Hills of Paradise
The female body has been admired, used and abused since time immemorial. Despite the symbiotic relationship between the sexes, men have always ended up with more power than women and the female anatomy seems to lie at the root of this inequality. We can find clues in art and literature; male narrators, artists and scholars have shown an eternal fascination for those body parts they lack: breasts, wombs and vulvas. Yet this fascination is often far from healthy.
Mineke Schipper (b. 1938) was Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden. She has professorships in Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and China. She received a Dutch knighthood for ‘building intercultural bridges nationally and internationally, inside and outside the academy’ and continues her scholarly work at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She wrote 'Widows' as a recent widow herself.