Wielding the Power of Popular Sentiment: Woman's Agency in Courtship and the Love Letters of Anna Todd∗

If you want to break [our engagement], and do not like to for fear it would be wronging me, then let the trouble be settled at once. Of course I do admit that it would be wronging me—yes, it would be taking away my love, my life—my whole existence. But I would sacrifice all that if such a proceeding would rid you of all these trials and troubles, and make you happy once again.     

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

This essay examines the personal accounts of married Filipina-Japanese couples living in urban Japan to show how the women negotiate power and influence over their husbands. Centering on Filipino ideas about power and “America,” the article draws on various ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the Filipinas' cultural knowledge. By negotiating their relationships, Filipinas' marriages to Japanese emerge as ongoing processes rather than as a static institution in which the women are simply (oppressed) gender-role performers. While these women's struggles are not denied, their actions engender possibilities for the subversion of existing gender-national hierarchies. Belle faced Kawai. “I can't marry you.…I was raped by the son of a powerful man in my hometown. I'm no longer a virgin…” In tears, “Will you still marry me?” Kawai assured her firmly, “It doesn't matter.”     

Edgeworth's Belinda: An Artful Composition

Very early in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801; rev. 1810),1 in a chapter entitled "Masks," the novel's hero, Clarence Hervey, having been accused of courting Belinda, exclaims, "Do you think I don't see as plainly as any of you, that Belinda Portman's a composition of art and affectation?" (26).     

An ethnography of global labour migration

An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs – dirty, dangerous and degrading – in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers' violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask – who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal.     

Chapter 7. “Learn What You Like and Like What You Learn”

Abstract

Mark Twain once famously quipped, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” Paul Simon, the American folk singer, begins one of his songs “When I think back on all the crap I learned at high school, it's a wonder I can hardly think at all.” These men could just have easily been discussing schooling in Ireland, for this is the way many Limerick children and youth felt about formal school life prior to their involvement with St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project. But it is prior to their involvement.

This chapter provides a demographic profile of the pupils of that project and explores aspects of the day-to-day life of the project as a child and youth care intervention by examining some of the influences of risk replacement or resiliency projects that have influenced provision of services. This Limerick YEP attempts to alter the approach from one that is risk, deficit, and psychopathology-oriented to one that is protection, strength, and asset focussed. A question posed is, “Has the early intervention enrichment programme assisted the pupils to reintegrate successfully within the community?” By reintegrate I mean the ability to attend a regular school, hold a job, live again with their family and such things. This chapter also explores the establishment of the Youth Encounter Projects in Ireland in the context of an important but largely overlooked study completed by Egan and Hegarty over two decades ago (1984). No official review has been published since.     

Whatever happened to the F word in higher education?

As a women's studies academic who has taught health and social care students for four years in the UK, it strikes me that much of what and how I teach is incompatible with my own pedagogic position. At a time of government cuts and economic austerity there are ever shrinking opportunities to work in women's studies environments within the higher education academy, and I often find there is a mismatch between what I am offering as an academic and what an employer is looking for. Occupying the most junior teaching post on a fixed-term contract, and coming from the discipline of women's studies – constructed often as irrelevant and/or too political and controversial, rather than a necessary philosophical foundation to critical thinking – I have diminutive curriculum influence and find myself, more often than not, delivering hegemonic groups of theories and practice. Drawing largely on level 5 health and social care interprofessional learning module course materials, this paper will analyse the discourses inscribed within them, and consequently expose the essence of the learning and teaching that takes place within the classroom. This paper will also act as a catalyst to explore whether it is possible to find, or construct, a feminist space in my learning and teaching practice.     

Men's violence,men's parenting and gender politics in Sweden

In this article, I discuss how the politics of survival in the science fiction TV series “Battlestar Galactica” (BSG) correspond to contemporary biopolitics in late modern Western society. BSG takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where war between artificial, non-human bodies and organic, human bodies emphasizes the importance of sustained population growth and, ultimately, survival for the human race. The BSG survival narrative accentuates the challenges that advanced reproductive technologies pose to the female body and how this is interrelated to state regulation of reproduction and population control. As a political fiction, BSG facilitates a discussion of the dynamics of choice and duty in relation to post-human reproduction: the right to choose not to reproduce as well as the right to reproduce. In light of my analysis, I suggest that the BSG survival narrative concludes with a displacement of discourses of choice onto discourses of obligation due to biotechnological advancement. I posit that BSG's endorsement of post-human reproduction, coupled with a pro-natalist approach to population control, represents post-human reproduction as an evolutionary advancement the female body cannot refuse. As such, the BSG survival narrative reinscribes gender as a category of difference and the link between the female body and reproduction as key norms for late modern societies.

