Catherine Cl ment and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001

And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory, by Anneke Smelik. London: Macmillan Press, 1998.

Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, edited by Elizabeth Fallaize. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, edited by Barbara Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, by Anna Battigelli. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood, by Philip Green. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

The Women and War Reader, edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

The Knotted Subjed: Hysteria and its Discontents, by Elisabeth Bronfen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, by U.C. Knoepfimacher. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.     

The toilet paper: Femininity,class and mis-recognition

This article unpacks the paradoxical and ambivalent meaning and value of femininity; both its theorization and its practice. To do this it draws on specific empirical sites in the UK—women's toilets—to think through the significance of the contemporary politics of recognition, a politics that Nancy Fraser (1995) argues is displacing the politics of redistribution. The first part of the article explores how the appearance of femininity as a form of cultural capital is utilized and theorized. It also shows how femininity is known and judged and frequently mis-recognised through historical classed positions that are premised on appearance being read as a value of personhood. This analysis is then applied to the empirical research, drawing on two different research projects to make its arguments. Using examples of the tension in women's toilets, it shows how the feminine-appearing body is judged on the basis of excess and devalued but also, paradoxically, given authority to shame and judge. The different processes of mis-recognition invoked in the toilets expose the way class underpins any reading of bodies on the basis of appearance.     

Turning like a Femme: Figuring Critical Femininity Studies

Psychotropics and alcohol are psychoactive substances with different cultural meanings and opposing gender associations. This paper examines the Swedish press debate on gender and psychotropics and compares it with the press debate on gender and alcohol, aiming to identify the conditions under which gendered moral boundaries of acceptable/unacceptable consumption are defended. The study shows that boundaries acquire a heightened moral status in news stories (1) that deal with a topic related to cultural ideas about essential gender difference, (2) where the cultural status of the psychoactive substance is linked to selfish and/or hedonistic motives, and (3) where innocent victims of consumption can be identified. Moreover, it shows that the “bad” characters constructed through this moral boundary are portrayed as exhibiting “excessive masculinity” and “insufficient femininity”. On the basis of these findings, it is argued that newspaper discourse on psychotropics and alcohol still relies quite heavily on gendered and heteronormative ideas.     

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Citation and Censorship: The Politics of Talking About the Sexual Politics of Israel

In response to critics’ claims that a discussion of sexuality and nationalism vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bears no relation to the author’s previous work, or to such discussions within the US or European contexts, this paper details the complex interconnections between Israeli gay and lesbian rights and the continued oppression of Palestinians. The first section examines existing discourses of what the author has previously called “homonationalism,” or the process by which certain forms of gay and lesbian sexuality are folded into the national body as the Muslim/Arab Other is cast as perversely queer, within Israel and the diasporas. The operations of homonationalism ensure that no discussion of gay and lesbian rights in Israel is independent from the state’s actions toward Palestine/Palestinians. The second section contains a critique of Israel’s practices of “pinkwashing” in the US and Europe. In order to redirect focus away from critiques of its repressive actions toward Palestine, Israel has attempted to utilize its relative “gay-friendliness” as an example of its commitment to Western “democratic” ideals. Massive public relations campaigns such as “Brand Israel” work to establish Israel’s reputation within the US and Europe as cosmopolitan, progressive, Westernized and democratic as compared with the backward, repressive, homophobic Islamic nations, which, in turn, serves to solidify Israel’s aggression as a position of the “defense” of democracy and freedom. The final section looks at the ways in which accusations of “anti-Semitism” function in academic and activist contexts to suppress critiques of the implicit nationalism within Israeli sexual politics.     

The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant women in Fortress Europe

This article is intended to contribute to the ongoing debate on the ideological, social and political formation of a New Europe. By focusing on the position of immigrant women it examines the gendered nature of the changing configurations of cultural and social European landscapes. Two features of immigrant women's positioning are the key issues of this analysis: regulations through national and European law and ideological representation. It is argued that the debate on European citizenship should be closely linked to the question of formal and substantive and also of symbolic rights. Moreover, feminists, when using the concept of difference in this context, should be aware of the power structures underlying differentiated social positions in society. European-ness will lose its exclusive character only if it provides a solid place in the symbolic order of Europe for immigrants.