Lone motherhood past and present: The life stories of Finnish lone mothers

The aim of this study is to examine how Finnish lone mothers of two age cohorts construct their lone motherhood and also to show how the meanings ascribed to social phenomena are socially and historically embedded. Finland presents an interesting case for studying the links between the social and the individual because the country has experienced rapid social shifts since World War II. It is shown how specific social contexts to some degree set the parameters for how social phenomena are understood and interpreted, as shown by the differences in how two cohorts of life-story writers construct lone motherhood.     

THE SINS OF THE SON

Masculine sentimentality played an important role in Australian culture in the 1930s and 1940s, as in other places where plaintive country music songs attracted a passionate following. Using ‘Australia's Singing Cowboy’ Tex Morton as a case study, we show that this sentimentality became part of both the bush tradition and country music in Depression- and Second World War-era Australia, associated with the bushworker or rugged ‘lone hand’. This sentimentality was deeply problematic from a feminist perspective, as indeed was Morton's personal life. It romanticised what he called ‘the sins of the son’; that is, the lone hand's inability to do right by those he loved. It also glamorised his tears and self-pity, treating them as signs of his hardy masculinity. Given the significance of this form of sentimentality both in Australia and elsewhere over the rest of the twentieth century, feminist scholars of popular culture and historians of gender and the emotions need to pay more attention to country music songs about errant sons and lovers from the 1930s and 1940s.     

transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom: towards plan F—a feminist economic strategy

This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.     

Retracing the contours of her figure … slippages begin to appear: Reckoning the limits of the archive with Senam Okudzeto’s Large Reclining Nude

Large Reclining Nude (2004) by transnational artist and scholar Senam Okudzeto is an 86-inch by 63-inch acrylic drawing of a nude, black female body released into a bare milieu. At first glance, the figure is grounded as shadows cast across her body hint at the presence of a foundation. However, outside the bounds of the body, Okudzeto resists three-dimensional perspective, calling into question the necessity of mediational signifiers for the orientation of the figure. How are we to read this solitary body after Scenes of Subjection, after Saidiya Hartman recontextualizes black corporeality as social relationality, throwing the “autonomous individual?…?into crisis?” For this article, the author reads the lone, floating body of Okudzeto’s 2004 Large Reclining Nude for new openings into Hartman’s archival reckoning in Scenes of Subjection. She offers a meditation on the aesthetic techniques evident through the visual aporia of the drawing – irresolvable contradictions in the field of the visible – suggesting Okudzeto offers alternative reading practices that afford reengagement with Hartman’s work.