Saturday 24th September 2005, Room 265:
Margot Paterson, “ The German Dramatist Jakob Lenz (1751-92) and His Revolutionary Depiction of Women” 2:00pm.
ABSTRACT: Gustchen is pregnant, Liese wants no children, Mine marries her brother, Marianne defies her parents; we shall take a closer look at these four highly unusual female characters.
Anu Korhonen, “ How to Collect the Scattered Woman: Narratives for Experiencing Beauty in Early Modern England” 3:00pm.ABSTRACT: In my paper, I will take a cultural historian's look at Renaissance conceptualizations of bodily beauty, particularly from the point of view of the visual operations that grasped beauty and the narrative formations in which the gaze was organized. I will suggest that in visualizing female beauty, two opposite narrative strands, one dismembering and the other integrating and harmonizing, contributed to the experiences of both beauty and gender.
Saturday 26th November 2005, Stewart House:
Susan Purdie, “A Curious Bird: Paradoxes of Gender and Discourse in Skelton's 'Speke Parrot' ” 2:00pm.
ABSTRACT: This paper considers John Skelton's long poem Speke Parrot (probably completed in 1525) whose principal speaker is indeed such a bird. Examining the highly contrasting qualities and significances that the 16th century attributed to parrots, I identify Skelton's deployment of these contradictory constructions in order to interrogate both his contemporary world and the possibility of language ever speaking 'truth'.
Julie Peakman, “Emma Hamilton - A Heroine for Our Time” 3:00pm.ABSTRACT: For more information on Julie Peakman's research, please visit her website at www.juliepeakman.co.uk
Saturday 28th January 2006:
Women's Studies Group Outing,
The Foundling Museum, London
Meeting at 10.45am for an 11am tour. This tour is now fully subscribed, but we are maintaining a standby list in case of cancellation by any existing subscribers. If you wish to add your name to this list please contact Lois Chaber
Saturday 25th March 2006, Stewart House, Room 273:
WSG Annual Workshop: Women and Books
Featuring Keynote Speaker Professor Jacqueline Pearson, "Dreadful News from Wapping (and elsewhere): Gender and Reading in Early Modern Women's Contacts with the Supernatural".
Further details can be found at our 2006 Workshop page.
Saturday 20th May 2006, Stewart House, Room 276:
WSG Special End of Year Session - Triple Bill
To close the year we will be holding a special meeting with three speakers. Not been to a meeting before? Know someone who might be interested in attending for the first time? We warmly encourage you to come along and see what we are about.
Lyndsay Croft, “Zenocrate in Marlowe's Tamburlaine: A Problematic 'Victim' of Rape” 2:00pm.
ABSTRACT: The paper will explore the extent to which Zenocrate can be considered a ‘victim’ of rape. This will be achieved through an analysis of the nature of the crime to which Zenocrate is subjected, which will be compared with both sixteenth-century definitions of rape, and the other ‘rapes’ in the Tamburlaine plays. Crucially, I intend to highlight the ways in which the play, arguably deliberately, creates a problem in how one perceives post-rape Zenocrate, mainly through its construction of female characters and the plays refusal to present Zenocrate as a typical obedient, virginal ‘victim’.
Melissa Hollander, “Gender, Courtship and Power: Female Roles in the Negotiation and Disintegration of Courtship in York, 1560-1625” 3:00pm.
Timothy Reinke-Williams, “Domestic Management and Female Honour in Early Modern London” 4:00pm.