Rap Music Genres and Deviant Behaviors in French-Canadian Adolescents

This study investigated the links between the preference for 4 rap music genres (American rap, French rap, hip hop/soul, and gangsta/hardcore rap) and 5 types of deviant behaviors in adolescence (violence, theft, street gangs, mild drug use, and hard drug use). The effects of peers' deviancy, violent media, and importance given to lyrics were statistically controlled. A self-report questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 348 bilingual French-Canadian adolescents (age: M = 15.32; SD = 0.9; 185 girls and 163 boys). Results indicated that rap music as a whole was linked to deviant behaviors, however the nature of the relation differed according to genres. Preference for French rap had the strongest links to deviant behaviors, whereas preference for hip hop/soul was linked to less deviant behaviors. Results are discussed within the psychosocial and sociocognitive perspectives on music influence in adolescence and also within the perspective of normative deviant behaviors in adolescence.     

The Unexpected: Bionic Woman at the Millennium

Wilfred Bion's A Memoir of the Future provides a point of departure for feminist thinking about the millennium. Bion problematizes hopes for the future and associates thought with catastrophic change. Women play an unexpected role in Bion's experimental autobiography, posing provocative questions and unsettling the status quo . Since Bion has little to say about women in his clinical writings, A Memoir sheds light on his thinking and on the post-Kleinian culture of the 1970s. Book I of A Memoir depicts a class- and sex-nightmare played out between men and women, and women and women, in an age of anxiety whose setting appears to be the fascist 'pacification' of Middle England during an unspecified period. In this hallucinatory drama, all encounters are reduced to a brutal fiction of dominance and submission. The violence of the action suggests the primitive mental world of psychosis. Book II of A Memoir satirizes 'the brilliance of masculine thought' through the voices and criticisms of women. But this is the purgatorial movement of Bion's autobiography, inhabited by 'idées mères' (untransformed beta-elements) and haunted by the ghosts of Bion's traumatic war-time experience. A monstrous plot is hatched to kill primitive, fascistic Man, who retaliates and takes the female spoils. Is this the prelude to catastrophic change? Book III stages a country-house debate between different characters who represent aspects of Bion's personality, recapitulating the concerns of his later writing. The debate includes a meditation on childbirth as compared to war trauma, but Bion takes his distance from feminine intuition or common sense. Women fight on both sides of the barriers in the Bionic revolution - becoming, however, figures for the 'unexpected' and precursors of emotional upheaval. The gendering of millennial thought in Bion's Memoir provides an opportunity to scrutinize our own unthought fantasies of change.     

Work in the interstices: Woman in academe

Stress and anger are inevitable responses on the part of a woman entering the men's sanctuary of the University, and will be aggravated by her not recognizing that the University has been from its beginnings a patriarchal institution and is committed to remaining so. She fails to recognize the pollution sanctions that are levelled against her, interpreting them as personal, and thus struggles with imaginary foes. Hope lies not in confronting these mystifying primitive taboos directly, for she can never be admitted to the secret society and may not really want to be, but in drawing on the larger tradition of learning itself to renew the principles of education in general, and in particular her own work.     

The Woman on the Postage Stamp

Class(room) wars

The Taking Liberties Collective, Learning the Hard Way: Women's Oppression in Men's Education (Macmillan, Women in Society, 1989) £25 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

Ann Thompson and Helen Wilcox (eds) Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (Manchester University Press, Cultural Politics Series, 1989), £27.50 hardback, £7.95 paperback.

The past before us: twenty years of feminism

Feminist review, spring 1988

Ania Loomba, gender, race, renaissance drama

Cultural Politics Series, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1989

The perpetuation of myth

Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Viking, £15.95     

Shopping for Men: The Single Woman Narrative

Philips adresses a relatively new genre of fiction for women readers- including works by Jane Green, Freya North, Jane Gordon, Marian Keyes and the journalist Kathryn Flett- namely, that of the working woman romance narrative. These are novels that are addressed to a generation of young women who have independent incomes, are in work and are skilled consumers. The title, 'Shopping for Men', refers both to the consumption of men as objects of romance, and to the deployment of consumer skills in order to create a man worthy of the heroine's desire. In these novels, romance and sexual desire are contingent upon the reader and heroine appreciating and valuing consumer items. Using Bourdieu's argument that distinctions of taste are integrally related to class relations, the paper suggests that 'Mr Right' in these novels is required to display an awareness of consumer labels, and an ability to purchase them that surpasses that of the heroine. Philips will suggest that, while the heroines of these narratives assume all the gains of feminism, the romantic expectations are those of traditional gender relations, and that, while the female protagonist is assumed to be a working woman with a successful career, the romantic denouement depends on a hero whose work and social status are superior to hers.     

Reassessing Portia: The Iconic Potential ofShakespeare's Woman Lawyer

This paper considers the adoption ofPortia, the heroine of The Merchant ofVenice, by feminist legal scholars as ametaphor for the woman lawyer. It suggests thatPortia has both captured and is captured by thefeminist legal scholar's imagination, becomingat once an idol, myth and icon. She is to somethe personification of the woman lawyer'sperceived difference, a mouthpiece for mercyand `the different voice' and to others, a shamor myth, her idolised reputation sullied, her`difference' rejected. Yet ultimately thisconstant and simultaneous idolisation andvilification of Portia threatens not only tosilence and constrain conversations about thewoman lawyer, but also to eclipse her promiseand potential. Thus in the final section of thepaper, Portia is established as an icon. Assuch her story, understood as a myth or fairytale, is seen to reveal previously unimaginedpossibilities for change, as an iconicunderstanding of Portia becomes a windowthrough which feminist legal scholars can lookonto alternative understandings of lawyeringand adjudication.     

The Curse of the Smile: Ambivalence and the ‘Asian’ Woman in Australian Multiculturalism

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of ‘Asians’ in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire for Australia to become ‘part of Asia’ has resulted in a relatively positive valuation of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’, an inversion from the racist exclusionism of the past. Against the self-congratulatory stance of this discourse, this article signals the operation of ambivalence at two levels: at the structural level, insofar as it points to the inherent contradictions in the idea of the ‘multicultural nation’ and its fantasy of a harmonious ‘unity-in-diversity’, and at the subjective level, in the sense that the ethos of multiculturalism doesn't erase the ambivalent relations of acceptance/rejection between majority and minority subjects. Several instances of such ambivalence pertaining to the positioning and representation of the ‘Asian’ woman are given.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.