Performing Social Reparation: “Comfort Women” And The Path To Political Forgiveness

During WWII, 200,000 girls and young women from across Asia were sexually enslaved by Japan—a tragic history unearthed less than 20 years ago and still inadequately addressed by the Japanese government. This paper examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the legacy of this “comfort women” history, problematizing its attendant rituals of apology, “political forgiveness,” and reparation. The author analyzes the meaning of apology and forgiveness, and develops a typology of “reparation,“ concluding that what surviving “comfort women” have articulated is a model of “social reparation,” or a holistic goal of mending the past and restoring an international human community.     

“(L)Activists and Lattes”: Breastfeeding Advocacy as Domestic Performance

This article considers how “lactivists” (lactation activists) consciously stage the act of public breastfeeding as a means of political advocacy, cultural resistance, and ideological subversion. Through the exploration of a specific nurse-in protest (the 2004 Nurse at Starbucks campaign in Silver Spring, Maryland), the author explores how the “domestic performance” of nurse-ins force spectators to confront (and hopefully, reconsider) latent and overt assumptions about motherhood in relation to parenting proficiency, civic responsibility, maternal sexuality, and political efficacy. In so doing, the author discloses how nurse-ins subvent traditional perceptions of mothers and mothering as a way of instigating social change.     

The Oprah shows I would like to see

This essay addresses how Oprah's book choices are inevitably affective but not necessarily feminist. By reading Oprah's book choices as highly individualistic, I analyze how her choices might be more aggressive and more complex, thereby offering a sense of community rather than the power of individuality to her huge audiences. My argument is based on a belief in Oprah's communicative power, and especially if her book choices were invested with more complications than individual resolutions.     

Gender, nation, landscape and identity in narratives of exile and return

This article is concerned with issues of nation, landscape, and identity in narratives of exile and return. It is based on the oral testimonies and written narratives of German Jewish Marxist women who were driven out of their homeland by German fascism, yet returned after the end of World War II, dedicated to the building of socialism, or more precisely to realising the dream of a society free of prejudice and discrimination. What interests me here is to elicit a sense of the complex ways in which people construct their sense of identity in relation to notions of nation and belonging. In particular, I am fascinated by what impelled this largish group of refugees from Hitler's Germany to return, and how they felt about Germany as “their” country (Vaterland), their “homeland” (Heimat), or at the very least their country of origin. Nor was this relationship static. This is a group of women who have “migrated” twice in one lifetime: the first time fleeing their homeland in a forced migration to escape persecution and death; the return a voluntary “re-migration” in the name of an ideological commitment. Their narratives present both exile and return in retrospect. Thus, their subjective identifications with notions of nation are also retrospective, relating to Germany first from the perspective of involuntary exile, or second, towards the end of their lives, from the vantage point of a united Germany, achieved at the expense of the death of the socialist dream in whose service they returned. This means that they have been forced—through moments of historical crisis—to renegotiate both their own identities and their relationship to Germany multiple times during a single lifetime. The intimate inter-relationship of the personal and the political in these women's lives, and the retrospective reworking of their historically driven life decisions makes these women's narratives on the issues of landscape and homeland particularly rich sources on the subject of identity and belonging.     

On Drugs: The Production Of Queer Filipino America Through Intimate Acts Of Belonging

With the highest recorded cases of HIV/AIDS among Asian/Pacific Islanders in the United States, queer Filipino Americans register as “toxic subjects” within epidemiological discourse. Yet, at what point do state-sanctioned norms of “abstinence only” and intimacy fail to deal with queer communities' lived practices? In this article, I address the tensions between public health discourse's framing of HIV/AIDS transmission within queer Filipino America and the actual experiences of this community on recreational drugs. Though the severity of HIV/AIDS experience within the queer Filipino American community is not to be underplayed, a reparative reading of these drug trips provide us with a productive notion of toxicity and alternative configurations of belonging, intimacy, and community-building. Through anecdotes and interviews, this article gestures towards how we can begin to think of queer Filipino American drug trips as community productions.     

