In Love with <Emphasis Type="Italic">Inspector Morse</Emphasis>: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television

This article consists of textual analysis of a highly successful television series, Inspector Morse, combined with qualitative audience study. The study of Morse and the fan culture surrounding it is presented in the context of a discussion of recent feminist work on the texts and audiences of popular culture. The textual analysis focuses on those elements of the programmes which contribute to its success as ‘quality’ television, and particularly on Morse as an example of the role played by nostalgic representations of Englishness in ‘quality’ media texts of the 1980s. The article goes on to discuss whether the presence of such representations in these programmes leads inevitably to a convergence of ‘quality’ and conservative ideology. The discussion of the ideological subtexts of the programmes then focuses on the area of gender representation, and on the extent to which feminist influences are discernible in this example of quality popular culture, particularly in its representations of masculinity. The second part of the article presents an analysis of a discussion group involving fans of the series, which was organized as part of a larger qualitative study of the fan culture surrounding the programmes. There is a detailed discussion of the impact of the social dynamics of the group on their readings of Morse. The analysis also focuses on the ways in which the discourses identified in the textual analysis, such as gender representation, quality and Englishness, are mobilized in talk about the programmes. Finally, the nature of the group made it possible to discuss the construction of a feminist subcultural identity in talk about a mainstream media text, and to identify irony and critical distance as key components of that identity, particularly in the discussion of the pleasures offered by the romance narratives of the programmes.     

Feminist Recoveries in <Emphasis Type="Italic">My Father's House</Emphasis>

One of the achievements of feminist politics, in a range of disciplines and practices, has been to secure a hearing for traumatic narratives of incest. Recently, however, the debate in the public domain seems overwhelmed by what has come to be known as ‘the memory wars’. Fathers accused by adult daughters have dismissed the possibility that traumatic childhood memories can be recovered, largely on the grounds of science and reason. This response of accused fathers would seem to drive out other ways of reading and interpreting the traumatic histories of the cultures we inhabit. On the other hand, feminist responses to narratives of incest are complicated by the desire for appropriate endings. Taking Sylvia Fraser's autobiography, My Father's House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (1989, 1992) as an exemplary text, this article explores the difficult implications for adult women who commit to literary writing their memories of incest. In particular, how can feminism respond to an incest survivor who wants to forgive her father?     

Weird Lullaby Jane Campion's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Piano</Emphasis>

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.     

Too Hot to Handle: The Cultural Politics of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fire</Emphasis>

This essay explores the ways in which the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta's diasporic film, Fire, in India. I locate this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex and sexuality, betrays an underlying fear that sex is something that is threatening to Indian cultural values, to the Indian way of life, to the very existence of the Indian nation. I discuss the responses to the release of the film by the forces of the Hindu Right as well as feminist and lesbian groups and critique the uncomplicated understandings of culture that informed these positions. Contingent upon these responses rests the story in Fire and the way in which the lesbian subject, a sexual subaltern, is constructed in the cultural space represented in the film. I challenge the positions that suggest that the women are represented as victims in the film, and draw attention to the cultural, sexual and familial ruptures brought about by the main protagonists through their desire for one another. I explore the complicated understandings of agency and desire that are represented through the assertion of this relationship.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Zina</Emphasis> and the moral regulation of Pakistani women

From 1998 to 1999, I interviewed women who had been incarcerated under the Zina Ordinance (zina means illicit sex) in Pakistan. This led me to an examination of women's moral regulation by their families, a process in which I maintain the state is complicit. I argue against relativist explanations of this process, which view Pakistani culture or notions of timeless Islam as the reason for women's incarceration. Instead, I examine the interconnection of morality with the legal/judicial structures, the relationship between the state and patriarchy within families, and the plight of impoverished women in Pakistan within an era of globalization. In my analysis, I link economic development and human rights to globalization and the continuing costs of militarization. Such connections allow feminists to target the structural conditions that sustain the laws in Pakistan and help create an environment that will bring about the repeal of the laws while contributing to trans-national feminist solidarity.     

