A chromatic presence: Barbara Hammer and “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At”

Since the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has been known for her photographs and experimental films chronicling and exploring lesbian experience. Since her 2006 diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she has ventured into an unflinching depiction of her own illness, aging, and dying. In “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At,” a 2014 collage series collaboration with Ingrid Christie, Hammer and Christie illuminate new modes of thinking about life, illness, and what we are describing the prismatic gaze: a mode of looking that subverts objectification and objectivity by positing sensuality, relationality, and spectacularity.     

Chapter 8: The “Citizen” in Youth Civic Engagement

SUMMARY

The concept of citizenship is a central, necessary, and defining feature of youth civic engagement. Any effort to educate young people for citizenship entails an implicit idea of what a “good citizen” is. There are a number of different and sometimes competing versions of what is a “good citizen.” This chapter reviews “standard” accounts of citizenship in political theory and offers lived citizen as a critical expansion and bridging dimension to current discourses of citizenship. We develop this idea through our readings of the three initiatives in conversation with the writing of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. Our reading of Arendt and Dewey provides a grounded, embodied, and fluid understanding of the relationship between doing citizen activities (PA, YIG, YSC), becoming citizen (learning through interaction), and being citizen.     

“It Is So Swedish That You Have to Work”. Returning Swedish Migrant Women’s Negotiations of Gender Equality and Heterosexuality

Notions of gender equality are strongly linked to the Swedish self-image. This article explores returning Swedish migrant women’s negotiations of heterosexual gender equality ideals based on their experiences of being housewives to middle- and upper-class men with work contracts abroad. From fieldwork conducted within two networks for returning Swedes, the article provides an analysis of the ways in which the women talk about work, gender equality, and domestic workers.

The analysis of the women’s accounts of gender relations shows that different ways of doing femininity are central in their narratives. By using the concepts “emphasized femininity” and “gender-equal femininity” the article highlights the different forms of femininity that can be traced in the women’s narratives. Drawing from the empirical examples, it is shown that the women are troubled by Swedish gender equality ideals and express a feeling of not “fitting in” after returning to Sweden. I suggest that the women’s articulations of not “fitting in” to (imagined) gender-equal Sweden tend to downplay the fact that they still have advantages that assist with “fitting in” from social positions such as class, whiteness, and (hetero)sexuality: positions which may create space for negotiating social norms in Sweden.     

“Hard work and much patience”. Career prospects for women scientists

The purpose of this article is to gain an understanding of the conditions which facilitate career attainment of women scientists. The data for this study come from interviews with 60 Norwegian scientists from university departments and institutes of applied research within the fields of chemistry, biology and psychology. The results indicate that flexibility in amount of years in recruitment position and a good mentor relationship are important strategies which can facilitate career attainment for women scientists. Improved working conditions for women can compensate for the more extensive child‐care responsibilities that women have compared to their male counterparts.     

“Mad Agnes” Ebbsmith: Revolutionary Roles and Reconfigured Relationships in A. W. Pinero's the Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith

In The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, Arthur Pinero's use of the “fallen woman” plot is an unusual one, with implications for the 1890s “New Women's” agenda that have continuing relevance today. Linking gender issues to national, religious, and class issues, Pinero examines the limitations of advocacy rhetoric and personal exemplification in promoting social change, and he uses the often puzzling action of the play to explore the possibility of viable alternatives.     

“A View You Won’t Get Anywhere Else”? Depressed Mothers, Public Regulation and ‘Private’ Narrative

The existence of ‘postnatal’ or maternal depression (PND) is contested, and subject to various medico-legal and cultural definitions. Mothers remain subject to complex systems of scrutiny and regulation. In medico-legal discourse, postnatal distress is portrayed as a tragic pathology of mysterious (but probably hormonal) origin. A PND diagnosis denotes ‘imbalance’ in the immediate postnatal period, although women experience increased incidence of depression throughout maternity. Current treatment patterns emphasise medication and tend to elide the perspective of the individual sufferer in favour of a blanket disease model. I emphasise the need for a feminist reassessment of maternal distress and the means available to ‘testify’ to its forms, and argue for PND to be analysed in biopolitical terms, perhaps as a ‘habitus’ materialising the low status and pervasive privatisation of Western mothers.

“Like Having New Batteries Installed!”: Problematizing the Category of the “40+ Mother” in Contemporary Danish Media

In recent years, the phenomenon of the “40+ mother” has generated much media attention in Denmark. Within these discussions, 40+ mothers are regularly labelled as ridiculous, bad, or irresponsible, their access to assisted reproductive technologies is restricted, and their right to them is questioned. This rhetoric is explored here within the particular context of the Danish welfare state, which commonly takes pride in being family-friendly and is often seen as liberal in terms of its gender policies. This paper analyses these debates and argues that the ideological category of the “old mother” is another formulation of sexist and ageist discourses that identify feminine ageing with decline and emptiness. Drawing on feminist age studies, these media representations are considered here as a manifestation of middle-ageism, in which 40+ mothers undergo a process of accelerated ageing as they fail to act their age. The analysis traces these emerging discourses and discusses some of the alternatives they raise. The paper is situated within social and feminist studies of time that aim to challenge normative reproductive temporalities and the ideology of ageing as decline, so that the category of 40+ mothers opens up new rhythmic options for reproductive time and for heteronormative life-course paradigms more generally.     

“Excuse Me,But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.