Oprah Winfrey and the co-production of market and morality

This essay introduces the dossier, situating Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames in the contemporary political context. After offering a brief synopsis of the film, the essay argues that Born in Flames serves as both a document of feminist, anti-racist social movements and as inspiration for modeling future political work. The essay then briefly introduces the pieces that comprise the dossier.     

Migrant melodrama and the political economy of suffering

This article deploys the term “migrant melodrama” to describe contemporary cultural production that trains a melodramatic imagination on migrants. It argues that migrant melodrama often reconfigures suffering as a necessary step in the progress toward inclusion and belonging. To interrogate this assumption, the article analyzes three prominent examples of migrant melodramas that feature children traveling north across national borders without adult caretakers: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; a 2009 HBO documentary film inspired by Nazario’s book, Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Cammisa; and the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen. The article proposes that migrant melodrama plays a role in the commodification and circulation of undocumented migrant suffering in a global market, a phenomenon that the author terms “the political economy of suffering.” Performances of suffering can be exchanged in the political economy of suffering for any number of privileges, from a handout to a visa, and are linked to major international economic and political decisions, such as migration policies that regulate human mobility across nation-state borders. The political economy of suffering is a web of transactions in which performances of undocumented migrant suffering are exchanged in attempts to promote empathy, tolerance of mobility, and respect for migrant human rights. In different ways, all three of the works analyzed accept the underlying logic of the political economy of suffering.     

Forced to pass and other sins against authenticity

This essay examines U.S.-based lesbian and gay activism from the turn of 1980 with a focus on tensions between models of activism based in unapologetic demands for visibility versus concerns about the contradictions presented by the recognition of lesbian and gay identities within a punitive political order. The author crafts this historical narrative alongside and through readings of Gus Van Sant's 2008 film Milk and Lizzie Borden's 1983 film Born in Flames. The essay analyzes how Milk showcases the politics of gay liberalism at its most militant, while Born in Flames highlights a variety of radical feminist activisms. The essay also looks at how the styles of each film bring into focus some of the ways in which liberal and radical lesbian and gay movements of the period limited their engagement with race and racism. The essay then considers how both films thematize the uses of communicative media in the production of social movements. It concludes by asking how these films might provide an opportunity to think about activist history today.     

The shadow block: Female bonding in quilters

In these brief notes, the author's aim is to situate Born in Flames historically, including within the history of feminist theory. His starting point for thinking through this film was the presumption that what it means now differs from what it meant in its own time. While that would be true of almost any text, it has seemed to the author that Born in Flames, as an incendiary text, is extraordinarily provocative in the very ways that make it now seem “dated.” It remains inspiring, however, because it offers a vision of intersectional political coalition more radical than any feature film that we are likely to see now, despite the influence of decades of feminist, queer, and critical race studies. Revisiting the discourses the film generated at the time of its release, the author has come to recognize that, though times and the trends in theory have changed since 1983, the stakes of the revolution in the film have not. It presents a desire to make the world otherwise, economically and culturally.     

Why Some Adolescents Are Open To Their Parents’ Political Communication

This study examines the conditions that make adolescents open to their parents’ attempts at political socialization. Based on a reformulation of the perceptual accuracy argument, that parents’ messages are filtered through correct perceptions of these messages by adolescents, the study suggests that adolescents who accurately recognize their parents’ high political sophistication are particularly likely to attend to and be open to their parents’ political communication. This proposition was tested using cluster analysis of a sample of 505 Swedish upper-secondary students and their parents (51% girls; Mage?=?16.56, SD?=?0.67). The analysis yielded two clusters where adolescents correctly identified (26%) and failed to correctly identify (22%) their parents’ high political sophistication, and three clusters where both parents and adolescents reported low or medium parental political sophistication (10%, 11%, and 32%). In confirmation of the hypothesis, members of the cluster group of adolescents who correctly recognized their parents’ high political sophistication were particularly aware of parents’ political socialization attempts and receptive to parents’ political communication. Moreover, these youth considered their parents’ political views as important and, accordingly, seemed to perceive their parents as political role models.

