|
Herculine Barbin
Herculine Adélaïde Barbin, later known as Abel Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 1868), was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, after an affair and physical examination. She is known for her memoir, ''Herculine Barbin'', which was studied by Michel Foucault. Early life Most of what is known about Barbin comes from her later memoirs. Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in France in 1838. She was assigned as a girl and raised as such; her family named her Alexina. Her family was poor but she gained a charity scholarship to study in the school of an Ursuline convent. According to her account, she was enamoured of an aristocratic female friend in school. She regarded herself as unattractive but sometimes slipped into her friend's room at night and was sometimes punished for it. Her studies were successful and in 1856, at 17, she was sent to Le Château to study to become a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French People
The French people (french: Français) are an ethnic group and nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history, and language, identified with the country of France. The French people, especially the native speakers of langues d'oïl from northern and central France, are primarily the descendants of Gauls (including the Belgae) and Romans (or Gallo-Romans, western European Celtic and Italic peoples), as well as Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that have continued to the present day. The Norse also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also exist within France that have distinct lineages, languages and cultures such as Bretons in Brittany, Occi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kate Bornstein
Katherine Vandam Bornstein (born March 15, 1948) is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. In 1986, Bornstein started identifiying as gender non-conforming and has stated "I don't call myself a woman, ''and'' I know I'm not a man" after having been assigned male at birth and receiving sex reassignment surgery. Bornstein now identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they/them and she/her. Bornstein has also written about having anorexia, being a survivor of PTSD and being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Biography Early life Bornstein was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, into an upper middle-class Conservative Jewish family of Russian and Dutch descent. Bornstein studied Theater Arts with John Emigh and Jim Barnhill at Brown University (Class of '69). Bornstein joined the Church of Scientology, becoming a high-ranking lieutenant in the Sea Org, but later became disillusioned and formally left the movement in 1981. Borns ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Lan
David Lan is a South African-born British playwright, theatre producer and director and a social anthropologist. Career Born in Cape Town, he trained as an actor and gained a BA at the University of Cape Town. He has lived in London since 1972, apart from two years in Zimbabwe 1980–1982. He was awarded a BSc first class (1976) and a PhD (1984) in Social Anthropology from LSE, with his thesis Making history: spirit mediums and the guerilla war in the Dande area of Zimbabwe'. He was the writer in residence at the Royal Court Theatre from 1995 to 1997. He was the artistic director of the Young Vic theatre in London from 2000 until 2018. At the Young Vic, he led the campaign to rebuild the theatre (architects Haworth Tompkins) which reopened to acclaim in October 2006. He also led the 24 shows in 31 cities 'Walkabout' season during the 2-year rebuild. He has produced more than 200 shows. He initiated the Genesis Directors' Project, the Jerwood Directors Award and the Young V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caryl Churchill
Caryl Lesley Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non- naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.Caryl Churchill profile ''Encyclopædia Britannica''; accessed 26 January 2018. Celebrated for works such as '' Cloud 9'' (1979), '''' (1982), '''' (1987), '' [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Mouthful Of Birds
''A Mouthful of Birds'' is a 1986 play with dance, written by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, with choreography by Ian Spink. Drawing its themes from ''The Bacchae'' of Euripides, it is a meditation on possession, madness and female violence. Synopsis The play has an unusual structure; it is a series of seven independent vignettes each focusing on a different character. After every scene, a moment in the tragedy of Pentheus is seen. Dionysos, a dancer, watches the action invisibly, and his kiss causes each episode's central transformation. At the play's end, the characters return to give epilogues narrating how their stories continued. The episodes include: * An unhappy wife slowly succumbs to post-natal psychosis. She experiences command hallucinations telling her to drown her baby in the bathtub, and eventually does so. * A man's marriage and career are disrupted when he falls passionately in love with a pig at a slaughterhouse his company owns. * A voodoo practitioner newly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gender Trouble
''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (1990; second edition 1999) is a book by the philosopher Judith Butler in which the author argues that gender is a kind of improvised performance. Summary Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of feminist theory, that there exists an identity and a subject that requires representation in politics and language. For Butler, "women" and "woman" are categories complicated by factors such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Moreover, the universality presumed by these terms parallels the assumed universality of the patriarchy and erases the particularity of oppression in distinct times and places. Butler thus eschews identity politics in favor of a new, coalitional feminism that critiques the basis of identity and gender. They challenge assumptions about the distinction often made between sex and gender, according to which sex is biological while gender is culturally constructed. Butler argues that this false ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Judith Butler
Judith Pamela Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. Butler is best known for their books '' Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (1990) and ''Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex'' (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Biography
''A Biography'' is John Mellencamp's second released album (third recorded), and last credited to his then-stage name "Johnny Cougar." Recorded in London, it was released in the U.K. and Australia by Riva Records on March 6, 1978. Due to poor sales of Mellencamp's debut album, ''Chestnut Street Incident'', ''A Biography'' did not receive a U.S. release upon its 1978 debut. Two of its tracks, "Taxi Dancer" and the single "I Need a Lover," were also included on his 1979 album ''John Cougar'', which was released in the U.S. In Australia, however, "I Need a Lover" became a Top 10 hit, giving Mellencamp his first taste of success. The song would eventually crack the Top 40 in the U.S. in late 1979 when released as a single from his ''John Cougar'' album. AllMusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine described "I Need a Lover" as Mellencamp's "first good song." ''A Biography'', along with all Mellencamp's other Riva Records/Mercury Records albums, were remastered and re-released in 2005, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middlesex (novel)
''Middlesex'' is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write ''Middlesex'' after reading the 1980 memoir ''Herculine Barbin'' and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions. Primarily a coming-of-age story (''Bildungsroman'') and family saga, the 21st century gender novel chronicles the effect of a mutated gene on three generations of a Greek family, causing momentous changes in the protagonist's life. According to scholars, the novel's main themes are nature versus nurture, rebirth, and the differing experiences of what society constructs as polar opposites—such as those found between men and women ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), ''Middlesex'' (2002), and'' The Marriage Plot'' (2011). ''The Virgin Suicides'' served as the basis of a feature film, while ''Middlesex'' received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis. Biography Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan to a father of Greek descent and a mother of English and Irish ancestry. Eugenides is the youngest of three sons. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School and then Brown University (where he became friends with contemporary Rick Moody). He graduated from Brown in 1982 after taking a year off to travel across Europe and volunteer with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. Of his decision to study a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
