Gendering Identity

Chair: Sarah Jones

“Gendered conflict in the Hebrew Bible: Ezra 9-10 and the feminization of otherness.” by Elisabeth Cook

The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament narrates in chapters 9 and 10 of the book of Ezra, the expulsion of women - described as foreign - and children from the Jewish community in Judah after the Babylonian exile. Much of the discussion in Biblical Studies has centered on the rationale for this expulsion, an approach largely based on the presupposition that the text in some way references an actual event. In this paper I read the text, rather, as the narrative expression of group conflict within and between male groups. The discursive world constructed in the text is largely based on the naturalization of binary hierarchical opposition, namely male/female, Israel/foreign, holy/impure. Post-colonial and masculinities studies provide a lens for exploring the way in which deviant groups are represented through the discourse of competing and deviant masculinities, including the feminization of those labelled as threatening. Participation in the male community - associated with holiness, lineage, and descent - demands the ritual performance of a covenant with God to expel the “foreign” women and children. The deconstruction of the binary oppositions that undergird this hegemonic discourse reveals them to be fluid, ambiguous and contested, and the monolithic narrative voice to be fragmented and diverse.

“Making Facts Fantastic: Henrietta Maria in 1660.” by Anna-Marie Linnell

No abstract provided.

"Power in weakness: feigned illness as the weapon of women in eighteenth century literature.” by Jessica Monaghan

The eighteenth-century literary heroine is most commonly recognised for her fragility, displaying her acute sensibility through eloquent tears, blushes and swoons. However, as G. J. Barker-Benfield has noted, ‘throughout the century novels of sensibility suggested that women’s nervous illness could be a means of self-preservation’, used to awaken the would-be seducer’s sympathy. Barker-Benfield highlights the interesting paradox of the potential for power within weakness, yet a closer examination of the novels and drama of this period suggests that illness, or the appearance of it, was perceived to be an active rather than passive weapon of the weaker sex.

Female characters are frequently depicted as knowingly simulating illness in order to gain power, and in many cases such artifice is condoned as the only available response in dire situations of rape or arranged marriages. Nevertheless, the idea that virtuous heroines must resort to lying and falsifying their previously legible bodes proved problematic, and novelists in particular felt discomfort with this artifice, often stressing the way that real emotional distress renders simulation practically unnecessary. Conversely, as this paper will indicate, such texts also depicted women making use of feigned illness for more unscrupulous ends, whether to practise infidelity, conceal pregnancies or manipulate those around them, revealing more explicit social anxieties regarding the possibilities of female somatic insincerity.