Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain

The Irish are largely invisible as an ethnic group in Britain but continue to be racialized as inferior and alien Others. Invisibility has been reinforced by academic treatment. Most historians have assumed that a framework of assimilation is appropriate and this outcome is uncritically accepted as desirable. Sociologists on the other hand have excluded the Irish from consideration, providing tacit support for the ‘myth of homogeneity’ of white people in Britain against the supposedly new phenomenon of threatening (Black) ‘immigrants’.Focus on the paradigm of ‘colour’ has limited the range of racist ideologies examined and led to denial of anti-Irish racism. But an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the ‘Irish Catholic’ was a significant Other in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Despite contemporary forgetting, hostility towards the Irish continues, over and above immediate reactions to recent IRA campaigns. Verbal abuse and racial harassment are documented in London and elsewhere, but unacknowledged.The masculine imagery of ‘Paddy’ hides the existence of Irish women in Britain, although they have outnumbered men since the 1920s. In America, by contrast, there is a strong stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and her central contribution to Irish upward mobility is recognized. But invisibility does not protect Irish women in Britain from racism. Indeed, they are often more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society. Moreover, women have played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which continues to resonate closely with Irishness and difference.     

fractured identity and agency and the plays of Adrienne Kennedy

This paper examines the plays of African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) and The Owl Answers (1963), which remain important for their engagement with notions of African-American identity, resistance and agency through their attention to mixed race female characters or mulattas who experience bodily and psychological traumas that demonstrate the abuse of the colonized on a deeply visceral level. Kennedy's plays have remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orientation of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of 1960s America. I aim to examine these plays through a framework of postcolonial-feminist performance analysis that finds its way back to histories of colonization and slavery, enabling through such returns, a compelling critique of the manoeuvrings of racial hierarchies and power imbalances. As well, I argue that Kennedy's protagonists are de-essentialized fractured beings who fail to embody either White superiority or Black nationalist pride, as they oscillate between two polarities. Such failure (on the part of Kennedy's mulattas) allows for a strategic de-essentialization of identity that interrogates fixed categorization. As well, through a form that is fluid, fragmented and blurs the distinctions among history, memory, space and time, her works impart political agency to the characters and enable an empowered sense of the ‘self-in-process.’     

Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.     

“Object Lesson(s)”

This article reconstructs up an impromptu dance performed by Lavinia Baker, a survivor of mob violence and star of an anti-lynching performance revue, and reads it as the occasion for rethinking the performative dimensions of a seemingly familiar spectacle: lynching. As opposed to the familiar scene of the black corpse captured and circulated in photographs, the author argues that Lavinia's 1899 dance and the liveness of her performance – that is, its excess, disruptions, and improvisation – is instantiation of racial violence that strains against the putative framing of mob violence as a finite event that is amenable to documentation, capture, or narrativization. By pivoting a discussion of lynching on Lavinia Baker’s protean performance, this essay not only challenges the shape and structure of nineteenth-century anti-black terror, but also demands that we (re) turn to a deceptively simple question that animates Scenes of Subjection: what does racial violence look like?     

Same Path,Different Purpose: Chopin’s La Folle and Welty's Phoenix Jackson

In her collection of lectures entitled Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison argues that "[t]he ways in which artists-and the society that bred them-transferred internal conflicts to a 'blank darkness,' to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies, is a major theme in American literature" (38). Among other instances, Morrison catalogs works by Cather, Hemingway, and Poe as examples of this transference. Black characters in American literature are not simply studies in blackness, however. Instead, by examining these examples of writing black (i.e., white authors creating black characters) we can learn, surprisingly, a great deal about whiteness, Morrison suggests. Additionally, there is a good deal we can learn about the authors. To wit, Morrison's concern is for "how Africanist personae, narrative, and idiom moved and enriched the text in self-conscious ways, to consider what the engagement meant for the work of the writer's imagination" (16). For my purposes, such an undertaking of looking at the artwork and assessing its reflection of the artist seems quite rich, especially when we consider the undeniably loaded issue of race.     

class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith

Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault's theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith's very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband's fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middle-class women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.     

