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The purpose of the work is to analyze the specific features of a widow‘s image and status on the Bible pages, to consider semantic contexts of an image, to follow the parallels between the images of an orphan and a widow, to conceive a loneliness phenomenon and orphans‘ and widows‘ protection in Biblical tradition. Axiological variety and poly vector spiritual and semantic representation of Biblical women‘ images are the main focuses of the issue. Methodologically the issue is based on the original source of the Bible. The work is based on methodical description of the women‘ images, who are selected from the Old and New Testament in order to highlight valued features of each image. Moreover, the methods of semantic analysis and hermeneutics are applied to consider semantic differences. The principles of comparative analysis are applied in order to reveal the traits of a widow‘s image in the blocks of historical texts and compare Ukrainian context of widows‘ existence with biblical one. Scientific novelty is in the poly semantic analysis of the women‘ Biblical context and widows‘ images separation with further analysis of their fates, valued statuses, which allowed them to embody the problems of motherhood and marriage, future children birth and solitude, the problem of divine protection in different ways. The issue is devoted to the consideration of symbolic and axiological poly vector transformations of the mentioned problems. Conclusions. The social polarity and spiritual separation of a widow‘s place and role in ancient tradition, and poly vector semantics of a widow‘s Biblical context are conceived. The attention is drawn to the varied contexts of solitude, selectiveness, devoted life, vocation, divine protection of a widow. A widow‘s image is compared with orphans‘ statuses, levits, foreigners, etc. A widow‘s figure is shown as a symbolic one. The ideas of selectiveness, God blessing, obedience, and humility, a miracle of sacred and virgin life are embodied in a person, whose name is translated as ―tears of sea‖. Virgin Mary is a crown of a widow‘s image understanding in Biblical tradition.
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Purpose of Article. The purpose of the article is to research some inverse forms of women's activities in the traditional Ukrainian culture of XVI-XIX centuries. Methodology. The methodology of the article is based on the interdisciplinary approach, which includes the following methods: analysis, synthesis, historical-comparative, legal-comparative and culturological ones. Scientific Novelty. The scientific novelty of the article is the analysis of the inverse forms of the women activities in the traditional Ukrainian culture of XVI-XIX centuries such as the woman’s right for matchmaking, the woman in army and woman in the urban corporative culture. Conclusions. Thus, in the Ukrainian culture, the women played various roles such as a mother, sister, and a homemaker. Despite those positions, the historical and social circumstances made the woman to realize themselves in political, social and economic activities. Such processes were manifested in the inversion between male and female social roles. The most popular embodiments of it are the women’s right of the matchmaking, women military service and craft professions.
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Three musical adaptations of the myth of Phaedra, in which the wife of King Theseus of Athens desperately falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, were composed in the second half of the twentieth century by three homosexual composers: the dramatic cantata Phaedra for mezzosoprano and small orchestra (1976) by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) after a text by the American poet Robert Lowell, the opera Le Racine: pianobar pour Phèdre (1980) by Sylvano Bussotti (1931-) after a libretto drafted by the composer himself and consisting of a prologue, three acts, and an intermezzo, and, last but not least, the two-act concert opera Phaedra (2007) by Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) after a libretto by the German poet Christian Lehnert. The aim of this paper is to prove that the three homosexual composers chose a myth about an incestuous—and thus censored—love in order to represent homoerotic desire, labelled as deviant by the coeval heteronormative society and hence condemned by it. The study sheds light on the aspects of the most famous literary elaborations that affect gay sensibility, and on how the three composers experienced their homosexuality and gave utterance to it in their other works. The analysis of the three works at issue demonstrates that the discourse about gayness takes shape through the interplay of numerous aspects. The elaboration of the literary sources, the organization of the libretto, the characters’ definition, and the mise-en-scène, together with the music, put the myth into that perspective.
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Das Ziel des Familiantengesetzes von 1726 war primär die staatliche Kontrolle über die Anzahl der jüdischen Bevölkerung. Seit dem Erscheinen meiner Miszelle, in der es um dessen Auswirkungen auf das Alltagsleben der böhmischen Juden und einen Einblick in die habsburgische Sozialgeschichte ging, haben sich neue Erkenntnisse und Fragestellungen ergeben. So macht Věra Leininger auf sich wiederholende Verordnungen zum Familiantengesetz aufmerksam, die auf dessen jeweilige Missachtung schließen lassen. Ähnliches stellen auch Philipp Lenhard und Martina Niedhammer fest. Jede Gesetzeslücke sei genutzt und kein finanzielles Opfer gescheut worden, um eine offizielle Heiratsgenehmigung zu erlangen.
