Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.     

Inventive Feminist Theory: Representation,Materiality and Intensive Time

Abstract

This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barad's terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminism's transformative nature.     

Constructing a Feminist Cinematic Genealogy: The Gothic Woman's Film beyond Psychoanalysis

The Gothic woman's film, as a particular 1940s phenomenon, responded to the social changes caused by the upheavals of the Second World War. It featured female protagonists, expressed anxieties about marriage and complicated the classic realist premises of narrative and heterosexual closures. As the Gothic narrative trajectory revolved around the heroine's pursuit of marital happiness, these films are often theorized in the sexually differentiated terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As a result, they are interpreted as cinematic manifestations of paranoia, primal scenes, passive female desires and the impossibility of female subjectivity. Tay considers how the Gothic woman's film may resist such psychoanalytic codifications by considering critiques of psychoanalysis and investigating the ways in which Gilles Deleuze's cinematic topography may apply to the genre. This engagement with Deleuze reveals how 1940s Gothic films--such as Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), Gaslight (Cukor, 1944), and Sleep, My Love (Sirk, 1948)--breach the narrative normativity of classic realist love stories like Random Harvest (LeRoy, 1942). Culminating in a detailed analysis of Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) as a film that sustains female transgression in its textual operation, Tay posits possibilities for furthering a feminist cinematic discourse beyond psychoanalytic codifications.     

The Question of Evil and Feminist Legal Scholarship

In this article, we argue that feminist legal scholars should engage directly and explicitly with the question of evil. Part I summarises key facts surrounding the prosecution and life-long imprisonment of Myra Hindley, one of a tiny number of women involved in multiple killings of children in recent British history. Part II reviews a range of commentaries on Hindley, noting in particular the repeated use of two narratives: the first of these insists that Hindley is an icon of female evil; the second, less popular one, seeks to position her as a victim. In Part III, the article broadens out and we explain why we think feminist legal scholars should look at the question of evil. In large part, the emphasis is on anticipating the range of possible objections to this argument, and on trying to answer these objections by showing how a focus on evil might benefit feminist legal thinking – specifically in relation to the categories of perpetrator and victim and, more generally, in relation to laws motivated by a desire to secure women’s human rights.     

Losing the Feminist Voice? Debates on The Legal Recognition of Same Sex Partnerships in Canada

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged.     

The Ethic of Care, Female Subjectivity and Feminist Legal Scholarship

The object of this essay is to explore the central role played by the ‘ethic of care’ in debates within and beyond feminist legal theory. The author claims that the ethic of care has attracted feminist legal scholars in particular, as a means of resolving the theoretical, political and strategic difficulties to which the perceived ‘crisis of subjectivity’ in feminist theory has given rise. She argues that feminist legal scholars are peculiarly placed in relation to this crisis because of their reliance on the social ‘woman’ whose interests are the predominant concern of feminist legal engagement. With the problematisation of subjectivity, the object of feminist legal attention disappears and it is in attempts to deflect the negative political consequences of this that the ethic of care has been invoked, the author argues, unsuccessfully. The essay concludes with suggestions as to how the feminist project in law might proceed in the wake of the crisis of subjectivity and the failure of the ethic of care to resolve it. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

美国最低工资与生活工资制度比较

最低工资与生活工资共同构成了美国的工资保障制度,其中,最低工资是基础性机制,生活工资是对最低工资的有条件补充,二者在适用范围、工资水平、实施效果等方面均存在较大差异.美国最低工资与生活工资的实践表明,对于大国,建构多层工资保障制度将更有利于保障劳动者的工资权益.     

美国华人餐饮业今昔谈

美国的华人餐饮业是随着19世纪中叶华人去往美国而在大洋彼岸落地、生根、发芽的。一百多年来,蕴藏着中国独特而又丰富饮食文化的华人餐饮不仅成为美国华人生存和生活的一部分,而且也成为海外华人的命脉。美国的华人餐饮业形式多种多样,主要包括茶楼和咖啡馆、外卖店、中高档餐馆和连锁经营店。华人餐饮业已成为美国饮食文化中不可缺少的一部分。     

A Defining Moment: A Feminist Perspective On The Law of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace in the Light of the Equal Treatment Amendment Directive