re-reading horror stories: maternity,disability and narrative in Doris Lessing's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Fifth Child</Emphasis>

The central issues raised in much of feminist literary theory's early scholarship remain prescient: how does narrative engage with the social‐historical? In what ways does it codify existing structures? How does it resist them? Whose stories are not being told, or read? In this article I use Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child (1988) as a text with which to begin to address the above questions by reading with attention to the mother story but also the ‘other’ stories operating both within and outside of the novel; in particular I am concerned with the convergence of maternity, disability and narrative. The novel's co-implication of sexual difference and corporeal difference reveals the ways in which the mother's story is both made possible and authorized by the disabled body of her child, and by his inability to tell his own story. Yet, if The Fifth Child is a horror story that uses the disabled child's body as its ground, it is also about the horror of maternity, in its conception and attendant choices. In this fictional story as well as in the social‐historical narrative circulating at the time of its publication in the late 1980s, both child and mother are indicted in their otherness and it is ultimately impossible to separate one from the other.     

the ambivalence of colonial desire in Marguerite Duras's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Lover</Emphasis>

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies.     

All Het up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Oprah Winfrey Show</Emphasis>

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah's presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. Here we shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualities of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of two of the key discourses which shape the show: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship. Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged.     

Pat Cadigan's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Synners</Emphasis>: Refiguring Nature,Science and Technology

This article analyses an anti-essentialist SF novel, focusing on the extent to which A anti-foundationalism enables a more accurate as well as a more productive representation of postmodernity. My argument stresses the ways in which Pat Cadigan's novel Synners, mostly because of its remarkable narrative form, challenges some of the most dangerous norms and normativity of American thought and culture. I argue, that, in order to understand this complex novel correctly, we must approach technoscience and transnational capitalism as separate, interacting discourses and material practices. The representations of technoscience, in the novel, are definitely not ‘figures’ for late capitalism: they are representations of a discourse which interacts with capitalism in the fictional world as in the real world.Contrary to what has been suggested by a number of critics writing about Foucault, use of this notion of discourse does not preclude use of notions of agency. As the queer theorists who have drawn on Foucault's work show, agency can be theorized in terms compatible with the notions of discourses, material practices and technologies. My discussion of Synners thus focuses on questions of agency, showing how Cadigan uses a deconstruction of Judeo-Christian religious tropes to argue for a responsible, and knowledgable, ‘incurably informed’ approach to technology.     

Postmodern Concepts of the Body in Jeanette Winterson's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Written on the Body</Emphasis>

This article is concerned with Jeanette Winterson's use and reworking of postmodern concepts of the body in her novel Written on the Body. Feminist appropriations of those concepts can be problematic: they tend to focus on the way in which a coherent body image is constructed and then imposed on the body parts, whereas many feminist theorists continue to emphasize the wholeness and integrity of the female body. Written on the Body offers constructive ways of theorizing the female body within a postmodern framework, because it is shaped by concepts of wholeness and fragmentation at the same time. Winterson develops a critique of androcentric science and medicine that strives to know the female body by dissecting it, analogous to the way modern society compartmentalizes human lives into neat manageable units. Against this, a concept of wholeness is strategically employed. Likewise, Winterson criticizes the equation of the female body with a penetrable surface. The androcentric concept of sexuality that associates penetration with the exploration of hidden depths and the achievement of power and knowledge is unmasked as necrophiliac. However, by constructing a lover/narrator whose gender remains undeclared, Winterson manages to unsettle perceptions of gendered difference. The text produces different meanings depending on whether the narrator is read as a man or a woman, and sexuality requires a basic human sameness from which a host of differences emerge that may or may not be gendered. In Written on the Body, Winterson disturbs fixed boundaries and rigidly gendered identities that objectify the body in order to build up a concept of the body that is fluid and leaves room for changes and mergings with other bodies, where bodies are held together not by a stable body image and a gendered identity, but by forces of connection and interaction between parts of the body.     