Women on the Edge of Modernity

Feminism has long been committed to a critique of stereotypic examples of women in patriarchal discourse and has been keen to see what it could offer by way of alternatives. Yet to suggest that alternatives are possible raises the question of whether feminism itself can altogether avoid the trap of turning women into stereotypes, turning the specific example of woman into a universal model, in its own efforts to represent women. Communication demands the particular; it is not possible to refer to everything at once. At the same time, judgements that arise from the use of those particulars are always to some extent faulty - inaccurate or incomplete, too particular or too general. This applies as much to aesthetics (models of beauty) as it does to politics (another matter of representation). What is at issue here is the entire problematic of inclusion and exclusion, whether in politics or aesthetics. Focusing on the significance of Kant's reliance on woman as an example in the Critique of Judgement , Elam argues that it would be a mistake to dismiss all aesthetic discourses of beauty as ploys on the part of patriarchy to keep women for men's eyes only. The Critique of Judgement stands to be useful to feminism because it demonstrates that the problem of the example cannot be solved by striving for the perfect representation of woman - either an inclusive aesthetics or a fully representational politics - or even by overcoming the use of examples altogether. Rather, taking 'woman' as an example stages both aesthetic and political questions about representation that call attention to the challenges feminism faces in its attempt to form political communities.     

Lessons from “Around the world with Oprah”: Neoliberalism,race, and the (geo)politics of beauty

On 6 October 2004, viewers went “Around the world with Oprah” and received a rare glimpse inside the lives of 30-year-old women from 17 different countries. When Oprah turned her gaze (and that of middle-class American housewives) eastward, she highlighted South Korean women's penchart for plastic surgery. Oprah's “trip” to South Korea is emblematic of Western discourse surrounding South Korean Women's plastic surgery consumption, most of which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery or the sangapul procedure as it is called in South Korea. Given its widespread popularity, the sangapul procedure has come to signify South Korean women's acquiescence to not only patriarchal oppression but racial oppression as well. This essay goes beyond the psychologization of South Korean women in order to ask what such psychological musings obscure about the very political nature of beauty itself. Using “Around the world with Oprah” as a starting point, then, this essay examines beauty at the intersection of race, technology, and (geo)politics in order to show that, in an era of neoliberalism, plastic surgery is often rationalized as an investment in the self towards a more normal, if not better future. As this essay suggests, such a framing of plastic surgery is contingent on Oprah's production of neoliberal feminism based on liberal notions of choice. Given her global reach, these neoliberal feminist subjects are not produced equally, however, but are discursively constructed along a First World/Third World divide.     

Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s–1930s Britain

Observing the divergent tracks taken by historians of the ‘modern self’ and those of the ‘modern body’ the article focuses on health and fitness movements in Britain, c.1920s–1930s. Asking whether there is a place for the body in the history of women performing ‘the self’ in this context, the article suggests a way in which contemporaries found a way to have a ‘self’ in the body. Contemporary notions of the body emphasised its interdependence with ‘the mind’, health and happiness being functions of each other. In the language of health and beauty was a language of inner vitality and outer radiance, a modern formulation of the individual as a ‘self’ equipped to embrace the exciting but uncertain possibilities of the ‘modern world’. Popular print culture on ‘healthy living’, reports by the BMA and the National Fitness Council are considered along with more extensive discussion of the Women's League for Health and Beauty founded in 1930 by Mollie Bagot Stack and inherited by her daughter, Prunella, ‘Britain's Perfect Girl’, in 1935.     

