texturing visibility: opaque femininities and feminist modernist studies

This essay examines women’s spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women’s bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women’s illegibility. Women’s visual prominence made apparent their ‘unknowability’, recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women’s opacity in the fashion and beauty press, I argue that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women’s place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. The essay draws on feminist and postcolonial theory to suggest that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity.     

women developing women: Islamic approaches for poverty alleviation in rural Egypt

Through an ethnographic account of a social reform project led by Islamic activist women in the village of Mehmeit in rural Egypt, this article analyses women's Islamic activism as a form of worship. Women's experiences of activism are at the centre of this account, which highlights their attempts to economically and socially develop a destitute rural community. Their development ideals mirror the embedded principles of liberal secular modernity and offer a tangible example of the concomitance of these so-called binaries of religion and secularism in women's religious activism. Normative assumptions regarding religion and secularism as two binary constructs have largely dictated a monolithic view of women who engage in Islamic activism as religious subjects primarily devoted to a spiritual, internal faith. Persistent models of religious selves engaged in a continuous exercise of self-fashioning towards a fixed ‘religious ideal’ overlook the complexity and seamlessness of the desires that animate these subjectivities. Moreover, it is inaccurate to represent participants in Islamic activism as homogenized into one overarching group that adheres to standardized religious membership criteria. Discourses of modernity have also constructed separate spheres of what is defined as religion and secularism. Yet, these spheres, in practice, are not always so neatly demarcated as they are in modern principles. Societies shaped by the historical and temporal dynamics of colonialism, modernization, secularization and nation building projects present more complex and heterogeneous forms of subjectivities in their members. This article illustrates how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism opens up new possible considerations of women's activism in Islamic movements. The author argues that the desires and subjectivities of Islamic women that inform their activism are ultimately linked to the historical emergence of secularism and state modernization schemes aimed at transforming Muslim subjects into modern citizens of liberal democracies.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN MULTICULTURALISM?

Abstract This article discusses the need to re-imagine multiculturalism and feminism in order to better accommodate women in minority cultures who are religious. It begins and ends with comments about multiculturalism and ‘difference feminism’ in Australia. In the body of the paper I use anthropological field-work in Indonesia, first to show that culture and religion are not separate and immutable, and secondly to show how Muslim women in the women's movement in Indonesia are using Islam to build a multicultural discourse. Finally I apply my findings about Muslim women activists in multicultural discourse in Indonesia to multiculturalism in Australia.     

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

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

‘If I strive not after my own salvation,who shall strive for me,and if not now,when?’ The Role of Religion in the West Central Jewish Working Girls' Club, 1893–1939

This article looks at the inclusion of religion within the West Central Jewish Working Girls' Club in London through newspapers, club histories and oral testimonies. Previous scholarship has downplayed the religious element in Jewish youth clubs; however, this article will demonstrate that religion was a factor within the activities of the West Central Club. Drawing on reports from the club leaders, this article will show that religion was present through prayers and services held on the Sabbath, and, where possible, this religion promoted domesticity for young women.     

gendered Islam and modernity in the nation-space: women's modernism in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity.     

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 <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.     

other mothers: encountering in/visible femininities in migration and urban contexts

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures.     

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted.     

‘We must give them an education,large, liberal and comprehensive’. Catherine Vale Whitwell: teacher,artist, author,feminist and Owenite communitarian

This article was provoked by the author’s conviction that its subject was a great deal more significant than a marginalised woman on the fringes of Owenism, the reformist movement promoted by Robert Owen during the early nineteenth century. It examines the life of Catherine Whitwell, formally identified in studies of Owen and in histories of education as teacher cum artist in the school at New Lanark, Owen’s factory community in Scotland, and also one of several women writers on astronomy. Otherwise little was known of her activities or the contexts in which they occurred. There are many gaps in the record and her footprint is often illusive, but much new information in widely dispersed archives, periodicals, digitised newspapers and secondary sources helps cast further light on her background, a career embracing work as proprietor of girls’ schools, author of works on astronomy and mathematics, promoter of sciences for women, advocate of women’s education, artist and communitarian. The context of Whitwell’s work is reviewed with reference to recent relevant literature and followed by a case study explaining her association with Owen, speculating on her role in visualising his plans for communities of co-operation designed to relieve distress and create greater equality, then describing her teaching career both at New Lanark and later at Orbiston, the first British Owenite community near Glasgow. The study concludes with a brief review of her post-Owen work running girls’ schools and an assessment of her role in the development of education and disseminating knowledge, particularly for young middle class women and working class children in the first half of the nineteenth century.     

Spinsters,war widows,and wounded soldiers: the Great War novels of Berta Ruck

Although a prolific romance novelist of the early twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has garnered very little critical attention or appreciation, in no small part due to the seemingly generic and conventional narratives of her dozens of novels. This article rejects the dismissive approach taken to Ruck’s work by focusing on her novels written during and immediately following the First World War and examining them in the context of contemporary debates about gender. In particular, these novels frequently challenge strict pre-war and wartime gender binaries as stifling, favoring instead a more inclusive approach to gendered ideals. Spinsters, widows, and war widows are granted agency rather than pity as Ruck responds to concerns surrounding Britain’s ‘surplus women’ during and after the war in order to challenge traditional categories of femininity. Likewise, physically and psychologically wounded soldiers are employed to critique a static and limiting idealization of masculinity that was promoted during the war.     

