Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

‘The Worst Job in the World’: Reform,Revolution, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida's Cane Fields

Governments around the world are embracing guestworkers as a flexible labor force. The untold story of 1960s-era strike wave among Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida shows how the longest-running US guestworker program – the H2 Program – has functioned. The program, which began in 1942 and continues today, provided Florida's sugarcane industry with its sole source of harvest field labor, and became all the more important in the 1960s as the Cuban Revolution and the embargo that followed it caused Florida's industry to expand exponentially. Expropriated Cuban sugar moguls adopted the labor practices pioneered by the US Sugar Company, importing mostly Jamaican peasant farmers as temporary workers and deporting those who refused to accept their terms. Federal efforts to mitigate growers' exploitative practices only encouraged worse labor abuses. Cane cutters defended themselves with frequent strikes but deportations made insurgency's gains ephemeral.

‘No ebery ting wha got sugar a sweet’.

Jamaican proverb 1 1. Frank Cundall 1924 Cundall, Cundall. 1924. Jamaica in 1924: A Handbook for Visitors and Intending Settlers with Some Account of the Colony's History, Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Jamaica.  [Google Scholar]: 56].      

Revolutionary Mothers? Interacting Power Relations,Agency, and Social Change

In this article a theoretical discussion about intersectionality is carried out in dialogue with the ways in which battered and separated mothers deal with their children's situation and their relationship to their violent co‐parents/ex‐partners. In line with Connell's (1987) Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power. Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.  [Google Scholar] argument that categories such as gender are shaped by several structures and that the social order is inherently instable due to historic “unevenness”, contradictions, and internal differentiation, it is shown how abused mothers both follow and undermine well‐established notions of childhood, gender, and parenthood when trying to tackle their situation post separation or divorce. What is furthermore shown is how their “doing” of age, gender, and kinship entails both dichotomization and neutralization. It is argued that constructions prominent in public discussions about children at risk—the intrinsic value of childhood, children's right to personal integrity, and need of safety and protection—serve as a resource when the interviewees argue against the norm prescribing contact between children and fathers post separation and divorce. Two established constructions of the child's best interests are set up against each other when the mothers try to undermine power associated with the father position. An empirically sensitive and actor‐centred intersectional analysis must be sophisticated enough to grasp such complexities if we are to be able to fully explore possibilities for social change.     

Between particularism,universalism and transversalism. Reflections on the politics of location of European feminist research and education

Against the background of the intense cross‐national networking activities, which have characterized feminist research and education in Europe since the beginning of the 1990s, the article discusses politics of national and regional location. Illustrated by a discourse analysis of three Europe‐based feminist research journals with an explicitly marked international scope, it is pointed out that it seems to be a difficult task to avoid the pitfalls of universalism, on the one hand, and particularism, on the other. The three selected journals are: Feminist Theory, The European Journal of Women's Studies, and NORA, Nordic Journal of Women's Studies. Along the lines of Yuval‐Davis (1997 Yuval‐Davis Nira 1997 Gender & Nation London Sage  ), the article argues for a feminist approach to European networking, which should be based on a dialogic and transversal feminism. The assessments of the politics of location of the three journals are, moreover, inspired by the notion of transnational feminism, developed within the context of post‐colonial feminism (Grewal and Kaplan 1994 Grewal, Inderpal and Kaplan, Caren, editors 1994 Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press  ; Kaplan, Alarcón and Moallem 1999 Kaplan Caren Alarcón Norma Moallem Minoo 1999 Between Women and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State Duke University Press  ). The article has two main sections. First, it discusses tenacious universalisms, using examples from the journal Feminist Theory. Afterwards it proceeds to a complementary pitfall – that of particularism. Examples are here drawn from NORA and The European Journal of Women's Studies. In conclusion, some guidelines are suggested that might usefully be taken into account when engaging in European feminist activities such as publishing journals, organizing conferences and networks etc.     