The Sudanese Woman

The nature of the relationship between (proto-)feminism and (anti-)imperialism is highly contested. A case in point is the work of Olive Schreiner, and the articulation of gender politics with (anti-)imperialism which has been subjected to repeated scrutiny in the last twenty years. One strand of criticism, exemplified by critics like Laura Chrisman, Anne McClintock and Carolyn Burdett, argues that Schreiner generally successfully integrates a (proto-)feminist politics with criticism of imperialism in her writing produced after The Story of an African Farm . However, her first novel is viewed as more problematic in this regard. While acknowledging it as a major early text of the women's movement, such critics see the novel as in large measure endorsing prevailing Victorian ideologies of racial hierarchy. Drawing on the methodology of Sub-altern Studies, Moore-Gilbert proposes a rather different interpretation of The Story of an African Farm . Following the lead of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, he seeks to trace the impact of (the resistance of) the colonized subaltern on the colonizer's unconscious and how this is reflected in the colonizer's regimes of representation and self-image. He proposes that Waldo can be read 'catachrestically' as a figure of the (partially resistant) colonized who at the manifest level occupy only a marginal role in Schreiner's text. The aim is not to overturn readings of Waldo that see him as an exemplary 'modern', embodying many of the characteristics of western civilization at the time. Rather, the argument is that such a 'catchrestic' reading can co-exist simultaneously with these received interpretations of his role, thus corroborating the perception of the Subaltern Studies historians on the existence of conflicts and contradictions in the colonizer's unconscious that mark the (oppositional) presence of the (historically effaced) subaltern. Against their emphasis, however, Moore-Gilbert suggests that the colonizer's unconscious can also be the seat of 'progressive' drives. And the presence of such drives on Schreiner's novel suggests that its racial politics are more consonant with those of her later work than is commonly assumed.     

‘Sharpening the wooden sword’ in Imperial Germany: marital status and education in the work of Helene Lange

This article addresses the views of Helene Lange (1848-1930) in the campaign to reform German female education during the imperial period (1871-1918). A former educator, Lange was a key leader in national discussions of both female education and women's rights. Education, middle-class interests, and marital status formed the pillars of Lange's reformist vision. Lange contended that nineteenth-century education was misguided in its emphasis upon marriage as the primary goal of middle-class female lives. She cited a perceived surplus of unmarried women (Frauenüberschuss) as a key reason to change the nature of female education. Lange saw this surfeit as particularly problematic among the middle and elite classes. In doing so, she acknowledged derogatory depictions of unwed women but inverted such stereotypes in order to promote her cause of improved female education. As a solution for the perceived female surplus, Lange advocated educational and professional experiences that would embrace the maternal character of women. Helene Lange believed that women were not to be educated to compete with men, but to stand beside them in creating a better world – patriarch and matriarch renewed.     

Matilda Gage Writes a World History of Women

Suffragist Matilda's Gage's Woman, Church and State, 1893, invites a revisit because it was a pioneering study in world history with woman as its central issue. While labeled an amateur, Gage's work demonstrated an excellent grasp of nineteenth-century historical scholarship and she offered interpretive insights that tied nascent anthropological theory to historical analysis. For these reasons she is best understood in relation to the women scholars of the 1890s and subsequent decades who created a well-researched and scholarly new history of women.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

Experiences of Racism,Racial/Ethnic Attitudes,Motivated Fairness and Mental Health Outcomes Among Primary and Secondary School Students

While studies investigating the health effects of racial discrimination for children and youth have examined a range of effect modifiers, to date, relationships between experiences of racial discrimination, student attitudes, and health outcomes remain unexplored. This study uniquely demonstrates the moderating effects of vicarious racism and motivated fairness on the association between direct experiences of racism and mental health outcomes, specifically depressive symptoms and loneliness, among primary and secondary school students. Across seven schools, 263 students (54.4 % female), ranging from 8 to 17 years old (M = 11.2, SD = 2.2) reported attitudes about other racial/ethnic groups and experiences of racism. Students from minority ethnic groups (determined by country of birth) reported higher levels of loneliness and more racist experiences relative to the majority group students. Students from the majority racial/ethnic group reported higher levels of loneliness and depressive symptoms if they had more friends from different racial/ethnic groups, whereas the number of friends from different groups had no effect on minority students’ loneliness or depressive symptoms. Direct experiences of racism were robustly related to higher loneliness and depressive symptoms in multivariate regression models. However, the association with depressive symptoms was reduced to marginal significance when students reported low motivated fairness. Elaborating on the negative health effects of racism in primary and secondary school students provides an impetus for future research and the development of appropriate interventions.     

