Re/Presenting Gender and Love Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board Simon Bacon Ana Borlescu Katarzyna Bronk Ann-Marie Cook John L. Hochheimer Peter Mario Kreuter Stephen Morris John Parry Peter Twohig Karl Spracklen S Ram Vemuri A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Gender & Sexuality Hub ‘Gender and Love’ 2015 Re/Presenting Gender and Love Edited by Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom © Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-343-7 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2015. First Edition. Table of Contents Introduction vii Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu Part I Representations of Gender and Love in Time Faith and Ascensus in Vittoria Colonna’s Lyric Dreams 3 Cristina Acucella Identity, Gender and Love in Transition: The Violet Hour 19 and Absent Love, A Chronicle. Katarzyna Moszczyńska-Dürst (En)Gendering Global China: Lesbian Affectivity in 27 Fan Wu’s February Flowers Kelly Y. N. Tse Part II Gender and Love in Literature Tennyson and the Idylls of Geraint: Medievalism, Victoriana, 37 and the Mechanism of Social Control Adèle Cook Love and the Crossing of Gender Boundaries: Strategies of 47 Staging Transgender Identity Marcus Hartner Between Loyalty and Transgression: Towards a Feminist 57 Deconstruction of Cultural Taboos against Young Lovers in Africa Canice Chukwuma Nwosu Happily never After: The Effect of Gender on Love as 67 Narrative Closure Megan Rogers Part III Gender and Love in Cinema Madly in Love: The Mental Threat of Homosexuality in 81 Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) Gesine Wegner Between Exotization and Erasure: Making Sense of Queer 89 Desire on the Mainstream Screen Mirjam M. Frotscher Defying and Dodging the Homophobic Weimar Film 99 Censorship: Same-Sex Adoration, Peer Comradeship, or Lesbian Love? Yuan-Tsai, Chen Part IV Gender and Making Sense of the Self and the World Am I Man/Woman Enough: Using Trans-Youth ‘Self-Portrait 109 Drawing’ to Analyse Their Body Image Wallace Wong, Fatima Natascha Lawrence Love and Gender in the Kabyle Family Romance 119 Sabrina Zerar Part V Gender and Love in Law Disabled for Love: Intersectionalities of Gender and Disability 133 in Love and Law Raadhika Gupta Women’s Rights, Prenatal Harm and Non-Identity Problem 149 Łukasz Dominiak and Łukasz Perlikowski Part VI Gender, Love and Postfeminism Gender in Recent Romance Novels: A Third Wave Feminist 161 Mills and Boon Love Affair? Eirini Arvanitaki Postfeminism, Consumerism and the Reclamation of Love 171 Franka Heise Introduction Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu Gender has become one of the key concepts of the humanities and social sciences since the early 1970s. Today, it is almost impossible to study culture without taking into account that all aspects of social life are gendered. This ‘Genderquake’ has shaken academic studies as well as Western democracies. While the study of gender intertwines with feminism, queer studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies, the Gender and Love project calls for the consideration of gender in relation to various kinds of love. As you will also see from examples in this volume, the project explores the interactions of gender and love with regard to self, spirit, religion, the family, friendship, ethics, laws, nations, globalisation, the environment, and so on. Its aim is to address how the interactions of gender and love promote particular performances of gender; how they affect conceptions of individual and collective identity, formations of community, notions of the human, and understandings of good and evil. These are just some of the questions that occupy this project and this volume. The overall aim of the project is to understand the interconnection and interaction between the concepts of love and gender; and whether, when, how and in what ways the two concepts understand and construct each other. The chapters in this volume were originally presented at the 3rd Global Conference Gender and Love held in Oxford in September 2013 as a part of the Hub activity of Gender and Sexuality by Inter-disciplinary.Net. The researchers represented every continent and a wide spectrum of disciplines. The volume covers topics ranging from social and cultural studies, philosophy, literature, media studies, to psychology and law. One of the fundamental topics focused on during the conference was the issue of representation. Most of the chapters in this volume concern the various ways in which representations of gender and love are constructed, reproduced and circulated throughout the ages and geographies. Representations of gender are never innocent. As cultural constructions, they address us in the practices of everyday life. These chapters will show that all social practices take place within representations and are different narratives through which we make sense of ourselves, our world and our culturally constructed identities. In the first part of this book we will discover various representations of gender and love from different times and places. ‘Faith and Ascensus in Vittoria Colonna’s Lyric Dreams’ by Cristina Acucella is the very first chapter and takes us back to 16th Century Italy. The poetry of Vittoria Colonna represents a woman’s love and dedication to the memory of her husband, who died in battle in 1525. In this context, she uses the dream as a tool for the encounter with the beloved, whom she gradually identifies with Christ. Love and the erotic dream in this sense are also the viii Introduction __________________________________________________________________ place of spiritual elevation and sometimes a door to the neoplatonic ascensus and religious ecstasy. The second chapter of the first part ‘Identity, Gender and Love in Transition: The Violet Hour and Absent Love. A Chronicle’ by Katarzyna Moszczyńska-Dürst takes us to Spain with women´s fiction of the Transition period. She focuses on the discursive strategies adopted by the protagonists of The Violet Hour, by Montserrat Roig and Absent Love: A Chronicle, by Rosa Montero, with respect to love, sexuality and woman´s role in society. She sheds light to the role played by the images of love in identity politics. In the last chapter of the first part, Kelly Y. N. Tse brings us to women writers in contemporary China, who write from a transnational and transcultural vantage point. In her chapter, ‘(En)gendering Global China: Lesbian Affectivity in Fan Wu’s February Flowers,’ she critically examines the formation and constitution of lesbian subjectivities and its qu(e)erying of Chineseness against the backdrop of a discourse of globalization. The representation of China as a hetero-normative space where lesbian love is un-verbalized and unnamed, as opposed to the queer space of potentialities that is the USA, points to a kind of lesbian subjectivity which is predicated upon the affirmation of a global and hybridized Chineseness. The second part goes on to talk about representations of gender and love in literature and furthers the concerns of the first part. As we acknowledge in the subsequent chapters and their various contexts, love may be used as a mechanism of social control. In ‘Tennyson and the Idylls of Geraint: Medievalism, Victoriana, and the Mechanism of Social Control’, Adèle Cook shows us how Tennyson was ‘horrified’ by the rapid social changes which confronted him and this horror was reflected in the Idylls, the work of his life. This chapter examines the Victorian representation of marriage as a means of control through love and discusses how this impacts on contemporary Arthurian texts. In the next chapter, ‘Love and the Crossing of Gender Boundaries: Strategies of Staging Transgender Identity’, Marcus Hartner explores representations of transgender identities in film and novel and investigates how the themes of love and affection are used strategically for the narrative staging of transgender identity. He focuses on the protagonists in Jackie Kay’s award-winning novel Trumpet (1998) and the American road movie Transamerica (2005), directed by Duncan Tucker. A discrepancy between their chosen gender and their biological sex shapes these characters’ identities. However, the stories are not merely on the theme of romantic love but focus for the most part on filial, paternal, and maternal love as well as friendship. The chapter shows how the topic of love is fundamental in the depiction and evaluation of those characters: Hartner points out that Transamerica evokes the transformative power of maternal love and Trumpet’s narrative structure follows the performative nature of identity and gender. Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu ix __________________________________________________________________