What are the key questions which could be addressed in women's studies?

As part of a panel session on the state and status of women's studies, this discussion paper addresses the aims of women's studies and feminist scholarship, stressing their links with, and accountability to, the women's liberation movement. It considers the politics of staffing in women's studies, issues of content, and the place of theory. It challenges us to remember the revolutionary intent of women's studies.     

texturing visibility: opaque femininities and feminist modernist studies

This essay examines women’s spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women’s bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women’s illegibility. Women’s visual prominence made apparent their ‘unknowability’, recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women’s opacity in the fashion and beauty press, I argue that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women’s place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. The essay draws on feminist and postcolonial theory to suggest that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity.     

中美贸易战评析与展望

中美关系、中美贸易战是中国崛起进程中不可逃避的一道坎，只要策略运用得当，在保持和增 强内部凝聚力、动员能力的基础上，以应对挑战为切入点推动自身改革，不断提高效率，敏锐识别、抓住危中之机， 中国就能经受住考验，保持、甚至增强国运上升势头。     

Gaining a Public Voice: Ottoman women's struggle to survive in the print life of early twentieth-century Ottoman society,and the example of Halide Edib (1884–1964)

After delving into the emergence of women in Ottoman print culture and the challenges associated with this process, this paper focuses on women's periodicals which provided a platform for women writers, education for a female audience and a means of communication between both parties. Analysing the social and technical challenges of establishing independently run and long-lived women's journals under the restrictive circumstances of the early twentieth century's gender-segregated Ottoman society, this article not only documents women's struggle for survival in the publishing world but also explains why women's periodicals and their female authors had an ephemeral print life. After acknowledging the role of print culture in the women's emancipation movement, the focus is on Halide Edib as an exceptional example in terms of her survival and transformation from unknown to world-renowned author. Her struggle to enter and become established in the print life of the late Ottoman society illustrates the potential and available positions for women in the publishing sphere and explains the failure of her female contemporaries to achieve success in this area.     

inhabiting or occupying the web?: virtual communities and feminist cyberactivism in online Spanish feminist theory and praxis

This article examines the relationships between gender and technology in Spanish feminist praxis online and argues that different perspectives on online feminist community-building offer distinct responses to cyberactivism, which is considered central to sustaining efforts for social change. To ascertain whether Spanish virtual communities and cyberactivism have the potential to address the challenges posed by the relations between gender and technology, we analyse feminist scholar Remedios Zafra's theoretical proposals, and the different ways in which this theory intersects with the cyberactivism put forth by two feminist web portals, Ciudad de Mujeres and Mujeres en Red. We will discuss to what degree particular Spanish feminist theory and practice online adapts to or challenges utopianism regarding the liberating potential of technology. We will also examine how, in the face of critical arguments about such liberatory possibilities, two options present themselves for women's effective use of technology: inhabiting or occupying the web through the construction of feminist communities online.     

Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history

The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp protest of the 1980s and 1990s has become synonymous with radical feminism. Given that many of the challenges raised and discourses employed were similar, it might appear as a relatively uncomplicated progression from Women's Liberation. From this perspective, the threat of nuclear war could be viewed as a stark indication of the persistence of male violence enabled by an unremittingly patriarchal world. The women's protest was therefore often described by those who took part as a direct challenge to the status quo, intended to bring about the cultural revolution required to overthrow it. This article examines two histories of the event published in the ‘post-feminist’ era of the mid 2000s. It will demonstrate how a shift in discourses since the end of the protest has enabled these emergent texts to challenge the previously dominant version of the Greenham peace camp. It will go on to suggest that this shift was necessary in order to communicate a new contemporary political message: a message that gains its authority by drawing on other ‘silent’ discourses from Greenham. It will compare this development to the post-suffrage period as observed by other historians. In so doing, it will once again reveal how closely the ‘present’ influences the reflections of the ‘past’, and how this affects the performances of participants in their autobiographical accounts.     

THE RADICAL POTENTIAL OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND INTRA-ACTION IN THE MUSIC OF ANNE BOYD

Anne Boyd (b. 1946) is recognised in the public domain as one of Australia's distinguished composers. Her work belongs in the Western art music tradition and emerges out of her entanglements with the Australian landscape and the music of South-East Asia. This article considers what some of these entanglements have produced and, in so doing, shifts the emphasis from questions of reflection and representation—in which Boyd's music might be understood to reflect in a representationalist mode those aspects of her identity that are bound with the Australian landscape—to exploring in a performative manner how her music offers glimpses into different aspects of the creative process in action. I consider Boyd's selected musical works and critique various biographical writings on Boyd, drawing on the work of Deleuze which I entangle with Barad's concept of intra-action. My aim is to offer a different model for thinking about the network of mutual engagements that are coimplicated in the music's becoming. I view Boyd's music as a becoming-woman, an animate flow and a dynamic process of intra-activity.     

