‘I Won't Go Back to It’: Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine

This paper explores the dynamic interaction between contemporary Irish women poets and the notion of tradition in Irish poetry. Looking at the work of Eavan Boland, Susan Connolly, Paula Donlon, Mary Dorcey, Paula Meehan and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, the paper suggests that women poets today are subverting tradition and destabilizing a conventionally accepted fusion of the feminine with the national. This is achieved through direct challenge, through dislocation and through establishing a dialogue between the mythical and the real in the context of the lived experience of women in Ireland. Finally, the paper suggests the potential for civil and social effect of the work of women who engage consciously in the process of giving women an active voice.     

‘Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things’: Contemporary Women Poets and the Female Affiliation Complex

If, as history indicates, the directions of poetry are determined by its inheritance – that is, its perception of its past – in looking at literary records such as poems, reviews and other critical texts, it is possible to anticipate how twentieth-century women's poetry will come to be defined and the extent to which it will have value and authority. This in its turn will formulate the nature and status of women's poetry in the twenty-first century. In surveying twentieth-century poetry in Britain, the signs are that just as the label ‘poetess’ was a handicap to the self-perception of a woman at the beginning of this century, so the label ‘woman poet’ will shackle her in the next, largely because her end-of-the-twentieth-century predecessors will have become mythologized as a literary underclass, undermined and overlooked. One reason for the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominated literary criticism. Although women now seem to be sufficiently published to make segregation unnecessary, there is still a case for positive discrimination or their names will disappear from the records. Positive discrimination in the form of gendered segregation is, however, opposed by poets because of their uneasy relationship with one another. Women poets need an alternative line of development to the ‘masculinity complex’ whereby they unsuccessfully seek recognition within the male traditions, or the ‘female affiliation complex’ which prevents them from identifying themselves with one another. It will be argued that there is an emerging tendency in recent poets to plunder and appropriate the associations of the male tradition and that feminist critics need to theorize this aesthetic and make connections between poets so that they become positive role models for poets of the future.     

‘Flat and fabulous’: women’s breast reconstruction refusals post-mastectomy and the negotiation of normative femininity

The ‘pinkification’ of breast cancer culture in recent years conflates women’s empowerment with the celebration of hyperfemininity. Consistent with this trend, reconstructive surgery post-mastectomy is increasingly normalised: restoring the breasts is to restore ‘lost’ femininity. Contextualised within the pressures of this normalisation, our article explores how women who decide against breast reconstruction negotiate their non-normative ‘flat’ bodies. We examine women’s posts in a breast cancer forum about their refusals of breast reconstruction. Using thematic and feminist post-structuralist analyses, we suggest that although health and body acceptance discourses enable resistance to embodied femininity norms, pressures to conform permeate practices related to appearance. Clothes and prosthetic breasts enabled forum participants to pass as ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, and ‘recovered’. The study’s findings emphasise the limitations to agency and resistance that emanate from the ways constraining gender discourses infiltrate every aspect of a woman’s life. In line with a critical awareness approach to breast cancer education, we discuss the possibilities of resistance afforded by the safe spaces of online communities.     

‘The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Purdahnashin</Emphasis> in Her Setting’: Colonial Modernity and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Zenana</Emphasis> in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s – India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) – in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji's apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a practice of history – how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period.     

Gender,body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.     

Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of ‘Women's Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women