Landscape,revolution and property regimes in rural Havana

This article explores landscape as an expression of political change. It focuses on the radical transformations in landholding after 1959 and post-1989. Given that landscape is understood as a socio-cultural and political process rather than – as geographers commonly treat it – a cultural image fixed in place [Hirsch, 1995 Hirsch, Eric. 1995. “Landscape: Between Place and Space”. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Edited by: Hirsch, E. and O'Hanlon, M. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  [Google Scholar], this analysis examines how the political changes in Cuba are made manifest in Havana's rural landscape. It also looks at the ontological relationship to landownership particularly during the Special Period, and focuses on how property is conceptualised by smallholding peasants who belong to agrarian co-operatives.     

Transing the small screen: loving and hating transgender youth in Glee and Degrassi

The teen television shows Glee (2009-) and Degrassi (2001-) are notable for diversity in gender and sexuality representations. Glee represents a variety of masculine women and feminine men as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters. Likewise, Canada's Degrassi franchise has portrayed non-heterosexual characters in significant and controversial ways. Its most recent incarnation, Degrassi (previously Degrassi: The Next Generation) is discussed in this article, alongside Glee, in relation to their recent inclusions of two transgender-identified teenagers bringing transgenderism to the fore of these programmes' discussions of gender and identity. As trans youth are highly vulnerable due to both systemic ageism and cisgenderism, it is not surprising that both detail narratives of discrimination and assault driven by bigotry and ignorance. Conversely, they also explore more positive aspects of the lives of young people, such as friendship and romance (even as these cause their own problems at times), also enjoyed by trans youth. As such, the themes of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ manifest in interesting ways in both of these televisual texts and guide this article's analysis. While challenging assumptions that trans lives are governed by negative emotional states, these representations continue to reify stereotypes, not only of transness, but also of boyhood, girlhood, race and their intersections. Both representations are grounded in material and emotional journeys (or movements) and the concept of the ‘moving body’ (Keegan, 2013 Keegan, C. M. (2013). Moving bodies: sympathetic migrations in transgender narrativity. Genders, 57. Retrieved from http://www.genders.org/g57/g57_keegan.html. [Google Scholar]) partly informs these readings. The privileging of certain modes of trans personhood and embodiment over less normative (unseen, unacknowledged, and thus invisible) ones is at stake in these representations, but they also lay the groundwork for diverse future depictions. By addressing this gap in research, this article elucidates how gender (diversity) is being constructed for consumption on adolescent television and its potential for (re)thinking trans/gender, identity, and embodiment for young people in contemporary Western societies.     

‘Control Grabbing’ and small-scale agricultural intensification: emerging patterns of state-facilitated ‘agricultural investment’ in Rwanda

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment. The Rwandan government has adapted neo-liberal tools, such as ‘performance management contracts’, which make local public administrators accountable for agricultural development targets (often explicitly linked to corporate interests). Activities of international development agencies are becoming intertwined with those of the state and foreign capital, so that a variety of actors and objectives are starting to collaboratively change the relations between land and labour. The global ‘land grab’ is only one aspect of broader patterns of reconfiguration of control over land, labour and markets in the Global South. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the state is orienting public resources towards private interests in Rwanda, through processes that have elsewhere been termed ‘control grabbing’ [Borras et al. 2012 Borras, S.M., et al. 2012. Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation: key features in Latin America. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 33(4), 402–416. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2012.745394[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 402–416].     

Survival Strategies of Widows in Dijon during the French Revolution

When people talk about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a little, exaggerate, become confused, and get things wrong. Yet they are revealing truths … the guiding principle for [life histories] could be that all autobiographical memory is true: it is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, where, and for what purpose. (Passerini Passerini and Luisa. 1989. “Women's Personal Narratives: Myths, Experiences, and Emotions”. In Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. Eds. Personal Narrative Group and Joy Webster Barbre 197Bloomington: Indiana, UP Print [Google Scholar] 197)     

drones,swarms and becoming-insect: feminist utopias and posthuman politics

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarm-like as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek (1987–1994, 1995–2001, 1996), Alien (1979) and The Fly (1958, 1986) to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist utopia in Gilman’s Herland (2015 [1915]) and Tiptree’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1989 [1976]). Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm.     

