Around the Bloc: Sacked Serbian Minister Retracts Sexist Remark
Bratislav Gasic was dismissed over his comment to a journalist.
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Bratislav Gasic was dismissed over his comment to a journalist.
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The article steams from a report of Valeriu Nicolae Lost generation. It presents the reality of Roma women in the poorest Roma settlements in few European countries. It asks questions about perspectives of inhabitants, mostly woman and children, deprived access to public utilities, basic infrastructure, lack of education and lack of jobs. This situation is even more complicated in case of illegal settlements and in front of lack of any ID, papers, registration etc. what makes inhabitants “illegal people” who cannot exercise e.g. the law to social benefits. Lack of possibilities threaten with the criminality and has negative consequences for internal and cultural cohesion of inhabitants.
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In literature, the image of women has been prejudiced. Perhaps the fact that the woman was considered an imperfect and inferior being has a great importance, but the creators themselves are also influenced of the time reflected in their works conceptions. Cold and calculated, the picara differs from other female figures in literature, for the sole reason that is not carried away by feelings. The physical qualities help them maintain their different from the picaros, who rarely make use of physical love in his adventures. Referring to the erotic theme, our view is to eroticism that follows the wild woman, the warrior.
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Erotic literature has never been the subject of a serious study, often dismissed for its immorality and considered as a subgenre. From Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence (1928) to the Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1968) all these works were banned and censored for obscenity.Alberto Moravia is considered as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, in his works he endeavored the issues of modern sexuality. His erotic works, with predominant sensuality and voyeurism, are the most surprising and daring.We will look at the short novel by Alberto Moravia, Agostino, written by the author in 1941 but only published in 1944, previously hampered by the fascist censorship. If Agostino can be considered as a Bildungsroman which recounts the passage from childhood to adolescence, through the discovery of sexuality as a rite of initiation, which idea of sex the writer wanted to bind?We propose, therefore, to investigate the reasons behind the choice of treating a subject considered taboo 'in a Mediterranean society with habits and traditional customs. We will also try to study the contribution of Moravian work in the realization of some sort of sexual liberation in the society of the time.
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In Negotiations, Gilles Deleuze explains that whole his work deals with the keywords «sign» and «sense». The interpretation of Sacher-Masoch’s, Marcel Proust’s and Lewis Carroll’s work he offers can be linked to a corporeal semiotic. For Deleuze, interpretation in the field of literature means decoding the signs the bodies express. This paper will first focus on the way Deleuze studies a symptomatology or a corporeal semiotic related to a flying sense. Then it will deal with the way this semiotic turns out to be in Logic of sense a grammar of phantasms which can be analyzed thanks to Nietzsche’s genealogy and Freud’s archeology. The last purpose of this paper will be to study how it happens that an erotic text is encoded to become in Alice’s adventures a logical text which is not pathologic and reflects phantasms.
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Among libertine topics, the seduction scene, often followed by erotic act, takes the lion’s share but it is preceded the most frequently by a sumptuous meal. If the reading of libertine novels shows an evident gastronomic richness, the importance concerning certain beverages appears almost in the margin of gastronomic descriptions, sprinkled in libertine works. So we will consider social and erotic value implicating champagne and chocolate consummation. Analysis concerning certain beverages is relevant, on the one hand, in the light of food habits at Old Regime and, on the other hand, due to narrative precise dynamics inscribing in libertine tradition.
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The aim of this paper is to present how transmen perceive their masculinity while constructing it during the process of transition in Poland. One’s own sexual identity can be demonstrated in various ways. However, transsexual people frequently follow stereotypical images of being a woman or a man. They seek a clear and obvious message so as to express themselves and their sex. It is related to forming their own image, appropri- ate body-language and their behavior towards the opposite sex. That is why transsexual people tend to choose sexually unambiguous clothing, avoiding unisex fashion.
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The essay calls for lling a gap in the studies on Warsaw Uprising concerning the place of queer people. A recent play, Snakepit by Joanna Oparek is considered, and the “scandal” surrounding Elżbieta Janicka’s academic work Festung Warschau is analysed, but the main source of understanding non-normative masculinities and sexualities is Miron Białoszewski’s Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising. The author offers a “paranoid” reading of traces, suggestions, allusions, and “illogical” fragments to build a working metaphor of queer acquaintances as an alternative “map” without the map. Finally he invokes the role of the picaresque narrative convention in representing such paranoid queer relationships.