On her arrival in Travancore in 1819 Mrs Mault, as wife of the new missionary, immediately set about establishing a school for convert girls and a ‘lace industry’ to employ convert women. Her actions reflect that pattern of activism and organization historians of gender and imperialism have identified as the ‘mission of domesticity’ conducted by European and North American Christian missionary women to their non-Christian ‘sisters’ in the colonial empires being established by their respective nation-states throughout the nineteenth century. Mrs Mault was herself among the first generation of missionary women to pioneer this specifically female branch of colonizing endeavour, designed to ‘emancipate’ Indian women in terms of the norms of metropolitan ideologies of femininity and womanhood.Drawing on a case study of the London Missionary Society's activities in South Travancore, South India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that this ‘mission of domesticity’ was not a straightforward transfer of conventions of marriage and motherhood to the colonial context. On the contrary, the project was from the start caught in a complex and contradictory web of agency and discourse which ‘remade’ not only convert women but missionary women as well. Central to this process of refiguring femininity on the imperial fulcrum were changes to the meanings of ‘work’ in relation to both ‘home’ and womanhood, articulated through a religious idiom and framework of action. The consequences of these processes, the article argues, were somewhat contrary. On the one hand, the Indian Christian woman is reconstructed as a wife, mother and worker, while on the other, the missionary women are bifurcated: the missionary wife increasingly viewed as an amateur appendage to her husband, firmly secured in the domestic sphere, while the single woman attains a new status as a professional worker.     

The Female Body and Reviews of Women Pianists in 1950s London

Women pianists in London in the 1950s, performing mainstream repertoire (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Chopin) as well as modern pieces which demanded stamina, physicality and bravura, were often the subject of negative reviews. The critics’ attitudes towards them seems to echo the prevailing Freudian mantra, ‘anatomy is destiny’: women, generally smaller than men, apparently possessing less power and mental capacity, were deemed unfit for this repertoire. But if some women pianists demonstrated ‘unusual’ (for women) physical and mental power, successfully performing long and difficult pieces, they too were damned by the critics, because they did not fit the traditional notion of femininity. In this article, the author demonstrates the magnitude of the effect of the cultural image of women on the reception of both the ‘feminine’ and ‘unfeminine’ women pianists in 1950s London.     

Hélène Cixous's Autre Bisexualité and the Eternal Feminine in the Works of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

This article analyses the creative engagement of the Irish-language poet Ní Dhomhnaill with Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine. Ní Dhomhnaill translates Cixousian images and concepts into her texts, returning on several occasions to the concept of l'autre bisexualité (‘the other bisexuality’). Cixous uses this concept to rehabilitate—and celebrate—what she designates as ‘the feminine’, the alterity within and outside the self. For both writers, this alterity comprehends marginalized cultures as well as femininity. Both bring anti-essentialist convictions to their views of gender and cultural identity, but their respective poetics are born of shared preoccupations with biblical and mythological figures, and narratives often implicated in essentialism. Ní Dhomhnaill connects these archetypal figures with the cultural realities of post-colonial Ireland. The author argues that she draws on the works of Cixous to connect the indigenous Irish language and culture with the rehabilitation of femininity. But whereas, in Cixousian texts, ‘femininity’ eludes concrete definitions and stable meanings, in the works of Ní Dhomhnaill, it often signifies an authentic pre-colonial culture that is ripe for rediscovery in post-colonial Ireland. Ní Dhomhnaill simultaneously celebrates this culture and acknowledges its embeddedness in a Celtic patriarchy that her Cixousian tropes work to undercut.     

‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology.     

militarism,conflict and women's activism in the global era: challenges and prospects for women in three West African contexts

This paper deals with the wrought relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, broadly defined. Tracing the trajectory in which psychoanalysis leads feminism from sexuality to sexual difference then to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, the paper takes on these ‘f-words’—femininity and ‘f-allus’, Freud and Foucault—to foreground an unacknowledged challenge of Judith Butler by Toril Moi in 1999. In this paper, I read Freud closely and demonstrate that although Freud's theory of cure is obscured by the turn to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, its language of fantasy, sexuality, desire and the unconscious remain important concepts for feminism of the new millennium. On the other hand, critiques of ‘empire of the Phallus’ such as the French feminists’ affirmation of femininity and Judith Butler's concept of ‘lesbian Phallus’ only reproduce the master's system. Butler's misreading of Freud's ‘tooth’ and Lacan's ‘eyes’ as the Phallus shows that ‘inversion, subversion and rebellion’ by reversal or negation often leads to repetition without difference. In conclusion, I introduce Joan Copjec's critique of Foucaultian historicism and Toril Moi's turn to ordinary language philosophy to propose a new psychoanalytic feminism that can have sex without the Phallus.     