Grrl explorers of the World Wild Web

Scholars in feminist rhetorical theory and linguistics have documented ways in which online environments reinstate patriarchal forms of control, leading to the continued online victimization of women. In this article, young women's resistance to a narrative of victimization is seen through the lenses of a feminist reconstructionist perspective and a gender diversity perspective (Foss, Foss and Griffin 1997 Foss Sonja Griffin Cindy Foss Karen. 1997 Transforming rhetoric through feminist reconstruction: A response to the gender diversity perspective. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 117 35  [Google Scholar]; Condit 1997 Condit Celeste M. 1997 In praise of eloquent diversity: Gender and rhetoric as public persuasion. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 91 116  [Google Scholar]). The author finds that grrls are best understood within a gender diversity perspective on rhetoric (Condit 1997 Condit Celeste M. 1997 In praise of eloquent diversity: Gender and rhetoric as public persuasion. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 91 116  [Google Scholar]; Butler 1990 Butler Judith. 1990 Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1st ed. New York Routledge [Google Scholar], 1997 Butler Judith. 1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York Routledge [Google Scholar]). Grrls appropriate the frontier metaphor and engender masculine talk to communicate resistance and change. The author concludes that the rhetoric of young women broadens the scope of feminist rhetorical criticism and calls for a re‐visioning of feminist rhetoric.     

Understanding ‘The Panty Shanty’: off-campus house signs as cultural texts on gender and sexuality

Students at a large, prestigious, public university in the Midwestern region of the USA have a long-standing tradition of naming their rented houses off campus and communicating those names to the student body through displaying prominent and eye-catching house signs. Examples of signs names and visual characteristics are: ‘Betty Ford Clinic’ (featuring an image of a martini glass); ‘Morning Wood’ (referencing male sexual arousal and depicting a tent with a man's legs sticking out); ‘Time Well Wasted’ (written in pink over a beach scene and a martini glass); ‘Fox Den’ (images of a fox tail and a well-known sorority symbol); ‘Tequila Mockingbird’ (a play on words); and ‘Down on U’ (the sign references a sexual act for a house located on University Avenue). Through a socio-feminist and social constructionist perspective, the researchers use content analysis to explore how these house signs serve as cultural texts on gender and sexuality norms in the American undergraduate college setting. Based on our data, house signs reinforce dominant forms of gender ideologies, including hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, both of which are associated with upholding and promoting institutionalized patriarchy (Connell, R. W., &; Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005 Connell, R. W., &; Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender &; Society, 19, 829–859. 10.1177/0891243205278639.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender &; Society, 19, 829–859). These house signs are also shown through the data to promote a campus culture of heteronormativity where partying, drinking, and casual sex are standards for social belonging, and where high rates of sexual assault persist. As opposed to viewing house signs as simply manifestations of student wit and harmless humor, the researchers critically evaluate if and how these visual displays serve as a mechanism through which gender and sexuality-related inequalities are perpetuated within a higher education institutional setting. Implications for students and their college campuses are discussed.     

what’s in a face?: Sara Baartman,the (post)colonial gaze and the case of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Vénus Noire</Emphasis> (2010)