Yugoslavia, an 'Almost Forbidden Word' Cultural policy in times of nationalism—interview with Dubravka Ugresic

In the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia many intellectuals, including writers, artists, and scholars, supported nationalist right-wing regimes and promoted narratives of national exceptionalism to justify relevant political decisions and cultural policies. The intellectuals who opposed these regimes were frequently silenced (censored and/or assassinated) and many of them eventually left the country. The following interview features the renowned writer Dubravka Ugresic, who analyzes Croatia's cultural and political climate at the outset of the war and explains how her opposition to the wartime Croatian regime led to her public ostracism and subsequent decision to emigrate to the Netherlands. Emphasizing the role that nationalist intellectuals played in altering former Yugoslav cultural policies, Ugresic discusses the politics of language, literature, and literary canon in the new states that emerged from Yugoslavia's violent dismemberment. Ugresic also reflects on how the new politics of ethnic identity affects international book markets in terms of publishing decisions, distribution of literature, and classification of writers according to national affiliation. In this process, Ugresic notes, Yugoslavia itself has become an “almost forbidden word,” and its nurturing of multiethnic and supranational literature and culture has been supplanted by narrowly nationalist cultural policies.     

Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

Motherhood as a national mission: The construction of womanhood in the legal discourse in Israel

The paper looks at the notion of womanhood that emerged from the discourse around two laws passed in the first years of the State of Israel: the 1949 “Defense Service Law” and the 1951 “Women's Equal Rights Law.” Law is conceived of as “producing” the cultural meaning of “women” as a social category and defining its relations to the state. My main argument is that in this discourse, the Jewish-Israeli woman is constructed first and foremost as a mother and a wife, and not as an individual or a citizen. The construction of a distinct category of women that emphasizes women's difference takes place within an ideological context of the self-conscious myth of gender-equality. Motherhood is defined as a public role that carries national significance. And it is via this notion of “motherhood as a national mission” that women are incorporated into the state and not through the universal characteristics of citizenship. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, coupled with the central role that the family and the military play within the Israeli culture and society are the major determinants of this specific definition of Jewish-Israeli women's citizenship.     

Pioneering women revisited: Representations of gender in some Israeli settlement museums

This study examines the representation of women in museums that are devoted to the preservation and celebration of the Zionist nation-building ethos of the 1920s and 1930s (i.e., Israel's pre-state era). These representations are encoded in the rhetoric of the museum guides. In the official discourse and the interpretive stances to which they give voice, the museums that provided ethnographic sites for this inquiry uphold the prevalent myth of gender equality in pioneering groups as if relates to women's participation in the male-dominated pubic sphere of “productivity” in agricultural and road construction work. At the same time, they reproduce representations of women as ambivalent participants in the pioneering enterprise. Their positioning within the redefined domestic sphere of communal living, women all too often remain marginalized participants; at times they are even “storified” as essentially objects of the male gaze.     

The women's project: A profile

This paper offers an analysis of the Oprah Winfrey talk show's success as emanating from an ideal typical form of branding that we term “dynamic branding”, in which the gap between production and consumption is almost entirely bridged. Oprah has managed to maintain a dynamic relationship with her viewers based on multiple feedback and feed-forward processes in which consumers' concerns are immediately translated into Oprah's performed identity in her talk show. Such an ongoing exchange of information with her viewers was the basis for Oprah's performance of her own self as a “failed self” embattled with the problems of everyday life, thus creating an equalitarian relationship with her audience. The success of Oprah's brand identity thus derives from its content as much as from the mode of its construction, a mode which involves an intimate and adaptive relationship with consumers that enables Oprah to immediately respond to and incorporate viewers' concerns, values and norms. This paper analyzes in detail Oprah's performed identity with analytical tools informed by linguistic anthropology and brings it into conversation with contemporary branding theories.     

Alice Havergal Skillicorn,Principal of Homerton College,Cambridge, 1935-60: a study of gender and power

This article sharpens our understanding of the intersection of the discourses of gender and power in the woman principal's role by an in-depth study of Alice Havergal Skillicorn, Principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, 1935-60. Like previous principals, Skillicorn constructed a subjectivity which was dual gendered. In her public life as principal, she adopted a masculine discourse of power which subordinated feminine discourse into the private sphere. But this marginalisation of feminine discourse in her public role made her unable, except in her most intimate emotional relationship, to enact an appropriate femininity in her private life. After a theoretical and contextual introduction, it is shown how Skillicorn marginalised and negated her femininity through her body, by failing to adopt feminine standards of attractiveness in her appearance and clothes. She successfully wielded autocratic power in the public sphere with a masculine discourse of political skill, financial acumen and, most importantly, an instrumentality in her dealings with staff and students, which was entirely devoid of a feminine desire to be liked. The difficulties she faced in the private sphere - difficulties which were assuaged but not overcome by homoerotic friendship - are also discussed.     