performing African Canadian identity: diasporic reinvention in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Afrika Solo</Emphasis>

This article examines Djanet Sears' Afrika Solo (1990), the first published play by an African Canadian woman, as an example of African diasporic writing in Canada. Now one of Canada's most celebrated playwrights, and a leading figure in the recent popularity and success of African Canadian theatre in the last decade, Sears began her dramatic exploration of African Canadian identity in her semi-autobiographical play Afrika Solo, first produced in 1987. As I intend to argue, the play's musical score and its use of stage space problematizes the notion of static cultural origins often associated with the Canadian multicultural discourse of hyphenated identities by pointing to the many cross-cultural and transnational sites that shape constructions of African Canadian identity. In so doing, the play develops an innovative diasporic aesthetic that can be placed within a larger cultural tradition of African diasporic representation theorized by Rinaldo Walcott, Paul Gilroy, and Dionne Brand.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Hanging On</Emphasis>: Reflections on visual reproduction and the UK Abortion Act 1967

This is a reflection on the visual installation piece, Hanging On, produced collaboratively for the Feminist Legal Studies ‘At the Kitchen Table’ zine in 2016. The author and co-artist considers the research that informed and helped conceptually drive the aesthetics of the piece, including academic research on abortion within literary aesthetics. How these concepts ‘translated’ into hands-on artistic practice and physical materials is discussed, including the difficulties and knowledge gained from the process. The author finally considers the benefits of such interdisciplinary, aesthetic encounters within contemporary feminist knowledge production.     

speculating Latina radicalism: labour and motherhood in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Lunar Braceros 2125</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">2148</Emphasis>

This essay unpacks the utopian impulse in Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novella Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009). As speculative fiction that has strong, explicit critiques on labour and globalisation, Lunar Braceros crafts a future-historical and future-present world where racialised forms of labour exploitation are the norm. The novella offers the radical response of worker revolution that can only ever be a potential and desire. The novella does this by presenting an ambivalent labour politics that results in the dismantling of the family as a heteronormative unit and that depend on the figure of the lost radical mother. The intervention this essay makes into Latina/o studies and feminist studies is to rearticulate the figure of motherhood through a specific lens of radicalism that is both queer and proletarian. By thinking about Latina radicalism through the intersections of labour, gender and non-normative sexuality in the novella, we see that the lost mother figure disrupts capitalist patriarchy by offering radical potentiality.     

dementia,care and time in post-war Japan: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Twilight Years,Memories of Tomorrow</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days</Emphasis>

As the number of people affected by dementia increases rapidly, dementia has been transformed into an epidemic which endangers global health and wealth, and many populations are now living in what Jain terms a time of prognosis, in fear of the disease. Through its strong association with ageing and memory loss, dementia is conceived of as a linear decline into loss of self and death, and those with dementia as other. More significantly, imagined as a threat that signifies both a loss of able-bodied workforce and a large population dependent on care and support, dementia inevitably feeds into the ‘crisis-of-care’ narrative that is prominent in many ageing societies. With one of the fastest ageing populations in the world, and an extremely low birth rate, the dementia prognosis is particularly acute in Japan and dementia is strongly linked to the idea of a ‘care crisis’. This situation has produced an increasing number of cultural representations of dementia and care and this paper considers three of these cultural texts, all rooted in the historical and cultural contexts in which they were produced: the novel The Twilight Years; the film Memories of Tomorrow; and the comic book Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days. The analysis concentrates upon their representations of care, seeing this as a space where the ethical relationship between self and other can be negotiated and where time with dementia can be imagined and re-imagined. The analysis of these texts from a feminist ethics perspective demonstrates the potential of popular and creative representations to interrogate and potentially expand the meanings of dementia, ageing and living in prognosis.     

