Performing the Self,Performing the Other: gender and racial identity construction in the Nanteuil Cycle

This article focuses on the Old French Nanteuil Cycle of chansons de geste, investigating the nature of medieval identity and its connection to gender, race and religion. The Nanteuil Cycle repeatedly uses disguise as a means of crossing gender boundaries, which allows the repositioning of identity and simultaneously reveals the arbitrariness of cultural categorisation. Although cross-dressing heroines abound in medieval literature, the fourteenth-century Tristan de Nanteuil contains instances where cross-dressing is both gendered and racialised, stretching the malleability of identity to the point that it seems physical form can be altered at will. The article discusses the distortion of genealogies in the Cycle effected by the challenges to the social matrix produced by disguise, with a new relational framework where wives may become fathers and mothers become husbands.     

Performing breastfeeding: embodiment,ethics and the maternal subject

Many feminist sociologists would agree that most breastfeeding research to date has been primarily undertaken from the perspective of medical and public health discourses. While there is evidence of a shift in research on breastfeeding to qualitative studies that focus on the lived experiences of breastfeeding women, this article addresses a number of concerns remaining in the literature surrounding breastfeeding. First, it questions the absence of breastfeeding as a legitimate philosophical topic, and, as a corollary, the invisibility of breastfeeding women as moral or ethical subjects. Second, by drawing on Michel Foucault's account of ethics and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, it is suggested that breastfeeding is best conceptualized as a gendered and embodied ethical practice rather than an aspect of one's being. Finally, this materialist approach to theorizing breastfeeding is discussed in relation to the Lucy Lawless poster that was released in Aotearoa New Zealand to launch World Breastfeeding Week in August 2002.     

Performing sinners: The Asobi and the Buddhist discourse of Tsumi

This essay addresses how Oprah's book choices are inevitably affective but not necessarily feminist. By reading Oprah's book choices as highly individualistic, I analyze how her choices might be more aggressive and more complex, thereby offering a sense of community rather than the power of individuality to her huge audiences. My argument is based on a belief in Oprah's communicative power, and especially if her book choices were invested with more complications than individual resolutions.     

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     

论社会管理与工会组织作用的发挥

社会管理是指在一定共同价值基础上,人们处理社会事务和提供社会公共服务的过程.工会组织广泛深入地参与社会管理,是对原有社会管理体制的完善,也是工会自身观念创新、制度创新和工作创新的有益实践.工会组织要在社会管理中发挥作用,就要处理好不同社会管理主体之间的关系,准确把握工会组织自身的定位,彰显工会组织在社会管理中的优势.     

Love and guilt: Normative orientations and their implications for accommodation and resistance among women

In the New Women's Movement we have discovered internal limitations to our liberation efforts. To a great extent these problems are the result of normative orientations of women. Internalized sex-role expectations lead women to reproduce the external conditions which serve to oppress them. Therefore women must begin to reflect critically upon these role models as a prerequisite for strategies for empowerment.However, the central sex-role expectations are contradictory: on the one hand women are socially obligated to behave in a loving and caring manner. The self denial and self-effacement which are demanded of women serve to maintain patriarchic dominance. On the other hand, this feminine social behavior encompasses a counterforce to the dominant values of exchange and competition: therefore it points beyond existing power relationships. Normative orientations of women ensure their accommodation and also their resistance to existing social relations.     

Muslim women and the burden of ideology

The patriarchal nature of Islam has led to the total submission and exploitation of female muslim workers. Although involved in the process of production muslim women are separated from the sphere of circulation and remain rooted in the sphere of domesticity. The double exploitation and enslavement of these women undermines the prospect of emancipation through competition in the labour market and makes them vulnerable to the lure of idealised images of motherhood and domesticity projected by the resurgent Islamic ideology.     

From the Drawing Room to the Stage: Performing Sexuality in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet

Ann E. Imbrie. Spoken in Darkness: Small‐Town Murder and a Friendship Beyond Death. New York: Hyperion, 1993. Pp. 261.