     

Controlling land they call their own: access and women's empowerment in Northern Tanzania

Formal rights to land are often promoted as an essential part of empowering women, particularly in the Global South. We look at two grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working on land rights and empowerment with Maasai communities in Northern Tanzania. Women involved with both NGOS attest to the power of land ownership for personal empowerment and transformations in gender relations. Yet very few have obtained land ownership titles. Drawing from Ribot and Peluso's theory of access, we argue that more than ownership rights to land, access – to land, knowledge, social relations and political processes – is leading to empowerment for these women, as well as helping to keep land within communities. We illustrate how the following are key to both empowerment processes and protecting community and women's land: (1) access to knowledge about legal rights, such as the right to own land; (2) access to customary forms of authority; and (3) access to a joint social identity – as women, as ‘indigenous people’ and as ‘Maasai'. Through this shared identity and access to knowledge and authority, women are strengthening their access to social relations (amongst themselves, with powerful political players and NGOs), and gaining strength through collective action to protect land rights.     

Governing the Taiwanese countryside: Guanxi,power and agency

Over the past two decades, bottom-up rural development has become the prevailing approach in Taiwan. The rise of community-based projects for Foucauldian thinkers should be understood as new ways of thinking about governing social life, in which political authorities create ‘active’ rural citizens through the deployment of political technologies. Foucault's emphasis on the intimate association between power and knowledge has been taken further by actor-network theory (ANT) authors. However, ANT tells more empirical stories about the dissemination of power and the assemblage of actors. Although ANT has been readily employed in the studies of social sciences, it has been subject to severe criticism; on the one side, the death of man, on the other, the demiurgic. Echoing these comments, this paper argues that the process of translation is far more complicated than ANT authors have proposed. In the Chinese context, social interactions rely heavily on the social interaction model known as guanxi. With reference to an anthropological participant observation I conducted in a Taiwanese rural community, this paper demonstrates that guanxi practice functions as a mechanism for coping with political collective action.     

Histories of now: listening to women in British film

ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses specifically on the permutations of the interview process for constructing women's film history in the contemporary period. Taking into consideration the theoretical, methodological and political issues at stake in recording oral histories of working women filmmakers, we contemplate the consequences of collecting and writing history that is still in medias res.     

The man who envied women

Boredom is a permeating, trespassing force – an intensity not necessarily recognized as such. This essay approaches the aesthetics of political failure, and in particular, the cinematic intensities of boredom as affective expressions of post-traumatic malaise. Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), one of only three Chinese narrative films to represent the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, draws upon an aesthetics of banality to dramatize the epistemological limits and resultant trauma of 6/4, a historical event subsequently repressed in mainland Chinese media. Refusing melodramatic catharsis, the film’s stalling and stupefying effects perform both the amnesiac circumstances surrounding 6/4, as well as the compassion fatigue that followed. Even more surprisingly, Lou’s overuse of sex, a dull instrument by the film’s end, constitutes Summer Palace’s privileged sight/site of boredom. Indeed, sex, rather than constituting the censored obscene act, stands in for something far more offensive. Summer Palace frenetically pivots around an open secret, the historical memory of Tiananmen, as nervous sensation is composed within and without the text, centering on women’s bodies. Drawing on close textual analyses, this essay contends that the excessive contours and shapes of the memorial wound in Summer Palace take on the particularly anxious forms of dull sex in a messy Square.     