Vacant wombs: feminist challenges to psychoanalytic theories of childless women

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.     

Classy lingerie

Underwear is the most intimate form of dress, and the type of underwear known as ‘lingerie’ is particularly invested with meanings of femininity, sexuality and pleasure. This article focuses on mass-market lingerie and is based on an ethnographic study of Ann Summers home shopping parties at which lingerie, sex toys and other ‘personal’ products are sold to women in the UK. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu and Skeggs to argue that the apparently ‘private’ world of lingerie is simultaneously part of the ‘public’ world of class distinction. The class connotations of mass-market lingerie are not simply aspirational, but are also used by working- and lower-middle-class women to distinguish themselves from ‘posh’ women who are thereby defined as pretentious, boring, snobbish or tasteless. The article concludes that the processes of choosing and buying lingerie involve identifications and dis-identifications of class, gender and sexuality, even though the garments themselves are rarely if ever worn in public.     

The trouble with ‘women in computing’: a critical examination of the deployment of research on the gender gap in computer science

The pessimistic scenario for ‘women in information communications technology’ and for ‘women in technology’ generally is even more paradoxical and insidious with respect to ‘women in computing’. Studies within this field not only report insignificant improvement in the proportion of women in Western countries’ computing fields but also alert us of a declining trend. Moreover, that decline has been accompanied – or even preceded – by years of research and programs that have specifically focused on increasing women’s participation in computing; however, they have not had the expected effect. More surprisingly, there has been a significant increase in the representation of women in all other science-related fields and professions. Our aim is to provide some clues to fight the feeling of inexorability that may be entailed by the research on women in computing. We will argue that part of the problem is related to the static nature of the research deployed around the problem of ‘women in computing’, primarily, the research constructed around the ‘leaky pipeline’ metaphor. We provide a synthesis of the critiques this research has received in recent decades and highlight research trends that render other landscapes visible when studying ‘women in computing’. These trends help us question how we are conducting research within this field and urge us to problematise assumptions about computing and gender that we may paradoxically continue to reproduce even while denouncing the paucity of women in computing and studying the reasons for this state of affairs. In short, we present the need for different researchers’ eyes that allow different landscapes of women and computing to be seen and produced.     

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.     

Dainty little fairies: women,gender and the Savoy Operas

Abstract

Since the 1890s, amateur operatic societies have enabled middle-and lower middle-class women to overcome any stigma associated with public stage performance through their constitution as ‘serious’ leisure organisations. Some women have occupied positions of (situated) prestige, though others were confined to supporting roles. Amateur ‘operatics’ have generated a carnival atmosphere around the activity of performance, where boundaries between members' leisure, social and performing identities became permeable and easily crossed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a staple of the amateur repertoire since their late-Victorian composition, draw on a range of representations of masculinity and femininity that acquired new cultural relevance for the middle classes from the inter-war period. Positive representations of femininity are predominantly youthful. More negative representations of older women have their origins in the grotesque, cross-dressed dame of burlesque. Nevertheless, interview evidence demonstrates that older women in particular, aided by the possibilities of moving between performing and social identities that this leisure activity encourages, have made empowering and selective imaginative appropriations from these gender ideals.     

Rationalizing pay inequity: women engineers,pervasive patriarchy and the neoliberal chimera

This article argues that neoliberalism with its pervasive patriarchy and co-option of feminism, renders women tacitly complicit in gendered pay inequalities. We show that in New Zealand, one of the world’s most neoliberal nations, women who might precisely be best equipped to argue for equal pay – engineers – do not do so because neoliberalism makes many feel responsible for, and accepting of, their lower salaries. In interviews and focus groups, many women engineers talk of deserving less pay than men because of their ‘choices’, their ‘personality’ and their lack of ‘responsibility’. In a disempowering environment, some women show agency by disavowing gender as a reason for the pay gap. Such narratives of individualized shortcomings reduce hope of collective action that might uncover and dismantle the systemic causes of pay inequity, which are not due to a woman’s choice or personality but rather what we frame as the neoliberal chimera.     