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The article examines the process of transformation of ideas about gender identity on the material of Russian culture of XVI c. and the beginning of the XVIII c. The main goal of the work is the analysis and description of differences in the concept of gender and age characteristics; as well as the description and analysis of the process of the formation of female discourse as independent. According to the authors of the study, the identification of a man and a woman from the point of view of belonging to the home (gender, family) as a whole, which is characteristic of the traditional culture, does not imply an independent gender identity, but only a functional one. At the same time, the fixation of the functions of the wife and husband, as well as servants and children (“Domostroĭ”) leads to the fact that the custom acquires a normative character and, as a result, each of the functions acquires legal independence, which makes it possible, on the one hand, to transfer the structure of the home (as the relationship of functions) to other cultural phenomena (for example, the state), as A. Kurbsky does. On the other hand, the independence of individual functions, the possibility of their absence in the system, the features of such points of view are demonstrated by Ivan IV. Nevertheless, one should admit that on the whole they retain traditional semantic patterns. However, it is this approach that allows independent female images to emerge in the XVII c. embodied by the teachers of the schismatic Morozova and Urusova or princess Sophia. At the beginning of the XVIII c., a complete reformatting of the cultural sphere takes place and one can speak of an independent female discourse as well as the male one. In the second half of the XVIII c., a man and a woman were already perceived separately, although, for example, for M. Shcherbatov it was the result of “damage to morals”.
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In this paper, I tried to make a presentation about the origin, growth and decline of the institution of temple girls. Devadasis were women who were dedicated to the particular temple deity or any specific symbol. A devadasi was considered nitya sumangali, a woman eternally free from the adversity of widowhood as she was married to God and married forever. She was married to a deity or god, but that did not mean that she had to live her life without the normal pleasures of sex and childbearing. In medieval times, she was a respected member of the society. These devadasis were performed ritualistic and non-ritualistic performances until 17th century, when devadasis were moving away from the temples into the secular spaces. Now they were no longer confined to the temples and by 18th century, the distinction between the devadasi and the prostitute becomes blurred. The bibliography to which I had access clearly shows a transformation of the role of the system in Hindu society, a role that I tried to capture in the following pages.
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This article examines the evolving role of national symbolism in Polish feminist discourses and activist practices since 1989. Three case studies involving symbolic appropriation are presented; in each, cultural signs of great importance to the national imaginary are put to work for women’s equality in acts of resistance to nationalist rhetoric. The first case is the graffiti reportedly seen on the wall of the Gdańsk Shipyard during the 1980 Solidarity strike: “Women, do not disturb us, we are fighting for Poland.” The sign and the story behind it came to play an important role in feminist debates about national belonging and exclusion. The second example is the 1989 election poster featuring Gary Cooper, twice transformed by feminists. Finally, the article examines the struggle between nationalists and feminists over the “fighting Poland” sign associated with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Black Protest of 2016 creatively transformed this symbol, which led to much public debate and several court cases. This article argues that Polish feminism is engaged in contestation of the dominant understanding of nationhood imposed by right-wing, male-centered forces and the Catholic Church. Responses to the post-1989 resurgence of nationalism have constituted key dividing lines between strands of feminist activism and thinking in Poland. The two competing strategies have been pathos and irony. The Black Protest seems to mark a new stage in these developments—one that corresponds to Victor Turner’s communitas, with its characteristic turmoil and symbolic intensity.
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This article discusses the role of child protection and residential care institutions in mediating the tension between women’s productive and reproductive responsibilities in early state socialist Hungary. At a time when increasing numbers of women entered paid work in the framework of catch-up industrialization but the socialization of care work was inadequate, these institutions substituted for missing public child care services. Relying on not only policy documents but more than six hundred children’s case files, including Romani children’s files, from three different locations in Hungary as well as interviews with former children’s home residents and personnel, the article examines the regulatory framework in which child protection institutions and caseworkers operated. It points to the differentiated forms of pressure these institutions exercised on Romani and non-Romani mothers to enter paid work between the late 1940s and the early 1950s from the intersectional perspective of gender and ethnicity. Showing that prejudice against “Gypsies” as work-shy persisted in child protection work across the systemic divide of the late 1940s, the article contributes to scholarship on state socialism and Stalinism that emphasizes the role of historical continuities. At the same time, reflecting on parental invention in using child protection as a form of child care, the article also complicates a simplistic social control approach to residential care institutions in Stalinist Hungary.