“I'm not a commodity, I'm a Viper pilot”

Starbuck, BSG 205: The Farm     

Editorial

The whole of this issue of Australian Feminist Studies is devoted to the theme ‘Making us Modern’ guest-edited by Alison Ravenscroft. Modernity was, I have argued myself, an essential element of First-wave Feminism. The articles that Alison has brought togetherm show how mutually imbricated are questions raised by a later feminism and modernism. Alison has written her own introduction for this splendid issue. Accordingly, all that I need to do here is extraneous to it. I want to record our regret at the passing of Oriel Gray, one of Australia's first female playwrights. The Playwrights' Advisory Board voted her work, The Torrents, best play in 1955, alongside Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. She wrote a number of stage plays, worked for radio and television, and published an autobiography—Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman (Penguin Books)—in 1985. I want to record our sadness, too, at the death of Glen Tomasetti, singer, song-writer and author. She wrote poetry, articles and reviews, and two novels: Thoroughly Decent People (1976), and Man of Letters (1981). In the Australian Women's Movement she is best known for one of the protest songs that she wrote in the early 1970s; this one, ‘Don't Be Too Polite, Girls’ has often been played as a kind of Women's Movement anthem. As always, I owe thanks to everyone who contributes to this journal—authors, assessors, editorial advisory collective members, review editor Susan Sheridan, assistant editor Mary Lyons, and, for this issue, my very warm thanks to Alison Ravenscroft.     

The Im/Possibility of Abandonment in New Materialist Ontologies

Organising prominent critiques of new materialism is the suggestion that it contains a gesture of abandonment. New materialism abandons the past to enable its self-promotion as a novel brand and generation of feminist intervention wedded to a particular vision of matter's transformative possibilities. Or it abandons questions of race in advancing a grand ontology, while simultaneously enacting a particular politics of perspective—one that is racialised. In this article we acknowledge the importance of these critiques as we engage them through an interrogation and opening of the nature of abandonment itself. From within a new materialist frame, we ask who or what abandons, and what assumptions about matter, race, the human and the iterative act of abandonment are at work in critiques of this field? We question how a new materialist approach enacts and recasts the positionality and privilege of ‘whiteness-as-humanness’ at the same time it is considered to elide these. Taking up with discussions from within critical race theory and approaches to human exceptionalism, we ask from this whether we can conceive of new materialism in terms of a perverse ontology that renders abandonment im/possible.     

Intersectionality,the Production of Difference and Norwegian Transnational Adoptees' Identity Work

Does intersectionality contribute to the production of knowledge, and if so, how? Does it provide us with new possibilities, or does it obscure rather than reveal anything new? In this article, I intend to further discussions about intersectionality by relating this concept to my own study of transnational adoptees' identity work. I focus on how intersectionality as an analytical tool can be operationalized in a concrete empirical study. I also bring the empirical data into dialogue with the concept of intersectionality in order to discuss how intersectionality can be developed further by interrogating the ways in which categories intersect.     

United or divided? Women ‘inside’ and women ‘outside’ against male lawmakers in Australia

Is it possible, under patriarchy, for women's liberationists and feminists to instigate and control the direction of law reforms, particularly in areas of law directly affecting women's daily lives—such as rape laws?This article covers one instance, in New South Wales, Australia, where women agitated for law reform and played a large part, at least for a time, in formulating a new law on rape. At the end, however, women's liberation women and feminists lost control because women in the bureaucracy sided with men in the bureaucracy, despite their stance of ‘sisterhood’.Will women ‘outside’ inevitably be sold out by women ‘inside’ the bureaucracy? Once inside, does an allegiance to the establishment (the patriarchy) develop which ousts allegiance to women's liberationism? Or is it true that women inside the system ultimately recognise the system is not ‘of them’, or ‘for them’, and therefore when the barricades are up, will align themselves with women outside, rather than with the true insiders, men?     

Regendering the Rural: The Agricultural Training of Office Ladies in Hokkaido

This article investigates the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After outlining the cultural politics of these twin phenomena, I explore them further through a case study of the depopulated community of Shintoku. By establishing the Ladies Farm School in 1996, the town hoped that the agricultural training of single urban women would eventually lead them to settle down as young (and productive) “farming ladies.” Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women's social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the sexual division of labor as a (historical) product of modernization, instead of interpreting it as a timeless cultural pattern. A society is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labor power is prepared. —Paul Willis, Learning to Labour     

