blowing the love-breath: healing men in Caribbean women's writing

Caribbean women writers (such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa, who are discussed in this article) often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants: helpers, healers or caregivers. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory, which embraces and redefines from a feminist perspective the affective fallacy (over-interpreting a text based on one's feelings) so dreaded by the New Critics. This article interrogates how to read through affects across multiple intersecting differences between the text and the reader (such as race, class, culture and gender). A self-reflective negotiation between an outsider reader and a text's healing communities reveals the limits of the reader's ability to participate. The affective fallacy in this context becomes a useful tool for reading, but here it seeks a very different goal from that for which it was previously used. The transcultural feminism of difference relies on affectivity and emotions as a political force and a method for meaning; however, knowing the boundaries of one's affects prevents one from intrusively taking on the other's suffering through sympathetic reading. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not self-evidently or solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations. Participation in these affective moments between the novels’ women and healing men is made possible by the reader's parallel process of embracing and curtailing her affective responses to the suffering of the other.     

Sexual Ethics,Masculinity and Mutual Vulnerability

Over the past two decades, significant work has been undertaken in masculinities scholarship to aid the development of efforts to prevent incidences of sexual violence against women. This has included Carmody's powerful contribution of grounding primary prevention strategies in Foucault's ethics of the care of the self and others. This paper expands on this approach by theorising how Judith Butler's ethics of non-violence built on the recognition of vulnerability can provide a conceptual mechanism or justification by which men will embrace sexual ethics of care. Using the contextual example of group sexual assault by team sportsplayers as well as recent efforts to address masculine violence in Australia, the paper argues that Butler's recent work contributes to ways in which that ethics can be better embraced by men as part of a broader project of cultural transformation of (hyper-)masculinity into a less-harmful event. The paper addresses ways in which to understand the failure of team sportsplayers capacity to recognise the vulnerability of women in group sexual assault cases by showing how the operation of normative frames prevent conceiving the hypermasculine self as anything but inviolable. In that context, some recent debates in Australian masculinities and anti-violence scholarship on whether or not changes to gender relations are best communicated as a benefit or loss of power to men are addressed. The aim of this paper is to make a small contribution to advancing theories and concepts of sexual ethics in the context of masculine sexual violence by investigating ways in which Butler's approach can operate as both a mechanism for inducing care of selves and others and an outcome of the cultural transformation of gender relations.     

All those nasty womanly things: Women artists,technology and the monstrous-feminine

In the context of international women's studies, contemporary women's art theory and practice remain somewhat on the margins. Yet the issues raised in the work of women practitioners are of crucial importance to current debates surrounding gender, the body, and technology. This article seeks to address the complex interface between feminism, bodies, and technologies, and explores how this might relate to Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine. For example, what happens when the slick technology becomes “contaminated” by monsters and “all those nasty womanly things”? Using processes such as digital imaging, interactive CD-ROM, and cosmetic surgery, women artists Orlan (France), Alexa Wright (UK), and Linda Dement (Australia) utilise the tools of modern technology to probe the limits of corporeality and question Western standards of female beauty. To read their work in the light of the monstrous-feminine opens up potentially liberating modes of knowing and experiencing the materiality of the female body.     

Field-faring women: the resistance of women who worked in the fields of nineteenth-century England

In nineteenth-century England, women worked on farms at many different tasks. They frequently did laborious, repetitive work in the fields. In the 1860s this labour was defined as unfeminine by the middle class. The women who did it were described as unsexed and immoral. Working-class radicals took up and adopted this imagery in order to demand a male breadwinning wage when they fought their employers. However, the women also directly challenged their employers' authority and were frequently at odds with the development of that new male working-class respectability which stressed women's role as wives and mothers. This paper looks at the resistances of the field women and the response to their action by the radical, mainstream and feminist press of the second half of the nineteenth century. It highlights the complex relationship between class and gender.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.     

ambivalent optimism: women's and gender studies in Australian universities

This article describes the place of Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities as a way of thinking about the place of feminism in the academy. It begins with a story of one such small programme at a time of stress and locates this story in an account of change in Australian universities over the last 20-plus years. The narrative traces a contradictory domain in which women, feminist scholarship and Women's and Gender Studies are enmeshed. The article draws on feminist literature about Australian universities to argue that while neo-liberal university environments are clearly places where masculinist values prevail, the flows of power around individual Women's and Gender Studies programmes cannot be simply predicted. Women's and Gender Studies programmes are thriving in some universities (on a small scale). As well as institutional imperatives Women's and Gender Studies programmes are engaged by specific intellectual challenges and some of these are sketched with reference to the Australian context. Asserting the need for dedicated research and teaching that focuses on gender, the article concludes that Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities are energetic places for this to occur. It proposes an ambivalent optimism to describe its assessment of these programmes and their viability as future places of work for feminist scholars.     

