Fabulation: Toward Untimely and Inhuman Life in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

This paper brings together Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book [2013a, Artamon, NSW: Giramondo] and the concept of fabulation from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophical approach to literature. I employ their approach to explore the complex relation to history and language that Wright’s highly poetic novel illustrates: a relation to untimely and inhuman life that suggests other possibilities for living within the body politic than are currently available.     

‘Writing from the Fringe of Empire’: understanding the gaps,silences and underlying whiteness in Jane Sarah Doudy’s literary works

Jane Sarah Doudy was a writer who often wrote to project an image of an ideal colonial community. Embedded within this literary construction were very clear ideas about cultural norms, colonial patriotism and racial hierarchies. Her literary works, however, have been shelved and forgotten for the better part of seventy‐five years. They have been revisited here to provide a fresh new site for acknowledging the political, cultural and historical significance of white settler women’s narratives and for understanding how one woman’s ‘dialogue of domination’ reveals much about the complex interracial boundaries and relationships that often occurred on the fringes of empire.     

Recruitment and coercion in Japan’s far north: evidence from colonial Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries, 1910–37

In 1905, Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) became Japan’s second formal colony and the most sparsely populated territory in the Japanese empire. Despite its peripheral location and small population the colony was of important economic value, boasting considerable natural resources such as marine products, coal, oil and timber. This combination of richness and remoteness meant that enterprises in the colony faced an acute labour shortage. This paper examines the ways that enterprises operating in Karafuto sought to circumvent this problem by analysing the recruitment, management and maintenance of labour in Karafuto’s forestry and construction industries. It is found that a degree of coercion emerged at worksites in the colony, as management struggled to hold onto its workforce for the entirety of a project; however, coercion was not the norm and was strongly associated with specific recruitment grounds. Utilizing contemporary social research, colonial newspaper reports, oral testimony and other sources this paper finds that recruits from further afield were more likely to be involved in incidents of abuse than those in close proximity to Karafuto. Local connections, strength in numbers and mutual dependence of workers from these areas and Karafuto-based recruiters for work/labour served to reduce levels of conflict between the two parties.     

Beneath the surface: the masculine self and body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’

This article examines the relationship between the masculine self and male body in Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story ‘Green Tea’ (1872), using a masculinity studies lens to analyze Mr Jennings’ destabilized masculinity within the parameters of Victorian male gender norms. I highlight the interwoven relationship between the masculine self and the body through looking at the physical depiction of Jennings, arguing that Jennings’ masculinity, his masculine self, is imprisoned as a reflection of the physical body; a relationship echoing Victorian gender norms regarding masculinity and the body. In the story, a demon follows and watches Jennings, appearing when Jennings is engaged in activity. Focusing on the relationship between the demon’s manifestation and Jennings’ activity, I show that the demon’s presence results from Jennings’ nonconformity to traditional notions of the masculine self. Le Fanu’s emphasis on the demon’s gaze serves to criticize Jennings’ masculinity as Jennings becomes submissive to the demon’s presence; as a result, this submission is mirrored in Jennings’ deteriorating physical body and health. By positing the masculine self within the body, the story acts to highlight Victorian society’s rigid male gender norms and the penalization of bodies that undermine those ideals.     

Power and Rights in the Community: Paralegals as Leaders in Women’s Legal Empowerment in Tanzania

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations. This article argues that paralegals can be effective actors in women’s legal empowerment where they are able to work as leaders, negotiating power relations and resisting the forms of violence that women encounter as obstacles to justice. Paralegals’ authority will be realised when their role is situated within community leadership structures, confirming their authority while preserving their independence.     

Benedetta Faedi Duramy: Gender and Violence in Haiti: Women’s Path from Victims to Agents

This book review examines the recent publication, Gender and Violence in Haiti: Women’s Path from Victims to Agents by Benedetta Faedi Duramy. Duramy provides an in-depth contextualized discussion of sexual violence in Haiti, where she examines the role that women survivors of sexual violence play as perpetrators of violence. Duramy engages personally with female victim-survivors to gain insight as to the daily threat of violence they experience and their motivations for participating in this widespread conflict. In light of the earthquake in 2010, which has exacerbated the level of risk posed to Haitian women, Duramy provides a number of recommendations that she argues should be implemented urgently.     

