Abstract Emerging from the rich and complex tradition of Northern Irish elegiac poetry, Gail McConnell’s 2021 poetry collection The Sun is Open unpacks the life and death of her father William McConnell almost four decades after his murder by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1984. Navigating the difficulties of mourning post-conflict, McConnell interrogates the structures that politicize mourning and make it difficult terrain to negotiate—even or perhaps especially, post-conflict. This essay unpacks McConnell’s elegiac poetry, both The Sun is Open and its predecessor “Type Face” (2016), to explore the politics of the archive and the dynamics of gender within the contexts both of post-conflict Northern Ireland and the elegiac tradition.
Abstract The short story’s brevity is commonly theorized by short story scholars as a simultaneously restricting and freeing feature of the form. However, not many have mentioned how this conflicting characteristic of the short story form can contribute to readers’ understanding of limits and latitudes within the short story. In this article, I argue that women writers’ interactions with this conflicting characteristic of the short story provide insights into how women confront the restrictions imposed upon them by exploitative, patriarchal systems. With specific reference to women’s (often unequal) situation in the labor force, as depicted in the case study of Karen Russell’s “Reeling for the Empire,” I contend that Russell’s engagement with the short story’s formal limits draws attention to the gendered notions of women’s work that confine women within their sites of re/production (e.g., the factory, the female body) and, crucially, spotlights the ways this gendering paradoxically nudges women toward creative work that restructures the labor force’s exploitation for their own personal survival and growth.
Abstract This article examines the relationship between the body and gender identity in Saudi fiction through Raja Alem’s novel Khatam. Drawing on feminist and semiotic approaches, the article explores how Khatam constructs the body as a site of gender ambiguity, cultural signification, and social regulation. Rather than presenting gender identity as fixed or biologically stable, the novel destabilizes binary understandings of masculinity and femininity through the concealment, performance, and interpretation of the body. Situated within a neopatriarchal Meccan society, bodily identity in the novel becomes shaped by social expectations, spatial divisions, and cultural norms. Through its representations of femininity, maternity, masculinity, and bodily performance, Khatam critiques essentialist assumptions about gender and reclaims the body as a site of feminist resistance and self-articulation.
Abstract As an African-American woman writer in the late twentieth century, Gloria Naylor always focused on the predicament and breakthrough of Black women’s subjectivity under the triple oppression of race, gender, and class. This article selects three of Naylor’s most representative novels—Bailey’s Café (1992), Linden Hills (1985), and Mama Day (1988)—and conducts an analysis following a thematic arc, rather than the chronological order of publication. Specifically, the article adopts a thematic arc that builds from an “ideal model” of collective corporeal autonomy (in Bailey’s Café), to a “critical diagnosis” of patriarchal capitalism’s co-option of Black womanhood (in Linden Hills), and finally to a “synthesis” of individual agency, cultural heritage, and communal connection (in Mama Day). Together, these three novels trace an evolving vision of resistance. By taking Black women’s “lived experience” as her source, Naylor not only deconstructs the myths of “victim” and “other” in patriarchal discourse but also constructs a Black feminist view of subjectivity that emphasizes the dialectical unity of body, space, and psychology. This view of subjectivity is not a static identity label but a dynamic practice of existence, thereby providing an analytical paradigm with both aesthetic and political significance for contemporary African-American literary research.
