between Islamophobia and post-feminist agency: intersectional trouble in the European face-veil bans

Women’s equality claims have occupied the forefront of the European debate on face-veil bans; most claims have been denounced as mere manipulation for anti-Islamic and/or anti-immigrant political agendas, and the dilemma between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles has been argued to be false. This article examines how opportunistic manipulation of gender equality claims and the ‘ethnicisation’ of sexism have been assessed and confronted in the scholarly debate opposing the bans, as well as the impact that this debate has had on women’s equality claims and the intersectionality issue. I argue that the women’s oppression argument has not been fully considered, because it would have disrupted the anti-racist struggle due to unresolved problems with understanding intersectionality.     

Liberal family law in the making: Nordic and European harmonisation

This paper discusses the past and contemporary legal harmonisation exercises of family law in the Nordic countries and Europe. The critique is that the harmonised ‹European family law’ only entrenches the status quo and reiterates traditional family patterns, the male norm, heteronormativity, and a public/private divide represented in the neutral guise of a liberal rights discourse. Furthermore, the critics point out that the political economy of legal harmonisation is, to a large extent, ignored. In the Nordic countries, egalitarianism and broad political deliberation characterised much of the previous legal harmonisation, whereas rights discourse in its liberal sense is a novelty, more or less triggered by the European integration. This paper discusses the gendered implications of the emerging rights discourse in the Nordic countries and the linkages between family law, the labour market and social welfare. The paper argues that the harmonisation exercise cannot be regarded as one consisting only of legal norms and reasoning, but rather it should be discussed from the perspective of a political and epistemological challenge to the prevailing ‹truths’ about marriage, family and sexuality.     

Who stays? who leaves? an examination of sex differences in staying and leaving

This article examines some of the major variables associated with the staying and leaving process, particularly as it operates similarly or differentially for male and female adolescents. Sixty attitude statements about aspects of school, parents, peers, teachers, and value orientations were obtained from 796 adolescents and factor analyzed. This subset of independent variables, together with a set of personality and ability measures, was then used to predict staying or leaving status. The discriminant analysis was undertaken using leaving status and sex (LVSEX) as the dependent variable. Using a stepwise solution method of discriminant analysis, two significant functions were identified-the first suggesting a sex dimension, the second a stayer-leaver dimension.Received Ph.D. from La Trobe University. Current research interest is adolescent development.Received Ph.D. from University of N.S. W. Current research interest is mathematical reasoning in adolescence.     

Gender,war and militarism: making and questioning the links

Feminist Review - The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of ‘masculinity’ that...     

ambiguities and ambivalences in making the nation: women and politics in 20th-century Mexico

By comparing two time periods, the early and late 20th century, this article examines the ambiguities and ambivalences in the state promotion of women in the nation-building projects of Mexico. I argue that in both cases, the state was keen to promote itself as modern and progressive and used women's status in society to these ends. Despite the explicit focus on women, there were many ambiguities and ambivalences resulting from the competing state projects in the political, socio-economic and cultural arenas offering women both privileged spaces and constraints in the development of gendered citizenship. The contradictions arise from simultaneously promoting women's rights, extolling traditional gender roles and fearing women's political activism – both conservative and more radical. Although these ambivalences and ambiguities remain a constant feature, there is a key difference in the two time periods: in one the regime is inward looking, economically protectionist and corporatist, while in the other a new vision of Mexico has attempted to dismantle the corporatist structures and state development project with private economic initiatives and political individualism. In both periods, women gained important rights but romanticized imagery of the self-sacrificing mother was mobilized to underpin change: women were expected both to change and remain the same.     

Striking fictions: Women writers and the making of a proletarian realism

The development of proletarian realism in the United States was part of a political strategy, although it was distinct from the Communist Party programme, which sought to portray a united, revolutionary working class. However, four of the earliest and most influential proletarian novels show that when writers focussed on women as both labouring and sexual subjects, the literary format was compelled to recognise a pattern of difference which conflicted with that goal of unity. Written in response to a 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930). Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932), Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home the Heart (1932) and Dorothy Myra Page's Gathering Storm: A Story of the Black Belt (1932) all conflict with the very literary and political conventions in which they aim to operate and, in so doing, add a significant dimension to what has been generally regarded as a formulaic and predictable genre.     

making politics visible: discourses on gender and race in the problematisation of sex-selective abortion

This paper examines the problematisation of sex-selective abortion (SSA) in UK parliamentary debates on Fiona Bruce’s Abortion (Sex-Selection) Bill 2014–15 and on the subsequent proposed amendment to the Serious Crime Bill 2014–15. On the basis of close textual analysis, we argue that a discursive framing of SSA as a form of cultural oppression of minority women in need of protection underpinned Bruce’s Bill; in contrast, by highlighting issues more commonly articulated in defence of women’s reproductive rights, the second set of debates displaced this framing in favour of a broader understanding, drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques, of how socio-economic factors constrain all women in this regard. We argue that the problematisation of SSA explains the original cross-party support for, and subsequent defeat of, the policies proposed to restrict SSA. Our analysis also highlights the central role of ideology in the policy process, thus making politics visible in policymaking.     

Doris Arnold: the making of a radio star, 1926–1939

ABSTRACT

Doris Arnold (1904–1967) was a BBC radio personality and the UK’s first female ‘Disc Jockey’. She produced and presented the gramophone record programme These you have Loved from 1938. Despite her fame, Arnold is oddly absent from broadcasting histories and little is known about her today. Hers was one of the best known ‘rags to riches’ narratives of the early BBC: a typist whose musical talent propelled her to stardom. This article explores Arnold’s rise to fame through a detailed evaluation of her personal staff files which expose a complexity of gendered issues including status, clothing and pay.     

Five women painters: The making of a television series

Broken Dreams? Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas

Race‐ing Justice, En‐gender‐ing Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. and introd. by Toni Morrison, Chatto and Windus, 1993, £12.99.

Unfixing the Maternal: the Case against Object‐Relations Theory

Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the ‘Good Enough Mother’, University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Troubled British Hearts

Rose Tremain, Sacred Country, Sinclair‐Stevenson, 1992, £14.99

Crossing Boundaries

Maureen Duffy, Illuminations, Sinclair‐Stevenson, 1991, £13.95, Fontana paperback, 1992, £5.99.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Jonathan Cape, 1992, £13.99.

Fairy Tales of our Time. Steven Spielberg (director), Jurassic Park