From Female Shamans to Danish Housewives: Colonial Constructions of Gender in Greenland, 1721 to ca. 1970

Abstract

Taking its inspiration from post-colonial feminist scholarship, particularly the writings of Greenland scholar Karla Jessen Williamson, this paper sets out to trace the ways in which conceptions of gender in Greenland changed as a consequence of the eighteenth-century colonial encounter with Christian missionaries and a Danish trade monopoly. According to Jessen Williamson, pre-colonial Greenlandic conceptions of gender were characterized by a certain social indifference to gender, and the absence of a given hierarchy of male dominance/female subordination—a situation of genderlessness. During the process of colonization, European morals of sexuality and hierarchies of gender were introduced, along with hierarchies of race. The paper focuses on two historical periods, the 1700s and the 1900s. We see the first period as characterized by intricate intersections of gender, race, and class, as well as transformations of existing norms of gender and sexuality. As for the second period, the paper investigates how the notion of genderlessness might provide a background for understanding the different implications of the process of modernization for different groups of women in Greenland. Our aim is to contribute to a continued discussion of different understandings of gender in Greenland and elsewhere.     

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities,c. 1650–1838

Abstract

In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred ‘woman's culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are vital to understanding black women's self-defined (as opposed to white attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women's identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’ and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society. The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse how black women's relationship to the gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the development of colonial relations between black and white and the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European cultures for black women's gendered identities.     

‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

politicizing biographies: the forming of transnational subjectivities as insiders outside

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.     

gendered Islam and modernity in the nation-space: women's modernism in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity.     

Gender,ethnicity and feminism: an intersectional analysis of the lived experiences feminist academic women in UK higher education

Studies have begun to explore how those women academics committed to social justice, namely feminist academics, are navigating the increasingly managerial Academy. To understand how these multiple social identities, including gender and ethnicity, interact and intersect, this paper adopts an intersectional approach to understanding the heterogeneity of women’s experiences in academia. Five focus groups with feminist academics (n = 6–10 in each focus group) reveal concerns of hampered career progression as a consequence of being female and openly feminist. Some ethnic minority academics felt that they were forced to choose between a feminist identity or that of their ethnic background. For some women, their feminist identity provided opportunities for challenging dominant practices. The paper concludes that the heterogeneity of feminist academics’ experiences within academia is under-researched and that the lens of intersectionality helps to illuminate this. This paper advances understanding of multiple identities at work, though demonstrating that intersectionality can lead to the accumulation of advantage as well as disadvantage in relation to social identities such as gender and ethnicity, and a political identity such as feminist.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.     

theatres of difference: the politics of ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ in the plays of contemporary Black and Asian women playwrights in Britain

Since the 1990s, there has been an extended debate among feminists and left-wing thinkers concerned with notions of justice and equality about the relationship between ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ in contemporary politics. In this article, I examine the ways in which the issues of redistribution of resources and recognition are articulated in plays by contemporary Black and Asian women playwrights such as Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta, Winsome Pinnock, and Zindika. I shall suggest that their theatre work, and experience of working in the theatre, produce a dynamic and interdependent model of the relation between redistribution and recognition that ultimately suggests the need for recognition as the continuing primary concern of Black and Asian communities in Britain. This is evident in the plays' contents, the theatrical forms employed by Black and Asian women playwrights (often naturalistic and issue-based), and the funding and theatre policies with which they engage. These, as I shall argue, produce tensions between the collective identities which they hail, for instance, through the appellation ‘Black playwright’, and the individual identities the playwrights seek to assert, requiring negotiations between the empowering as well as constraining demands of collective identities and the post-‘cultural diversity’ aspirations of long-term theatre politics.     

Are Teens “Post-Gay”? Contemporary Adolescents’ Sexual Identity Labels

Recent reports suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels—“gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual”—have lost meaning and relevance for contemporary adolescents. Yet there is little empirical evidence that contemporary teenagers are “post-gay.” In this brief study we investigate youths’ sexual identity labels. The Preventing School Harassment survey included 2,560 California secondary school students administered over 3 years: 2003–2005. We examined adolescents’ responses to a closed-ended survey question that asked for self-reports of sexual identity, including an option to write-in a response; we content analyzed the write-in responses. Results suggest that historically typical sexual identity labels are endorsed by the majority (71%) of non-heterosexual youth. Some non-heterosexual youth report that they are “questioning” (13%) their sexual identities or that they are “queer” (5%); a small proportion (9%) provided alternative labels that describe ambivalence or resistance to sexual identity labels, or fluidity in sexual identities. Our results show that lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities remain relevant for contemporary adolescents.     

Hostages of destiny: gender issues in today's Poland

In an e-mail of June 2002, some women on Gender Link noticed that in Polish there is an expression, ‘husband of trust’, used to describe a person in the workplace appointed to represent workers’ interests. This role is more often than not given to women, and yet they are called ‘husbands of trust’. ‘Isn't that strange,’ they said. ‘Isn't it time to change this?’. It is. The change in gender role identities has started with questioning the language. It has started with asking who has produced and is reproducing the language, and for whom. The journey has not stopped there. From looking at language it has continued through social stereotypes, work, labour, money and the division of power, and reached the law and legal system itself. In Poland, the path has been rather circuitous and uneasy for we are, more than many other countries, bound by Catholic tradition mingled with apparent freedom. We had the ethos of Solidarity, and Lech Wa??sa. Wa??sa had a badge of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus on his jacket, which somehow helped label all Polish women, even those still very young, a ‘Mother Pole’. To resist that identity one needed to look beneath the image and be brave enough to call oneself just a woman. This article will try to analyse that process.     

