Metacritic Journal


for Comparative Studies and Theory

Feminisms. Materialist, Transdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, 4.1 (July 2018)
ISSN 2457 – 8827
Ana-Maria Deliu,  Laura T. Ilea Ana-Maria Deliu, Laura T. Ilea

Combined and Uneven Feminism: Intersectional and Post-Constructivist Tendencies


Our study is meant to be read as an introduction to current networks of ideas and projects within the third-wave feminist theories. The first tendency that we identified is intersectional feminism, animated by the idea that feminism should not only speak to white middle-class women (Hamrouni, Maillé) and posing problems such as: seriality, equity and equality, postcolonialism. It seeks freedom from (intersected) oppressive social forces. The other tendency is an emerging post- constructivist, alternative...   ⇨ Read more
Alina Preda Alina Preda

An Agential Realist Approach to Posthumanist Relational Subjectivity in Jeanette Winterson’s THE STONE GODS


This paper examines, through the lenses of agential realism, the uncanny sense of posthumanist relational subjectivity that Winterson’s ustopia evokes through the twofold romantic encounter between female scientist Billie Crusoe and humanized she-robot Spike. This same-sex cross-species futuristic love affair that develops across two different space-times succeeds in blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, thus prompting readers to overcome their anthropocentric worldview and to abandon the deep...   ⇨ Read more
Martine  Delvaux Martine Delvaux

Take Lemons and Make Lemonade: Serial Girls and the Question of Race


This paper addresses the question of race in relation to the image of serial girls. I reflect on how seriality affects women of colour and how it operates by imposing an ideal white female body and an ideal image of femininity. I am also interested in the way seriality is used by artists of colour, as a means for resistance against white cultural supremacy and (white) misogyny. Beyoncé is one example of how seriality can be reproduced in order to resist. Some relevant proof I analyse in this paper are the 2016...   ⇨ Read more
Khanyile  Mlotshwa Khanyile Mlotshwa

The Futility of Chasing Shadows of Patriarchal Liberation: the African National Congress Women’s League (ANCWL) and Anti-Colonial Feminist Politics


In this paper, I combine critical feminist theories and postcolonial/decolonial feminist theories to examine the persistence of patriarchy in South Africa’s postcolonial moment. The postcolonial is taken as both the time that comes after settler rule is over and the recognition that colonialism continues in another form even after settler rule is over (Hall, Post-colonial 244). I ask how is it that at a postcolonial time, when South Africans seem to have made strides on the liberation of women, especially black...   ⇨ Read more
Cristina Diamant Cristina Diamant

A Kynical View on Corporeality: Jeanette Winterson’s Non-Philosophy in WRITTEN ON THE BODY


Science-fiction writers tend to side either with the flesh, holding that “all is body/matter,” or with the machine, believing that “all is mind,” and these two divergent perspectives translate into either a protectionist or an accelerationist attitude. They can, however, be seen as interpenetrating agencements (Charles T. Wolfe), as is the case of Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” as an emerging political form, especially in feminist science- fiction works. Jeanette Winterson’s novels may seem to slowly turn away from...   ⇨ Read more
Anna Specchio Anna Specchio

Eutopizing the Dystopia. Gender Roles, Motherhood and Reproduction in Murata Sayaka’s SATSUJIN SHUSSAN


From the start of her career, contemporary Japanese writer Murata Sayaka has been writing novels that dismantle the existing politics of gender, family and sexuality through stories set in dystopian or surrealistic worlds. In Satsujin shussan (The Birth Murder) she depicts a society in which a person can kill another if s/he gives birth to other ten. Women are given a contraceptive implant at the time of their first menstruation, sex is conceived as an act of lust, and pregnancy occurs exclusively by assisted...   ⇨ Read more
Daiana  Gârdan Daiana Gârdan

The Great Female Unread. Romanian Women Novelists in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: a Quantitative Approach


The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main...   ⇨ Read more