urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

Rewriting fertilization: Trust, pain, and exit points

Feminists debate the nature of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and women's choice in relation to it. In this article, we focus on the process of becoming and being an IVF user without questioning women's choices. This process is empirically examined within a feminist body approach. Based on interviews with 22 Israeli Jewish women who went through IVF treatments in two infertility clinics where one of the authors has herself undergone IVF treatment, the article focuses on women's pain. We ask how IVF users learn about, and manage pain, and whether the pain they experience drove them to abandon the treatment. The analysis we present reveals a process, based and shaped by the women's trust in IVF and by an inner struggle. Attempting to cope with pain, the women relied on an image of their bodies as detached from their souls, and they initiated exit points from IVF treatment once their emotional experience became powerful to the extent that such detachment could no longer be sustained.     

La Nouvelle Vague: Epiphanies, Encounters, Events

A recent collection of essays,Feminist Perspectives on Law and Theory,is here taken as the starting point for an analysis of the political trajectory of feminist jurisprudence. The ‘new wave’ of feminism borrows much of its inspiration from continental theory – from Derrida, Deleuze and Irigaray – and has been subject to criticism for its attention to language and its turn towards culture and aesthetics. Reviewing the materialist bases of the new wave, and particularly its concern with the immediacies of the body and events, it is argued here that it represents a return to the radicalism of feminist legal theory. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Youth and jobs: Educational,vocational, and mental health aspects

Much research has been done on the personality factors related to occupational choice and work performance during adolescence. However, only a few systematic studies have been reported on the effect of work experiences on adolescent personality formation. Studies in the second area are reviewed critically, their implications are discussed, and directions for further research are suggested.This paper was written for the Task Force on Work in America set up by the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C.Received B.A. Harvard University (1949), M.A. Boston University (1950), Ph.D. Boston University (1955). Main interest: clinical child psychology research.     

Queer,young, and homeless: A review of the literature

Queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, questioning, two-spirited) youth are greatly overrepresented in the homeless youth population. The present review critically analyzes the literature on queer youth homelessness, with a particular focus on (a) methodological issues; (b) entries into homelessness; (c) programming needs; (d) targeted programming; and (e) exits out of homelessness. Results from this review demonstrate that homeless queer youth are a unique population who require specialized services, implemented by sensitive and knowledgeable staff. Recommendations focus on practical implications, policy implications, and ideas for future research.     

Loneliness at adolescence: Correlates,attributions, and coping

The present study provides much needed empirical data on the adolescent loneliness experience. One hundred adolescents were given measures of loneliness, loneliness attributions, coping styles, and personal characteristics. Loneliness was positively related to state and trait anxiety, an external locus of control, depression, self-consciousness, and social anxiety and negatively related to self-reported attractiveness, likability, happiness, and life satisfaction. Lonely adolescents were also less willing to take social risks. Adolescents most often attributed loneliness to boredom and most often coped with loneliness by watching TV or listening to music. The implications of these findings for adolescent social development are discussed.     

Study in blue: trauma,affect, event

As contemporary student activists in the United States embrace a vocabulary of trauma and microaggressions, some critics on the left consider this a depoliticizing move symptomatic of the university’s growing thralldom to neoliberalism. The author argues that such criticism neglects how talk of trauma and microaggressions attempts to affectively manage structural violence’s failure to manifest in the form of discrete, identifiable, and extraordinary events. To illustrate this, she turns to the poetry of Claudia Rankine and the performance art of Emma Sulkowicz as aesthetic treatments of racial microaggression and sexual trauma, respectively. Rankine’s and Sulkowicz’s works belong to an emergent genre the author calls the coincidence report, in which subjects with no proof of structural violence except for their own feelings must cope with what happens when an event doesn’t. Ultimately, both artists sideline attempts to reconstruct the event in favor of redistributing specific affects throughout their respective publics. In both cases, these affects are blue – that is, depressive (Rankine) and obscene (Sulkowicz). Subjects in the blue find themselves ambivalently attached to living politically in the shadow of an event even as they detach from the fantasy that political life is less disappointing, depressing, or deflating than it actually is.     

Inheriting, marrying, and founding farms: women's place on the land

This article considers rural women's place on the land in south-central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on a community history and ethnographic study conducted during the 1980s, the article draws on women's oral narratives to explore the connections between women's sense of agency and their relationship to the land through descent and inheritance, marriage into a landowning family, founding a farm in partnership, and the experience of dispossession.     

Shifting dynamics in international trade unionism: Agitation,organisation, bureaucracy,diplomacy

This article compares and contrasts international trade unionism in its formative stages with patterns today. It identifies a continuing tension between an ‘agitator’ model (internationalism from below) and a bureaucratic model (internationalism from above). With the construction of an architecture of international institutions, notably the International Labour Organisation, another variant emerged: the labour diplomat. It is argued that none of these models on its own is adequate: the future of effective internationalism requires a synthesis of these often contradictory elements.     

Love,labour, loss: women,refugees and the servant crisis in Britain, 1933–1939

Between 1933 and 1939, around 20,000 Jewish, ‘non-Aryan’ or politically active refugee women from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia entered Britain on domestic service permits. Their immigration, mostly organised by women in the British voluntary sector, served as a moral response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Fascism in Europe, and a practical response to the ‘servant crisis’ in Britain as working-class women increasingly rejected domestic labour. This paper considers the practical and emotional relationships around domestic service and argues that the acceptance of refugee women into the metropolitan British home was conditional on the tacit expectation they could fill the vacancy left by the working classes, becoming British through their labour.     

