Postmillennial femininities in the popular romance novel

Popular romance fiction was thought to carry a patriarchal ideology and was often dismissed as a manifestation of ingrained prejudice and bigotry against the female sex. However, there appears to have been influence from feminism, particularly where Harlequin Mills and Boon stories use the contemporary world and ‘reality’ as a touchstone. In this article I will discuss how the heroines of Harlequin Mills and Boon postmillennial ‘Modern’ novels display various expressions of feminism which contribute to the construction of their identities but that ultimately these tales rely on the dismantling of these autonomous identities sine the heroine is still required to be ‘swept off her feet’.     

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.     

other mothers: encountering in/visible femininities in migration and urban contexts

Whereas much has been written about migrants’ visibility, the multiple and complex layers of migrants’ invisibility invite further exploration. Migrants’ in/visibility is not clear-cut: it differs across various locations and, as such, demands a comparative, intersectional analysis. This paper seeks to explore it by investigating how recent migrants make sense of their own appearance, as well as those of others they encounter in their new places of residence. Specifically, I inquire into the notion of femininity as it is performed and perceived by Polish migrant mothers living in German and British cities. I discuss whose performances of femininity are visible and whose femininity is rendered invisible in the eyes of my research participants, and what implications this may carry for urban and migration research. Strikingly, the women I interviewed only seem to recognise white British and German women’s performances of femininity for what they are. Non-white and Muslim femininities remain, at best, invisible or, in the not infrequent cases of racism and Islamophobia, are stripped not only of their unique gendered features, but of humanity altogether. As seemingly peaceful interactions in urban space do not exclude privately harboured racial, ethnic, religious and class prejudice, a feminist revision of encounters with diversity provides valuable insight into the structure of such metropolitan paradoxes, yielding new understandings of how racism, classism and sexism persist alongside ostensibly inclusive urban cultures.     

From Fashion Colours to Spectrum Analysis: negotiating femininities in mid-Victorian women's magazines

This article closely examines the first set of accusations in the Matthew Hopkins witch‐hunting phenomenon in early modern England by paying particular attention to the female actors. It reveals that Matthew Hopkins was not only a member of the elite group that lent credibility to the witchcraft accusations arising from within the community, but he also had kinship ties with Susan Edwards, mother of the child supposedly bewitched to death by this group of women. This impacts on the traditional historiography concerning Hopkins's role as a witch‐finder. Secondly, the evidence reveals a group of marginalized women who befriended and supported one another. It is argued that this group of independent women, meeting together without the supervision of a man, challenged the social order. Witchcraft was a social phenomenon that had the ability to satisfy many divergent needs. When multiple agendas converged, a suggestion by a cunning person could end in the execution of many victims. The author suggests that the so‐called witches' meeting was actually a prayer meeting of semi‐literate, devout women, who fell outside the parameters of the ‘godly’ community of Mistley parish. In this case, the accusations may not have spread any further than the two women who were initially suggested by the cunning woman, if it had not been for the women's group meetings.     

Learning masculinities and femininities: power/knowledge and legitimate peripheral participation

This paper takes up my previous work [Women's Stud. Int. Forum 26 (2003b) 69] considering how masculinities and femininities can be regarded as local communities of practice. In particular, I focus on how the legitimate participation of children in adult communities of masculinity and femininity takes place within gendered power/knowledge relations. My main concern in this paper is the process of legitimation of participation in communities of masculinity and femininity practice. I examine this through a number of examples, including the medical appropriation of the process of gender assignment of intersex babies.Masculinity and femininity are intimately connected with power/knowledge. One aspect of the hegemonic processes that establish sex differences as important is the naturalization of the development and awareness of differences between males and females as part of early child development. To sustain gendered power/knowledge relations, we require our boys and girls to behave differently from birth and consciously or unconsciously reward them for this. In this paper, I tease out the relationship between power/knowledge, legitimation, and the learning of masculine and feminine roles within communities of practice.     

recovering the past in Jodhaa Akbar: masculinities,femininities and cultural politics in Bombay cinema

As the dominant media institution in South Asia, Bombay cinema's cultural production of narratives, images and spectacle plays a crucial role in the effort to consolidate and project definitions of the nation. Moreover, such images are exported to the South Asian diaspora worldwide as part of the processes associated with the globalized cultural product referred to as Bollywood. This discussion examines the production and reception of the 2008 film Jodhaa Akbar both as process and product of complex historical, cultural and political nation-building projects in which gender plays a central role.     

Orwell's despair,Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

George Orwell's 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwell's critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.     

创新:新时期高校共青团工作的主题

新时期高校共青团工作面临着挑战与机遇,创新成为新时期高校共青团工作的主题。高校共青团工 作必须从工作思路、工作内容、工作手段、工作机制等方面进行创新,不断推进高校团组织的建设。     

Dialogue, distance and difference: Feminism in contemporary japan

In this article, I examine the ways in which women’s groups in Japan have attempted to deal with issues of difference prompted by the co-existence of residents of different ethnicities in contemporary Japan, and the new issues raised by labour migration in the context of globalization of economies and labour markets. Japan’s place in contemporary East Asia can be clarified by using the term colonial modernity, to refer to Japan’s early 20th-century history; and the term postcoloniality to refer to the legacy of the colonial project in the culture of the metropolitan society. In representations of Japan’s contemporary “Others,” notions of gendered difference interact with representations of ethnic and cultural difference. Contemporary attempts to deal with these issues will be placed in the context of several decades of feminist activism in Japan.     

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.     

precarious changes: gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy

The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.