CONCORDIA DISCORS vs DISCORDIA CONCORS

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Authors: Meritxell Esquirol Salom

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Authors: Otta Wenskus

It is a moot point whether the Greeks would have developed myths about Amazons even if they had never heard about female warriors. Be that as it may, their mythical Amazons fulfill several ideological functions. The most important of those is probably to represent an unnatural menace which has been successfully defeated by the Greeks. However, there is no denying that from the late sixth century onwards the Greek depiction of amazons, on vases or in writing, has often (but not always) been influenced by their knowledge of Sarmatian mounted archeresses, at least some of whom were almost certainly also warriors. Yet it is naive to say that the Greeks were right all the time, that Amazons did exist and that they had a wonderful time killing enemies and living a life characterised by companionship, fulfilled sexuality and gender equalitiy. The Amazons constructed by Adrienne Mayor resemble the heroines of Klingon legend told by Klingons in the Star Trek spin offs.

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Authors: Marta Fernández-Morales & María Isabel Menéndez-Menéndez

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks CBS premiered Person of Interest. It introduced the inventor of a surveillance system commanded by the government trying to find a “back door” to his creation: devised to prevent terrorism, it was programmed to distinguish “relevant” from “irrelevant” threats, and he feels that many potential victims are being neglected. Focusing on the topicalization of gender violence, we read the show through: 1) Furedi’s analyses of the post-9/11 culture of fear; 2) McNay’s neo-Foucauldian discussion of gender and agency. We argue that Nolan transplants ideas about the War on Terror onto everyday threats including gender terrorism. We also approach agency, which fluctuates between presenting the (super)hero as the savior of the damsel in distress and portraying women as agents who can protect themselves and others. Although the former dominates, the weight of gender violence within a Greimasian dramaturgical model makes Person of Interest different from other post-9/11 series; the clearest one in the vindication of this problem as “relevant” within a media discourse dominated by allegedly more important, macro-level fears of our time.

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Authors: Lavinia Ienceanu

The present contribution proposes a hermeneutically- and socioanthropologically-based approach to Catalina Guzmán de Ascencio’s ascent in a men’s world, as depicted by Ángeles Mastretta in the novel Arráncame la vida (1985). In order to successfully make out the inner workings of the protagonist’s developing identity, we seek to analyze more closely the driving force behind the adultery committed, and, in so doing, we hope to pin down the axiological tenets of feminine behaviour, more specifically, to trace her ontogenetic evolution back to its fons et origo, with a view to capturing the psychological profile of this very young Mexican adulteress by zooming in on several phases of her search for a new identity, or patterns followed in constructing her femininity. Thus, her growing awareness of the power residing in this femininity, which, as she matures, makes for her conversion from victim into victimizer, from the perfect ingénue into Mrs. Ingenuity, from a humble imitator into a fierce combatant, or from a rather dependent and self-effacing girl into a fairly independent and self-assertive woman, adduces supporting evidence for our claim that facing us is the perfect case of constructing the feminine identity at the expense of the masculine alterity, or, worse even, by more or less abruptly destroying one’s inner self. In the light of the above, while upsetting tradition, general Ascencio’s highly atypical spouse can be viewed as in fact setting up a new typology in the literary genre documented, since, even if a genuine representative of Feminism still very much in its infancy, she did after all revolutionize the spirit of that epoch. Finally, by bringing allegory to bear on the interpretation of this novel, we venture to construe Catalina Guzmán de Ascencio as an epitome of the Mexican life philosophy in particular, and, by extension, of the spiritual HispanoAmericanicity at its ripest, and last but not least, as a personification of the decolonized “Motherland” as well as a feminine symbol of the fate of Hispanic America at large.