FRAMING THE VICTIM

This paper analyses the (re-)presentation of rape complainant testimony on three Australian television programs which investigate the issue of football and sexual assault. The ways in which the testimony is framed—the use of others’ narrations, ‘expert’ testimony, and conventional film techniques such as music and editing—are critical in determining whether the woman's words are likely to be believed. Although the framing process is fraught, and complainants are frequently objectified and the authority of their words undermined, there is nevertheless great potential for the framing of a complainant's narrative to lend it truth-value and present it as believable.     

UNICEF, syphilis and the state: negotiating female citizenship in the post-Second World War world

Few charitable organizations have achieved the status of global recognition enjoyed by UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, which embodies the international effort to provide for needy children the world over. Created because of its synchronicity with the United Nations' stated purpose—to maintain peace in the world—UNICEF launched its operations in 1946. Its founding, early operations and eventual restructuring reveal a great deal about concurrent political and economic events, but also provide keen insight into international ideas about who qualified for full citizenship in the post-war world. The consequences of UNICEF's policies, procedures and practices posed challenges to notions of citizenship for both women and children. It challenged citizenship not by questioning sex-specific gender roles, but by judiciously adhering to the United Nations' promise to create equality for men and women alike. UNICEF found itself in the unique position to be able to globalize definitions of what constituted full citizenship in any nation, due to its rapid expansion throughout the world. Through its programs, especially those related to health care, it not only challenged these roles in the West, but began over several decades to complicate the definition of citizenship as it became a forceful presence in Asia and Africa throughout the 1970s.     

谈当代中国政治文化建构与思想政治工作

全球化导致政治文化的多元化。在全球化背景下, 我们应采取理性的态度来面对全球化对我国政治文化带来的挑战, 正确认识我国政治文化现状, 明确加强思想政治工作对科学建构当代中国政治文化的重要作用。     

The roots of rural agitation in India, 1914–1947: A reply to Hardiman

This constitutes a reply to David Hardiman's recent criticism of my article on the middle peasant thesis and its applicability to late colonial India. It challenges Hardiman's notion of the middle peasantry as too narrow and not the indisputable Leninist definition. Further, it emphasizes the emergence of a more flexible agrarian economy and society which, whilst not necessarily ‘capitalist’, renders redundant the concept of a traditional middle peasantry. Finally, Hardiman's interpretation of the Bardoli campaign of 1928 and its implications for understanding rural agitations in British India are critically examined.     

Women and Mental Health A Feminist Review

This article contextualizes some of the more specifically focused articles in this Special Issue of ‘Women and Mental Health’ by reviewing general historical and political currents structuring contemporary discussions around questions of models, treatment and provision for women within British mental health services. We highlight some particularities of the current British context (in relation to other national scenes) in terms of the forms and expressions of feminist activity around mental or emotional distress. While not absolute mirrors of each other, resonances between general trends in feminist debates and organizational forms within feminist mental health work give rise to a wide spectrum of sites of intervention. We discuss some of the conditions that gave rise to these forms of (visible) feminist intervention within mental health service provision, focusing particularly on women's counselling and therapy services, and we offer an analysis of the range and conceptual tensions within which such interventions may be situated, including contested perspectives on power and empowerment. We also consider ways in which women's political activity around mental health issues is likely not to be noticed as such, given women's prototypical positions as patients and practitioners. We end by identifying what we see as current challenges for feminist activism around distress and its links with the conditions of women's lives and oppression more generally, not only as instances of more general tensions and challenges within contemporary feminisms, but also as offering an arena of opportunity for broader alliance and coalition-building.     

THE SINS OF THE SON

Masculine sentimentality played an important role in Australian culture in the 1930s and 1940s, as in other places where plaintive country music songs attracted a passionate following. Using ‘Australia's Singing Cowboy’ Tex Morton as a case study, we show that this sentimentality became part of both the bush tradition and country music in Depression- and Second World War-era Australia, associated with the bushworker or rugged ‘lone hand’. This sentimentality was deeply problematic from a feminist perspective, as indeed was Morton's personal life. It romanticised what he called ‘the sins of the son’; that is, the lone hand's inability to do right by those he loved. It also glamorised his tears and self-pity, treating them as signs of his hardy masculinity. Given the significance of this form of sentimentality both in Australia and elsewhere over the rest of the twentieth century, feminist scholars of popular culture and historians of gender and the emotions need to pay more attention to country music songs about errant sons and lovers from the 1930s and 1940s.     

Augusta Webster’s Mother and Daughter and the only child debate

The enduring debate about family size has roots in Victorian England, most notably in literary works addressing the issue of balancing motherhood and a writing career. One Victorian writer and activist, Augusta Webster (1837–1894), directly addressed the issue of family size in her uncompleted sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which she began when her only child was a newborn. In this posthumous series of 14-line poems, Webster defends her decision to have one child and, in doing so, challenges popular assumptions that only women with multiple children could be considered ‘complete’, socially-acceptable mothers. Despite her efforts, however, and despite the rising popularity of one-child families, the results of numerous scientific studies and the lingering critiques of mommy blogs make it clear that challenges to mothers of ‘onlies’ remain.     

