2011 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
The Rhetoric of Body Politics : Popular and Radical Imagination in Late Victorian Feminism and Literature
| Project/Area Number |
20520233
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Literature in English
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| Research Institution | Kushiro Public University of Economics |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2008 – 2011
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| Keywords | 女性運動 / 散文 / 性道徳規範 / 女性医師 / ヴィクトリア朝後期 |
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| Research Abstract |
In this research project, I sought the configuration of the female political network in nineteenth-century gender politics, focusing on the political writings of Josephine Butler, medical women's involvement in Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the representation of doctors in popular fiction such as New Woman novels. Butler's writing displays female rage as a primary source of creative power as well as the motivation behind the campaign, and implies her aspiration to subvert the patriarchal authority over women's bodies. In fact, pioneering medical women responded to Butler's crusade in many ways. Especially, Elizabeth Blackwell's writings made a significant contribution to the radical shift in raising the powerful voice of women to justify the importance of physical-self-determination for women, as Sarah Grand's novels offer insights about sexual double-standard and body politics by representing mental and physical abuse of women in modern medicine. More interestingly, some of medical women also wrote literary works in which they articulate the significance of new roles for women in both private and public domains at the fin de siecle. I presented papers on medical women in International conferences in 2010 and 2011, and my article on Butler will be published in an interdisciplinary academic journal on women's history(Routledge).
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Research Products
(14 results)
