‘I DON'T WANT HER TO BE OVERWEIGHT LIKE I WAS AS A GIRL’

Widespread concern about a childhood obesity ‘epidemic’ has focused attention on the bodies, weight and food behaviours of mothers and their children. In childhood obesity-related discourse, mothers' bodies are framed in relation to the bodies of children, most directly in claims that fat mothers produce fat babies. Drawing on data from a qualitative study involving interviews with mothers of pre-school aged children, this paper examines how the blurring of body boundaries between women and children are translated into responsibilities in feeding. We argue that in the contemporary stigmatisation of fat, the external auditing of maternal feeding and children's bodies connects the bodies of mothers and children in detrimental ways. By focusing on the ways women are held responsible for both their own and children's bodies, we draw attention to how bodily aspirations, conflict and failure, shame, self-surveillance, judgement and guilt connect women to the bodies of their children. We stress the embodied significance of mother/child relations in early childhood nutritional care and we argue that a punitive anti-fat ethic threatens positive health outcomes for mothers and children.     

‘I Insisted I Was Myself’: clergy wives and authentic selfhood in England c. 1960–94

From the 1960s onwards, Anglican clergy wives developed a literature of protest by writing letters, newspaper articles and books about their lived experience. Clergy wives were protesting against their own incorporation into their husband's profession. By revealing aspects of their life histories, clergy wives challenged the broader gender inequalities of the Church. The article draws on recent research emphasising authenticity as an important concept for understanding romantic relationships and religious identities in the mid to late twentieth century. Clergy wives articulated a desire for authentic selfhood, which was often manifested in a need for domestic privacy, but could also underpin vocational ambitions within and without the Church. Though the influence was often implicit, contemporary feminist debates were also relevant to how clergy wives perceived their lives. Whilst the discourse of authenticity drew from liberal secular individualism, it continued to be most commonly framed by Christian ideals.     

‘I am not Mr. Mom:’ a qualitative analysis of at-home father’s struggle for legitimacy

Although scholarship on at-home fathers explores how men negotiate their masculinity and wrestle with social stigma, research has yet to address how language and micro-level interactions are used to undermine, or contest, men’s abilities to parent as well as to reconstruct dominant forms of masculinity and fatherhood. As such, the purpose of this study is to explore the challenges at-home fathers face when gender becomes a frame for evaluating their abilities to parent. Drawing on interviews with men who are primary caregivers, the focus here is on how language situates and delegitimize men’s parenting practices. The findings suggest that gendered discourses constrain men’s ability to parent and create struggles for them as they interact with family, friends and their community. Additionally, these findings demonstrate the flaws in redefining masculinity to incorporate childcare and the implications this process has on existing gender inequalities.     

‘I get together with my friends and try to change it’. Young feminist students resist ‘laddism’, ‘rape culture’ and ‘everyday sexism’

Abstract

Contemporary alarm about ‘laddism’ reveals what feminist research and activism has long-recognised; universities, like other social institutions, can be dangerous places for women. Research in the US and, more recently, the UK reveals alarming rates of violence, against women, the cultural and institutional norms which support violence and gaps in institutional responses. In the midst of this contemporary alarm about the university as a hotbed of laddism, there is a risk that the university – a site of potential empowerment and liberation for women (and men) – becomes re-positioned as a danger zone. The limited focus on danger and safety belies the potential of universities to enhance human freedoms through intellectual endeavour. We argue this progressive potential should remain centre-stage, as should university-based resistance to everyday sexism and laddism. This paper analyses accounts of young women feminists (n = 33) in UK and US universities. It explores their use of feminism and features of the university environment to resist and challenge oppressive cultures and practices. It argues that, despite encroaching neoliberalism and enduring sexism, universities continue to provide environments for engagements with feminism, enabling young women students to use feminism to resist and challenge sexism and to envision their feminist futures.     

Who Am I and Where Am I From? Substitute Residential Home Children’s Insights into Their Lives and Individual Identities

Abstract

Decisions regarding children’s residential care reorganisation are primarily based on an adult’s perspective of children’s wellbeing and care. While these adults tend to be well-intended and base their decisions off relevant evidence, the children’s perspectives ‐ which reflects their actual lived experiences ‐ is almost never considered. However, since children are experts of their own lives, they should have the right to participate and express their opinion: Their point of view could be of great value in developing residential child care. In this article, we provide SOS children’s insights into their own life experiences and individual identities. The data was collected during an ethnographic research in one of Estonia’s SOS Children’s Villages (SOS CV). This article aims to answer to following research questions: 1. What are the main topics in SOS children’s stories when they talk about themselves and their everyday lives in substitute homes? 2. What kind of identity can be determined from children’s stories? 3. How can the subtext within the children’s stories be used to develop a child-centred residential care? In this article, we present and discuss several key-findings. First, it is important to note that there are gaps in the children’s life stories, as they sometimes lack information about important people and events in their lives. Second, this lack of adequate information can damage the children's identities and, in turn, undermine their development. Third, the opportunity to talk about important life events encourages the children to ask questions, as they are interested in obtaining additional information to complete the gaps. Fourth, the children’s stories indicate the shortcomings of substitute homes, related to both culture and communication.     

Performance's mode of reproduction I: searching for Danh Võ’s mother

This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of contemporary artist Danh Võ, the essay explores how performance’s mode of reproduction can affect the reproduction and sustenance of minoritarian life against historical, social, and economic forces of elision, erasure, and annihilation.     