Woman to Woman: Australian Feminists’ Embrace of Radio Broadcasting, 1930s–1950s

This article demonstrates the crucial importance of the radio medium in the post-suffrage era as a space in which women could expand their sphere of influence and enact their responsibilities as citizens. It challenges previous scholarship which has argued that during the early decades of radio women were confined to the world of the everyday and the domestic. In the interwar years, Australian feminist organisations were quick to take advantage of the still-developing radio medium, which they used to publicise their activities to mass audiences. One such organisation was the United Associations (UA), founded in Sydney in 1929 by Jessie Street and Linda Littlejohn. Perth feminist Irene Greenwood was introduced to radio broadcasting as a member of the UA in the 1930s, and she later drew on these media skills and her extensive feminist networks to create her own innovative and interactive radio program in Western Australia, Woman to Woman (1948–1954). Correspondence between Greenwood and her audience shows that the program provided women from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to engage publicly with significant political debates, to create a new imagined community of listeners, to communicate across geographical and class boundaries, and to become media producers themselves.     

Occupations and attitudes of former student activists 10 years later

Respondents in a 1969 survey (N=400)of undergraduate men at the University of Michigan were resurveyed as alumni in 1979 (N=215).Of the 400 surveyed in 1969, 50 were active in political organizations (organization activists) and 57 had been in demonstrations. These were rank- and-file student activists in the 1960s, not leaders. The demonstration activists were the more extreme in attitudes in both 1969 and 1979. In 1979 the demonstration activists were still more interested in political affairs than the nonactivists, more suspicious of free enterprise ideology, more opposed to current fears of communism, and more alienated from the military. Former organization activists were disproportionately employed in the human services areas of government, disproportionately absent from the business sector. In 1979 the former activists were no longer critical of the universities or of American society as a producer of poverty. They had shifted their main involvement from national to community affairs. While still distinctive in some attitudes, they were generally less radical than earlier.Financial support was provided by the Spencer Foundation.Received Ph.D. from Harvard University. Research interests include sociology of religion and youth.Received M.A. from Catholic University. Research interests include social movements and sociology of the arts.     

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean,Nicholas Ray,and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955 Rebel Without a Cause, 1955. Film. Directed by Nicholas Ray. USA: Warner Bros. [Google Scholar]), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.     

Political women in singapore: A socio-linguistic analysis

This study sets out to discover how the political woman in Singapore is portrayed in Singapore through a study of her representation in the media. A focussed study of the Singapore English newspapers in the political elections of 1984, 1988 and 1991 show the construction of the political woman in two ways: one is through the creation of the stereotype, packaging the political woman as a type of woman and like all women, operating within the framework of the family, such as, their role as wives, as the helped, as mothers and as “the weaker sex”; and the other is through the medium of language itself, for example, such as the use of address terms, overlexicalization, and the tabloid commentary style.     

“Use words. Not your body”: The hunger that has no name

This essay examines the competing readings of food refusal that emerged from a student hunger strike held at Columbia University in fall 2007. The invisibility of the act of food refusal forces hunger strikers to adopt performance strategies that make their (non)action visible as protest. To make the politics of their food refusal legible, advocates for the hunger strike promoted their actions as part of a 40 year tradition of student protest. However, that same invisibility allowed the protest's detractors to deride the hunger strikers as anorexic. At the center of the protest and the commentary about it was a wasting female body that confused for spectators the line between the political and the pathological. Attention to this body raises questions of how community is created and disciplined through performative acts, how easily female protest is evacuated of political meaning and the uneasy role of whiteness in popular attention to anorexia.     

‘Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude’: the freewoman's critique of the suffrage movement 1