Permanent transition or permanent revolution: Peasants,proletarians, and politics

David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. Pp. xii + 244, £15 (cloth).

This review article considers a book which attempts to present and evaluate Marxist debates on agrarian transition without at first clarifying its own position on Marxist theory and concepts. It is suggested here that this omission, combined with a compressed treatment of complex arguments, results in misinterpretations and misrepresentations of some of these debates, together with a devaluation of the significance of their political inception.     

On Luisa Passerini: subjectivity,Europe, affective historiography

Weaving together the key themes of subjectivity, Europe, and affects, this article argues that the work of Luisa Passerini constitutes a paradigmatic shift in understandings of contemporary European history, culture, and politics. During the 1990s, Passerini's focus shifted from the history of fascism and memory to the study of ideas and experiences of Europeanness. She reclaimed Europeanism as a research topic for cultural history in order to articulate a critique of Eurocentrism. The coherence of her overarching thematic scope was safeguarded by a constant emphasis on subjectivity. Understanding the correlation between the theoretical privileging of the notion of intersubjectivity and the nurturing of collaborative, transgenerational, and transnational academic practices is thus very important for contextualizing Passerini's historiographical contribution. During the last three decades, Passerini has developed a historiographical framework that crosses many disciplinary boundaries and incorporates practices of teaching, learning, and researching into an integrated mode of producing historical knowledge.     

Sex,power, and dependency: The politics of adolescent sexuality

This study examines the social psychological determinants of adolescent sexual activity. Drawing on power-dependency theory within a social exchange framework, a conceptual model of adolescent sexuality is developed and tested using survey data on 288 teenagers. It is hypothesized that attributes of power (confidence with members of the opposite sex, popularity, opposite-sex friends, and egalitarian gender role attitudes) would indirectly decrease sexual activity (participation in unwanted sex and the extent of intimate sexual behaviors) through their negative effect on dependence (discomfort with physical appearance, the need for self-disclosure and closeness, the need for physical gratification in sex and the need for emotional gratification in sex). The findings indicate that the model is a good predictor of the sexual activity of adolescent males for whom dependency is an important determinant of sexual behavior. When the model is estimated separately for the Black and white teenagers, distinct patterns are observed for the Black females. Black females' participation in unwanted sex is far below the average for the other subgroups, and the most influential factor in decreasing coercion for Black females is nontraditional gender role attitudes.This research was supported in part by awards from the Phyllis Diness Foundation and the John Fletcher Hurst Fellowship of the American University, and a Drescher research leave provided by the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.Received Ph.D. from The American University in 1989. Research and teaching interests include social psychology, gender, and culture.     

Borders,Conflict Zones,and Memory: scholarly engagements with Luisa Passerini

A substantive historiographical as well as introductory essay to this issue in honour of Passerini's important scholarship, the article highlights such themes as subjectivity and intersubjectivity; transformations in oral history and memory studies prompted by attention to such issues as the role of myth, collaboration, autobiography, and the imaginary. It documents Passerini's early reception among feminist and labour historians; the collaborations researching trauma and memory under totalitarianism; her Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968, and work on love and on redefining Europe in more inclusive ways. It also situates the application of Passerini's insights by an international and multidisciplinary line-up of scholars working on diverse projects.     

Ideology,deprivation, and adolescence: A psychoanalytical,clinical point of view

This paper relates to some aspects and some moments in the disengagement and reengagement process in adolescence within the framework of kibbutz life. The data for this paper are based on observations of the internal representations and metaphoric understanding of adolescents and young adult kibbutz patients who were treated through psychoanalysis by the author or brought to her for supervision. The cases under discussion grew up on kibbutzim at a time when the ideology required a communal sleeping arrangement for children. The author emphasizes the importance of the function of holding at the stage of absolute dependence that facilitates the establishment of integration and satisfactory development of the ego. The author discusses the problematic holding environment for the patients discussed in the paper when the kibbutz ideology led to separation of young infants from their parents' homes and to their placement in collective children's houses under the care of other kibbutz members. Most of the cases under discussion in this paper are young adults who chose to leave the kibbutz and immediately entered psychoanalysis. The author presents the hypothesis that the intensive framework that psychoanalysis offers provides a holding environment and the continuous presence of the same person as a parental figure and perhaps represents the patient's longing for something that was lost in childhood.Received Ph.D. in psychology from the Sorbonne. Research interests include generations of the Holocaust—children and adolescents in time of war and social violence, and emotional developments in babies and toddlers.     

Feminism,Art, Deleuze,and Darwin: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz

Abstract

This discussion stresses that looking at countries on the margins of European colonial rule can be useful when considering the wider dynamics of the present, reflecting the persistence of colonial discourses and how racism “endures”. Iceland’s colonial experience was characterized by duality, in which the country was an object of colonialism, while actively participating in the racist discourses predominant in Europe at that time. This paper demonstrates how Iceland’s long association with the exotic and its gendered manifestations is currently being perpetuated by the tourist and state industries, under the influence of neo-liberal ideas about nation branding. When contextualized within the larger geopolitical environment, Iceland as an “exotic” destination unravels the racist and colonized narratives still at play within a wider geopolitical context.