Female Figure (female + figure)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


THE OBJECT OF DESIRE SPEAKS: INGEBORG BACHMANN'S ,UNDINE GEHT' AND LUCE IRIGARAY 'S ,WOMAN'

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2008
Lorraine Markotic
ABSTRACT This article presents a detailed examination of Ingeborg Bachmann's ,Undine geht'. It argues for the uniqueness of this work: the text's astonishing ability to depict an object who is also a subject, able to articulate her otherness. Undine is a speaking and desiring subject at the same time as she remains an object of projection. The article compares Bachmann's short story with Irigaray's extensive philosophical and feminist project, showing the many ways in which ,Undine geht' anticipates (and is ultimately more successful than) Irigaray's concept of ,woman' and her mimetic strategy. Bachmann's Undine subversively mimes what she represents; she both incarnates and eludes her representation as man's imaginary other. While ,Undine geht' appears to provide an alternative conception of female subjectivity or to articulate repressed female desire, it ultimately explores the radical complexity of these concepts. Bachmann's short story illustrates, moreover, the salience of Irigaray's attempt to examine the way in which language constructs and reproduces sexual difference. ,Undine geht' goes further, however, by also exploring the constitutive role of narrative and culture in subjectivity. The text is less an account of a female figure who finds her voice than of the difficulty and impediments to so doing. [source]


Multiple Refractions, or Winning Movement out of Myth: Barbara Köhler's Poem Cycle ,Elektra.

GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 1 2004
Spiegelungen'
Barbara Köhler's poem cycle ,Elektra. Spiegelungen' (written 1984,5, first published 1991) is the response of the female poet to Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (1977). The paper examines the relation between Müller's Ophelia/Elektra, who swears revenge while being bound into a wheelchair in the course of the final scene, and Köhler's multiple figure (,die gestalt nähert sich wird körper verdoppelt verviel-/facht eins in allen bildern neigt sie sich zu und fordert', I), focusing in particular on the strategies with which the woman writer seeks to elicit movement from the potential entrapment in immobility of the female figure in the mirror-images of male-created myth. If iconoclasm is rejected as an option ,,und schlag ich dann treffe ich/dein gesicht und mein gesicht//zerfällt', III , the multiple refractions created by the eight-poem cycle nevertheless win a liberating movement from reductive mythical images of Woman (in contrast to Christa Wolf's re-entrapment of her Kassandra figure in an alternative heroic narrative in her 1983 Erzählung), opening out into a utopian space ,,traum hinter dem irrgarten beginnt eine landschaft', VIII , in the final poem in the cycle. [source]


Rousseau's Other Woman: Collette in Le devin du village

HYPATIA, Issue 2 2001
RITA C. MANNING
The life and work of Rousseau the musician and aesthetician has been forgely neglected in the debate about Rousseau's views on women. In this paper, I shall introduce a new text and a new female figure into the conversation: Collette, the shepherdess in Le devin du village, an opera written by Rousseau in 1752. We see an ambiguity in Collette-the text often expresses one view while the music expresses another. When we take Collette s music seriously the following picture emerges: the natural desire of women to be free, a fairly active female agency, an incipient rebellion against the social role of women, and a final acceptance of the role of wife. This view of Collette supports the thesis that for Rousseau women are not naturally subordinate to men but are taught to be subordinate because it is required for the maintenance of the patriarchal family, the cornerstone of civil society. We see many glimpses of Collette's true, unsocialized, nature, especially in the melodies she sings, it is in song, the first and hence most natural language of humans, that we see Collette's longing for freedom. But she ends by singing the praises of civil society, albeit a rural society, and thus implicitly accepting the subordination she is destined to suffer at Colins hands. [source]


Male preferences for female waist-to-hip ratio and body mass index in the highlands of Papua New Guinea

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2010
Barnaby J. Dixson
Abstract One hundred men, living in three villages in a remote region of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea were asked to judge the attractiveness of photographs of women who had undergone micrograft surgery to reduce their waist-to-hip ratios (WHRs). Micrograft surgery involves harvesting adipose tissue from the waist and reshaping the buttocks to produce a low WHR and an "hourglass" female figure. Men consistently chose postoperative photographs as being more attractive than preoperative photographs of the same women. Some women gained, and some lost weight, postoperatively, with resultant changes in body mass index (BMI). However, changes in BMI were not related to men's judgments of attractiveness. These results show that the hourglass female figure is rated as attractive by men living in a remote, indigenous community, and that when controlling for BMI, WHR plays a crucial role in their attractiveness judgments. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2010. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


