From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.     

The Peer Appearance Culture During Adolescence: Gender and Body Mass Variations

The purpose of this research was to examine gender and body mass, as factors linked to perceived experiences within the peer appearance culture. The sample included 215 girls and 200 boys who were either in 7th grade or 10th grade. Students provided self-reports on experiences in three domains: appearance culture among friends (appearance conversations and diet/muscle talk), peer evaluations (peer appearance pressure, appearance teasing, and vicarious peer teasing), and peer acceptance concerns (appearance-based acceptance, peer appearance comparison). The results indicated that although girls reported more appearance conversations, boys perceived more appearance pressure and teasing. Boys also admitted that they talked with friends about muscle building at a rate greater than girls talked about dieting. BMI showed distinct gender patterns. BMI was a key attribute that unified the experiences within the appearance culture for overweight girls. Among the boys, BMI was associated with differentiated experiences for underweight and overweight participants.Associate Professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Washington. She is a developmental psychologist specializing in the contributions of peers to body image and social-emotional well-being during adolescence. Research interests include body image during adolescence and gender differences.Doctoral student at the University of Washington in Human Development and Cognition. Her research focuses on the social-emotional development of adolescents, academic and appearance social comparisons, and issues related to gender and science. Research interests include body image during adolescence, gender differences, social comparison, and academic competence.     

Breaking the Silence: Gender Mainstreaming and the Composition of the European Court of Justice

Why has it taken so long for member states to appoint women to the Court of Justice? Despite having won relatively significant policy instruments for equal treatment at work and high levels of legislative representation, women in the European Union have been slow to extend the demand for gender mainstreaming to courts. Prior to 1999, the Court of Justice had had one woman member until Ireland appointed Fidelma Macken in late 1999, and Germany appointed Ninon Colneric and Austria appointed Christine Stix-Hackl Advocate General in 2000.The 1995 U.N. meeting in Beijing was a catalyst for the demand for balanced participation of women and men in decision-making processes within the E.U., and it coincided with Sweden, Finland and Austria joining and championing the cause of gender equality. In 1999, the Commission published a report on women in the judiciary and women lawyers began to organize across Europe. After tracing the appointment process, I review the European Parliament's role in championing women on the Court and consider recent developments. Courts, particularly supranational and federal courts, are representative institutions even if their representative function differs from legislatures. Non-merit factors have always been a factor in judicial appointments and thus the demand for women on the bench is not a terrible deviation from merit. An all male bench is no longer legitimate. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Escalon:

No abstract available for this article.     

Parity,Power and Representative Politics: The Elusive Pursuit of Gender Equality in Europe

In recent years the concept of parity democracy has rapidly risen up the European political agenda. Using a threefold typology of sex-quotas, this article undertakes a classification of the measures taken by the 15 old E.U. member states to improve the gender balance in representative assemblies. This is then used as the basis for an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of the parity approach as a tool to promote gender equality, including the constitutional obstacles which stand in its way. The article goes on to present a comparative study of several national systems in which attempts to achieve parity democracy have been pursued, concluding that, in order to maximise their effectiveness, parity measures must operate within a system of unbiased political structures and be properly adjusted to suit the particularities of individual national electoral regimes.     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

V.A.T., Taxation and Prostitution: Feminist Perspectives on Polok

Debates concerning the taxation of prostitution have occurred in taxation law and in feminist literature. This article will integrate the case of Polok v. C.E.C. [2002] E.W.H.C, 156; [2002] S.T.C. 361, within the feminist legal canon. The case is discussed in the context of the argument of the European doctrine of fiscal neutrality, which dictates that, regardless of legality as amongst member states, if an activity is levied to V.A.T. in one member state, V.A.T. should be levied on it in all member states. The doctrine of sovereignty accepts the possibility that the integrity of the V.A.T. system may be compromised by the levying of tax on illegal activities, in terms of the cooperation between tax and other aspects of the U.K.’s legal system. European law, feminist law, commodification and the marketplace are all considered within the context of these principles. The article also considers the place of Polok within standard feminist texts on prostitution. Different paradigms of prostitution define different aspects of prostitution as ‘problems’, and the article considers the implications within a feminist reconstruction of Polok of this. The article suggests that the challenge for a feminist analysis of Polok is to remain within the realm of European tax and competition law, and to render the perspective of the employees of the Polok taxpayers part of the substance of the deliberations of the case.     

Talent alone does not suffice: erotic capital,media visibility and global popularity among professional male and female tennis players

Following Catherine Hakim’s notion of the increasing significance of ‘erotic capital’ in contemporary society, this paper addresses the effects of erotic capital in the realm of professional sports. Erotic capital may be closely related to popularity and thus represents a key marketing asset, in particular for female athletes facing a predominantly male audience. These ideas are examined here through analysing the media visibility of top tennis players in the German print media, as well as their global popularity (measured by search engine queries). The results provide further evidence of gender discrimination in sport since they show that the popularity of female athletes depends on their physical attractiveness whereas such a relationship does not exist for male athletes. Given gender-discriminatory consumer and print media preferences, female athletes face strong incentives to adapt to a sexualized sports culture that reinforces hegemonic masculinity.     

Little Swans with Luxette and Loved Boy Pudding: Changing Fashions in Cookery Books

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.