FSD Newsletter Fall 2003

The following graduate scholars received the FSD Top Paper Awards:

Lynette Lim of Michigan State University
The Other Other: The Chinese Peasant Girl in the Films of Zhang Yimou & Chen Kaige
The early films of Chinese directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have a recurring motif: the Chinese peasant girl. Feminist critics have asserted that Edward Said’s Orientalism theories have completely excluded gender from the equation. While Said has fluently articulated race and ethnic divides, he has neglected the intersections of gender and class within society. In the absence of an occidental or Western influence, the female is almost always considered to be of lesser social standing than a male of the same culture. And if that female hails from rural roots, she is on the bottom rungs of the cultural ladder. This article examines and analyzes, in an already Oriental context, the role and symbolism of the Chinese peasant girl in Zhang and Chen’s films and how it illustrates contemporary Chinese society today.

Shayla M. Thiel, University of Iowa
Instant Identity: Girls, Adolescence and Negotiation of Identity in the New Culture of Instant Messaging
Recent studies show that millions of adolescent girls in the past few years have turned to a relatively new real-time communication technology, Instant Messaging, as a primary means of communication with their peers. This raises intriguing questions about how adolescent girls – a group that historically was placed at the margins of study – may use Instant Messaging to negotiate and articulate identity at a particularly turbulent time in their lives. This preliminary study uses the qualitative methods of interview and narrative analysis to investigate this phenomenon with a framework grounded in poststructuralist feminist theory and cultural studies views of identity construction. Its findings suggest adolescent girls have come up with creative uses for the technology that are at once empowering to them but also suggest adherence to patriarchal cultural norms.

Michaela Ardizzoni, Indiana University
Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France
Much of the discussion that surrounded the question of the veil in France, following the 1989 infamous 'affaire du foulard', has been couched in terms of restricting binaries: secularism-Islam; Us-Them; East-West. There have been few attempts to look at the resurgence of the veil among Muslim schoolgirls in French public schools outside of the politicized discourse of ‘Islam is reversing the colonizing process’. There has been only sporadic reflection on the significance of dress, and other bodily markers, in the contestation and re-negotiation of group identities within conflicting cultural spaces. Rather, the predominant discourse, which is consistent with the Orientalist mystique of the Orient as the ‘Other’, has revolved around the threat Islam and its dress code pose to the cultural integrity of French society.

The underlying premise behind such a parochial interpretation is the notion of identity as a bounded, already completed entity. This is mainly due to the limiting political discourse that has surrounded the veil affair ever since it was made public. Following Stuart Hall’s argument that identities are contextual and relational positionings which are never fixed but always ‘in process’, I argue that the young women’s decision to wear the veil should not be viewed, exclusively, as a religious statement with an intent to subvert the status quo in French society. Dress is an important marker of difference, and highlighting one’s religious, cultural, or social difference is expected in a context of marginalization and racism. In this paper, I will probe the cultural specifics as well as the political complexities that form the background of this affair.

Julie Ferris, University of Iowa
Parallel Discourses: Media Constructions of Anorexia and Obesity in the Cases of Tracey Gold and Carnie Wilson
Mass media images of gender, beauty and women have been at the heart of many feminist arguments about the need for change in our understanding of gender and the role it plays in our day to day existence. The role of a body, much like the role of a woman, is also negotiated between the pages and airways of our popular culture that precariously favors particular excessive behaviors and norms. A textual analysis of the popular press discourse surrounding two bodies demonstrates specific rhetorical strategies at work in the construction of the "appropriate" cultural body. This paper explores how these two bodies are positioned at the border of cultural intelligibility and how these bodies, acting as discourse themselves, speak to culture and reify their positions on the margins.