The historical understanding of female premodern possessions. Problematizing some gender assumptions in the historiography on Teresa de Ávila and Jeanne des Anges

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how to approach the history of female possessions today. By analyzing some recent contributions applied to two well-known historical figures: Teresa de Ávila (1515–1582) and Jeanne des Anges (1602–1665), I will problematize some of the ongoing history of female possessions. I intend a reflection on two of the current conceptual frameworks that feature the way history explains the subjective experience of these premodern possessed individuals. I focus on two kinds of interpretation: one I call the ‘neurotic’ interpretation, and the other the ‘subversive’ interpretation. Both constructions underpin explanations of women’s divine and demonic possessions, involving historiographical gender prejudices and ahistorical assumptions.     

Chapter 10. Children and Youth

Abstract

It is impossible to make global generalisations about children and youth from a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of such a limited number of participants in just one city, Limerick, Ireland, and one case, St. Augustine's. The goal of phenomenological research is, however, not to seek generalisations but to expose the individual case, so I have endeavoured to use a symptomatic rather than representative approach to risk biographies, in so far as we assume all biographies are composed of the partial perspectives of knowledges that are insider and situated. Truths are contingent on differences of time, space, age, gender, class, sexual preference, and other aspects of culture and context. Nonetheless, I am reminded towards the conclusion of this book of a comment made by well-known Irish economist, T. K. Whittaker (1997), who observed: “If we think about it, save for the vagaries of birth, errant biology, class and status, or simply circumstance, we are all but a half step away from the 'other' families we describe as in need of service, or 'at risk.' In the final analysis, it is not 'us' and 'them.' It is all of us. Together” (p. 138).     

Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective

Abstract

Two recently discovered letters have finally established what has long been conjectured, that the English radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay corresponded with each other. The occasion for the correspondence was the publication of responses by both women to Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. The article explores the nature of their responses and analyses the main differences between them. It concludes that the two women were remarkably close in their ideas on democracy, equality and women's rights ideas ultimately circumscribed by eighteenth-century radicals' notions of property and class     

Chapter 7. “Learn What You Like and Like What You Learn”

Abstract

Mark Twain once famously quipped, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” Paul Simon, the American folk singer, begins one of his songs “When I think back on all the crap I learned at high school, it's a wonder I can hardly think at all.” These men could just have easily been discussing schooling in Ireland, for this is the way many Limerick children and youth felt about formal school life prior to their involvement with St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project. But it is prior to their involvement.

This chapter provides a demographic profile of the pupils of that project and explores aspects of the day-to-day life of the project as a child and youth care intervention by examining some of the influences of risk replacement or resiliency projects that have influenced provision of services. This Limerick YEP attempts to alter the approach from one that is risk, deficit, and psychopathology-oriented to one that is protection, strength, and asset focussed. A question posed is, “Has the early intervention enrichment programme assisted the pupils to reintegrate successfully within the community?” By reintegrate I mean the ability to attend a regular school, hold a job, live again with their family and such things. This chapter also explores the establishment of the Youth Encounter Projects in Ireland in the context of an important but largely overlooked study completed by Egan and Hegarty over two decades ago (1984). No official review has been published since.     

Modernization,under development,uneven development: Prospects for a theory of third world formations

Taken as a whole, the two books considered in this review article ‐ David Lehmann, ed., Development Theory: Four Critical Studies, Frank Cass: 1979, £9.50, £4.95 (paperback) and John G. Taylor, From Modernisation to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment, Macmillan: 1979, £12.00, £4.95 (paperback) ‐ give a concise but comprehensive picture of the complex debates and the various theoretical impasses of today's ‘Third World’ studies. The four essays edited by David Lehmann are a critical review of both the old orthodoxies (development economics and modernisation theories) and the newer ones (neo‐Marxist theory of underdevelopment); whereas John Taylor's work is an ambitious attempt to go beyond the neo‐Marxist paradigm by laying the foundations of a mode‐of‐production approach to the study of third‐world formations.

Since I believe that the most lively and interesting debates in this field today focus on the various shortcomings of the neo‐Marxist approach, and on attempts within Marxism itself to overcome them, this review will pay particular attention to Henry Bernstein's article “Sociology of underdevelopment vs. Sociology of development?” and to Taylor's book.     