Impossible Hosting: D'lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

An honest human body : Sexuality and the continuum of resistance

Theories of resistance have informed ethnographic research over the last two decades. Researchers have been concerned to document the significance of counter-cultural acts of resistance and have highlighted intersections of class, gender and “race” within the processes of resistance. However, questions of sexuality have been largely silenced. This paper focuses on the experiences of six women who identify themselves as lesbian and attempts to assert the importance of sexuality within debates on resistance and accommodation. The experiences of these women reveal that lesbians are willing and able to use a conscious collage of bodily signifiers to resist the discourse of compulsory (hetero)sexuality. The “continuum of resistance” illuminated in this paper can encompass both the lesbian who wears her sexuality on a t-shirt and the lesbian who “passes” in a heterosexual frock.     

All Het up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Oprah Winfrey Show</Emphasis>

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah's presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. Here we shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualities of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of two of the key discourses which shape the show: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship. Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged.     

“Everybody's looking at you!”: Girls negotiating the “femininity deficit” they incur in physical education

There is a growing awareness of the complex and largely negative attitudes many girls in the UK hold towards physical activity in general and Physical Education (PE) in particular. This research in the UK involves a qualitative study of six Year 9 girls' experiences and motivations in PE.Reflexive interpretation and biographical analysis of in-depth interviews are utilized to explore the themes of the relationship between “sportiness” and heterosexual desirability; and the polarized images of “tomboy” and “girlie.” Work by Connell [Connell, R.W. (1987). Gender and power. Cambridge: Polity Press.] on the gender order, and theories arising from the cultural analysis tradition on teenage girls' subcultures and identity formation are drawn on in order to make sense of the girls' narratives.The findings of this research reveal that images of teenage girls and young women being physically active are non-congruous with the traditional ideologies of acceptable femininity. This paper describes how these girls negotiate the contradictions and the tensions caused by the “femininity deficit” incurred in PE by creating “double identities” and living “split lives.”     

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.     

Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy

One of the great insights of second wave feminism was the recognition that “the personal is political.” Many feminist psychologists (both practitioners and researchers) claim a strong commitment to this slogan and attempt to implement it through their theory and practice. This article explores four interpretations of “the personal is political” in feminist psychological writing. It is argued that far from achieving radical feminist goals, psychological interpretations serve: (1) to personalise the political, translating social, economic, and ecological concerns into individual psychological matters; (2) to foster revolution “from within” at the expense of political change in the outside world; (3) that insofar as it aims uncritically to “validate women's experience,” it ignores the social and political factors which shape experience; and (4) that the concept of “empowerment” depends upon a radical split between the “personal” and the “political”. In sum, it is concluded that femenist acknowledgement that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.     

Women talking : Creating knowledge through difference in cross-cultural research

This paper discusses the research process of a cross-cultural study investigating the health care experiences of Chinese Canadian and Indo-Canadian women. Employing the notion of reflexivity, the paper discusses the use of an accepted feminist method, the in-depth interview, in a study involving women from racialized groups. The paper discusses the layering of power relations at the different sites of data gathering, and the negotiation of “difference” between researchers, research assistants, and study participants throughout the study. The position of research assistants, as mediators of the research process, is given particular attention. In discussing our attempt to put the principles of feminist research into practice in cross-cultural research, we argue that problems encountered in the interview method require critical reflection, not only on the grounds of the practical issues of gaining detailed, narrative accounts of women's lives, but also in relation to the way in which “others” are constructed through research practices.     

African American Art in a Post-Black Era

The term “post-black art” was invented in the late 1990's by Thelma Golden, curator and executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and Glenn Ligon, an African American artist. This paper examines the origins of the term, its definition and the extent to which the phrase challenges cultural practices that adversely impact artists of color and women. A discussion of the works of two African American artists who worked in the early part of the 20th century provides historical perspective on the origins of damaging cultural practices which prevailed for many decades. Though the civil rights movement instigated real change, the era unwittingly played a role in introducing cultural policies and practices that continued to limit the way in which the work of women and artists of color was presented and interpreted to the public. The paper concludes by observing the work of individual artists who circumvented those limiting cultural policies and practices and who in their imaginatively inventive ways of engaging the public were the precursors to the current "post-black" point of view.