This article considers, from a feminist perspective, the introduction of the European Equal Treatment Amendment Directive (E.T.A.D.) and its impact on the law of sexual harassment in the United Kingdom. Since feminists identified sexual harassment as a problem for women in the 1970s, feminist legal scholars have focused their attention on the law as a means of redressing it. Bringing claims in the U.K. has been difficult because of the absence of a definition of sexual harassment and reliance in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 on a comparator approach. These problems are illustrated by the recent House of Lords decision in Pearce v. Governing Body of Mayfield Secondary School(2003). The failure of the House of Lords in Pearce to understand sexual harassment as an issue of substantive equality for women makes the introduction of the European law all the more the pressing. The author discusses the implications of the changes embodied in the E.T.A.D. in the light of feminist theory. She argues that the changes envisaged constitute welcome developments which will make it easier to remedy workplace sexual harassment. However, it is also likely that problems will remain for women in establishing sexual harassment claims, particularly if concepts of reasonableness and unwelcome behaviour continue to form part of the legal definition. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

Taking her cue from the recent Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, 'New Photographic Work 2000', Meagher considers the ways in which feminist art critics have analysed Sherman's work since it was first 'discovered' by Douglas Crimp in 1979. Her claim is that analyses of Sherman's work are involved in a debate about whether the images are useful or destructive to feminist politics. More importantly, what has come to be known as Sherman Studies places an emphasis not upon Sherman's art, but rather upon the identify of the artist. Instead of enquiring into the political status of the art works (are they feminist?), critics often end up asking after the political status of the artist herself (is she feminist?). Meagher's essay is in four sections: 'Encounters' traces the critical reaction to Sherman's work; 'In or Out of the Picture' considers the critical tendency to impose a narrative upon the work and the simultaneous insistence that this narrative is informed by the artist's feminist intent; 'New Photographic Work 2000' looks at the most recent reactions to Sherman'swork and prepares for the final section, 'Feminist Occasions', in which Meagher draws upon Nancy Miller and considers the relationship between feminist critics and their resistant celebrity.     

The Functions of Class at the Present Time: Including Taste,or Sex and Class as Culture

Gagnier provides an analytic account of current uses of gender, sex and sexuality, and of class as objective condition, role, identity, subjectivity, performance, product of cultural formation, pain and pleasure. She concludes that we shall do better today to take from the history of political economy a focus on the division of labour, the kinds of work people do, including women's unpaid labour at home, and the ways that work structures identity and subjectivity, than on more abstract class identity (e.g. wage-labourers and capitalists), and to see that both local and global divisions of labour or work patterns are along race and gender lines as much as along class lines. The introduction of consumption models of taste and status draws together both class and gender, for consumption and leisure, the realm for most wage-labourers of pleasure, is as significant in the formation of identity and subjectivity as work, production or pain. We should account for people's pleasures and desires as well as their pain and place in narrowly conceived 'productive' relations. Class is no less significant than it always was, but future work should disaggregate the concept along these lines, mindful of gender salience in the division of labour and the reproduction of class. And it should include critical analysis of the realms of taste, pleasure, consumption, leisure and status.     

The Development of a Parent Support Group as a Means of Initiating Family Involvement in a Residential Program

SUMMARY

Working with the families of children in residential care is critical to the success of the placement. For a variety of reasons, parents of adolescents in one residential setting were not receiving adequate services during placement. A parent support and education group was designed and implemented to provide opportunities for parents to access support, learn new parenting skills and, ultimately, optimize their relationships with their children. The responses of both parents and staff to this program were favorable. The group is now a regular component of the organization's range of services, and served as a springboard to enhance family involvement in other program areas.     

以人为本思想理念对高校工会实践的指导意义

高校工会在科教兴国,全面建设小康社会的伟大事业中,要善于把以人为本的思想理念贯穿在工作实践中。以维护广大教职工的合法权益为己任,积极落实依靠教职工办好学校的思想,重点做好三个方面的工作:树立主动为教职工服务的思想意识;把握求真务实的工作原则;搭建坚实的感情桥梁。     

The Impact of Language Status as an Acculturative Stressor on Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors among Latino/a Children: A Longitudinal Analysis from School Entry through Third Grade

This study examined the relationship between limited English proficiency status, and internalizing and externalizing behaviors among a sample of Latino/a children (N = 2,840) from the US Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten (ECLS-K) data set. Results of cross sectional regression and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analyses suggest that there is a positive relationship between limited English proficiency and externalizing symptoms, particularly by third grade. Additionally, sex and place of birth also helped to explain externalizing behaviors at various time points in the models. Place of birth and family poverty were significantly associated with internalizing symptoms. Implications for future research and interventions related to internalizing and externalizing behavior among the Latino/a school aged population are discussed.