feminist disavowal or return to immanence? the problem of poststructuralism and the naked female form in Nic Green’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Trilogy</Emphasis> and Ursula Martinez’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">My Stories,Your Emails</Emphasis>

This essay discusses the work of two female theatre-makers, and their strategic use of nudity on stage. The author appropriates signs of indignation in this work in order to re-visit the ‘problem’ of the female form being traditionally associated with bodily immanence rather than transcendence. Both Nic Green’s Trilogy (2009–2010) and Ursula Martinez’ My Stories, Your Emails (2010) use the naked female form to proffer statements about the experience of being a woman in the 2000s. Their use of nudity breaks with feminist theories popular in the 1990s, which argued that because the female form could never escape the symbolic logic of phallocentrism, it could never escape sexual objectification, and thus should operate on the margins of mainstream culture, cultivate agency by appropriating the means of production and be removed from view (radical negativity). By identifying as ‘artists’ and by insisting on their right to put their experience centre stage, Green and Martinez break with the anti-humanist theories of the 1990s and proffer a more individualistic strain of feminist performance. The author celebrates this work as a break away from the deadlock offered by theories of radical negativity.     

The power of the ordinary subversive in Jackie Kay's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Trumpet</Emphasis>

In Jackie Kay's award-winning novel, Trumpet (1998), the main character Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpet player, is discovered upon his death to be anatomically female. The essay traces both postmodern and humanist affirmations of constructions of self-hood. Situating Virginia Woolf's version of a metaphysical and escapist androgyny as one kind of aesthetic against the material politics of the transgendered subject, the essay argues that Kay's novel can be seen as part of a 20th century tradition of literature and film which satirizes, parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex–gender systems. The essay ends by arguing that Kay also develops these systems by imbricating sex and gender within a series of dislocated familial, sexual and racial identities, beginning with the arrival of Joss's African father in Scotland at the beginning of the 20th century.     

paradise,built in hell: decolonising feminist utopias in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Top of the Lake</Emphasis> (2013)

Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion’s return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show’s central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake’s formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion’s oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of utopia.     

‘Gone are the Days’: Bisexual Perspectives on Lesbian/Feminist Literary Theory

In this article I offer a map of recent UK and US lesbian feminist literary theory which highlights the shifting and often paradoxical interpretations of lesbian sexuality as both real and as metaphorical. I focus on two key texts which offer overviews and analysis of the field from different sides of the Atlantic, which are both accessible, in the sense of being written from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ lesbians, rather than structuring lesbian feminist literary criticism around traditional critical concepts, and which also, unusually, offer some (small) comment on bisexuality. These two works are Bonnie Zimmerman's Safe Sea of Women (1992), and Palmer's Contemporary Lesbian Writing (1993). I argue that lesbian/feminist literary theory offers particular constructions of sexuality which, while challenging many of the assumptions of heterosexual feminist literary theory, largely ignores the bisexual content of much lesbian fiction, and consequently glosses over some of the tricky areas of gender and sexuality difference. Through this ‘les/bi’ reading I hope to encourage the figure of the bisexual woman to question both constructions and deconstructions of lesbian sexuality.     

The Benefit Cap and the Complexity of Discrimination: <Emphasis Type="Italic">R</Emphasis> (<Emphasis Type="Italic">SG and others</Emphasis>) <Emphasis Type="Italic">v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions</Emphasis>

In R [on the application of SG and others (previously JS and others)] v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the United Kingdom Supreme Court evaluated the legality of the benefit cap. The Court was sharply divided but decided by a narrow margin that the benefit cap did not amount to a violation of the claimants’ human rights. While the majority accepted that the gender discrimination was justified, the Court noted that the current measures fell short of the United Kingdom’s responsibilities under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This could prove of the outmost importance as the government elected in May 2015 has announced further reductions to the existing benefit cap. The case comment evaluates whether the Court paid enough attention to the multifaceted nature of poverty and discrimination, and argues that the impact the benefit cap has had specifically on women from black and ethnic minorities should have been considered.