Gender studies
Reference:
Liu, T. (2025). Appealing and Responding: An Interpretation of the Confucian Canon "Li Ji" from the Perspective of Modern Feminist Critique. Man and Culture, 3, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.25136/2409-8744.2025.3.74307
Abstract:
The subject of this research is a critical analysis of the Confucian canon "Li Ji" from a feminist perspective, grounded in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The study focuses on the ethical status of women within the Confucian ritual-moral system and reveals how female subjectivity is structurally excluded from the realm of ethical expression. Attention is given to both the textual mechanisms that reinforce gender otherness and the forms of female response, which are simultaneously imbued with emotionality and normative discipline. Using Levinas's concept of the Other, the work aims to show that women in "Li Ji" function as ethical carriers but not as recognized subjects capable of calling to account. Thus, the research contributes to understanding the possibility of the female voice as the beginning of ethical relations within the patriarchal canon. The study employs a comparative philosophical method, combining a critical reading of the Confucian text with feminist analysis and the conceptual apparatus of Levinas's ethics to reveal gender asymmetries in the structure of moral recognition. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the interdisciplinary interpretation of the Confucian canon "Li Ji" at the intersection of feminist critique and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The main methods used include hermeneutic analysis, intertextual approaches, and critical-discursive readings of key concepts such as "ritual," "obedience," and "difference." The study shows that despite women's active participation in ritual-ethical practice, their status as a Person remains invisible and unrecognized within the moral structure. The work demonstrates how the normative logic of the text generates an effect of ethical silence, structurally placing women in the position of the responding subject while excluding them from the possibility of being initiators of moral calls. This gender bias in the Confucian model necessitates philosophical deconstruction. In conclusion, the necessity to rethink the very foundation of ethical relations and affirm the female voice as an equal and autonomous source of ethical subjectivity and moral expression is emphasized.
Keywords:
Ethics and Gender, Structural inequality, Gender norms, Confucian family ethics, Gendered othering, Levinas, Face, Affective labor, Confucian ritual, Female subjectivity
Art and Art History
Reference:
Mezhinskaya, V.R. (2025). The urban landscape of St. Petersburg by artists of the academic school of the 2000s and 2020s. Man and Culture, 3, 14–26. https://doi.org/10.25136/2409-8744.2025.3.74448
Abstract:
The article reveals the theme of the "urban landscape", formulates the main features, using the example of the works of artists. There are not many images in modern academic painting that harmoniously combine genre subjects and urban views. Among the graduates of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, there are artists who are fascinated by the "living" aspects of the urban environment: A. Gorlanov, K. Malkov, as well as P. Tyutrin, A. Makarov, I. Tupeyko find inspiration in everything they see around them (in passers-by on the streets, in festive events in squares and boulevards). The subtlety of the artists' perception is focused on interesting details and plot. In the works of these landscape painters, the everyday life of the Northern Capital is perceived as an endlessly changing motif. The subject of the study is the urban landscape of St. Petersburg. Research methods such as cultural and historical analysis and formal stylistic analysis are used to study this topic. The study is due to the low degree of study of the modern St. Petersburg urban landscape in the scientific and theoretical field of art criticism. The urban landscape expertly balances between two principles of depicting reality: natural, realistic, and conventional, decorative. In modern academic painting in the genre of urban landscape, various human interactions with the urban environment are shown: images can convey an organic existence in the dynamics of the strict geometry of the city, loneliness and isolation, and the contrast between history and modernity. In the practice of modern academic art, new approaches to landscape largely synthesize genre forms familiar to the viewer. Landscape images can be present in portraits, still lifes, and everyday scenes where nature or an urban backdrop serve to create a certain mood, symbolism, or compositional solution. The urban landscape occupies a significant place in modern academic painting, as it allows artists to convey the dynamics of urban life and its internal contradictions.
Keywords:
St. Petersburg, Academy of Arts, academic painting, modern landscape, landscape genre, St. Petersburg landscape, landscape painting, painting, modern art, urban landscape