Kiss and Tell: ‘The Writing Cure’ in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997)

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.     

Who Gets Played By ‘The Gender Card’?

This article is concerned with questions of sexism and misogyny in the context of post-feminism. It examines the particular case of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’, a rare instance of a woman in high political office directly accusing her opponent of sexism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the coverage of that speech in the Australian print media, the article explores the radical disjuncture between how the speech resonated with women, both in Australia and internationally, and its construction in the print media as an illegitimate and ill-conceived ‘playing of the gender card’. In forwarding this analysis, the article highlights how, in a post-feminist media environment, the possibilities for women of naming experiences of sexism are being closed down not least because such naming is positioned as a strategic choice on the part of women deployed only to gain advantage.     

Theme: Making us Modern: Australian Writing in Modernity

‘Making us Modern’ brings together articles concerned with the scene of Australian writing and the relevance of ‘modernity/ies’ and ‘modernism/s’ for contemporary writing and reading practices. What is the ‘modern’, who are its subjects, and how has the modern made us—as ‘postmodern’, perhaps? And, who is this ‘us’, anyway? Attempts to theorise modernity and its aesthetics have often taken the white Western male as their subject. Intervening in these theories, however, are the efforts of feminist critics, among others, who seek to install those troubled terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ at the centre of their considerations of modernity, modernism, and reading and writing subjects. The articles in ‘Making us Modern’ contribute to these debates. Twentieth-century Australian modernities have been seen as holding together a mix of trauma and pleasure, constraint and release, sometimes represented in literary texts in seemingly impossible relation. For Esther Faye, writing on the short stories of Australian-Jewish writer Rosa Safransky, the subjective experiences of post-war Australian modernity are characterised by the traumatic dislocation of human subjects in time and space. In Safransky's stories of family and domesticity is seen the trauma experienced by gendered and racialised subjects in the particular context of the Shoah and its aftermath. Although, as she says, ‘the canonical status of the Shoah as the paradigmatic modernist event is increasingly contested’, through a Lacanian reading of Safransky's texts, Esther Faye shows the ways that the Holocaust's radical disruption of time and its dislocation of the Jewish subject in history echoes in its logic the wider deracination of the subject in modernity. It testifies ‘to the traumatic structure of subjectivity itself’, and it testifies, too, to the particular kind of ‘pleasure’ that is constituted in inextricable relation to trauma. In this way, as Esther Faye argues, being Jewish after Auschwitz is a question for all of us.     

Imagining Mary in Theology and Visual Culture: Between Constraint and Resistance

This contribution focuses on the Virgin Mary’s continued relevance as a polyvalent signifier that straddles the secular-religious divide. Interlacing feminist theology and visual studies, I trace Mary’s ambiguous significance between oppression and liberation, and between religious and secular realms in texts and images. The extended analysis of the contemporary transformation of the traditional motif of the Guadalupe in the digital collage Our Lady (1999) by Chicana artist Alma López shows that contemporary reimaginations of Mary as a self-confident woman at one with her body and sexuality both echo and reinforce tendencies in feminist theology. Combining religious and cultural dimensions, the work and reactions to it uncover the intricate ways in which religion has shaped and continues to shape cultural views of gender, both in terms of consolidating a binary, hierarchical gender order and providing a source of alternative visions.     

Love,Passion, Conversion: Constance Maynard and evangelical missionary writing

This article explores how Constance Maynard understood her sexual emotions as part of her evangelical religion and how, in doing so, she was drawing on an evangelical tradition which placed strong emotion at the centre of religious experience. The article outlines how nineteenth-century women tract writers, missionaries and biographers wrote about female friendship and conversion using emotional rhetoric. The article analyses Maynard's diary entries to identify her use of missionary narrative tropes, arguing that, in the absence of psychoanalytic theories, Maynard turned to missionary narrative to make sense of her relationships with vulnerable women.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

‘HOTTEST 100 WOMEN’

Social movement theorists have developed several concepts to explain the role of social networking in maintaining social movements. This is particularly relevant for periods when levels of public activism are low due to backlash, hostile social contexts and structural uncertainties. As part of my study of the women's movement online and feminist blog networks in Australia, I provide a review of several of these concepts, interrogating their applicability to the study of online communities. This paper explores the relevance of the social movement theory concepts of submerged networks, abeyance structures and the related idea of counterpublics for the study of feminist blog networks. In 2009, the radio station Triple J's ‘Hottest 100 of All Time’ poll featured no solo women artists, and women played on few tracks. In response to this, several strands of discourse developed in the Australian feminist blogosphere identifying ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women. Activists developed a cross-platform poll on Twitter, Facebook and email, and promoted it through blogs and Twitter, to counter the ‘Hottest 100 Men’ with a ‘Hottest 100 Women’. This paper shows the ways these women have used blogging networks to challenge mainstream discourses and generate new ones.