The story of Sara Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the erotic-exotic freak ‘Hottentot Venus’, is arguably the most famous case study of the scientific validation of (gendered) racism. Her scientific examination and post-mortem dissection by Georges Cuvier, who looked for an alleged connection between the Khoisan and the orangutan, have been the object of famous critical works (Gilman, 1985; Haraway, 1989; Fausto-Sterling, 1995), but also exposed her to the unpalatable fate of becoming the ‘quintessential’ figure of intersecting gender and racial oppressions. This paper deals with Abdellatif Kechiche’s film Vénus Noire (2010), which interestingly rearticulates the (in)famous narrative in unexpected ways. Shot by a male director who is also a postcolonial subject, the film exposes the performativity not only of gender and racial identities, but also of science theorisation, while at the same time raising the issue of whether exposing a violent male colonial gaze on a heavily exhibited woman can contribute to a counter-knowledge of her experience or rather risks reiterating the historical violence. The startling dynamic between the portrayed abuse and Kechiche’s peculiar filmic strategies is the crucial focus of this paper. While Sara’s body is continually exposed and violated, Vénus Noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987 [1980]) account of the close up, I explore how Kechiche’s take on Sara’s face builds a strong connection with the spectator’s extra-filmic dimension. As a case of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘reflective face’, such close ups invest the viewer with the ethical responsibility of being complicit in the othering practices of (post)colonial times. Vénus Noire thus manages to engage the spectator’s own corporeal awareness of violence, and calls attention to the persisting exploitation of sexual and racial colonial tropes in the contemporary world.     

Tenderness,for Lynda Hart

Pedro Almodóvar and Judith Butler's respective projects have long shared an interest in the performativity of gender. More recently, Butler has turned her attention to thinking of rupture as constitutive of identity. Talk to Her reveals a similar turn in the director's work. This essay argues that Talk to Her employs the figure of a comatose woman who awakens in order to investigate the condition of wakefulness as a newly achieved consciousness. In doing so, the director also investigates the parameters of his own authorial condition: alternately embodied and disembodied, he reveals it to be effectively dispossessed. This essay rotates around the opening five minutes of the film, which introduce, in parallel, the space of the theater and that of the hospital–one a space of silence and the other a space for ‘talk,’ a place where the impetus of narrative cures. I argue that these two spaces underscore our condition of existing as bodies. I furthermore consider the role that melodrama–a genre described by its inclination toward embodiment, muteness, and excess–plays in articulating these themes.     

Elizabeth and Her Mountain Garden

Abstract

In this essay the author suggests that Elizabeth von Arnim’s anonymous novel In the Mountains (1920) can be regarded as a modernist work, and is best understood in this context. The author indicates why von Arnim was intellectually and spiritually ready to develop her writing along these lines in the post-First World War era. This novel, like von Arnim’s early works—Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899 Arnim, Elizabeth von (1899), The Solitary Summer, London: Macmillan. [Google Scholar])—is written in the form of a journal; the title, also like those of her early works, points to a symbolic setting derived from nature. However, the narrator of In the Mountains no longer appears as ‘Elizabeth’, but remains mysteriously and completely anonymous. This device, together with von Arnim’s stylistically innovative use of structures and motifs derived from nature and music, as well as her manipulation of time, perception and memory, demonstrates her unique approach to modern writing in this novel, inviting comparison with contemporary works by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.     

Semiotics and lived-spaces: Merleau-Ponty's concept of freedom as a potential goal for community transformation

In Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1945 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962). Phenomenology of perception (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) Phenomenology of Perception, there is a short chapter at the end of the book dedicated to the concept of freedom. Although brief, and often ignored, this chapter arguably presents the central crux of the thesis Merleau-Ponty works to constitute throughout a majority of the text: namely, that any sort of free action is only truly possible should one recognize, in his or her local circumstances, the reasons and conditions necessary for freedom to be considered at all. This current article takes up this concept of freedom, as well as others such as intercorporeity and the lived-body, as imperative points of consideration for both psychologists and child and youth workers who are interested in transforming communities on a local scale. Some examples of recent empirical research on community intervention are discussed in relation to the aforementioned concepts, with an emphasis on the importance of place and embodiment.     

