Catherine Breillat's Romance and Anatomy of Hell: Subjectivity and the Gendering of Sexuality

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has consistently challenged viewers to consider the ways women negotiate sexual freedom in light of numerous forces of repression. This essay considers how Breillat's depiction of women's sexuality in Romance and Anatomy of Hell simultaneously evokes abjection and empowerment. Specifically, we consider Breillat's contrast between her female protagonists and male protagonists, her treatment of women and their bodies as infused with desire yet struggling towards sexual subjectivity, and the avenues available to women to define themselves outside of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that Breillat's provocative portrayals provoke consideration of the problems inherent in hegemonic female sexuality while also offering hopeful alternatives to sexual expression, sexual freedom, and changing definitions of power and pleasure.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

Reassembling Gender: On the Immanent Politics of Gendering Apparatuses of Bodily Production in Science

Abstract

Arguing that new feminist materialist work has insufficiently attended to how gender is differently materialized and embodied in practices with non-human others, this article examines ethnographically what genderings come to matter in the knowledge-making practices of mass spectrometry and peer review in a Czech research laboratory. The article returns to Donna Haraway's analytics of the ‘apparatus of bodily production’ and its extension by Karen Barad as a productive device for tracing the situational making and unmaking of gender in specific human–technology assemblages and the sedimenting histories of such intra-actions. Through a triple movement of disassembling, contextualizing and reassembling particular embodiments, the author brings unstable, implicit and absent genderings, and their affective textures, affordances and valuations to the fore, including the corporeal orientations associated with enterprising adrenalin-driven masculinity and denigrated forms of embodiment such as shame and defeat. The article shows how these (de)genderings render present tensions and exclusions in prevailing apparatuses of knowledge production and pose questions of responsibility.     

Gendering transnational radio: women listeners and the BBC Empire and Overseas Services, 1932–1967

ABSTRACT

The BBC World Service, today a respected broadcaster on the global stage, had its origins in the BBC Empire Service of the 1930s. Shortwave radio broadcasts from London explicitly targeted isolated white men in the geographically dispersed British colonies and dominions, with the intention of strengthening them in their imperial endeavours. BBC staff positioned women at the margins of programming and scheduling decisions. Yet for some women listeners radio was a crucial constitutive element of their multi-sensory empire (and post-empire) experience. This paper draws on the BBC Written Archives collection to explore the neglected topic of gender in relation to international broadcasting, focusing on how white women ‘exiles’ and settlers used and understood radio in their daily lives from the 1930s to the 1960s. BBC Overseas broadcasting, as the Empire and later General Overseas Services, provides a fruitful channel into further exploration of the gendered nature of the transnational domain, illustrating women's agency in the complex webs of empire.     

The detention of asylum seekers in the UK: bail for immigration detainees

Feminist economics draws increasing attention from professional mainstream economists. In this paper, we discuss methodological issues, some theoretical developments – notably on the household – and issues of economic policy. We point to parallels between feminist economics and institutional economics, and argue that these relations might be strengthened to the benefit of both.     

(En)Gendering indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in french colonial discourses

The issue of gendering highlights the indeterminacy of France's own conception of its role abroad, whose ambiguous and confused emphases are contained in the term la mère-patrie, and find expression in France's double mission to both nurture and subdue. The gendered and sexualised images variously attributed to Indochina in French colonial discourses sit uncomfortably alongside the more parental or familial configurations of the Franco-Indochinese relationship as expressed by the ideological imperatives of mise en valeur and the French colonial doctrine. The arrival en masse of women settlers and the consequent feminisation of settler society conflicted with the initial conceptualisation of Indochina as a male utopia. Whilst official France desired the further domestication of Indochina, and hoped to achieve this partly through the tacit moral arbitration of women, certain sections of the settler community resented this evolution, and desired instead a return to what was perceived as a more authentic and unadulterated society and relationship with Indochina.     

The maternity care needs of refugee and asylum seeking women in Ireland

This article presents some of the findings from the original research carried out with asylum seeking and refugee women in Ireland who were pregnant or who had recently given birth. The explosion in numbers in Ireland from 1998 onwards has been such that this group now comprises more than one in five of every birth in the country's three major maternity hospitals, all based in Dublin. The article explores the background reasons for the major increase in recent years of this group of women. It discusses the difficult circumstances encountered by women who must engage with a system of maternity care unused to such complex needs, amidst a general policy climate of uncertainty and even hostility towards asylum seekers. The research findings contribute to the feminist literature on maternity and challenge us to examine the way in which globalization is impacting on women as mothers and the need for challenging Western states anew on the development of a more coherent model of maternity care in response to the needs of such women.     