Book Review: Narratives on gender,generations and ethnicity

ABSTRACT. Though the study of men and masculinities has always been part of Women's Studies, recent Finnish studies on men have often developed without explicit attention to gender relations. In a Nordic context, Finnish studies on men have been relatively neglected. In this article we provide a concise review of Finnish research on men, including special reference to men's relations to home and work, men's violences, and the social exclusion of men. We present a synthetic account of the recent development of these studies and a critique of the field, and suggest some ways forward in future studies.     

Equality versus difference and gender versus class in Danish women's history

The articulated goals of feminist research and politics in Denmark have been changing during the last twenty years, from “liberation” to “equality” and now perhaps to “difference”. Open theoretical debates on these changes have been rare in the Danish context, but the need for such debates has been made topical by the latest theoretical and political discourses in Denmark on equality and difference, gender and class. The American feminist historian Joan W. Scott has shown the detrimental effects to feminist research and politics of constructing the concepts of equality and difference as binary oppositions. She argues that women's equality with men could be claimed on the basis of sameness/ similarity as well as on the basis of difference. The same detrimental effects occur, however, when sameness/similarity and difference, gender and class, are constructed dichotomously. The history of the women's movements in Denmark around the turn of the century shows that some women have tried to avoid such dichotomies. Other women have contributed to them, however, and their arguments have been sustained by the hegemonic discourses of the time. Women's history research is part of competing discourses on gender. It may have political impact on the gender relations of today. Therefore, an important purpose of feminist history is to expose the way dichotomous discourses act against feminist goals, and to avoid making such discourses part of one's own theoretical framework.     

‘these things not marked on paper’: creolisation,affect and tomboyism in Joan Anim-Addo's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Janie,Cricketing Lady</Emphasis> and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Pirate's Daughter</Emphasis>

This article will look closely at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady, written as a tribute to her mother Jane Joseph, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter, a fiction about Errol Flynn's ‘outside’ Jamaican daughter, May. It will argue that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, respectively, shape the life narratives of Janie and May who express their anger, shame, fear, frustration and desire through their ambiguous gender identity and through their determination to intervene in masculinist traditions, such as cricket, piracy and adventure, traditions that underpin Caribbean his/tories. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at colour and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolisation.     

Dreams by Day and Night: Kant,Freud and Ella Freeman Sharpe

Abstract: The poet and novelist Mathilde Blind (1841–96) is known to have been influenced by evolutionary theory, particularly in her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889). However, critics have not yet noted the extent to which her depictions of the courtship plot in her less overtly evolutionary writings are indebted to Darwin's representations of animal mating rituals. Although Darwin's commentary on patterns of relationships in the animal world often reinforced stereotypes of masculine aggression and feminine coyness, feminist writers, including Blind, shifted the focus onto creatures, such as birds and spiders, whose mating behaviour disrupts these stereotypes. This article examines four pieces in which Blind re-imagines the courtship plot by applying imagery of other species to human relationships: her poems ‘The Song of the Willi’ (1871), The Heather on Fire (1886) and ‘The Teamster’ (1889), and her novel Tarantella (1885). By rewriting the courtship plot in this way, Blind contests the idea that middle-class gender relations are sanctioned by the natural world and highlights the variety of possible gender roles found in other species.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.     

working-class whiteness from within and without: an auto-ethnographic response to Avtar Brah's ‘the scent of memory’

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997.     

The Personal is Work is Political is Theoretical: Continuities and Discontinuities in Women's Studies, (Pro)feminism, “Men” and My Selves

This essay reflects on some specific questions posed by the organizers of the Past, Present, Future conference held at Umeå University, Sweden, in June 2007 to the keynote speakers on their personal experiences of the influences, inspirations, challenges, and problems in and around Women's/Gender Studies over the last 30 years. It extends the notion of “the personal is political” to: the personal is work is political is theoretical. It also critically reflects on continuities and discontinuities in women's studies, (pro)feminism, “men” and my selves. Four kinds of (spheres of) activity and experience (the personal, work, the political, the theoretical) are considered in relation to four social spaces, social sites, or social institutional formations (in this context, primarily: selves, “men”, feminism/profeminism, women's/gender studies).     

Gender troubles,Redux

Thirty years ago, women's history written from a feminist standpoint was the revolutionary force, challenging androcentric thought and definitions of experience. Today, gender has become the more threatening moniker to those who would maintain patriarchal power and suppress knowledge. While not new, recent attacks on ‘gender ideology’ by conservative, often labeled right-wing governments, threaten the continuation of degree programs, as in Hungary, and pose manifold dangers to scholars world-wide. In the context of women's and LGBTQ movements, twenty-first century globalization, and political and economic changes, those who cling to the gender binary simplify the subject of women's history.     