Remaking markets in the mountains: integration,trader agency and resistance in upland northern Vietnam

As part of an ongoing agenda by Vietnamese lawmakers and local state officials to accelerate market integration in the northern mountains, rural marketplaces are being physically and managerially restructured according to standard state-approved models. Moreover, these market directives are coherent with the ‘distance demolishing technologies’ that James Scott (2009 Scott, J.C. 2009. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]) suggests the state has implemented to bring these uplands more directly under its panoptic gaze. This integration strategy seldom meshes well with upland livelihood needs. In this paper we examine a number of power contestations currently unfolding as upland market traders – both Vietnamese and ethnic minorities – negotiate or resist these developments while striving to maintain meaningful livelihoods.     

My Heroine

Desire is forced to maintain itself in this space between reality and pleasure, this frontier that power jealously controls with the help of innumerable frontier guards: in the family, at school, in the barracks, at the workshop, in psychiatric hospitals and, of course, at the movies (Guattari 1996a Guattari , Félix (1996a) , ‘A Cinema of Desire’ , trans. from the French by David L. Sweet , in Félix Guattari , Soft Subversions , ed. Sylvère Lotringer , New York : Semiotext(e) , pp. 143 – 54 . [Google Scholar]:144).     

Caring consumption as marketing schema: representations of motherhood in an era of hyperconsumption

What can representations of women's ‘caring consumption’ (Thompson 1996 Thompson, C., 1996. Caring consumers: gendered consumption meanings and the juggling lifestyle. Journal of consumer research, 22, 388–407. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489789.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reveal about broad cultural understandings of the nature of motherhood? We study Canadian television advertisements to gain insight into the production of cultural schemas and the reproduction of beliefs about gender and motherhood. Employing an inductive qualitative analysis of portrayals of mothers and women who are not depicted as mothers, we find that the defining feature of mothers' consumption is a unidimensional depiction of control and caring for others, presented as self-evidently gratifying and fulfilling, in the absence of competing consumption goals. Mothers' identity emerges solely from successful consumer choices that benefit others. Such unidimensional representations of consumption stand in contrast to the consumption of women who are not depicted as mothers, who are found to engage in hyperbolic and indulgent consumption targeted towards self-gratification. We thus provide novel empirical data which show that depictions of consumption in mothers and in women not depicted as mothers are extreme in nature. Our findings provide support for, and elaborate on, the concept of ‘caring consumption’ by helping to make sense of media representations appearing within the conjunction of the contemporary marketing context of hyperconsumption, and the parenting/gender context of intensive mothering. By examining extreme consumption in television advertisements, we gain insight into features of maternal consumption ideals that may not be observable in everyday instantiations, such as the lack of mothers' consumption for self-benefit.     

Negotiating Female Morality: place,ideology and agency in the Red River Colony

By 1850 British women had settled in the Red River colony, a British outpost in what became the province of Manitoba, Canada, and where the Hudson’s Bay Company established fur trading posts. Through an analysis of documents concerning two unconnected lawsuits involving Countryborn women, it is possible to glean some understanding of how British women became agents of colonialism. Company authorities envisaged that White women would establish households predicated on Victorian patriarchal ideology that defined separate spheres for men and women. This article maps how White women stereotyped non‐White women as ‘Other,’ manipulated their symbolic role as mothers of the English nation, and used rumour to maintain a segregated settlement. It also explores the agency of these White women as they sought to establish a place for themselves through their struggles with one another, with First Nations and Countryborn women, as well as with the White men who ruled the colony.

The establishment at which we encamped last night, may be considered the boundary between the Civilized and Savage Worlds, as beyond this point, the country is uninhabited by Whites, except where a Trading Post of the Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company occasionally presents itself. ¹ [1] Hudson’s’ Bay Company Archives (HBCA) D6/4, Frances Simpson’s Journal, 5 May 1830. In 1830, Frances Ramsey Simpson was the eighteen‐year‐old English wife and first cousin of Sir George Simpson, the Governor of Rupert’s Land. View all notes