Women, Genealogy, and Composite Monarchy in Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2010
Raphael Falco
This essay explores the remarkable proliferation of female generative figures in Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1613). Rivers, bays, lakes, isles, forests, and shires in this long chorographical poem are gendered female and descend in complicated genealogical trees from important maternal guardians. The maps which precede each Song of the poem supply evidence of the predominance of female figures and of their dual roles as topographical deities and, in many cases, as local rulers in Drayton's version of Britain's origins. The maps combine to form a powerful representation of charismatic influence, demonstrating the importance of female figures in the governing structures of the poem. These governing structures are usefully seen, in J. H. Elliott's terms, as "composite monarchies" in which the "horizontal" is opposed to the "vertical articulation" of authoritarian rule. (R.F.) [source]


Mother, Martyr and Mary Magdalene: German Female Pamphleteers and their Self-images

HISTORY, Issue 291 2003
Ulrike Zitzlsperger
Female pamphleteers who involved themselves in the German Reformation faced a double challenge: they had to argue why a lay person needed to enter into public debate and, still more controversially, why a woman should brave the consequences of going into print. In this article two noblewomen, Argula von Grumbach and Elisabeth von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and two middle-class Protestants, Katharina Schütz Zell and Ursula Weida, serve as case studies of how women with noticeably different backgrounds dealt with the challenge. The article focuses on the images they projected of themselves. While some of these images derived from traditional idealized and biblical female figures, others show a creative attempt to argue the case for long-term participation in public debate. The most striking concept within this second category is Katharina Schütz Zell's role as ,Kirchenmutter' (Churchmother). The impact of such an image becomes obvious when Katharina Schütz Zell is compared with the Nuremberg shoemaker-poet, Hans Sachs. An equally outspoken lay participant of the Reformation, his mounting disappointment with religious politics and the decline of his home town led him to withdraw into privacy. In contrast, Katharina Schütz Zell, whose remit was the more closely defined Strasbourg parish, remained actively involved until her death. [source]


The Burden of Disease and the Cost of Illness Attributable to Alcohol Drinking,Results of a National Study

ALCOHOLISM, Issue 8 2010
Helena Cortez-Pinto
Background and Aims:, The World Health Organization estimated that 3.2% of the burden of disease around the world is attributable to the consumption of alcohol. The aim of this study is to estimate the burden of disease attributable to alcohol consumption in Portugal. Methods:, Burden and costs of diseases attributable to alcohol drinking were estimated based on demographic and health statistics available for 2005, using the Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) lost generated by death or disability. Results:, In Portugal, 3.8% of deaths are attributable to alcohol (4,059 of 107,839). After measuring the DALY generated by mortality data, the proportion of disease attributable to alcohol was 5.0%, with men having 5.6% of deaths and 6.2% of disease burden, while female figures were, respectively, 1.8 and 2.4%. Considering the sum of death and disability DALYs, liver diseases represented the main source of the burden attributable to alcohol with 31.5% of total DALYs, followed by traffic accidents (28.2%) and several types of cancer (19.2%). As for the cost of illness incurred by the health system, our results indicate that ,95.1 millions are attributable to alcohol-related disease admissions (liver diseases, cancer, traffic accidents, and external causes) while the ambulatory costs of alcohol-related diseases were estimated in ,95.9 million, totaling ,191.0 million direct costs, representing 0.13% of Gross Domestic Product and 1.25% of total national health expenditures. An alternative analysis was carried out using higher consumption levels so as to replicate aggregate alcohol consumption statistics. In this case, DALYs lost increased by 11.7% and health costs by 23%. Conclusion:, Our results confirm that alcohol is an important health risk factor in Portugal and a heavy economic burden for the health system, with hepatic diseases ranking first as a source of burden of disease attributable to alcohol. [source]


ENVELOPING OBJECTS: ALLEGORY AND COMMODITY FETISH IN WENCESLAUS HOLLAR'S PERSONIFICATIONS OF THE SEASONS AND FASHION STILL LIFES

ART HISTORY, Issue 3 2006
JOSEPH MONTEYNE
While in London during the 1640s Wenceslaus Hollar produced a striking cycle of etchings using contemporary female figures as allegories of the seasons, followed by another series of still lifes depicting fashion accessories, in which fur muffs appear repeatedly. This article focuses on the connections between the personi-fications of winter and the still lifes, and brings out the tensions that transpire when the disinterested and supposedly objective eye utilized in Hollar's other projects of the 1640s is revealed as an eye steeped with ambivalent desires , not just in relation to the bodies of certain women, but to the commodity form as well. The fur muff in these etchings is shown to be an enigmatic entity, not only intersecting with issues related to fetishism, eroticism and urban space in early modern London, but is also poised on a threshold between different economies of the object, between residual classical and medieval systems of representation and newly emergent anxieties about the commodity and exchange value. [source]