The Freewoman has commonly been read as an example of New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women's sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual experimentation. The Freewoman's extraordinary discussions of sexuality have tended to distract historians' attention from other elements of the debates it engendered. In particular, the political argument found within its pages has received insufficient attention; the journal tends to be misread as a socialist publication. Placing the journal as part of the New Woman narrative lends itself to an alternative view of the political subject of The Freewoman; the New Woman focus on individuality, autonomy and creative genius plays an important part in the distinctive political debates found within the journal. Although the suffrage struggle dominated Edwardian feminist activism, many Freewoman contributors rejected the vote entirely. In aperiod when new liberal or Fabian conceptions of an increasingly interventionist state appeared to sit comfortably with feminist demands for a more inclusive and socially responsible state, The Freewoman took an anti-statist stance. Rejecting the common suffragist metaphor of the state as the home writ large, Freewoman contributors saw the state as machine-like. The author explores the motivations for these positions, and the development of an individualist-feminist, or even egoist stance. Specifically, she outlines contributors' rejection of militant suffrage activism, and their contestation of the citizen as a rights-holding and consenting political subject, and maps the alternative political structures suggested within The Freewoman, and the manner in which concepts of individuality found within New Woman discourse served to construct a disturbingly elitist and even coercive feminist politics.     

(ALL THE) SINGLE LADIES

In the film fragment Smart B**ch, two women—a black Sudanese-Australian and a white American-Australian—share what it means to be diasporic travellers and explore their similarities and differences within evolving feminist discourses which have in some ways abandoned the subaltern for the subdivided. No longer content to criticise the ways in which we speak for and to each other, and to accommodate hierarchies of class, race and sexuality, this ethnocinematic dialogue prefers these film personae to speak with each other and their audience using Conquergood and Denzin as performance ethnography guides, while challenging hegemonic notions of diaspora to include such diversities as adoptees, queers, and others.     

Neither worker nor housewife but citizen: BBC’s Woman’s Hour 1946–1955

This article investigates BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour in the post-war period. It explores Woman’s Hour’s focus and insistence on educating women listeners about their role as citizens, and the tensions this caused particularly between broadcasters and different groups of women. The article documents the programme’s development of public and outward looking items, such as the reporting and covering of current affairs, public debates and national politics, women’s party political conferences, and further introducing women MP’s to the microphone. This gave the programme a public and arguably political dimension. The article thus places Woman’s Hour within the broader historiography of the women’s movement in this period, and illuminates the changing role and expectation of women, particularly the middle-class housewife.     

Geopolitical transformation in rural Mexico: toward new social and territorial boundaries in an indigenous municipality of central Mexico.

After decades of being one of the most loyal and reliable sources of PRI electoral votes, rural Mexico has become the arena of partisan political competition. The increasing political party rivalry in rural areas is not only related to a legal or formal institutional transformation at the national or sub-national level but to the ejido endogenous reconfiguration. Today local interest groups and supporters of opposition political parties are challenging the once hegemonic ejido authority, associated with the PRI regime, which since 1930 has ruled most Mexican rural villages. The ejido as a political institution is yielding many of its political functions to the empowered municipal government. As I will show in this paper, a major transition in rural Mexico is well under way, moving from agrarian toward municipal governance. The new political order challenges the ethnic and territory boundaries associated with the ejido rule forged in rural Mexico during the post-revolutionary era.     

The Stability of Political Attitudes and Behaviors across Adolescence and Early Adulthood: A Comparison of Survey Data on Adolescents and Young Adults in Eight Countries

The persistence of adolescents’ political attitudes and behaviors into adulthood is a perennial concern in research on developmental psychology. While some authors claim that adolescents’ attitudinal patterns will remain relatively stable throughout the life cycle, others argue that the answers of adolescents in political surveys have but a limited predictive value for their future attitudes and behaviors. In this article, we tackle this question on an aggregate level, by comparing survey data for 14, 18 and 18 to 30 year old respondents from eight European countries (n = resp. 22,620; 20,142 and 2800). We examine political trust, attitudes toward immigrants’ rights and voting behavior. The analysis suggests that country patterns with regard to political trust and attitudes toward immigrant rights are already well established by the age of 14. We find less indications for stability in the relation between intention to vote (for 14 and 18 years olds) and actual voting behavior (for young adults). The latent structure of the political trust scale was found to be equivalent for the three age groups we investigated. We close by offering some suggestions on why attitudinal stability seems stronger than behavioral stability.

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

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