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This article explores the history of HIV activism in Poland from the socialist period through the early 1990s transformation as a means of examining the reconfiguration of rights, obligations, and responsibility as Poland redefined itself as a market democracy. Drawing on archival materials, in-depth qualitative interviews with current and former HIV activists, and participant observation at HIV prevention organizations in Warsaw, Poland, I sketch the ways in which the socialist system’s failures to protect the health of its subjects led to the terms through which state-citizen engagement was defined in the postsocialist period. Uncertainties and anxieties surrounding who was responsible for protecting the health and well-being of citizens in the newly democratic Poland gave rise to a series of violent protests centered on HIV prevention and care for people living with HIV/AIDS. Resolution of these political and social crises involved defining democracy in postsocialist Poland through claims to moral authority, in alliance with the Catholic Church, and an obligation by multiple stakeholders to disseminate technical/scientific knowledge. By comparing the responses to the epidemic by diverse institutions, including the government, the Catholic Church, and the fledgling gay rights movement, this analysis reveals the ways in which democracy in postsocialist Poland tightly links science, democratic reform, and moral/religious authority while at the same time excluding sexual minorities from engaging in political activism centered on rights to health and inclusion in the new democracy.
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The review of: 1) Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950, by Melissa Feinberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 2) Living Gender after Communism, by Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007. 3) Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe, edited by Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. $24.95 (paperback).
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The article introduces the notion of visceral feminism and advances its usage as a methodological framework for art interpretation capable of addressing urgent political and artistic challenges, as well as histories of traumatic legacies and imperial powers (among them, the peculiarity of the post-Soviet condition). Drawing encouragement from feminist political theory, carnal aesthetics and new materialism, visceral feminism enhances corporeality in order to address the visceral dimension of the body and the capacity for a liveable life. Due to the multitude of theoretical references, the first part of the article is devoted to providing an insight into the continuity of visceral feminism and the leading traditions of feminist philosophy, especially of feminist aesthetics and theories of the body. It should be noted that in the academic debates of the last decade, the term ‘visceral’ has already obtained some theoretical coverage. However, its potential for grounding a methodological approach for a profoundly feminist art interpretation, especially within the political framework of the Eastern Europe, has not yet been elaborated. After providing a brief summary on the theoretical context of visceral feminism, the term is defined and examined in detail by incorporating theoretical insights of both post-structural theory (notably, Judith Butler) and the new materialism (Barbara Bolt, Jane Bennett etc.). Thus visceral feminism is understood as a viewpoint which prompts the issues of bodily matter, its liveliness, intrinsic vitality and fluxes of dynamic life forces, as well as articulating the body’s ability for agency and resistance, while at the same time preserving the post-structural findings about how ideology and social norms shape and transform our bodies. From this perspective, the political claims for a liveable life can be made which become the foundational question also for visceral art interpretation: how can art affect bodies viscerally? Rather than examining the immediate psychosomatic reactions to artworks, the aesthetic position of visceral feminism focuses on the performative powers of art to transgress the art world’s institutionalized framework and its common art audience. The capacity of art to perform, to bring into being or, to borrow a term from John Langshaw Austin, to do (emotional, conceptual or material) things, is of crucial importance. These are the qualities that have the utmost impact and ultimately reveal the inherent political potential of art to transform not only society, but also to affect bodies on a visceral level. While social changes may take decades and are sometimes hard to grasp, visceral transformations (from tears to laughter, from shame to anger, from pain to solace) are straightforward – they are a crucial part of everyday lived experience. However, the insights into these experiences are seldom universal or self-obvious. In pursuit of embodied knowledge, visceral feminism draws from the standpoint of feminist theory that questions both the possibility of objective knowledge and the neutrality of cognition. Instead, a visceral standard for knowledge is established; in order to claim epistemic authority, one must not distance herself, but rather immerse into the bodily matter. The perspectives of such investigations are often reinforced by (a feminist) art practice and therefore can be addressed through theoretical art research. For the purpose of visceral scrutiny, two artworks have been selected – the painting “Susanna and the Elders” by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610) and a work by Latvian artist Rasa Jansone, “Self-Portrait. Exercise Machine I” (2017). Both are examined from the perspective of visceral feminism. This enables us to account for a variety of issues of the marginalization and oppression of women embedded both in the gendered art history and today’s culture, as especially manifest in the patterns of passive victimhood and sexual objectification. While the juxtaposition of the iconic work of feminist art scholarship from the Baroque era (Gentileschi) and a contemporary painting which draws on post-Soviet legacies and the neo-liberal cult of a superwoman (Jansone) may seem daring, the encounter of the two artworks succeeds in encouraging a transgenerational and transnational feminist genealogy in arts, based on the visceral experiences of bodies, their capacity to act and to strive for a liveable life. Both paintings highlight the scope of bodily resistance and thereof put forward a feminist materialist critique of the Western art canon as well as the oppressive body politics of today. By addressing the questions of art’s animacy and its agentic potential in intervening and engaging with the materiality of the world, visceral art interpretation aims at promoting care, empathy and love which make life more liveable.