Menstrual fictions: languages of medicine and menstruation,c. 1850–1930

Abstract

Gynaecological narratives of menstruation in the late nineteenth century placed woman firmly within the orbit of domesticity by virtue of her biology. In the rhetoric of medical ‘truths’, menstruation was defined as a ‘ldisability’, a physical ‘illness’ and a threat to emotional stability. Thus, it was argued, women could not hope to achieve equality with men when the dictates of Nature (as opposed to society) stipulated that they remain mothers, carers and homemakers. This article explores the notion that narratives of menstruation were created and articulated through subjective readings of social and cultural truths: menstruation was perceived and defined through the medium of ideas relating to what femininity was and ought to be. An examination of the medical languages of menstruation articulated between 1850 and 1930 reveals that the creation of menstrual knowledge was in perpetual flux. What remained a constant, however, was the appropriation of the female body as a field for the definition of ‘difference’     

(Un)twisted: talking back to media representations of eating disorders

In 2014–2015, there were several news reports about a rise in the diagnoses of eating disorders (EDs), as attributed to the use of image-driven social media. Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern in which those diagnosed with an ED are constructed as ‘especially vulnerable’ to the power of media images – a subjectivity which is pathologised and devalued precisely through its association with femininity. The most incisive objections to EDs being presented as a response to the ‘weight’ of media representation have come from Abigail Bray (2005) in her work on how anorexia is constructed as a reading as well as an eating disorder. In exploring the results of 17 semi-structured interviews with people who have experience of an ED discussing their encounters with media representations of EDs (material that is often co-opted into debates about the ‘toxic’ nature of media culture in this regard), this article uses empirical evidence to intervene in how ‘ED’ media subjectivities are often defined. In particular, it aims to explore the qualitative responses in the context of more ‘every day’ understandings of media engagement, thus working against the gendered pathologising which has persistently occurred.     

‘a fine university for women engineers’: a Scottish munitions factory in world war I

In a tiny village in south-west Scotland, a model factory was established during World War I, not just to produce munitions ‘for the duration’, but with the expressed intention of continuing as ‘a fine university for women engineers’. In an attempt to keep the enterprise going after the War, the factory was converted to the manufacture of motor cars. The Galloway – ‘a car made by ladies for others of their sex’ – was the result. This article considers the factory as a focal point for a network of material conditions and discursive claims within which the women of the Galloway Engineering Company sought to shape new technologies in their own terms, and so establish a permanent place for themselves in that masculine world.     

(Re)creating gender hierarchies within northern landscapes: a study of stories about nature and gender

This article examines how gender hierarchies are (re)created within the context of northern landscapes. We analyse data from fieldwork and interviews with middle-class female Russians having settled in a small town in northernmost Norway, most of them as marriage migrants. Inspired by the phenomenology of the body, feminist phenomenology and gender theory, the analysis shows how the participants talk about nature as ‘recreation’ and ‘poetry’, but also as a venue that is vital for (re)shaping their gendered identities. In particular, the Russian women talk about their strong, skilful outdoors Norwegian husbands as ‘experts’ in nature, and about themselves as ‘novices’. This ‘expert–novice’ relationship creates a hierarchical distinction between the Norwegian man and the Russian woman, but also attributes additional value to the equality-oriented, but in several cases neither highly educated nor highly paid, Norwegian husband. Through this ‘re-masculinisation’ of their Norwegian partners, the Russian women create a complementary, but subordinate space for themselves. The analysis reveals that our participants situate themselves in contrast to the Norwegian equality ideal while creating a room of their own where they can form a separate and unique Russian femininity. This illustrates how constructions of gender are interwoven in translocal ‘minoritising’ and ‘majoritising’ processes.