A Conversation About Q. D. Leavis

Mary Ellen Mark's photographic collection Twins (2003) raises provocative questions about performance, contingency and the relativity of difference, self and other. Her images complicate notions of individuality and foundational difference and challenge both self-recognition and recognition by others. They require viewers to observe closely, to spend time studying her subjects and to address the relativity—sometimes the radical relativity—of difference but also of sameness. Difficult questions about where ‘you’ end and ‘I’ begin are raised. Though Twins contains images of fraternal twins and triplets, Mark's subjects are, overwhelmingly, identical twins. She usually photographs them standing together, dressed in precisely the same way, in carefully constructed poses. This recreates the carnivalesque, performative aspect of Twins Day, held each year in Twinsburg, Ohio, in which the fact of being a twin (or in some cases triplet) is affirmed. Some identical twins choose to represent themselves as twins rather than solely as individuals, or as siblings who are also twins, in order to test out the limits of individuality. Here, I consider the ways in which such a chosen celebratory representation challenges different ways in which identical twins have been conceived of, which emphasise instead alterity and uncanniness.     

From autobiography to biography: Roma the First

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queen's Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others?

These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchell's own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predominantly during the last decades of her life. It is therefore a story shaped by her recognition of herself as exceptional, ‘Roma the First’, and also by other people's desires that she be—for them—precisely that: ‘Roma the First’. This is the ‘authorised’ narrative of Roma Mitchell's life, the story that she told herself. Many regard it as unquestionably definitive, and therefore determining. Yet, it does, itself, prompt an array of questions.

The story is set in Australia, ‘the last of lands, the emptiest’ wrote poet A.D. Hope, in a time that historian Michael Ignatieff deemed ‘“the worst century there has ever been,” in wanton destruction of human life and in murderous unreason masking itself as reason’. More specifically, it takes its beginning from the early years of the twentieth century, in the city of Adelaide, core of a British colony founded less than a century earlier, on the plain that had basked in the custodianship of the Kaurna people before the arrival of the ships from Britain, roughly in the middle of the southern curve defining the Australian continent. The forms that appear in the story derive from those origins: the British law which the colonists practised, with all its theatrical paraphernalia and terminology; a gradually developing copy of Westminster government, but with deference to British rule and allegiance always observed; education adopted from schools and universities in England and Scotland. Only in its churches was it distinct, for, among all of Britain's colonies in Australia, South Australia was the ‘paradise of dissent’. Here, on the edge of the anglophone world, this story did not so much unfold as gather itself together and take off.     

Chapter 10. Children and Youth

Abstract

It is impossible to make global generalisations about children and youth from a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of such a limited number of participants in just one city, Limerick, Ireland, and one case, St. Augustine's. The goal of phenomenological research is, however, not to seek generalisations but to expose the individual case, so I have endeavoured to use a symptomatic rather than representative approach to risk biographies, in so far as we assume all biographies are composed of the partial perspectives of knowledges that are insider and situated. Truths are contingent on differences of time, space, age, gender, class, sexual preference, and other aspects of culture and context. Nonetheless, I am reminded towards the conclusion of this book of a comment made by well-known Irish economist, T. K. Whittaker (1997), who observed: “If we think about it, save for the vagaries of birth, errant biology, class and status, or simply circumstance, we are all but a half step away from the 'other' families we describe as in need of service, or 'at risk.' In the final analysis, it is not 'us' and 'them.' It is all of us. Together” (p. 138).     

affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

Restricted to Half the Sky: Unwanted Girls,Battered Wives and Inglorious Women

The proverb ‘women hold up half the sky’ was created by the Maoist government 64 years ago in order to show that women in ‘New China’ have equal power and rights to their male peers. I selected three photographs for my FLaK zine and called them ‘unwanted girls’, ‘battered wives’ and ‘inglorious women’. To examine the relevance of the proverb in Modern China, I will discuss three women-related problems behind these photographs and analyse their cultural and legal causes. By doing so, I aim to achieve two purposes—first, to help the reader have a better understanding of the problems of women in the region where one-fifth of the global population lives, and second, to argue that seemingly gender neutral law and policy can produce new and greater restrictions on women’s freedom.     

Editors' introduction

The following is drawn from the editor's remarks at a roundtable session on "State-of-the-Art: Labor and Working-Class History" of the Organization of American Historians, April 12, 2002, in Washington, DC. Also contributing to the panel were Joshua Freeman, editor of ILWCH and Bryan Palmer, editor of Labor/Le Travail . Particularly noteworthy among their remarks was Freeman's paradoxical assertion that " 'Whiteness' is the greatest imperial triumph within labor history since E. P. Thompson's definition of class, even though labor historians may not like how it is used." I also appreciated Palmer's declaration about a field where he sees "a lot of art, but no state. And that is probably a good thing." Intended to engender larger discussion, my words drew an immediate response from Andrew Arnold, published here as a comment. Should interest warrant, Labor History will publish further contributions on this theme.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

<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.