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The review of: 1) Gail Kligman. The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 358 pp. 2) Sabrina P. Ramet, ed. Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999. 343 pp.
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Local communities function as dynamic living organisms. Their existence is in balanced forms; therefore, the local names, along with the ancient language forms and nominations reveal also the modern dimensions of space. Toponyms contain the historical memory of Oryahovo and its area and of the people living there. They contain real and imagined events and remain therefore important for the people here regardless of the time that has passed and the changes that have happened. The toponyms that were collected have a distinct presence of Turkish and Wallachian names that were mostly inherited. The names given in modern times are on the basis of the Bulgarian language. The local names describe a situation that should be recorded because it reflects an earlier way of life the names in which represent its spatial delineation. Today, part of what has been preserved and recorded can be recognized only in the present publication; that is the reason why the registered onyms tell the history of the area. Part of that history is the locality named Stalbat (The Pole), a 30 m iron pole transferring electricity from the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Station to Romania. There are no electrical wires across the river any longer, and the poles are part of the memory of a period in the past. “The Romanians take care of their pole. They repainted it last year, while ours is all rust, forgotten” (St. M.). That peculiar token of the era manifests its capacity to use familiar shapes and places to construct the inhabited place. Similar functions can be seen in Esperanto Island on the Danube. It is not that much because of its exotic name but rather because of the practiced models of everyday life and entertainment well known to everybody in the area. In the socialist era, there was a restaurant on the island where they organized parties and Neptune celebration events. That made it a local emblem, related at the same time with modernization practices and active life on the Danube. The young Chateau Bugrozone winery is a significant element of the modern economy. The establishment has even marked its territory with signs showing the beginning and the end of the place where it is. Making unquestionable quality wine, it is nearly invisible in the life of the town. The vineyards are referred to as “the old fame of Oryahovo” (MM); nevertheless, the winery is not mentioned in any of the interviews with the local people. Most probably, that indicates non-matching audiences and a failure in assigning meaning to the local products. Fish and fishermen are an essential component of the culture of this area, and there are a relatively large number of people and places related to the river and the fishing in it. Their stories describe surroundings and a lifestyle showing intangible cultural heritage elements. The present research dwells on the fishing community, with a comprehensive examination of the multitude of components that build the community, and its links with the town and the area. The examination includes the shape of the gravestones in the area as well as the images of the heritage specific to Oryahovo. Field ethnographic studies of particular areas normally evolve in efforts to identify the special ethno-cultural traits of the local population. The former administrative structures, known as counties, are often used to mark the scope of a research. In the Post-Liberation period, counties were formed largely on the basis of the logic of the natural pre-modern life of the local communities forming their own market centers, or towns that turned into their centers. Oryahovo was also a county centre that encompassed territories of the contemporary municipalities of Oryahovo and Kozloduy. The strategic development of the town was promoted by the inauguration of the Cherven Bryag-Oryahovo railway. Although narrow-gauge, that line was sufficient to link the area to the central section of Northern Bulgaria, hence to the capital city and other cities. Oryahovo does not have a direct communication with a large urban centre because there is none at a small distance, not even on the northern side of the river. Its existence therefore has been related to the traditional communication with the neighboring settlements with which it built a joint nomination system, as seen in the toponym research made by Ivalina Vasileva. The Danube River, along with land farming, has been and still is the main business potential of the area where the port and the fishing are the livelihood of many of the local people. We will add here a number of ship mills built by Hungarian migrants; knowing the technology of setting up such facilities on the Middle Danube, they transferred them to the Bulgarian section of the river. Their presence was impressive for the local population. Therefore, the ship mills have remained in the toponym picture of the area despite the fact that nobody remembers them any longer. Territory-based research today is just one of the approaches to research work today. Today, we have a variety of approaches to choose from. We will also include the story of the cultural landscape and the ideas of what heritage is for the local communities in order to outline past and modern cultural tradition forms, and the system of transferring knowledge and