Heterosexuality and Race in the Australian Same-Sex Marriage Postal Survey

ABSTRACT

This article argues that race and class are central aspects of sexual citizenship in a Australia. It does so by investigating representations of heterosexuality that were produced and circulated during the 2017 same-sex marriage postal survey. Engaging with feminist and critical race theorists, we position same-sex marriage as not exceptional but part of a wider distribution of sexual citizenship within Australia's ongoing settler colonial history. We do so by introducing a number of illustrative examples of representations of heterosexuality produced during the survey. These representations reveal how same-sex marriage perpetuated heterosexual authority by asserting claims to authenticity and the occupation of space. We observe how heterosexuality in the survey material reproduced fantasies linking these three themes, for example, in an authentic white heterosexual family who speaks from their suburban backyard. It reveals that ceding to a bifurcated view of either progressive or conservative voices forestalls rather than advances other visions which may exceed the limited imaginings of sexual citizenship offered by the white liberal settler colonial state.     

Plantation rubber,land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos

This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationships of resource-based production. I examine the concession of 10,000 hectares by the central government of Laos to a Vietnamese corporation for extracting timber and planting rubber in the southern province of Attapeu. This acquisition has excluded farmers from land and resources that constituted their primary sources of (re)production, reconfigured rural property relations, altered the peasant relationship to land and produced new exploitative forms of wage labor.     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.     

The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which vegetarianism was found in the militant and non-militant strands of the women's suffrage movement, and looks at some of the other movements contributing to vegetarian and suffrage thinking. The arguments linking the two movements are discussed, ranging from the psychological identification of women with animals as victims of male brutality, to the empowering idea that women confined to a homemaker's role could still help to create a new and more compassionate world by adopting a vegetarian diet. Vegetarianism and the women's movement are seen as linked with each other, and also with theosophy and socialism, as complementary ways of creating that longed-for new world.     

Images of gender and the negotiation of agency in Salman Rushdie's Shame

This article is concerned with the images of gender in Salman Rushdie's Shame. I focus my analysis on one particular character, Sufiya Zinobia. By drawing attention to two images of gender I want to analyse the fundamental structures of gender with respect to two important concepts in the novel: shame and power. I first strive to unravel the relationship between gender and shame as it is conceptualized in the novel. The second image deals with the image of gender with respect to power. With the help of Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject I pinpoint this image. Finally, I make an allegorical reading based on these two pictures in order to uncover the agency embedded in the character. Since the images are static it is vital to conduct a reading that can entail an eventual shift in the structures. With reference to the Hindu goddess Kali I analyse how agency is negotiated with respect to the character Sufiya Zinobia.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

The sacred may not be the same as the religious: Angela Carter's ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ and ‘Black Venus’

John Everett Millais's painting The Bridesmaid (1851) depicts a young woman, on the evening of a wedding, attempting to conjure up a vision of her own future husband. This work has been linked to a number of others by Millais dealing with marriage, and has been seen as an articulation of 'matrimonial ideology'. Brown sets the picture in the context of the widespread, though clandestine, practice of fortune-telling, through which women in particular attempted to foreknow, and thus control, the central event of their lives. One of the most frequent questions asked of fortune-tellers was 'whom shall I marry?', the question the girl in the painting has herself asked. However, drawing on recent critical work on 'proposal composition' pictures, Bown argues that men, too, faced great uncertainty on the brink of marriage, and that artists repeatedly explored this uncertainty through attempts to represent a complex female subjectivity in their works. In The Bridesmaid Millais (who was thinking about marriage in the early 1850s) depicts a woman telling her fortune, but he also seeks to represent her as full of thoughts and feelings. The artist, and the viewer of the painting, then, engages in an act of divination in which he tries to discover the mysterious secrets of female subjectivity.     

The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.     

Stevie Smith's Myth-Kitty

Abstract

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 ‘statement on poetry’, contemptuously called a ‘common myth-kitty’. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this ‘myth-kitty’, especially ?n her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld.     

The Psychic Life of Money: Rethinking the Relation Between Ecology and Economy

ABSTRACT

This article takes up the recent debate on whether ecology and economy should be understood as entangled or analytically distinct entities. Instead of continuing to place these two strands of thought against each other, this article suggests another route into the problematic. This route is offered by thinking through the psychic life of money. In mobilising Jacques Derrida's theorisation of hauntology, it rethinks the spatiality and temporality of money in terms of dis/continuity. It argues that rather than opting on the one hand for a generous inclusive notion of the economic-ecological, or on the other for keeping money and energy apart as two separate realms, it is more productive to envision a modality of radical complicity structured by originary lack and excess of interest and survival.     