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This essay asks what happens to hegemonic discourses around gender, identity and subjectivity when the stable frame of reference within which they typically operate shatters under the pressure of cinematic and narrative oversaturation. Through a close analysis of Nicholas Ray’s film noir In a Lonely Place (1950), the article traces the representational undermining of post-WWII Western masculinity, which is revealed to be in a state of perpetual crisis. It shows how sexual difference is depicted as a key element informing the notion of agency, but with a surprising result: instead of the typical hierarchy of classic Hollywood films—in which the woman on the screen occupies a passive to-be-looked-at position (Mulvey 1975)—In a Lonely Place complicates the formula by giving its female protagonist more agency over the narrative than its male anti-hero, thereby marking the film as a provocative feminist text. In later parts of the essay, I focus on the film’s noir features such as narrative loose ends and plot inconsistencies, and what they reveal about the inherent violence of normative forms of storytelling, both cinematic and otherwise.
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If we accept the distinction between sex and gender, introduced by the Second Wave of Feminism,and if we agree that gender does not have to be limited to two sexes, we will enter the terrain of thequeer, the world of labile, liquid sexuality where the borders between men and women get blurredand the space opens for creating various human hybrids. In Poland, the middle of 1990 saw thelaunch of the women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, queer, LGBT, opening newdomains and new methods of human studies. We can call them post-feminist and cultural studiesbecause they stem from the feminist distinction between sex and gender and are focused on gender,i.e. on cultural rather than biological determinants of human beings. The new human sciences willhave to face such new narratives of human beings, rethink the concept of objectivity (science) andcommitment, learn to live in pluralistic world of many theories and more precisely many discourses,and to learn to cooperate with various groups to present their point of view. But first of all, the newhuman sciences will have to replace the idea of unity by idea of difference. Once we were lookingfor unity, now we are looking for difference.
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The article, referring to the concept of Mary Douglas, presents various practices undertaken in thesports world to maintain the “purity” of gender boundaries. The first part focuses on the concept ofgender boundaries and the embodiment of these boundaries. Then, the concept of Mary Douglasand the possibility of its application for the analysis of gender order in sport is presented. The mainpart of the article presents the different types of sportswomen’s bodies, which can be perceived asabject (J. Kristeva), dangerous for the existing order and describes practices to deal with these abnormalbodies and restore the “purity” of the sports system.
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Article concerns the issue of women’s exclusion from the motor sports, which happens throughlanguage practices. The fastest car racing series – Formula 1 remains a male-dominated sport. Oneof the reasons for this dominance certainty results from the awareness and social stereotypes. Excludingdiscourse is shaped and reproduces in the statements which can be found, for example, onthe websites dedicated to the Formula 1. Conducted discourse analysis allows to show the methodsof reasoning to justify a point of view, in accordance with which the F1 racing is not a sport forwomen. Secondly, it defines the image of the women who compete or aspire to drive in races of thistype. Thirdly, it determines the way in which, from the perspective of woman driver, gender determinesthe presence in Formula 1.
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The presence of women in “male” sports is becoming more common and accepted. The reversesituation applies to the participation of men in the “feminine” sports. In this article author analyzesthe presence of men in synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, which disciplines areconsidered to be typically “feminine”. Assuming, in line with the theory of Judith Butler that sportis one of the areas of social life which reproduce heterosexual matrix, the author examines the practicesof men’ exclusion in “feminine” sports.
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This article summarizes key findings in the contemporary research field of happiness economics. Elaborated is the influence of macroeconomic factors like inflation, unemployment, and GDP, as well as the quality of governance on the overall reported life satisfaction. The concepts of conspicuous consumption and the relative income hypothesis are brought in connection with the notion of the ‘hedonic treadmill’ for the purpose of explaining the invariant happiness levels in the last decades despite of the remarkable increase in standard of living. The methodological framework is used to find an answer to the puzzling question of declining women’s reported happiness levels in developed economies.