The relative importance of identity status interview components

Eighty college males were given an expanded identity status interview which included two new interpersonal-sexual areas, “attitudes towards sexual expression” and “sex-role beliefs.” The relative contribution of the new content areas as well as of the standard three areas (occupation, religion, and politics) to overall identity status was assessed by noting the extent of correspondence. Identity status in each content area was also compared with performance on the dependent variable of cognitive complexity. Ideology contributed more than occupation both to overall status rating, as well as to discrimination on the dependent variable. Results on the two new areas supported the view that interpersonal-sexual concerns are important for men's identity development as well as for women's. The finding that all interview areas corresponded well with overall identity status and discriminated significantly on the dependent measure leads to the suggestion that the process variables of crisis and commitment may so overshadow a particular content area that any content of personal relevance for the late adolescent might be used in investigating ego identity development.     

‘THE QUALITY AND NOT ONLY THE QUANTITY OF AUSTRALIA'S PEOPLE’

This article is an examination of Ruby Rich (1888–1988), an Australian feminist, concert pianist, Zionist, pacifist and eugenicist. Although much lauded by her peers, Rich has gone largely unexamined by historians, particularly in contrast to the recent research on her feminist contemporaries Mary Montgomerie Bennett and Bessie Rischbieth. I draw attention to Rich's remarkable life and varied experiences, and use her example to explore the relationship between feminism and eugenics in twentieth-century Australia. From the early 1920s, Rich became a prominent figure within several Australian feminist organisations and in 1926 was appointed the founding president of the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW, an organisation which espoused eugenics. Although it is often assumed that eugenics is innately anti-feminist, Rich remained an active champion of both feminism and racial hygiene for over 50 years. Her example therefore provides an opportunity to trace the unlikely sympathies between these two movements, and highlights the extent to which eugenics found acceptance among progressive members of the Australian community.     

特朗普政府执政以来全球贸易体系的变局：机遇与挑战

特朗普自执政以来,强力推行"美国优先"的经济政策,冲击着现行的国际秩序,使全球贸易体系出现前所未有之大变局。美国成"变量",单边对决多边,西方阵营分裂,新兴经济体和发展中国家群体崛起明显。变局中,特朗普政府孤立主义、单边主义、保护主义的政治经济学逻辑显现无疑,这给中国的发展既带来了机遇,又造成了新的挑战。因此,中国必须采取稳妥的应对策略,把握战略全局,维护中美关系稳定大局;深化改革开放,打造多边利益共同体;布局主场外交,提升中国的战略能力。     

Foetal politics and the birth of an industry

In early Western society, women were considered to have a minor role in the reproductive process. Their social status was, correspondingly, secondary. Since the eighteenth century, women's contribution to procreation has been widely accepted, yet their social status remains. Women's importance in the reproduction of the species has not guaranteed them social prestige and the argument of this paper is that women's social standing is being further assaulted by the legal and economic consequences of innovations in birth technology. Two well-publicized innovations, Artificial Insemination by Donor, and In-Vitro Fertilization (or ‘test-tube babies’) have provoked legal, political and economic considerations which focus upon the possibilities of extensive bioengineering. The significance of this for women is that birth technology is not being fashioned after the interests of its clients but, instead, is becoming a new mercantile frontier in which women's needs may well be eclipsed by commercial and political ambitions.     

The Republic is a Feminist Issue

The growth during the 1990s of a republican movement in Australia has stimulated among other things a feminist examination of both the gendered nature of republicanism and the under-representation of women in senior positions in republican organizations. Feminists have adopted several critical perspectives on Australian republicanism: one involves the claim for the redesign of Australian political institutions in order to maximize the representation of women and women's interests; another suggests that the neglected history of women's involvement in constitutional politics during the last century needs to be understood to throw light on ways in which republicanism can be made more meaningful for women now, while a third argues that republicanism is not essentially a feminist issue and should not be pursued as such. The article challenges this conclusion.     

Editorial voices

Jack Smith is an artist on the margins of official narratives of art of the 1960s. This essay attempts to read his works as a means of questioning the challenges posed to normative readings of the work of culture, by presenting ideas about queer performance. Smith's almost hysterical identification with Maria Montez, a 1940s film siren, is privileged in my reading. Her key film, Cobra woman, turns on the image of a wound that will not heal. In this essay, I read the wound as signaling the breaches in our attempts at full communication, and compare this state of being to the idiosyncratic form of the camp effect, which functions as a kind of hieroglyph, or broken sign. Read through Maria Montez, the ‘failures’ of Smith's practice are explored in order to invogorate the seemingly exhausted discourse on camp, as well as to pose a critique of the ways in which certain bodies are failed by dominant culture.