. She might look innocent, but her facial expression gives me the idea that she is not that innocent or naïve at all. For the other paintings I have said that Young’s theory might not be applicable, but I believe that this is not the case with this painting. What I find problematic with this assignment is that these paintings are painted in different countries and in different times (though they are close to each other), because I believe that each country has its own view on what masculine and what feminine is. I did enjoy doing this assignment though. As for the bonus question: I believe that there are 4 boys presented in this painting. The first one is the boy on the left who puts his left hand on the right shoulder of the girl in front of him. I believe this shows that he wants to protect her and this is probably a male thing to do. The same goes for the tallest character who does the same thing. He puts his hands on the shoulder of the little boy in the chair and the shoulder of the boy in front of him. The child in the chair could be a boy, because his hands are not closed and his body does appear to be open. His legs are closed, but I believe this has more to do with class than with gender in those days. The other boy that I mentioned is the one with the sword (degen) and I basically think he is a boy based on the fact that he is painted with this sword.
10. Gender and body experience December 14, 2007
Posted by rtblaauw in Uncategorized.add a comment
So we have three paintings from the early modern period: Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and the Sieve portrait of Queen Elizabeth I by Quentin Metsys the Younger. I think we can actually analyze these representations of bodies from the perspective of Young’s framework, albeit a bit sparsly.
Young, in her article ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, mainly focuses on movement: throwing like a girl, walking like a girl, climbing like a girl and so on. However, she does mention that women and men also have a difference in their stance: ‘women still tend to sit with their legs relatively close together and their arms across their bodies. When simply standing or leaning, men tend to keep their feet farther apart than do women, and we [women] also tend more to keep our hands and arms touching or shielding our bodies.’ (Young, p. 145). In general we could say, according to Young, that men have a more open body position as compared to women. The first two paintings are perfect examples of this.
The Laughing Cavalier shows what Young would probably term the typical masculine pose: the man in the painting has his right arm hanging beside his body, while he has placed his left hand on his hip, in a sort of defiant pose. Because neither arms are actually shielding his body, he seems open to the world.
The Mona Lisa, by contrast, shows the typical feminine pose: the arms are crossed over the stomach and touching each other, shielding the body, which suggests a closedness to the world, perhaps even insecurity.
The picture of Queen Elizabeth is, however, more problematic. Her hands are not exactly shielding her body like in the Mona Lisa, nor is her stance as open as The Laughing Cavalier: one of her arms is in front of her body, while the other seems to be floating or ‘resting’ on something indiscernable. It could be that this has to do with the fact that, to my knowledge, Queen Elizabeth actually actively let herself be portrayed as more masculine in order to compensate for the fact that she was a woman while being the head of state: she repeatedly separated her actual body from her body politic, which was male. (Or so I seem to recall…). So, because she wanted to appear more masculine, maybe the painter actually gave her a more masculine pose, or a pose that was in between masculine and feminine.
I do think that Young’s framework applies to the early modern epoch as well as to our own, at least on the basis of these three portraits. In fact, when looking at the bonus question, the problematic character of Queen Elizabeth’s painting might even be resolved: her right arm, that seems to be floating, might be suggestive of the boy in the middle of the picture that is holding his left arm near his sword. The reasons for thinking that this person is a boy are the following: the hand on the hip is a similar defiant pose compared to The Laughing Cavalier, while the boy also has his feet a little further apart from each other than the other figures do. The other figures are problematic: the two figures on the far right are probably girls, because their feet are closer together and because they are holding hands, which seems to indicate a need of support and thereby insecurity, of the children on the far left, the one standing a bit further to the back is probably a girl, because she is leaning on the figure before her, while the figure more to the front might be a boy, since he seems to be mimicking the pose of the boy in the middle and because the girl in his back has her hand on his shoulder, much like the mother has her hand on the shoulder of the boy in the middle, but he . Finally, the child sitting above the two children seems most likely to be a girl as well: she is sitting with her hands in her lap, while her mother actually has her hand on her lap as well, which might be problematic if the child was in fact a boy. However, the stances in this picture are more problematic. The apparent differences are small, the feet of the boy are just a litte further apart than those of the ‘girls’, while other differences in stance are more interdependent: instead of feminine stances that involve shielding the body, we see in this picture stances that involve giving or seeking support by holding hands, which suggests femininity, laying the hand on the shoulder, which suggest masculinity in the one who has the hand on his shoulder and femininity in the one who puts her hand on the shoulder, and the hand of the mother in the lap, which suggests femininity because of the tension that would arise would the child in fact be a boy.
Remancipation December 8, 2007
Posted by Kristine in gender notes.2 comments
This morning on Radio 1: Remancipation, a new Dutch movement that states that after years of emancipation, it is now man’s time again. One of the things they mention on their website, is that men in today’s society lack initiations rite to take them out of the company of their mother and female teachers into a company of men. Does this remind you of one of the texts in our course?
Waar is de echte man toch gebleven? Die echte man die zijn grenzen aftast en zijn krachten meet met andere mannen? Die echte man staat tegenwoordig luiers te verschonen, vraagt aan zijn vrouw toestemming om met zijn vrienden een biertje te gaan drinken in de kroeg en is soft geworden, oeverloos soft. Het is daarom hoog tijd voor de remancipatie, het in ere herstellen van de man als Man met andere woorden.