Adolescents' moral dilemmas: The context

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology which outlines the kinds of real-life moral dilemmas adolescents spontaneously present in open-ended semiclinical interviews. A coding procedure is introduced which delineates three aspects of these moral dilemmas, conflicts, context, and content, and an analysis is done of the category labeled context. One hundred forty-eight adolescents from two school settings were interviewed. The results show that the majority of both boys and girls in these samples describe moral conflicts in the context of a relationship, particularly involving friends. However, boys are more likely than girls to focus on the the self as the context of the moral dilemma with no other relational context present and significantly more girls than boys focus on relationships rather than self.The authors thank the Dodge, Klingenstein and Kendall Foundations for funding these studies.Her Ed.D. is from Harvard University, M.Ed. from Boston University, and A.B. from Ohio University. She was the Project Director for Carol Gilligan on a coed high-school study. Her present research interests are preservice teacher training and women's development.She is the Project Director of a longitudinal study of moral and social development in female children and adolescents and is the editor ofA Guide to Reading Narratives of Moral Conflict and Choice for Self and Moral Voice. Her Ed.D. is from Harvard University and B.A. is from Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas. Her research focuses on a developmental analysis of narratives of relationship in girls.Her B.A. is from Brown University and her research interests are in female development and children of alcoholics.     

Adolescent room culture: Studying media in the context of everyday life

For the past several years, the authors have been investigating adolescent room culture in order to learn more about the relationship between teens and the media. The bedroom, they have found, is an important haven for most teenagers, a private, personal space often decorated to reflect teens' emerging sense of themselves and where they fit in the larger culture. Teens listen to music, read magazines, watch television, do homework, and consider the events of the day in their rooms. They appropriate and transform media messages and images to help them make sense of their lives. By looking closely at how teens draw from the media as they construct their identities and personal worlds, the authors have come to see adolescent media use as a dialectical process played out through everyday practices. Their Adolescents' Media Practice Model highlights the connections between adolescents' identities and media selection, interaction, and application.An earlier draft was presented at the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in San Diego, California, February 1994.Received M.S. in television-radio from the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Research focus is on the relationship between the media and public health.Received Ph.D. in mass communication from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research focus is on adolescent health and mass media.     

Enclosing the global commons: the convention on biological diversity and green grabbing

‘Green grabs,’ or the expropriation of land or resources for environmental purposes, constitute an important component of the current global land grab explosion. We argue that international environmental institutions are increasingly cultivating the terrain for green grabbing. As sites that circulate and sanction forms of knowledge, establish regulatory devices and programmatic targets, and align and articulate actors with these mechanisms, they structure emergent green market opportunities and practices. Drawing on the idea of primitive accumulation as a continual process, we examine the 10^th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity as one such institution.     

Texts in context: Afro-Colombian women's activism in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

This paper speaks across the divide between feminist theorists and praxis-oriented gender experts to argue for a more enabling reading of postcolonial feminist critiques of gender and development. Drawing on the activism of Afro-Colombian women in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia – most especially Matamba y Guasá, a network of black women's organizations from the state of Cauca – it brings attention to the independent ability of women in these locations to reflect and act on their own realities and claims.     

The social context of teenage childbearing: Effects on the infant's care-giving environment

The effects of maternal age and the social context on the home environment, and maternal behaviors of adolescent and older mothers, as well as the stability of the care-giving environment, were studied. Fifty low-middle socioeconomic status (SES), primiparous, Caucasian mothers and their fullterm healthy infants were included. At four months, support systems and life stress were assessed, as well as the home environment and maternal behaviors. At two years, a similar home visit was conducted in a subsample. Adolescent mothers had less education, lower SES, and a different child care support system. They also differed in the home environment and maternal behaviors at four months. Some of these differences disappeared when maternal education and SES, or child care support and life stress, were controlled. Moderate correlations were observed between four months and two years home environment and maternal verbalizations. Thus, a combination of maternal age and other social factors mediate the negative characteristics of the adolescent mother's care-giving environment, which is relatively stable during the infancy period.Received Ph. D. from Harvard University. Main research interests are sociocultural aspects of development, teenage pregnancy, and infant temperament.Received Ph. D. from University of California, Los Angeles. Main research interests are determinants of neonatal and infant development and statistical systems.Received Ph. D. from Brown University. Main research interests are mother-child interaction, and language acquisition in the hearing impaired.Received M. D. from the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines. Main research interests are both animal and human studies during the perinatal period.