Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.     

Gender bias in sport media: a critical analysis of Twitter content and the National Football League’s Carolina Panthers

The National Football League (NFL) is the most popular sport in the United States. Of the NFL’s passionate fan base, 46 percent are women. Despite the substantial attraction and following by women, communication to this audience has been compromised through gender discriminated sport media content. We examined Twitter posts from the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, over a two-month test period. The posts confirm a bias toward men. On the rare occasion woman were noted, it was framed in a stereotypical context, for example, promoting team cheerleaders. We conclude by making recommendations on future social media strategy for the NFL and its related teams. There is an opportunity to embrace womanhood and build trust among this viable stakeholder.     

Peasants,proletarianization and the articulation of modes of production: The case of sugar cane cutters in northern Peru, 1940–69

This article examines the transformation of the labour market for sugar cane cutters in an area of Northern Peru between 1940 and the onset of the Agrarian Reform in 1969. The system of enganche (debt bondage) is described for one large sugar estate and is identified as a historically specific stage in the development of the labour market. This system disappeared in the 1960s, owing to a combination of population growth in the highlands, heavy rural‐urban migration, unionization of field labour and technical change in cane harvesting. The evidence presented suggests that the concept of the articulation of different modes of production is a more useful framework for analysis than that provided by Lewis‐type models of dualism.     

The Role of Youth’s Ratings of the Importance of Socially Supportive Behaviors in the Relationship Between Social Support and Self-Concept

The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between the perceived frequency and perceived importance of social support with youth’s self-concept. Data from a large representative sample of 921 children and adolescents in grades 3 through 12 were analyzed. Results indicated that the relationships between the frequency of social support from parents, teachers, classmates, and close friends with self-concept were significant. However, only the perceived importance of social support from teachers was significantly related to self-concept. Finally, an interaction was found between the frequency of social support and the importance of social support from classmates and close friends on self-concept. These results suggest that self-evaluations of the importance of teacher support may be especially influential for youths’ self-concept, and that the ability to discount the value of support from classmates and friends, when it is lacking, may be protective to the self-concept of children and adolescents.

Act Natural: Dubious Proposals in The Mill on the Floss,The Pastor’s Wife,Vera and Rebecca

Abstract

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. In The Pastor’s Wife (1914) and in Vera (1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) follows Vera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness.     

Young women’s negotiations of gender,the body and the labour market in a post-feminist context

This article explores the ways the body and femininity is understood and negotiated in relation to employment. This article draws on interview data from an Australian study which aimed to explore what it meant to be a ‘young woman’ in neoliberal late modernity, and in relation to the paradoxes of post-feminism. Though there has been an unprecedented rise in youth post-secondary school participation in Australia and elsewhere, girls’ and young women’s increased investment and participation in education has not provided the same gains as for their male counterparts. All interview participants described being aware of gender inequalities and gender discrimination in the workplace, including the glass ceiling, the gender pay gap, and demands and pressures on women to balance career and motherhood, however many did not associate these issues with ‘feminism’. We explore the dynamics of notions of equality, difference and the body in participants’ discussions of work and their anticipation of motherhood and the logics by which gender inequalities are sustained.     

Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: the attitude of the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League to divorce,birth control and abortion in England, 1928–1939

In order to ensure that women benefited from their newly won rights as citizens in 1918 and 1928, the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League campaigned, along with feminist and political women’s organisations, to enhance the role and status of women in society. Difficulties emerged, however, when changes in public attitudes led to the liberalisation of the law in relation to divorce and birth control coupled with the growing demand within the women’s movement for safe and legal abortion. This article examines the arguments put forward by the two groups on how these reforms would undermine the role of women as housewives, mothers and citizens. It is argued that despite the fact that both groups appeared to be out of step with the wider women’s movement, they succeeded in highlighting a number of major social and welfare concerns facing many women at this time. As a result, they too made a significant contribution to the campaign for women’s rights during the interwar years.     

‘Vials,ampoules and a bucketful of syringes’: the experience of the self-administration of hormonal drugs in IVF

During the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), hormonal drugs are used to stimulate the woman's ovaries to produce multiple eggs. The injecting of the drugs is often performed by the women themselves outside of the clinical context, constituting a gendered burden of work that is rendered invisible by the dominant representations of treatment as undergone by couples and performed by doctors. Based on a series of interviews with women and couples who have undergone IVF unsuccessfully and who have ended treatment at least two years previously, this paper focuses on two aspects of the self-injection of hormonal drugs that emerged from the participants accounts: firstly, the gendered ways in which the drug regimen was experienced as compromising privacy and secondly, the strategic use of images of both illicit and medical drug use in the accounts. The paper argues that in spite of the dominant representation of IVF as a couples' technology, the IVF process is profoundly gendered, both in terms of bodily intervention and in the distribution of labour in the implementation of treatment; that the invisibility of the drug regimens from dominant representations of IVF can leave those undergoing treatment unprepared for some of the problems that the self-administration of the drugs can raise, particularly in terms of maintaining privacy; and finally, that images of the drug injection are mobilized strategically in the accounts to locate themselves within normative social reproductive standards. This highlights the extent to which the enduring ideological construction of proper womanhood as defined by motherhood continues to pose a dilemma for those who are involuntarily childless.     

Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.     

‘In the case of a woman’ or ‘the headache’: married women’s nationality and Canada’s Citizenship Act at home and Europe, 1946–50

In addition to making Canadian nationality independent of British subjecthood, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act made women’s nationality independent of marriage, but did not repatriate women who married aliens before 1 January 1947, when the act became law. This article examines the lobby to repatriate the women, most of them married to European allied soldiers and living in Canada or Europe, and wider contexts involved. Scrutinizing the citizenship claims made by and for ‘ordinary’ but racially privileged white women in a dominion that was both a receiving nation on the cusp of renewed immigration and a neo-colonial state vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples, it acknowledges the woman’s heartfelt sentiments and assesses the lobby against the continuing disabilities imposed on status-Indian women who ‘married out.’ The delayed reform of 1950, which fell short of automatic repatriation, and the absence of feminists from a lobby related to a long-identified feminist issue, are also addressed, as are topics in need of further research.     

African American Adolescent Engagement in the Classroom and Beyond: The Roles of Mother’s Racial Socialization and Democratic-Involved Parenting

Previous research has explored how differential youth outcomes are associated with racial socialization and parenting style individually, but very little work has examined whether democratic-involved parenting style bolsters the positive link between racial messages and adolescent outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine mothers’ use of democratic-involved parenting as a moderator of the association between racial socialization (e.g., racial pride, racial barrier, and self-worth messages) and youth engagement. The types of engagement explored were attitudes toward class work and persistence on task. Ninety-four African American youth (ages 11–14) reported on maternal style and socialization. As predicted, racial barrier socialization was positively associated with engagement among adolescents who perceived their mothers to provide more involvement coupled with opportunities for their teens to make decisions. In contrast, barrier socialization and engagement were negatively associated among adolescents who viewed their mothers as low in democratic-involved parenting. Implications for adolescent engagement and for research on racial socialization and democratic-involved parenting style are discussed.

Workers,parties and a “New Deal:” A comparative analysis of corporatist alliances in Mexico,and the United States, 1910–1940

Mexico experienced the twentieth century’s first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas’ U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal’ institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor’s growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval.     

The Cross-Dresser,the Thief,His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926). Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage. The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.     

The ‘middle peasant thesis’ and the roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947

Peasant agitations during the last decades of British rule in India are now receiving increasing attention. Despite a diversity of arguments concerning their origins within the peasantry, one popular model is that developed by Wolf and Alavi of the potential radicalism of a landowning subsistence middle peasantry. The thesis is here examined both in terms of its general analytical value for India and by studying one particular movement, the campaign in Bardoli, Gujarat in 1928. From this, some conclusions are suggested about the nature of successful peasant political action in India and other parts of Asia.     

Daniel Tobin’s famous ‘rubbish’ comment and the need for a reconsideration of AFL national union leaders in the new deal era

ABSTRACT

Daniel Tobin led the Teamsters Union from 1907 to 1952. He guided its transformation from a dwindling set of locals representing horse-drawn wagon drivers to the nation’s largest union. However, Tobin is best remembered today for a comment he made during an American Federation of Labor (AFL) Convention in 1934, when he denigrated new members flooding into the labor movement as ‘rubbish.’ The quote has been used to illustrate depictions of the AFL leadership as racist, nativist, sexist and elitist. This article argues that the quote has been taken out of context and used to misrepresent Tobin’s meaning. He did intend to denigrate some of the new members coming into the labor movement, but his criticism had nothing to do with ethnicity, race, level of skill, or opposition to organizing the mass production industries.     

Some Personal Reflections on the Foundation of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History in 1987: a message sent to the participants of the twentieth anniversary conference,held in Bulgaria, 2007

This article is a greeting sent to the participants in the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, 8–12 August 2007. The author looks back to the establishment of the IFRWH in 1987, of which she was Co‐founder, tracing the contacts, correspondence and meetings that led to that moment. Attention is also drawn to the first conferences in Bellagio, Madrid, Bielefeld and Montreal, as well as to the Newsletter activities that served to connect all the national committees that make up the Federation. The story told is one of friendships and inspiring moments. It ends with hope for the continued importance of the IFRWH to global women’s and gender history.