The Unexpected: Bionic Woman at the Millennium

Wilfred Bion's A Memoir of the Future provides a point of departure for feminist thinking about the millennium. Bion problematizes hopes for the future and associates thought with catastrophic change. Women play an unexpected role in Bion's experimental autobiography, posing provocative questions and unsettling the status quo . Since Bion has little to say about women in his clinical writings, A Memoir sheds light on his thinking and on the post-Kleinian culture of the 1970s. Book I of A Memoir depicts a class- and sex-nightmare played out between men and women, and women and women, in an age of anxiety whose setting appears to be the fascist 'pacification' of Middle England during an unspecified period. In this hallucinatory drama, all encounters are reduced to a brutal fiction of dominance and submission. The violence of the action suggests the primitive mental world of psychosis. Book II of A Memoir satirizes 'the brilliance of masculine thought' through the voices and criticisms of women. But this is the purgatorial movement of Bion's autobiography, inhabited by 'idées mères' (untransformed beta-elements) and haunted by the ghosts of Bion's traumatic war-time experience. A monstrous plot is hatched to kill primitive, fascistic Man, who retaliates and takes the female spoils. Is this the prelude to catastrophic change? Book III stages a country-house debate between different characters who represent aspects of Bion's personality, recapitulating the concerns of his later writing. The debate includes a meditation on childbirth as compared to war trauma, but Bion takes his distance from feminine intuition or common sense. Women fight on both sides of the barriers in the Bionic revolution - becoming, however, figures for the 'unexpected' and precursors of emotional upheaval. The gendering of millennial thought in Bion's Memoir provides an opportunity to scrutinize our own unthought fantasies of change.     

Feminist utopias and questions of liberty: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as critique of second wave feminism

Taking her cue from the recent Cindy Sherman exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, 'New Photographic Work 2000', Meagher considers the ways in which feminist art critics have analysed Sherman's work since it was first 'discovered' by Douglas Crimp in 1979. Her claim is that analyses of Sherman's work are involved in a debate about whether the images are useful or destructive to feminist politics. More importantly, what has come to be known as Sherman Studies places an emphasis not upon Sherman's art, but rather upon the identify of the artist. Instead of enquiring into the political status of the art works (are they feminist?), critics often end up asking after the political status of the artist herself (is she feminist?). Meagher's essay is in four sections: 'Encounters' traces the critical reaction to Sherman's work; 'In or Out of the Picture' considers the critical tendency to impose a narrative upon the work and the simultaneous insistence that this narrative is informed by the artist's feminist intent; 'New Photographic Work 2000' looks at the most recent reactions to Sherman'swork and prepares for the final section, 'Feminist Occasions', in which Meagher draws upon Nancy Miller and considers the relationship between feminist critics and their resistant celebrity.     

Old conservatism in ‘new’ clothes

This review article considers two books about development theory and practice informed by what is variously referred to as an ‘impasse'/'post‐impasse'/'post‐Marxist’ framework. The latter, its adherents maintain, is a new approach to development that transcends economic reductionism and instead recognises/celebrates cultural ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’. By contrast, it is argued here that many of the allegedly ‘new’ claims/arguments advanced by the postmodern ‘impasse’ are those traditionally made not just by populism but also by conservatism.

Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, edited by F.J. Schuurman. London: Zed Books, 1993. Pp.ix + 233. £13.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 2109

Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice, edited by D. Booth. Harlow: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1994. Pp.ix + 319. £19.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 582 234972     

Maternalism,professionalism and industrial welfare supervisors in World War I Britain

Abstract

During World War I industrial welfare work was firmly established as an occupation, especially in munitions factories under the Ministry of Munitions. This article explores the significance of the fact that the majority of the welfare supervisors employed during the war were women. Welfare supervisors are one example of the ways in which middle-class women grasped career opportunities offered by the war. Much of their work epitomized contemporary concepts of ‘womanly' duties and was designed to protect women workers as mothers of the race. Women welfare supervisors were caught between the proto-welfare state's espousal of the ideology of maternalism, and their aspirations to professionalism. To claim the status of professionals meant, not only proving their abilities, but also conforming to masculine norms of efficiency, rationality, expertise, organisation and status. By the end of the war, women welfare supervisors who sought to stay in the field had built a strong central organisation which proclaimed industrial welfare work as a professional part of management. Women's entry into the managerial level through welfare work, consolidated after the war, challenged the patriarchal hierarchy and traditions of business and industry. Thus women welfare supervisors juggled the feminine and masculine definitions of their work, but increasingly stressed its masculine managerial dimensions to claim management status.