Can women fly?: Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake and Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground

In this article Vonda McIntyre and Sally Gearhart have been chosen to represent two different trends in recent speculative fiction written by women: the books written by feminist writers to whom writing comes first, and those by feminists who write because they have a message they want to express. According to traditional literary and critical norms, the former group of writers write fiction, the latter propaganda. The question posed by the article is this: what is one to do if the conclusions reached through literary analysis are very different from the emotional quality of one's reading experience?     

双重取向—主体性神话—献媚——潘金莲故事的重述中发生的价值姿态变异

叙事文学文本是把一种价值姿态编制在一个故事之中。潘金莲故事的三个文本的不同叙述 ,就展现了三种完全不同的价值姿态     

Media and Militancy: propaganda in the Women's Social and Political Union's campaign

The integrated and sophisticated nature of the Women's Social and Political Union's (WSPU) propaganda campaign – which included newspapers, pamphlets, posters and merchandise – is often overlooked in suffrage histories. This article traces the development of propaganda by the WSPU within the context of the organisation's changing militancy, to position propaganda as one of the major elements of the WSPU's campaign. The interaction between these two central campaign strands – militancy and propaganda – is a focus of the article. Militancy is shown to have both facilitated and necessitated the development of the organisation's propaganda, but the WSPU's intensified militancy after 1912 is shown to have hampered the continued evolution of propaganda.     

Archives,genealogies and narratives in women workers’ education

ABSTRACT

In this paper I look back at my research of writing a genealogy of women workers’ education and I map methodological moves and strategies that I have deployed in the process. While there is a rich body of literature around genealogical histories little has been written about a genealogical approach to archival work. It is precisely in the lacuna of how to do archival research from the situated position of a feminist genealogist that I look at three interrelated methodological and epistemological planes: (a) living and re-imagining the archive; (b) working with the possibilities and limitations of archival technologies of the self and (c) considering the visual turn in the era of the digital revolution. While I perceive archival research as a process, I also take the archive as an event, marking discontinuities and ruptures in our modes of analysis and interpretation.     

``Is Alec a Rapist?' – Cultural Connotations of `Rape' and `Seduction' – A Reply to Professor John Sutherland

This article is a response to an essay written by an academic in English Literature, Professor John Sutherland. Through close textual analysis,Sutherland purports to resolve a well-known literary question: whether the sexual encounter outlined in the Victorian novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles should be classified as rape or seduction. The present article rejects his conclusion on the matter. An(equally) close analysis of the fictional text in question and of Sutherland's gloss, demonstrates the partiality of his critique, both in literary-critical and critical-legal terms. In addition, examination of the conceptual and historico-legal context regarding the notions of rape and seduction on both sides of the Atlantic highlights parallels between Sutherland's own partiality and that of the law. In short, the apparent objectivity of the textual analysis and subsequent critique undertaken by Sutherland is revealed as a continuation of legal and patriarchal prejudices defining rape and seduction. The use of close textual analysis as the key critical device promotes the apparent probity of his findings. Locating them in an essay collection designed for mass lay public consumption completes the circle – from partisan scholarship to `informed' popular prejudice. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

解放战争时期东北工业领域开展的献纳器材运动

"献纳器材运动"是解放战争时期中国共产党在工业领域领导的一场工人群众运动,这场运动缘起于抗日战争结束后东北工业饱受摧残、机器设备破坏严重的历史背景,旨在恢复工业生产、支援解放战争。在东北局和各地工会组织的有效动员和宣传下,东北各主要工业领域掀起了一场广泛的群众性献纳器材运动。这场运动在一定程度上解决了工业所需、满足了战时需要,也带动了全国工业领域的献纳器材运动风潮,增强了工人阶级的主人翁意识,具有重要的经济和政治意义。     

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.     

论科学宣传与经济建设的互动

科学宣传是科技转化为现实生产力的中介和助推器 ,它与经济建设是相互作用、相互促进的关系 ,科学宣传通过提高人的科技素质促进经济的发展 ;经济建设为科学宣传提供物质支持和发展动力。科学宣传必须面向经济建设的实际 ,才能卓有成效 ;经济建设不仅应为科学宣传提供物质支持 ,更重要的是 ,应成为科学宣传发展的驱动器     

texturing visibility: opaque femininities and feminist modernist studies

This essay examines women’s spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women’s bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women’s illegibility. Women’s visual prominence made apparent their ‘unknowability’, recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women’s opacity in the fashion and beauty press, I argue that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women’s place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. The essay draws on feminist and postcolonial theory to suggest that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity.     

Women in Eastern Europe: Survey of literature

Since 1975 there has been a considerable increase in the amount of literature, written in English, about the status of women in Eastern Europe. In this article it is argued that the growth of interest is related to the re-emergence of the Women's Movement during the sixties when feminists were looking towards socialist states for role models and for strategies to guide the transition to sexual equality in the West. This article reviews the literature on women in Eastern Europe and considers the impact of Women's Studies on East European Studies as a whole.     

