OUT NOW: Hannah Priest (ed.), The Female of the Species: Cultural Constructions of Evil, Women and the Feminine (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013)

Blurb:

From Alien Queens to prostitutes, 'phallic' mothers to child murderers, evil women proliferate across cultural productions that span millennia. This collections explores the perennial question of 'evil' and its relationship to women and femininity. Taking as their starting points material as diverse as Greek mythology, nineteenth-century medical texts, Elizabethan drama and contemporary cartoons, and informed by various theoretical perspectives, the authors scrutinise the construction of the feminine as evil, and vice versa. Throughout these essays, recurring anxieties of female agency, reproduction and the appropriation of patriarchal power are identified and explored. As the writers reveal, these anxieties are not always situated within the anatomically or genetically 'female' (or even human) body, but rather in culturally-constructed and pervasive concepts of femininity - which is at once recognisable and abject, necessary and disavowed. These essays reveal the strategies of construction and maintenance upon which the reification of feminine evil are based.

Contents

- Introduction, by Hannah Priest

Part I: Writing the Evil Woman

- Medea's Medicine: Women and Pharmaka in Greek Mythology, by Alison Innes
- The Representation of the Evil Woman in Elizabethan Literature, by Abdulaziz Al-Mutawa
- (De)centring Women in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, by Zubaidah Mohamed Shaburdin

Part II: Reproductive Evils

- Alien Queens and Monstrous Machines: The Conflation of the Out-of-Control Female and Robotic Body, by Simon Bacon
- The Ultimate Cold War Monster: Exploring 'Mother' in the Film The Manchurian Candidate, by Kathleen Starck
- The Tainted Birth in Lovecraft's Fiction, by Cécile Cristofari

Part III: The Evil That Women Do

- Sugar and Spice, But Not Very Nice: Depictions of Evil Little Girls in Cartoons and Comics, by Jacquelyn Bent, Helen Gavin and Theresa Porter
- A Wellspring of Contamination: The Transgressive Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
- Myra: Portrait of a Portrait, by Shelley Campbell

For more information, please visit the publisher's website.

CFP: 5th Global Conference: Evil, Women and the Feminine

Saturday 18th May – Monday 20th May 2013

Prague, Czech Republic

Call for Presentations:

"A wanton woman is the figure of imperfection; in nature an ape, in quality a wagtail, in countenance a witch, and in condition a kind of devil."

(Nicholas Breton, 1615)

Despite the attempts of feminists the conjunction between evil and the feminine seems unbroken. Established as secondary, derivative and hence inferior, women have been long suspected of being the source of human (though more often masculine) miseries, always in cahoots with the forces of evil and destruction. Paradoxically, at the same time, some have also been put on the pedestal and lauded as ideals of purity and dedication, yet these paragons only proved the rule that, on average, the feminine/woman equals imperfect and transgressive. Mischievous, beguiling, seductive, lascivious, unruly, carping, vengeful and manipulative – these are only a few of the epithets present in cultures and literatures across the world. In grappling with our understanding of what it is to be and do ‘evil’, the project aims to explore the possible sources of the fear and hatred of women and the feminine as well as their manifestations and pervasiveness across times, cultures and media.

This interdisciplinary project invites scholars, artists, writers, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, historians, etc. to present papers, reports, work-in-progress, art pieces and workshops on issues related but definitely not limited to the following themes:

~ Evil Women and Feminine Evil: Vices and Sins of Women

~ Representing and Misrepresenting the Female; Evil Women 'Talking Back'

~ Motherhood; Monstrous Motherhood; Infertility and its Meaning across Cultures

~ Monstrous Births and Infanticide

~ Matriarchy/Matricide/Spouse Murder

~ Devious Sexuality and Feminine Perversions

~ Women and/as the Abject; Unnatural Women/Femininity

~ Menstruation, Castration

~ Fears and Myths: Feminine Blood, Witchcraft, Vamp(ires)s, Sirens, Harpies, Lamias, etc.

~ Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on Evil Feminine and Femaleness

~ The Evil Woman in Literature, Religion, Medicine, Law across Times and Cultures

~ Psychoanalytic Perspectives: 'Vagina Dentata,' 'the Wandering Womb,' 'Poisonous Look' etc.

~ Sexualizing the Female or Evil Objectification

~ Trans-Cultural Conceptualisations of Femme Fatale vs the Perfect Woman

~ Women and (Misuse of) Power

~ Evil Beauty; the Meaning of Hair and Make-up

~ Evil, Feminine in Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Horror, Thriller

~ Evil, Feminine in Mythologies and Religions across the world

~ Case Studies: Evil Women on the Agenda

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday15th February 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: EWF5 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Natalia Kaloh Vid 

Rob Fisher 

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

For further details of the conference, please click here.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Beautiful, Strong, Broken Women

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that tonight I watched Buffy s5 ep12 ('The Body') for the first time in ages. In case you can't recall, this is the episode where Buffy finds her mother's dead body on the couch and has to deal with the immediate aftermath. The episode is wonderfully played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and beautifully directed. There is no soundtrack, and each of the central characters plays out the most attractive facet of their character. As I said on Twitter, I'll only get behind a Buffy reboot if they can pull off something as beautiful as that episode.

Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance as the amazingly strong, yet perfectly vulnerable, Buffy got me thinking about femininity. And the way in which women are forced to juggle 'surviving' with 'being beautiful' and 'being good'. This is something I've had to deal with in my own life - as an apparently 'confident' and 'successful' woman - and I'm going to give you a run-down of women that have given me strength. Don't get me wrong... I find strength in so many women (from Emmeline Pankhurst to my bestest mate K), but these are the beautiful, strong, broken women who speak to my experience.

I would love to hear who your beautiful, broken icons are...

5. Buffy. This time last year, my dad found out he had cancer. During the time of his treatment, I got dumped and had to deal with my younger brother's 'issues' with his relationship to our dad. Of course, there are a lot of background issues, and my brother is only 16 months younger than me, but up until now his whole experience with death has revolved around my protecting him from it (mine hasn't - as my job from being 16 entails I've had to go to a lot of colleagues' funerals). Our (me and my bro) first bereavement was three days before my 8th birthday - I understood, he (aged 6) didn't - and our next was on his 13th birthday, and I've spent a lot of time making sure his birthday doesn't remind him of Grandma's death (he doesn't actually remember that Granny died around my birthday, but I'd rather he didn't remember our first bereavement). When the next death happened (when I was 17, he was 15), I had to be the one to break it to him. I might not be a slayer, but I am a big sister - and a child of a cancer patient -which is why Buffy is the first on my list of beautiful women. I can't show the whole episode, and you really do need the whole soundtrack-less thing to get the picture, but you'll get it from this:




4. Stacey Slater in Eastenders. Bipolar rape victim who wasn't totally sure what consent might mean when she was ill. (And the older, wiser me will say, hun, you can't consent if you're having an episode. And yes - I am bipolar. And yes - I am a rape victim.) Found one good man... and he died for her 'crime'. Beautifully, beautifully portrayed by Lacey Turner:



3. Tina Turner. This should be considered a clarion call to all of us who have suffered domestic abuse. And trust me, I know whereof I speak (My ex - hit me, hit his son, hit the cat). When they hit us, when they make us feel small, when they rape us, we should remember:




2. Blanche Dubois. A double one here. The character is a (possibly) mentally ill rape victim; the actress is a perfect, fragile, violent, broken harridan. No-one wanted to help Blanche or Vivien, because they were too much like hard work. I'm mentally ill (which should have been apparent throughout this post), and I've been forced to accept all NHS treatments short of sectioning. Blanche took it like this (I didn't... and Vivien Leigh didn't either...):



1. Judy Garland. I left her to last, because this says it all. For me, she is the beautiful, strong, broken woman par excellence. This is one of the most painful videos I've ever seen. Look into her eyes. You will see her soul... and mine:

3rd Global Conference: Evil, Women and the Feminine

Friday 13th May - Sunday 15th May 2011

Warsaw, Poland

Call for Papers

This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to examine issues surrounding the conjunction between evil and the feminine. In many cultures women have been long suspected as the source of sundry human miseries, however basic to society they may be. At the same time as ideals of purity and dedication to family have been exhalted and feminine beauty lauded, women have been viewed as embodying sinister forces of evil. Mistrusted as seductive and beguiling, women are also often thought of as vengeful, manipulative and even malevolent. In grappling with our understanding of what it is to be 'evil', the project aims to shine a spotlight on this dark area of the human condition and explore the possible sources of the fear and resentment of women.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to the to the following themes:

• Evil Women and Feminine Evil
• Representing and Misrepresenting the Female
• Motherhood; Monstrous Motherhood
• Monstrous Births and Infanticide
• Matriarchy/Matricide
• Devious Sexuality and Feminine Perversions
• Women and the Abject
• Menstruation, Castration
• Fears and Myths: Feminine Blood
• Anthropological Perspectives
• Historical Perspectives
• The Evil Women in Literature
• Psychoanalytic perspectives: "Vagina Dentata" etc
• Sexualizing the Female or Evil Objectification
• Jezebel, Delilah, Lilith, Harpies and the Femme Fatale
• The Bitch
• Women and Power
• Beauty as threatening or evil
• Portrayals of Evil Women
• Fantasy
• Mythology
• Vampires, Witches and Sirens
• Case Studies

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 26th November 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 1st April 2011.

300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.

Emails should be entitled: EWF3 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Hub Leader, Project Co-Leader, School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Stephen Morris
Hub Leader, Independent Scholar, New York, USA

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discusssions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

For further details about the project, please click here.

For further details about the conference, please click here.