Trickster Humour in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home: Negotiating Arab American Muslim Female Sexuality

Randa Jarrar’ s A Map of Home (2008), a major contemporary Arab American woman's novel, utilizes trickster humour as a way to resist the ideological manufacture of the Muslim female body propounded by US orientalism, Islamist orthodoxy and secular Arab patriarchy. Current scholarship on A Map of Home has not examined the relationship between humour and contemporary female sexuality. Focusing mostly on authorial tone, this article reads the novel's narrator-protagonist, Nidali Ammar, as a trickster figure, who resists being perceived as a cultural heroine and in doing so disrupts the sacredness of social conventions. The trickster A Map of Home celebrates, and Nidali enacts, prompts readers to laugh at key cultural norms shaping the Muslim female body in post-9/11 US sculpture. This inquiry examines a range of interconnected sexual themes—most notably, ‘proper’ sexual boundaries, orientations and codes of virginity—to illustrate how trickster humour fosters Arab American women's agency.     

Adolescent Sexuality:

This chapter examines recent Supreme Court cases about issues of privacy rights pertaining to adolescent mothers, and also examines various presumptions the Court makes regarding adolescents. These case decisions are viewed in conjunction with a review of perspectives on Black adolescent parents. Overall, we contend that the Court's decisions do not take into consideration cultural differences within our society. Adolescents bear the brunt of this cultural dissonance and cannot look to the courts for understanding or increasing access, Sexuality, possible pregnancy, and childrearing for adolescents require legal provision for the rights of teens so they and their families can make appropriate decisions that respect privacy and cultural identity.     

Lynette D. Myles. Beyond Borders: Female Subjectivity in African American Women's Narratives of Enslavement

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Woman Suffrage 6? Women's Rights, by Ellen Carol DuBois. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive, by Marta Caminero‐Santangelo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Common Science? Women, Science, and Knowledge, by Jean Barr and Lynda Birke. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement, by Julie Roy Jeffrey. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Feminism and its Fictions: The Consciousness‐Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement, by Lisa Marie Hogeland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, by Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, edited by Julia M. Walker. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.     

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.     

Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field

The papers in the following section arose from a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, titled ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field’. Participants in the roundtable were asked to reflect on the challenges confronting law, gender and sexuality (LGS) as an area of research and scholarship, and to ask what benefits, possibilities, risks and dangers accompany the establishment of a research terrain. The papers address such questions as ‘what is a field and how is it made?’; ‘has LGS attained the status of a field?’; ‘what does it mean to locate oneself within the field of LGS?’; and ‘what is the relationship between feminism and LGS?’. They also consider possible future directions for the field of LGS. Together, the papers provide a variety of differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the developing body of intellectual and political activity that might be labelled ‘law, gender and sexuality’.     

Narratives of Irishness and the Problem of Abortion: The X Case 1992

This paper considers the ways in which discourses of abortion and discourses of national identity were constructed and reproduced through the events of the X case in the Republic of Ireland in 1992. This case involved a state injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents, to prevent them from obtaining an abortion in Britain. By examining the controversy the case gave rise to in the national press, I will argue that the terms of abortion politics in Ireland shifted from arguments based on rights to arguments centred on national identity, through the questions the X case raised about women's citizenship status, and women's position in relation to the nation and the state. Discourses of national identity and discourses of abortion shifted away from entrenched traditional positions, towards more liberal articulations.     

School Belonging and School Misconduct: The Differing Role of Teacher and Peer Attachment

The schools-as-communities perspective provides a popular explanation for school-disruptive behavior, stating that interpersonal bonding at school and feelings of school belonging prevent misconduct. In this article, we build on this perspective in three ways. First, we test whether the preventive influence of school belonging acts at the individual or school level. Secondly, we test whether a distinction should be made between the different actors with whom students bond at school, by assessing whether perceived teacher support, school belonging, and peer attachment relate differently to school misconduct. Lastly, the present study investigates whether the associations of bonding with teachers, peers and the school with school misconduct differ by socio-ethnic school context. Multilevel analyses were performed on data from the Flemish Educational Assessment. The sample consisted of 11,872 students (51.4% female) in 85 schools, most of whom were natives (88.8%), with immigrants (11.2%) mostly having Turkish or Moroccan backgrounds (both about 30% of immigrants in the sample), and others Southern-European (16%), Eastern-European (8%), North-African (5%), or other (17%) backgrounds. Results showed that the students’ individual feelings of bonding with peers, teachers and school associate with school misconduct, rather than the overall school cohesion. Results further showed that, while higher perceived teacher support and school belonging related to less school misconduct, higher peer attachment was associated with higher rates of school misconduct. No differences were found by socio-ethnic context. Implications are discussed.     

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.