Oprah.com: Lifestyle expertise and the politics of recognition

The contemporary mediascape has been marked by a proliferation of popular TV genres in which the public appear as central protagonists. These genres are part of a broader shift in the relationship between media and audiences which challenges traditional conceptions of public service broadcasting and appear to represent a shift from media as public knowledge to media as constituting a space for diffuse popular engagement. A central feature of this shift has been the growing role of popular forms of expertise on television. This paper maps the main critical debates around participatory television and the role of the expert, from earlier work on talk shows to more recent discussions of reality and makeover TV. It notes a transition within the critical media and cultural studies literature from a focus on public sphere theory and questions of democratization to a growing concern with the role played by popular media culture in supporting new modes of governance based on the expert mediation of normative self-control. In this paper we analyze the role of experts on Oprah Winfrey's popular website Oprah.com, noting both the utility and limitations of a governmental perspective. Extending upon Foucault's notion of the productive nature of liberal subjecthood, the paper suggests the more positive role played by popular expertise in contributing to a media-civic culture articulated to a politics of recognition.     

Like a tree

The contemporary mediascape has been marked by a proliferation of popular TV genres in which the public appear as central protagonists. These genres are part of a broader shift in the relationship between media and audiences which challenges traditional conceptions of public service broadcasting and appear to represent a shift from media as public knowledge to media as constituting a space for diffuse popular engagement. A central feature of this shift has been the growing role of popular forms of expertise on television. This paper maps the main critical debates around participatory television and the role of the expert, from earlier work on talk shows to more recent discussions of reality and makeover TV. It notes a transition within the critical media and cultural studies literature from a focus on public sphere theory and questions of democratization to a growing concern with the role played by popular media culture in supporting new modes of governance based on the expert mediation of normative self-control. In this paper we analyze the role of experts on Oprah Winfrey's popular website Oprah.com, noting both the utility and limitations of a governmental perspective. Extending upon Foucault's notion of the productive nature of liberal subjecthood, the paper suggests the more positive role played by popular expertise in contributing to a media–civic culture articulated to a politics of recognition.     

入世后宣传思想工作面临的机遇、挑战与对策

加入WTO,给宣传思想工作带来了许多的新课题和难题。只有科学地分析加入WTO后宣传思想工作所面临的机遇和挑战,积极制定应对政策,才能增强宣传思想工作的时代性、创造性、针对性和实效性。     

反虚构:新时期文学创作的一个新动向

20世纪 80年代中后期 ,文学的创作方法潜流着一股从“虚构”到“反虚构”的倾向 ,含有强烈的“非虚构”、“纪实”的新写实小说成了文坛一道流行色。产生这种现象的主要原因是与中国当下的社会变革紧密相关 ,它能将人们在这转型期复杂的情绪最迅速的渲泄出来。     

images within the precarity movement in Italy

The recent cycle of social struggles against precarity in Italy has been characterized by an extensive use of images representing precarious workers. This contribution explores this in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) protest campaign. The subversion of existing popular culture traditions was the main objective of the activists' newly created icons such as San Precario, Serpica Naro and other visual tools. The visual work on gender in the EMP seemed to fill a gap between theoretical work on the feminization of affective and immaterial labour and the less predominant presence of gender. Visual icons seem to have been at least as successful as text messages in publicizing the precarity discourse and their production deserves further attention.     

关于创新工会宣教工作的思考

在新形势、新任务的要求下,工会宣教工作面临着与时俱进创新发展的问题。目前,创新工会宣教工作,就是要把围绕奥运开展的各项工作作为一项育人工程、系统工程、精品工程,从观念、思路、内容、形式、机制、制度等方面实现创新发展。     

Suffering as esthetic and ethic among Pashtun women

Along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the Pashtun society, pain and suffering are an emic criterion of honor among women. This aesthetic ethic is expressed outwardly in statements and narratives by women in everyday life, but especially when their sons or husbands die, get ill or are the victims of accidents. On these occasions, related and non-related women are under obligation to visit the mother (or wife) and bring condolence. The woman entertains her female guests with a performed detailed narrative account of the event, in which she portrays herself as the devastated woman. Aesthetics and ethics are here combined, as the audience judges a ‘beautiful story’ by the amount of suffering the woman performer expresses having endured.Mothers must suffer over their sons in order to gain status and recognition, and a wounded or dead son presents an ideal occasion for a mother to attain this recognition by way of a narrative of the event, which acts as a vehicle through which she can publicly display her actions for the benefit of the community.The same image of the devoted, self-sacrificing woman can be observed throughout popular culture, (e.g. films, chapbook romances, songs, folk poetry), which is created and performed by men.This paper examines this ‘tragic aesthetic’ more closely, comparing one woman's personal narrative performed for visitors on the occasion of her son's shooting,² with a chapbook romance which is very popular among Pashtuns because it is considered to illustrate a woman's ideal behavior within the code of honor.³ In effect, her honor here results in her self-effacement and death. I compare women as bearers of folklore (the personal narrative) with women in folklore (the popular romance written by a male poet), and conclude by raising questions as to the identity and image of women as painted in each case.     

“The tender mother”: The social construction of motherhood and the lady's magazine

My aim in this essay is to explore the politics of one of the seemingly least political forms of literature, the woman's magazine. Specifically, I will analyze the ideological content of the Lady's Magazine, one of the most popular and profitable of British monthly miscellanies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth‐centuries.¹ In this essay I will explore the role the Lady's Magazine played in the development of the idea of the “tender mother,” a concept which was key in the formation of the cult of domesticity and in the development of the ideology of “woman's sphere” as a realm distinct and separate from the man's world of work.²An underlying assumption informing this essay is that the concept of motherhood was (and still is) culturally constituted,³ and that literature, including popular literature found in magazines, has played an important role in this process.⁴ In the Lady's Magazine's portrayal of motherhood we can see one of the means by which the ideology of motherhood, in particular, the concept of the tender mother, was created, legitimated, and perpetuated.⁵