Beyond the Centre: women in nineteenth-century Iceland and the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history

In recent years, women’s and gender historians have paid attention to the dissonance between the grand narratives of European women’s history and the history and experiences of marginal regions and countries. This article discusses the challenge of writing women’s history from the margins—Iceland—into the framework of the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history. It is argued that this framework grounded in theories of progress and modernisation is too narrow, offering little space for different or marginal voices from rural societies. Using the case study of the ‘ordinary’ woman Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809–1871), the article argues that more voices from the margins and different histories, broaden our understanding of the multi-vocal and multi-levelled history of women in Europe.     

Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: the attitude of the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League to divorce,birth control and abortion in England, 1928–1939

In order to ensure that women benefited from their newly won rights as citizens in 1918 and 1928, the Mothers’ Union and Catholic Women’s League campaigned, along with feminist and political women’s organisations, to enhance the role and status of women in society. Difficulties emerged, however, when changes in public attitudes led to the liberalisation of the law in relation to divorce and birth control coupled with the growing demand within the women’s movement for safe and legal abortion. This article examines the arguments put forward by the two groups on how these reforms would undermine the role of women as housewives, mothers and citizens. It is argued that despite the fact that both groups appeared to be out of step with the wider women’s movement, they succeeded in highlighting a number of major social and welfare concerns facing many women at this time. As a result, they too made a significant contribution to the campaign for women’s rights during the interwar years.     

silent voices: mothers who kill their children and the women’s liberation movement in 1970s Japan

In the early 1970s Japan witnessed the emergence of a new women’s liberation movement that put forward an unprecedented gendered critique of Japanese post-war society. Known as ūman ribu (woman lib) or simply ribu (lib), this movement appeared at a historical time when the numerical increase in cases of mothers who killed their own children prompted the news media to describe maternal filicide as a dramatic social phenomenon. This article explores ribu’s engagement with the increased public visibility of mothers who kill. It contends that the solidarity and support the movement demonstrated for these criminalised mothers radically challenged idealised notions of motherhood, maternal love and the sanctity of the mother–child bond, and deeply questioned the post-war nuclear family as the cornerstone of society. The article investigates the revolutionary potential of ribu’s preoccupation with murderous mothers by framing it in the context of the movement’s call for consciousness transformation and for the pursuance of a more genuine relationality, and it gestures towards an understanding of what might be at stake in reading maternal filicide through the interpretative grid of a revolutionary agenda.     

‘Hand in hand with the women,forward we will go’: welsh nationalism and feminism in the 1890s

This article explores the history of women's liberalism in Wales in the 1880s and 1890s, during the period of the Liberal nationalist movement known as Cymru Fydd or Young Wales. The Welsh Union of Women's Liberal Associations (WUWLA) was founded in 1892 to provide an important bloc of votes for the Progressive (Suffragist) faction in the Women's Liberal Federation, but its aims combined Liberal, Nationalist and feminist objectives. This article argues that briefly, and uniquely, in the 1890s, the WUWLA was able to bring together feminism and nationalism in British party politics, despite some opposition from its own nationalist members. The active intervention of women ensured that the masculinist language of nationalism shifted to an emphasis on equality of the sexes. In 1895, Cymru Fydd, embodied in the Welsh National Federation, espoused women's suffrage among its objects, and gave women's organisations special representation in its structures. This change is explored both through the writings and the events – a series of meetings and conferences – which led to the formation of both the WUWLA and the Welsh National Federation. But the weakness of liberalism at the end of the 1890s, together with divisions within Wales, meant that the new politics was short lived. The decline of women's national organisation after this period, though not fully explored here, can be linked to those problems, but also to the rifts created between Liberals, women and men, over the issue of women's suffrage in the Edwardian period.     

The Spinster in the Garden: Joy and Transcendence in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

Abstract

This article proposes an original reading of Father (1931) and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), two texts by Elizabeth von Arnim that centre on a young single woman. It will examine how female autonomy is spatially imagined in the form of a garden and poses significant challenges to the patriarchal societies presented in the texts. Many scholars have detailed the recurring motif of the garden in Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899). The two texts this article addresses were published later than those that have been discussed in relation to the garden, and signal a move away from the married female towards an examination of the independent or single female. Significantly, they disrupt the traditional ‘marriage plot’ novel by tracing two single women’s movement into the garden as a retreat from the societies in which they live. In both texts, von Arnim presents a distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience for her female protagonists that contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by urban society. These texts turn on dichotomies—city/country, built/organic environments, repression/freedom—to expose the central characters’ repression and their attempts to gain some degree of independence. Each central character experiences joy as a result of her interaction with the organic environment and the power the protagonist exercises over this space.