values revealing the unity between man and nature. In this particular case there is a specific cultural space; reading it through the “Locus and Universum” (Zhivkova, Zhivkov 2001) will enable us to see what unites people rather than what separates people. The progress of our exploration – along with the recorded names of localities and sites, and those mentioned in the numerous interviews – will reveal the local names that everybody knows, shared spaces and topoi that have become visual memory markers, parts of the town and segments of the river related to the local knowledge, cultural practices, fishing skills or local cuisine. That way, the simultaneous existence of elements will be outlined, and the territory markers – characters, heroes, places of memory, market places and roads – will stand out. We will see, in its full variety of colors, the ethnological picture of the area. The research of the area toponyms and the fishing communities on the Danube does not present images of the daily life and the culture of the constellation of town-dominated settlements that make the area of Oryahovo. The research aims at focusing on the cultural heritage of this area, on the valorized forms of the past systematic realization of pre-modern culture linked to folklore beliefs and Christian ideas that are equally known in by village and town people. They are the factors that help today's residents in Oryahovo area to recognize their own local nature and individuality in the places they live in, the food they eat, the celebrations with which they want to show they are different from everybody else, or in their skills and knowledge about the river and the wild life in it. These places of memory and forms of inherited knowledge, emblematic in their manifestation, have become today local heritage that can be found in the daily life and the celebrations of the people in the Oryahovo area; that is what they need in order to distinguish their identity in the dynamic changes in our modern world. SOURCES: Zhivkova, Zhivkov 2001: Zhivkova, V., T. Iv. Zhivkov. Lokus i universum. Dobrodan, planinata – mitologia i .... Pub. “Alya”, Sofia.
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This article explores the highly heterogeneous social structure of female workers at two fish canneries: Kvarner on the island of Lošinj and Plavica on the island of Cres. The heterogenous workforce reflected certain characteristics of Yugoslav society. First, there was regional and ethnic diversity. Second, there were differences created by rapid modernization, especially between educated and uneducated women who possessed different types of knowledge and embodied different behavioral norms. The third set of differences between workers was based on a traditional patriarchal idea of female propriety which existed simultaneously alongside the socialist idea of a “working woman”. Lastly, the position of workers was also shaped through the tension between appreciation of industrial and physical labor in socialism and tourist imagination of the Adriatic coast. Workers’ narratives and the visual material testify to social hierarchies and differences, but also to negotiations of these positions and different affiliations, all of which depended on their various situations and interests. The stories from different factories also point to different possibilities of social relations, interactions and community building. While workers from Kvarner in Lošinj on occasions remained disintegrated, workers from Plavica on Cres traversed boundaries more easily and formed a close-knit network and community. This was due to the different working and living conditions in the two factories, including a policy of organized leisure and social events, which were a consequence of different periods in which the factories operated, different roles that they had in the local community and different factory management.
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Review of: Dubravka Dulibić-Paljar - Francesca Maria Gabrielli, Evine kćeri: žene o biblijskim ženama u talijanskoj renesansi. Zagreb: Disput. 2019. 217. str.
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Review of: Варвара Склез - Ayşe Gül Altınay, María José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, eds. Women Mobilizing Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 525 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-54997-4.
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The article analyzes clerics’ participation in Swedish diplomatic missions to Russia in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. It is demonstrated that until the 1530s clerics (mostly canons) were regularly included in Swedish embassies to Russia. It was in keeping with the general level of diplomacy in Sweden, the rulers of which often gave important diplomatic assignments to bishops. But the Swedish embassies to Russia, by contrast, started to include bishops only in the second half of the sixteenth century, when this practice had almost disappeared in other foreign policy directions. It is assumed that the reason for this might have been the attempt to utilize a person’s high clerical status as an additional symbolic resource in difficult diplomatic situations (primarily in the cases of the missions of Laurentius Petri and Michael Agricola, as well as that of Paul Juusten). It is also confirmed that during the whole period under consideration most (although not all) clerics carrying out diplomatic missions to Russia were from Finland.
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