Aesthetic self-medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose's structures of breathing

This essay tracks adaptations to corporeal transformations in breathing in the performance art and life writing of Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) and Sheree Rose (b. 1941). It chronicles how breathing as an aesthetic strategy gets entangled with breathing as an exceptional or ordinary effect of disability over the course—and, in Rose's case, in the aftermath—of Flanagan's cystic fibrosis. The term “aesthetic self-medication” describes the process through which breathing is induced as an aesthetic form, and its patterns and rhythms transcribed and dramatized, in order to stage minimally coherent self-encounters amidst crisis. As Flanagan's chronic illness worsens and the couple's sadomasochistic dynamic no longer manages chronic pain, aesthetic self-medication structures laboured breathing into new genres of, or affective and libidinal relations to, pain, including boredom and musical humour.     

Toward a holistic paradigm for Asian American Women's Studies: A synthesis of feminist scholarship and women of color's feminist politics

In this paper I propose a Women's Studies method for an Asian American Studies curriculum by incorporating a women-centred feminist historical approach and a holistic feminist anthropological approach with American women of color's feminist politics with an emphasis on the interconnectedness of sexism, racism, classism and homophobia in the American social systems and cultural ideologies.My work is based on the belief that an Asian American Women's Studies method must be founded on a feminist politics which is specifically derived from their own definition of themselves and feminism which are based on multiple consciousness raising and multiple identities of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.     

Telling the past – doing the truth: Toni Morrison's beloved

Abstract

This essay challenges the concept of historical truth by arguing that history is only true within its own parameters.One of the main interests of history is to organize (evaluate) events that were important in shaping the world as it presents itself today. What history neglects to describe are the forces and interests that structure that hierarchical system that history applies when writing its text, i.e.history. Taking Toni Morrison's Beloved as an example of writing the past that sets itself apart from writing history, the essays follows a narrative that is doing the truth by giving voice to the repressed fears of a white and black world that do(es) not dare investigate the parameters of existence.     

Between subordination and she-tiger: Social constructions of white femininity in the lives of single, Protestant missionaries in China, 1905–1930

In this paper I focus on the social constructions of gender in the lives of single Protestant missionary women, exploring how they were able to expand notions of White femininity by utilising both ideologies of devotional domesticity and the personal support and professional validation of women-identified communities. I suggest that these freedoms were directly related to certain framings of indigenous Chinese men and women — specifically, the emasculated Chinese male who was seen as little threat to Western women's safety, and the victimised Chinese woman who required advocacy and rescue. To illustrate these issues, I use the writings of two White Methodist missionary women from the United States and England who served in China between 1905 and 1930, suggesting that such stretching of the parameters of femininity questioned the particularly androcentric nature of Western imperialist authority at the same time that it perpetuated the racial dynamic of a colonial social order.     

diasporic governmentality: on the gendered limits of migrant wage-labour in Portugal

This essay explores the meaning of diasporic practice as it has been applied within the contemporary Black Atlantic context. The general focus of this topic has been visible or performative practices that have broad audiences, ranging from diasporic members to the sociopolitically included or the privileged citizen. Moreover, the objects or products of diasporic practice are largely understood to be aesthetic; the literature has highlighted music, dance, art, and religion, for instance. In this essay I argue that a taken-for-granted prerequisite of a hierarchized viewing audience misses passing moments of negotiation that occur in silence or within disciplined exchanges among persons who we identify as diasporic. These practices build community in very powerful ways but may not leave lasting traces or archives; they have to do with fleeting displays of affect such as rage, shame, joy, etc. The ethnographic focus is African immigrant women's constrained work schedules in Lisbon and the ways their labour-time textures the types of community - building practices in which they engage on a daily basis. I address how gendered configurations of migrant labour-time -a condition for governmentality – influence the diasporic process by which a form of racial identification is assumed in the context of Portugal.