The conscientization of women: A rite of self- initiation with the flavour of a religious conversion process

In traditional societies, young men and women are initiated separately into the adult world and, for various reasons, the male rite has typically been much more dramatic and elaborate. In western industrialized society, the formal education system became the initiation rite, par excellence, by which boys passed from childhood and the world of women into the public, adult world of men. By gaining access, albeit belatedly, to this male initiation rite, many women have thus gained access to the public, adult world but have found that they have had to give up being women. Other women have remained with the traditional female initiation rites of marriage and motherhood and have discovered that society does not really consider them to be adults. Another group of women have tried both routes to adulthood and have been unable to integrate their identities as women and adults.When these women get together in consciousness-raising groups they find themselves undergoing a rite of self-initiation made necessary by the fact that neither the traditional female rites of marriage and motherhood nor the masculine rites of formal education are adequate for women who wish to be considered both female and adult. Women in CR groups develop a strong sense of themselves as adult women and then are faced with the crucial question of how to relate to a patriarchal society which does not accept or affirm this new identity. There is a parallel in the process of religious conversion which, if probed, can help feminists to reflect on what are the most effective ways for a minority group to influence the mainstream of society without losing its identity and original values in the process.     

“I No Longer Let Anyone Hit Me for Free”: Affective Identificatory Practices of Women Imprisoned for Violent Crimes

This article explores the ways in which Finnish women serving prison sentences for violent crimes attach meaning to their violence and to themselves in relation to it. The analysis is based on a study involving 20 imprisoned women, who either sent a written account or were interviewed. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of emotions. Hence, it focuses on the affective and discursive processes through which the women participating in the study enact identities in their narratives about their involvement with violence. These enactments are conceptualized as affective identificatory practices in which gendered, socio-culturally circulating meanings and valuations become entwined with personal histories in locally variant ways. Four different groups of selves that emerged from the participants’ narratives are discussed: victimized selves, defender selves, lost selves, and rehabilitated/unrehabilitatable selves. By looking at the constitution of these selves in close detail, I put forward a reading in which the participants are seen as primarily striving to enact autonomous identities and hence to subvert devaluation by distancing themselves from vulnerability, which threatens their integrity as subjects.     

Dainty little fairies: women,gender and the Savoy Operas

Abstract

Since the 1890s, amateur operatic societies have enabled middle-and lower middle-class women to overcome any stigma associated with public stage performance through their constitution as ‘serious’ leisure organisations. Some women have occupied positions of (situated) prestige, though others were confined to supporting roles. Amateur ‘operatics’ have generated a carnival atmosphere around the activity of performance, where boundaries between members' leisure, social and performing identities became permeable and easily crossed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a staple of the amateur repertoire since their late-Victorian composition, draw on a range of representations of masculinity and femininity that acquired new cultural relevance for the middle classes from the inter-war period. Positive representations of femininity are predominantly youthful. More negative representations of older women have their origins in the grotesque, cross-dressed dame of burlesque. Nevertheless, interview evidence demonstrates that older women in particular, aided by the possibilities of moving between performing and social identities that this leisure activity encourages, have made empowering and selective imaginative appropriations from these gender ideals.     

‘When Two Loving Hearts Beat as One’: same‐sex marriage,subjectivity and self‐representation in the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards, 1906–1916

This article focuses on the Australian case of Marion‐Bill‐Edwards who lived most of her adult life in male attire. It examines three bursts of publicity Edwards encountered, a 1906 criminal trial, her 1908 autobiography and a 1916 court case in which she was a witness. The case is significant because it makes an important contribution to understandings of the sexual subjectivity of women (especially women of the lower classes) who had same‐sex relationships in the early years of the twentieth century. The article explores changes in Edwards’ self‐representation and subjectivity in this pivotal period in which (research has indicated) new models for modern sexual identities began to emerge.     

the politics of conflict and difference or the difference of conflict in politics: the women's movement in Nepal

This article argues that an adequately historicized and politicized understanding of the women's movement in Nepal (or elsewhere) requires a detailed examination of the construction of the gendered subject herself in the complex geo-political space of the emergent (Nepali) nation state. In turn, this unravelling of the gendered subject in Nepal serves to reinforce the premise that the representation of ‘the Nepali Woman’ as a single over-arching category is a contemporary construction, which has been achieved at the expense of consistently effacing the historically prior multiple and contested ethnic/caste identities taken by thrust upon women in what is now the new Nepal. The ‘natural’ goal of the women's movement since post-1990 Nepal to achieve a (single) feminist agenda has become part of the problem, as it can only be achieved at the expense of respecting the radical diversity and difference that is covered over by the ‘theoretical fiction’ of the unified nation of Nepal. The main important players, whether it be the women from mainstream political parties, or the women of the NGO world or the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists), have all contributed to excluding and silencing radical diversity in the name of expediency and elite power brokering. Moreover, it is argued that the contours of this composite discourse continue to be shaped by the international aid industry in Nepal, where ‘development’ is not merely the epistemic link between Nepal and the ‘West’, it is also the locus classicus of generic apolitical consciousness-less Nepali woman whose cause is taken up by scholar and activist alike.