‘Happy Abortionists’

Recent feminist scholarship about abortion in Australia has focused on the politics of abortion as it is played out in the law, the media, public discourse and political debate. This article seeks to offer new angles on the politics of abortion by focusing on the provision of abortion services and in particular the position of doctors in relation to abortion in Australia since the early 1990s. It crafts a theoretical framework to think about the place of doctors, and their patients, in abortion provision and sketches a history of doctors over the last two decades. It is based in a small interview project conducted by the author in 2013 and uses interviews to supplement documentary evidence with ‘inside information’ about local histories and the micro-politics of decision-making in order to build an account of the multifaceted position of doctors in relation to abortion. It also uses the interviews to build a picture of the subjectivity of doctors who play a crucial part in the provision of abortion services. It argues that the ‘pro-choice versus anti-abortion’ spectrum is inadequate for understanding the multiple negotiations that doctors make in relation to abortion. Responsibility is devolved, often to the individual, albeit in sometimes resistant environments. Neoliberal female consumer citizens, empowered by as well as subordinated to dominant discourses, are often oblivious to the history and politics that make abortions available. Some doctors, although caught up in these forces, claim to be ‘happy abortionists’.     

‘Porn Trouble’

In this article, I explore the emergent relationship between feminist media studies/cultural studies and the field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). EP scholars increasingly conduct research on media and popular culture. At the same time, media/ted texts are increasingly marked by EP discourses. I take as my focus commercial women's online magazines produced in the UK and in Spain and accessed globally. Specifically, I explore a recurrent thread in their discussion forums: women expressing confusion, concern, disappointment, hurt and/or self-doubt, and asking for advice on discovering that their male partners consume various pornographies. A feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis is developed to explore both peer-to-peer and editorial advice on such ‘porn trouble’. I show how pseudo-scientific discourses give support to a narrative of male immutability and female adaptation in heterosexual relationships, and examine how these constructions are informed by EP accounts of sexual difference. The article offers empirical insights into the penetration of EP logics and narratives into popular culture transnationally. Advancing the notion of ‘postfeminist biologism’, my analysis contributes to feminist interrogations of EP's ongoing popularity in the face of sound, longstanding and widespread criticism of it as scientifically flawed and culturally pernicious.     

‘THUGS AND BULLIES’

Abstract Traditional militant displays of proud working-class masculinity are no longer an advantage in union (or Labor Party) campaigns to win public support. This paper examines the contested masculinities within the construction industry, and specifically those deployed within the campaign by construction unions to achieve workers' rights on site, together with the strategic limitations for their campaigning options. The question of how unions in this sector can effectively campaign to protect their rights is considered, as is the dilemma for union leaders in managing members' legitimate outrage when its usual expression will replicate behaviour demonised by the unions' opponents. In the era of mediated political campaigning, and third-wave labour politics, unions are having to reinvent their public image and campaigning tactics. As the example of the construction unions shows, gender roles and performances of particular masculinities and femininities are highly significant in this process.     

‘HOTTEST 100 WOMEN’

Social movement theorists have developed several concepts to explain the role of social networking in maintaining social movements. This is particularly relevant for periods when levels of public activism are low due to backlash, hostile social contexts and structural uncertainties. As part of my study of the women's movement online and feminist blog networks in Australia, I provide a review of several of these concepts, interrogating their applicability to the study of online communities. This paper explores the relevance of the social movement theory concepts of submerged networks, abeyance structures and the related idea of counterpublics for the study of feminist blog networks. In 2009, the radio station Triple J's ‘Hottest 100 of All Time’ poll featured no solo women artists, and women played on few tracks. In response to this, several strands of discourse developed in the Australian feminist blogosphere identifying ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women. Activists developed a cross-platform poll on Twitter, Facebook and email, and promoted it through blogs and Twitter, to counter the ‘Hottest 100 Men’ with a ‘Hottest 100 Women’. This paper shows the ways these women have used blogging networks to challenge mainstream discourses and generate new ones.     

‘I get together with my friends and try to change it’. Young feminist students resist ‘laddism’, ‘rape culture’ and ‘everyday sexism’

Abstract

Contemporary alarm about ‘laddism’ reveals what feminist research and activism has long-recognised; universities, like other social institutions, can be dangerous places for women. Research in the US and, more recently, the UK reveals alarming rates of violence, against women, the cultural and institutional norms which support violence and gaps in institutional responses. In the midst of this contemporary alarm about the university as a hotbed of laddism, there is a risk that the university – a site of potential empowerment and liberation for women (and men) – becomes re-positioned as a danger zone. The limited focus on danger and safety belies the potential of universities to enhance human freedoms through intellectual endeavour. We argue this progressive potential should remain centre-stage, as should university-based resistance to everyday sexism and laddism. This paper analyses accounts of young women feminists (n = 33) in UK and US universities. It explores their use of feminism and features of the university environment to resist and challenge oppressive cultures and practices. It argues that, despite encroaching neoliberalism and enduring sexism, universities continue to provide environments for engagements with feminism, enabling young women students to use feminism to resist and challenge sexism and to envision their feminist futures.     

Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.     

MARRIAGE ‘AMONG THE MURKANS’

Abstract Stella Miles Franklin (1879–1954) is best known for contributions to a uniquely Australian literary tradition. However, during her American years (1906–1915) when she worked in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League, Franklin wrote much unpublished fiction in the New Woman literary genre common to early-twentieth-century US women's traditions. This paper focuses on two such little-known unpublished stories: ‘Uncle Robert's Wedding Present’ (1908) and ‘Teaching Him’ (1909), discussing ways their entanglements with questions of marriage and economics are grounded in Franklin's work and personal life and in the intellectual influences that shaped her writing.     

Where angels fear to tread?: ‘Third world women’ and ‘development’

Male Bias in the Development Process, edited by Diane Elson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Pp.viii + 215. £29.95 (hardback). ISBN 0 7190 2555 9

Gender, Development and Identity: An Ethiopian Study, by Helen Pankhurst. London: Zed Books, 1992. Pp.216. £29.95 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 157 9 and 158 7

Where Women are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India, by Kalima Rose. London: Zed Books, 1992. Pp.286. £32.95 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 083 1084 X

In debates between feminists from South and North it has been argued that Western feminists implicitly disparage ‘third world women’ by representing them as ‘sexually oppressed’. Further, it has been argued, ‘third world women's’ political struggles are trivialised when these women are discursively homogenised. It is argued here that while there is some truth in these assertions. Southern feminists should beware of cultural ‘fundamentalism’. However, their emphasis on the importance of socio‐cultural analysis is applauded, especially if we are to understand Southern economic contexts. Socio‐cultural analyses do not lead away from economic issues: they provide more explanatory variables and more complex models.     

Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.