Narratives of Irishness and the problem of abortion: the X case 1992.

This article explores the ramifications of the 1992 "X Case" in which an Irish High Court rescinded the constitutional right to travel of a 14-year-old rape victim who intended to obtain an abortion in England. The article opens by noting that this decision made the subordinate role of women in Ireland painfully visible, thus allowing Irish feminists to win a degree of national and international support. The article examines newspaper coverage of the injunction to consider how this abortion issue reconstituted discourses of women's status, sexuality, and national identity in Ireland. The article provides background information on women's role in Ireland, relegated by the Constitution to the domestic sphere, and reviews the origins of the 1983 "pro-life" Constitutional amendment. Next the article considers how the discourse surrounding the child's rape and resulting pregnancy submerged the autonomy of the child in the victimhood of her family. The article continues by looking at the internal and international denouncement of the Irish state for its action and the responding Irish construct of a civilized "us" versus a barbaric "other." This was countered by appeals to "the people's" will and reinterpretations of the 1983 amendment to justify a more pragmatic approach to public policy about rape that would de-emphasize the moral status of the fetus. After showing how feminist protest extended the questions raised to embrace the issue of national identity and women's citizenship rights, the article concludes that the battle for female reproductive and sexual hegemony in Ireland continues.     

The Language of Hysteria: A Misappropriation of the Master Narratives

Bronfen discusses the language of hysteria in conjunction with recent discussions of ethics, notably in the sense that the hysteric gesture of misappropriating a grand narrative such as humanism confronts the manner in which discussions of gender might traverse alterity without effacing or occluding it.     

Narrative Swerves: Grand Narratives and the Disciplines

Beer explores the legacies of Jean-François Lyotard's proclamation of the death of 'grand narratives', including the gendered dimension of their fall-out in a 'domestication' or everydayness despised because it is perceived to hold no possibilities for invention and newness. Beer does not, however, seek to reinvent 'domestication', but rather to explore the possibilities of the 'narrative swerve': a model of narrative as flexible rather than totalizing. Its possibilities emerge in the philosopher Richard Rorty's account of 'irony' (which he genders as a female trope) and, more powerfully, in the 'trickster' figure of folk-tale which takes on new resonances in postmodern feminisms and in contemporary literature. Rorty's ironist ultimately controls language and meaning through her characteristic device of quotation marks, containing words while disclaiming responsibility for them. A more enabling site for the trickster (conceived by Beer as an enabling feminist thought-tool and not as an identity for women to assume) and for the narrative swerve might, paradoxically, be found in scientific studies, which are, and despite their declared ideals of coherence and testability, fascinated with the relations of deviation and rule. Thus we find spaces-between and across the 'two cultures' as well as other cultural borderlines - for productive knowledge-testing and knowledge-making which are neither held fast by 'grand narratives' nor wholly abandoned in and to their dereliction.     

The Mythology of Female Sexuality: Alternative Narratives of Belonging

Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, £25, £6.99 pbk. (1999). Annie Coombes, Re‐Inventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, £40.00.     

Northern Ireland's Abortion Law: The Morality of Silence and the Censure of Agency

This article explores the context within which abortion law and discourse in Northern Ireland must be situated and understood, relying in part on post-modern insights into the wider and long-term implications of feminists engaging law and by examining the strategies employed in Northern Ireland around the issue of abortion. In 2001,the Family Planning Association (Northern Ireland) took legal action to force the devolved government to defend at a procedural level the unequal and uncertain form of common law abortion regulation for Northern Ireland. The authors examine the strategy of this review as well as the response of the High Court, suggesting that while it may begin to challenge the legitimacy of abortion law, feminists and pro-choice advocates must prepare for challenges beyond that, the greatest being the cultural challenge. The courts, legislators and other public and political institutions(including the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition) consistently explain the law's lack of provision for women with reference to the `pro-life' majority views of Northern Irish people. The authors question the legitimacy of this claim in a cultural climate of intimidation against the expression of alternative views. Women will continue to be marginalised and devalued in this debate if the silencing of the pro-choice community and bodies responsible for protecting human rights is not redressed. A case is therefore made for a reconceptualisation of the abortion debate from the perspective of women's agency, which, alongside litigation and other strategies, is necessary to overcome the cultural censure that currently prevents meaningful dialogue. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Silences: Irish Women and Abortion

This article considers the forces which act to prevent women in Ireland from speaking about their experiences of abortion. It considers the various forms such silencing can take and the complexity of feelings and circumstance which women who have had abortions are subject to. In so doing it raises important questions about the way public debate about abortion between pro-choice and pro-life arguments - couched in terms of rights - acts to further silence women. Finally, the article calls for the creation of a new public and intellectual space in which the complexities of the issues can be realized. A new public space such as this could then facilitate the enactment of permissive legislation which in turn could enable women to decide the best pregnancy option available for them at any particular moment in their lives.     

Narratives of progress: cooking and gender equality among Swedish men

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cooking practices. For example, men may find cooking a tedious and stressful responsibility and foodwork a fatherly duty. This article draws on interviews with 31 Swedish men from 22 to 88 years of age, and explores stories about cooking and foodwork as part of their everyday lives and their life transitions and how these relate to broader notions of food and gender equality. The data illuminating the men’s stories can be synthesised into two narratives of progress: a narrative of progress in gender equality in Sweden, where men’s participation in household labour has become taken for granted, and a narrative of culinary progress among Swedish men in general and among some of the interviewed men themselves. We agree with previous scholars who have argued for a reconsideration of the simplistic picture of men’s cooking as only being for the self and for leisure. We further show how the men express foodwork as a self-evident responsibility, regardless of whether the men find it fun or not, and that a desirable masculinity is represented by a man whose cooking skills have progressed beyond the survival level and who is more gender equal than what are perceived to be less-progressive men from previous generations and foreign cultural backgrounds.     

Book Review: Narratives on gender,generations and ethnicity

ABSTRACT. Though the study of men and masculinities has always been part of Women's Studies, recent Finnish studies on men have often developed without explicit attention to gender relations. In a Nordic context, Finnish studies on men have been relatively neglected. In this article we provide a concise review of Finnish research on men, including special reference to men's relations to home and work, men's violences, and the social exclusion of men. We present a synthetic account of the recent development of these studies and a critique of the field, and suggest some ways forward in future studies.     

Personal Narratives, Social Justice, and the Law

North American writer Joan Didion’s eloquent testimonial speaks to the significance of storytelling in our lives. Personal storiesmake our lives meaningful. Part of this is because our stories, wittingly or not, become the means through which we fashion our identities for listeners. Or, as scholars from many disciplines have argued, identity and selfhoodare narrative accomplishments. In this formulation, an individual constructs a sense of self by telling stories or “personal narratives,” which describe “the evolution of an individual life over time and in social context” (Maynes et al. in Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and in history. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008, 2). While personal narratives contain unique autobiographical elements, the logics of storytelling and the values and beliefs of a particular time and place also influence the kinds of stories people tell. As feminist historian Mary Jo Maynes and her coauthors argue: “The stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual, but are told in historically specific times and settings and draw on the rules and models in circulation that govern how story elements link together in narrative logics” (2008, 2). Put another way, even the most idiosyncratic story is always in some way social: what narrators decide to tell is often guided by the expectations of audiences (real or imagined); the conventions of various genres (such as life history or autobiography); as well as the broader cultural narratives located in particular historical times and places. In this light, personal narratives at once provide evidence of a storyteller’s viewpoint and experiences as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they live.     

Chapter X: The Child Care Worker

No abstract available for this article.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.