‘What can I do next?’: Cosmetic Surgery,Femininities and Affect

This article is based on a study of young people's understandings and experiences of body work (or body modification) in relation to gender and health. Drawing on feminist and Deleuzian–Spinozan approaches to the body, the article explores the embodied sensations, or affects, associated with the body's physical modification through cosmetic surgery as one practice of body work. This approach pursues a non-dualist analysis of the body and contributes to new understandings of body-modification practices such as cosmetic surgery as processes influenced, and informed, by affect. Through examples of differing experiences and trajectories relating to the practice of cosmetic surgery, which has long been a contentious issue in feminism, the article makes evident what a feminist Deleuzian approach means in practice and what it can contribute to analyses of the body in/and society. This approach can assist in exploring the complex ways in which gendered embodiments assemble, and in understanding the dynamics and processes informing differing bodily possibilities related to gender.     

‘Where am I in this story?’ – listening to activist women writers*

This study discusses the dynamic roles of activist women in militarized societies. It offers an analysis of the perspectives of Israeli activist women regarding their roles as women activists and writers. In their non-fiction writings, these activist women voice their resistance and document both their everyday lives and political perspectives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their socio-political activism and resistance to the Israeli occupation. These women were interviewed regarding their perspectives and struggles. The interviews were analysed by applying narrative analysis – the ‘Listening Guide’ methodology – to explore their various voices and narratives. By using this methodology, this study sought to uncover additional knowledge regarding women’s forms of resistance in militarized societies. We emphasize the importance of women citizens’ voices, narratives and points of view by presenting activist women’s critical insights on activism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and literature. Their curiosity, agency, critical perspectives, and resistance can be viewed as counter-narratives that de-centre Israeli hegemonic masculinity and demand a critique of the national and militarized ideology. Our article seeks to demonstrate the importance of women’s perspectives, everyday life experiences, dilemmas and struggles in a reality of conflict and war.     

“I Got Your Back”: Friends’ Understandings Regarding College Student Spring Break Behavior

Behaviors that pose threats to safety and health, including binge drinking and unprotected sex, increase during a week-long break from university. Understandings with peers regarding these behaviors may be important for predicting behavior and related harms. College students (N = 651; 48% men) reported having understandings with their friends regarding alcohol use (59%) and sexual behavior (45%) during Spring Break. These understandings were to engage in behaviors characterized by risk (e.g., get drunk [23.5%], have sex with someone new [5.2%]) and protection (e.g., drink without getting drunk [17.8%], use condoms [15.8%]). After controlling for previous semester behavior and going on a Spring Break trip, Get Drunk Understandings predicted a greater likelihood of binge drinking and alcohol-related consequences; No/Safe Sex Understandings predicted condom use; and Sex Understandings predicted not using condoms. Understandings with friends regarding Spring Break behavior may be important proximal predictors of risk behaviors and represent potential targets for event-specific prevention.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

‘Whether you are gay or straight,I don’t like to see effeminate dancing’: effeminophobia in performance-level ballroom dance

This article discusses recent responses to performances of same-sex male ballroom dancing in order to consider the subtle difference which can exist between homophobia and effeminophobia. Given that the world of performance-level ballroom dancing is a gay-friendly environment, in which many participants are openly gay identified, this article will argue that a discourse of effeminophobia, rather than homophobia, underpins the world of performance-level ballroom dance. Performance-level ballroom dance is often read as camp not only because it represents exaggerated gender roles but because its official technique requires that the male dancer synthesise codes of masculinity and femininity in his dancing. What protects the gender-dissident male ballroom dancer from being read as effeminate is that he is paired with a female body performing excessive femininity. Without the foil of the hyper-feminine female partner, the same-sex couple draws attention to the fact that the male ballroom dancer is not dancing as a man but in accordance with ballroom’s queer construction of masculinity. Given that performance-level dance has struggled for so many years to be viewed as masculine sport, practitioners may, quite understandably, be anxious about any representation which suggests that ballroom dance may be an effeminate activity.     

‘The Injustice of the Woman's Vote’: opposition to female suffrage after World War I

Winning the vote in 1918 for British women over the age of thirty and, in 1928, on equal terms with men, did not mean that the controversy over the legitimacy and soundness of women's suffrage ceased to exist during the interwar period. In the context of the backlash against egalitarian feminism, many men and women remained opposed to women's suffrage. This article presents the views of three individual women, Arabella Kenealy, Charlotte Cowdroy and Charlotte Haldane, who, although they held diverging views on politics and feminism, agreed that female suffrage might have adverse consequences for the future of Britain. They shared the widely accepted views on the disappearance of sex differences and on the danger of ‘race degeneration’, which led them to advance critical views on female suffrage.     

Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in South Gujarat,India—Part I

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.?     

“I have always been so afraid”: Fearsome Encounters in Unni Lindell’s Rødhette

Norwegian crime writer Unni Lindell’s novel Rødhette [Red Riding Hood] (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co, 2004/2010) is a narrative about a woman whose feeling of safety transforms into a fear of violation, and how her defence against this fear takes the form of systematic violence. The novel is a rewriting of the traditional tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and is a comment on the patriarchal premises of the most widely known version of this folktale. In the article, I discuss the representation of the female murderer as being in the grip of an affective economy based on the fear of male violence, represented in the novel by the metaphor of the “wolf”, and how fear grows into a comprehensive, moral and pragmatic, murderous orientation towards the world after an experience of violence. Theoretically, I draw on affect theory and particularly Sara Ahmed’s ideas about the affective politics of fear (The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and how this fear turns into a significant qualifier in encounters with people who are experienced as strangers (Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000). Fear is treated in Lindell’s novel as a psychological constriction and a tool for the construction of agency, through which the mechanisms of othering and violence are explored.     

And I Love You So

And l love you soThe people ask me howHow I' ve lived till nowI tell them l don' t knowI guess they understandHow lonely life has beenBut life began againThe day you took my handAnd yes l know how lonely(loveless)lifevan be     

Do I Know You?

No abstract available for this article.