Marianne Moore and the Arcadian Pleasures of Shopping

When R. P. Blackmur declared in 1935 of Marianne Moore that 'no poet has ever been so chaste',he was deploying a gendered critical language describing Moore's work as ideologically pure, untainted by the commercialism of capital; at the same time, he was carefully demarcating the boundaries between high culture and mass culture (Blackmur 1935:206). However, while Moore's status as an exemplary modernist has secured her a place in the modernist canon, this has inevitably led to readings that marginalize aspects of the poet's work that declare an interest and textual investment in mass culture. Moreover, interpreted within these narrow critical parameters, Moore's verse has been effectively transformed into what Randall Jarrell called one of the 'nicer animals': it has been declawed and tamed, divested of its more radical properties in order to reinforce a self-sufficient and autonomous modernist aesthetic. While it is undoubtedly important to recognize the ways in which modernist women writers have contributed to forms of avant-garde culture, those forms should be identified, in Rita Felski's words, as 'only one of a continuum of cultural practices' rather than as the dominant model for critical investigation (Felski 1994:191-208). Tracing the relation between Moore's poetry and the discourses of fashion, advertising and consumerism is an attempt to resist reproducing what Andreas Huyssens has referred to as 'the great divide' reinforcing modernism's cultural hegemony. The philosophical frames of modernity, particularly as it has been theorized by Walter Benjamin, provide the discursive context for making visible and valuable Moore's preoccupation with aspects of her own contemporary popular culture. Furthermore, by gendering this modernity, by recognizing the ways in which the formations of capital produce and consume 'woman' as discursive subject, Moore's poetic shopping sprees reveal the difference gender makes to our understanding of modernity and its relation to modernism. Moore's work, as illustrated by archival material based at the Rosenbach Museum and Library as well as her poems and her critical essays, is as much constructed out of the arcadian pleasures of modernity as it is the expression of the poetics of high art. With its investment in the aesthetics of display, the discourses of advertising and the pleasures of consumption, Moore's poetry offers a model for reading a gendered modernism in the context of modernity. The poem, 'When I Buy Pictures' (1921) will provide the focus for this discussion as it suggests not only how the aesthetic is related to consumer culture but it also reveals the textual traces of a debate taking place in the visual arts in the United States concerning the nature, value and function of 'pictures' as cultural signs. However, before looking more closely at the poem, it might be worth reconceptualizing Moore's writing in relation to some of the recurrent 'motifs' of modernity.     

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract

This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UK's right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that law's temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.     

Being Part of the Family: Social and Working Conditions of Female Migrant Care Workers in Italy

This paper will present a study examining the social and working conditions of immigrant women who work in the family and the field of elderly people's assistance in private houses in Italy. The research will focus on categories such as social class, “race”, and gender, variables that stratify and naturalize the inequalities inbred in the social relations between immigrant caregivers and the families they work for. I will seek to illustrate through these perspectives how an affective and family life of their own is denied to these care workers. I will further investigate how the relationship between the care worker's body and the elderly care receiver's body becomes structured and characterized each time differently on the basis of gender. Moreover, I will take a closer look at the relationship of the female worker with her own body and disease, and also at the relationship of the care worker with death and money.     

A Voice for the Injured

This article analyses the nature and effect of the campaign against the Family Court led by social commentator Bettina Arndt from 1995 to 2006, in the context of the men's rights agenda and the politics of anti-feminist backlash. It documents the changes to Australian family law and the workings of the Family Court under the Howard government, as a result of this campaign, in order to understand the politics of backlash in the context of Wendy Brown's States of Injury theory of 1995. In this analysis, the conservative men's rights agenda is understood as a reaction to structural and economic adjustments associated with neoliberal reforms, especially labour market regulation. But this context, of structural adjustment, is distorted in the rhetoric and focus of campaigns characterised by anti-feminist backlash, such as that directed at the Family Court in Australia. The example of Arndt and her championing of men's rights in this arena is presented as a means by which to compare the different experiences and traditions of feminism in Australia and America, and the associated politics of backlash in each nation, all of which have had a profound influence on Arndt's outlook and work.     

Paradoxes of Gender in Elderly Care: The Case of Men as Care Workers in Sweden

The Swedish public system of elderly care is highly relevant for studying gender relations, specifically when male care workers are more frequently seen within this female-coded field of practice. In this article, qualitative interviews with male and female care workers, elderly women and men, and care managers are analysed to discover how they talk about care work and how gender is expressed, both implicitly and explicitly, in the materialization of care. By illuminating the dynamics of how gender is constructed and negotiated in the intersection of the different actors' perspectives, the paradoxes of gender appeared. The care workers' moral responsibility seemed to undermine equality between male and female care workers, and the elderly clients' gendered expectations and representations created inequality in care work. Furthermore, the gender-neutral assessments made by the care managers came to favour elderly men. Thus, the results suggest the importance of capturing the different perspectives in society's institutions, such as elderly care, in order to understand the complexities of gendered processes.