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The first part of the article tries to (re)define feminist stylistics, i.e. its subject, interest fields and possible methodological frameworks within Croatian context. Trying to arrive at a workable definition of feminist stylistics, a dialogue is established with selected foreign and Croatian literature on stylistic disciplines on the one hand, and on feminist criticism in literary theory on the other hand. The author argues for an understanding of feminist stylistics as a discipline between critical discourse analysis (especially in view of methodology) and literary theory (especially regarding attention given to relations of gender, sexism, ideology and the relationship between the physical and implied reader). An interdisciplinary feminist stylistics argues for gender, identity, discourse, context and awareness of politics; it deals with both literary and non-literary texts. Emphasis is put on the text–reader interaction, i.e. the dominant and other possible readings, which is the subject of the second part of the article. Here, a poetic text (Slavko Mihalić: Approaching of a Storm) and its established criticism is analysed from a feminist stylistic position as outlined in the first part. The selected text is interesting because it exemplifies a representation of the voice of the »silenced« woman and the ways in which the markers of femininity/ masculinity and gender roles can be detected in the text. These questions are brought forth by posing Vera’s silence not as a fact but as a problem. From the outlined four possible readings of the text, two non-dominant ones are further elaborated. The feminist stylistic approach is thus positioned as a subversive reading in opposition to the dominant reading recognized by the critics.
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In this paper, the author takes up Freud’s analysis of the so-called dream of Irma’s injection to be an example par excellence of Freud’s dream analysis. The analysis of this specific dream-work is crucial for understanding genealogy that is made of various contested readings between feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, on the one hand, and deconstruction, on the other. Freud’s analysis and its impact on reading procedures outside psychoanalytic interests are being examined in order to gain insight into how they contribute to the politics of reading literary texts. Thus, the discussion will range from Freud and Lacan to Felman and Derrida.
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A phenomenon of migration shows that women suffer the consequences of migration differently than men. Therefore we focus on the specificity of socio-cultural problems of women-migrants in Poland. Biographical interviews with women-refugees from Chechnya and Ukraine reveal different paths of integration into Polish society. They also reveal tensions and conflicts that are experienced by women in the context of new socio-cultural system. Analysis of the city documents of Gdansk shows institutional conditions that are involved in the process of migrants’ integration and adaptation. Integration requires active migration policy and the searching for promising practices on the part of the host.
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The aim of this study was to examine the role friendship maintenance strategies play in satisfaction with same-sex friendships, with a particular interest in actor and partner effects of friendship maintenance strategies and whether these differ in male and female same-sex friendships. The study involved 196 pairs of friends 19-30 years old, both male/male and female/female pairs. The results revealed significant actor effects for all three dimensions of friendship maintenance strategies, such that both men and women who show more affection, show less antagonism and interact with friends more, are more satisfied with their friendships. No partner effects were significant for male same-sex friendships. In female same-sex friendships we found a significant partner effect for expressing affection – women with more affectionate female friends are more satisfied with their friendships. The results are discussed in the context of gender and cultural differences in friendship maintenance strategies.
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The aim of this study was to examine unique contributions of different dimensions of students’ temperament (self-control, positive affectivity and negative affectivity), students’ emotional regulation, students’ adjustment problems (the presence of internalizing and externalizing symptoms), and students’ perception of parental behavior of their mothers and fathers (parental dimensions of emotionality, acceptance and rejection) in explaining their school success. The sample consisted of 553 students (275 girls and 278 boys) mean age of 13 years. By using hierarchical regression analysis, the results obtained in the subsample of boys revealed a significant and unique contribution of students’ temperament, emotional regulation and parental behavior in explaining the variability of school success. Boys who are more prone to anger but are less fearful, who regulate their emotions effectively, and who perceive to be accepted by their mothers and fathers, have higher levels of school success. On the subsample of girls, only emotional regulation has a significant and positive contribution in the explanation of their school success; girls who regulate their emotions effectively have higher grades.
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The article elaborates the position and the role of ecofeminism in the Republic of Croatia whereat ecofeminism is being analysed as holistic and layered context, circuit that is composed of different theoretical positions, forms of activism and different ways of life, oriented by specific life philosophies and spirituality forms. For the purpose of better and complex insight in ‘The Power and Promise’ of ecofeminism (Karen Warren), the author of the article has organized two focus groups which displayed that ecofeminism is not visible in the Croatian academic society as well as there is no existence of ecofeminist movement in the Republic of Croatia. It was also revealed that individuals with academic, activist and personal affinity for ecofeminist idea are trying to apply these ideas in daily life, which for some participants include spiritual practices close to ecofeminism as well. The ecofeminist dialogue have opened and set out a various issues concerning: an academic attitude toward critical theories and alternative knowledge; the position of feminism and its different variations that have been articulated on the activist scene; contemporary and future problems on the Croatian activist scene; issues regarding identity strategies; alternative religiosity and, ultimately, the future of ecofeminism itself within Croatia.
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