Late Additions
Asynchronous Session
Culturally Informed Factors in Adult Mothers and Daughters Relationships: What Makes the Difference? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ronit Reuven Even Zahav
Mother-daughter relationships are often portrayed as one of the most constitutive ties that shape women's identities throughout their lives. Yet, a few studies examine a mother-daughter relationship in adulthood. Most of them focus on the mother-daughter relationship among one origin group and only the daughter's voice is represented. Hence, the existing knowledge about these relationships in adulthood, in the context of culture, disadvantaged groups, and encounters between different cultures remain limited. Based on critical cultural perspectives and a critical feminist approach the current study focuses on a cross-cultural comparison of adult mother-daughter relationships among three groups: Israel, Ethiopia, and the Former Soviet Union. Method: A mix method study was conducted with 190 mothers participating in a quantitative and qualitative study. Measures included socio-demographics, language proficiency, social distance, closeness, emotional stress, and expectations of similarity and difference in mother-daughter relationships. In addition, mothers (n=37) participated in a semi-structured interview. Analysis of the findings yielded three relationship patterns that characterize each group of origin. Ethiopian mothers reported more sharing their daughters, fewer expectations of similarity, and felt more stress in the relationship than the Israeli women and the Former Soviet Union mothers. The study highlighted the impact of intercultural transition and social exclusion on mother-daughter relationships in adulthood in the context of culture and gender. The paper explores the findings that were brought up by participants. We will discuss practices linked to intersecting inequalities regarding diverse groups and discuss reducing inequalities and promoting empowerment to transform oppressive conditions.
Center-periphery Dichotomy in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Riham Yassin
Studies on post-colonial issues like diaspora, immigration, and cultural hybridity have been prioritized by a number of psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers among the various literary movements that have found their way into the Contemporary English Literary Canon. Due to the marginalization of non-western art, Homi Bhabha is credited with coining the term “Third Space” in order to describe the developing crevice between clashing cultures which in turn gives rise to new hybrid identities and center-periphery dichotomy. This dichotomy has resulted from the western domination by universalism which creates fragile relations between the center and the peripheries; one of power and authority rather than geography. A third space or hybrid realization is nurtured in migrants who are frequently exposed to other cultures. In other words, this in-between space has led to the consequences of alienation, cosmopolitanism, diaspora, displacement, hybridity and transnationalism. Hence, this research investigates how the novelist Salman Rushdie has decentered the dominant canon by advocating a hybrid world, in which diversity and heterogeneity are passionately cherished. The paper highlights how The Satanic Verses is clearly dedicated to the ideas of center-periphery dichotomy and third space by resisting the chimera of plausibility and opposing calls for homogeneity. Rushdie puts his protagonists in a difficult diasporic condition as a background for his suggestion that no other option rather than hybridity can cure the cultural wound and decrease the gap between the center and the margin, that hybridity is the perfect option for the disoriented diasporic states.
Sri Lanka - Rebel Fragmentation in the Time of Peace Negotiations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Soosaipillai I. Keethaponcalan
This research was guided by the question: why and under what conditions do peace negotiations lead to rebel fragmentation? The research question was examined by treating the defection of the Karuna Group from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the Norway-facilitated peace process as a case study. The objective of the research was to explore the reasons why rebel organizations disintegrate during peace negotiations. The fact that this issue has not been explored adequately despite its significance for peace and conflict resolution in divided societies justified the investigation. Primary and secondary data formed the basis of the analysis. The disagreement between LTTE leader Prabhakaran and Karuna was the immediate cause of the split. There also were supporting factors that boosted the disagreement. Karuna’s fear that the LTTE might assassinate him, the differences between the Northern and Eastern Tamils, and the external support that both enhanced and consolidated the disagreement. Peace negotiations in civil wars could unintentionally break rebel organizations by igniting negotiation disagreements, and these disagreements could stem from personal, structural, and external stimuli.
E.A.Poe and “Gothic” Tradition: Poe’s Influence and Reception on Literature
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tamari Cheishvili
This paper presents an analysis of various periods in the critical reception of Poe’s gothic tales. An attempt has been made in it to retrace radical shift in Poe criticism from total “negativism” up to present day critical acclaim. It is stated that recent Poe scholarship stresses the rational grotesque and satiric elements in Poe. I also address the intricate question of the American gothic the status of which is uncertain. Several factors contribute to the uncertain status of the American gothic. One of the factors that makes the gothic so shadowy and nebulous a genre as difficult to define as any gothic ghost is that it can not be seen in abstraction from the other literary forms from whose graves it arises. The American gothic is a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation. As for E.A. Poe and Modifications of “Gothicism”in the 20th Century American Fiction - I try to differentiate between the concepts of “Literary Gothicism “ and “Gothicism “ in Literature”. Thus in order to re-canonize Poe as a canonical literary figure within the American literary canon his gothic tales must be analyzed in relation to European and American National gothic tradition.
Letter-beings and Time: Hélène Cixous's Exappropriation of Martin Heidegger
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session François Vozel
This paper argues that Hélène Cixous’s poetical and philosophical turn at the end of the 1970s not only results from an encounter with Clarice Lispector’s works as many important studies have advanced, but also from a confrontation with Martin Heidegger’s works, which Cixous was reading extensively at the time. Although Lispector is a very pronounced influence in Cixous’s texts from 1979 to 1982, the filigreed presence of ‘s phenomenolgy makes itself felt at every turn. Focusing mainly on Vivre l’orange / To Live the Orange (1979), this study explores how Cixous addresses one of the major limitations of Heidegger’s though: the neglect of the body. Cixous’s profoundly sensuous poetics shed light on a dimension of existence where the body is no longer reduced to being the mere accessory to meaningful ends, as per the epistemology of readiness-to-hand. In spite of the dizzying destruction of the theoretical and scientific comportment, Heidegger’s phenomenology left intact one of Western philosophy’s most fundamental biases: its aversion for the living body, a livingness that escapes the grasp of linguistic categories and concepts. Far from dismissing Heidegger, however, I propose that Cixous adds another turn of the screw to the phenomenologist’s destruction of metaphysics, renovating some of Heidegger’s key concept in the process, giving the philosophy of Existenz a new life.
Unworthy and Worthy Victims in Postosocialist China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tiantian Zheng
Sexual violence or sexual assault is defined by the World Health Organization as sexual acts or attempts via violence or coercion, directed against a person’s sexuality, regardless of the relationship to the victim. In China, although sexual harassment was included in the “Law to Protect Women’s Rights” in 2005, it provided no legal definition of, or punishment for, the act, only stipulating the nature of sexual harassment as a civil affair, rather than a criminal violation. Based on interviews and a survey of discourses and legal cases, this paper investigates this issue and uncovers the cultural system of gender power hierarchy that creates injustice and inequity associated with sexual violence.
