Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Frontier expansion and settlement in lowland Bolivia

This article examines the expansion of cash crop production into the lowland Bolivian frontier and explores the dynamics of class formation that shaped peasant political consciousness. It discusses the factors that moulded local‐level response to the conditions created by capitalist development: the process of social differentiation that affected settlers and the relationship between subsistence agriculture and wage labour; the tensions between settlers and large‐scale entrepreneurs; and changing state policies and economic conditions. It concludes that rigid analytic distinctions between peasants and proletarians ignore the historical development of production relations in Bolivia.     

Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited ‘wastelands’ targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary state-capitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are justified through discourses of national sovereignty and notions of ‘untamed’ and ‘wild’ resource frontiers. I highlight the multiple meanings and notions associated with regions where resource frontiers and national borders interlock. The study offers an explanation of how frontiers as discursive constructs and material realities play out along national borders.     

The trivialisation of Mary Wollstonecraft a personal and professional career re-vindicated

This paper primarily addresses three points in relation to the distortion of the image of Mary Wollstonecraft and the distortion of her ideas: firstly there is the argument that there has been a sustained and systematic marginalisation and devaluation of Mary Wollstonecraft with the result that her work is neutralised, secondly that this originated with her husband, William Godwin and thirdly that Godwin's distortion have since been perpetuated by all biographers despite the fact that contrary testimony is available.     

社会史视野下的陕甘宁边区劳动英雄运动

对劳动英雄的推崇在我国有着悠久的历史传承和重要的现实意义.抗战时期,陕甘宁边区政府在生产中奖励劳动英雄,推动了向劳动英雄学习的生产竞赛运动,对边区生产建设的发展和新的劳动观念的塑造也起到了很大的作用,劳动光荣的道德观念逐渐形成.在此过程中,越来越多的劳动英雄从组织起来的群众中涌现出来,集体英雄主义的价值观在群众中传播....     

Autonomy as a disposition to non-domination in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that there is a notion of autonomy which can be extrapolated from Wollstonecraft’s work: central to this notion is the need for us all to adopt a disposition to non-domination.Thus, an individual is autonomous when she is not dominated but also, how she behaves towards others is significant, for she is only truly autonomous if she does not dominate others. I argue that such a disposition can be read in Wollstonecraft as something which cuts across the public/private divide. It is based on the notion that individuals are always capable of being rational in both of these spheres. There must be a disposition to non-domination because Wollstonecraft demonstrates how domination is corrupting, and when this disposition is lost we find ourselves faced with myriad concerns from slavery to multiple forms of social oppression. Domination creates relations of dependency. It is arbitrary and contingent and makes us relate to each other with a marked lack of compassion. Instead, Wollstonecraft stresses we have a duty to treat others as equals and key to this duty is the need to not dominate others. Finally, I highlight how Wollstonecraft suggests such a disposition is to be gained through education.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

Twisting the knife: Frontier violence in the central Amazon of Brazil

The presence or absence of high rates of violence in the Central Amazon of Brazil, one of the last great frontiers of the world, is analysed in terms of a comparative approach to the study of global frontiers. Violence is shown to be low among historical peasantries in riverine and pastoral areas of old settlement located beyond the greater frontier where less inequity and imbalance between social classes, ethnic groups, sexual groups and age sets exist. The advancing frontier of open-field agriculture presents the opposite with some of the highest rates of violence in the country and is shown to be typical of a process of polarised development in Brazil.     

贯彻"三个代表"坚持"三个为本"

"三个代表"的重要论述,是新时期党的建设纲领,也是推动工会工作的指南,在理论与实践上与工会有着密切联系,学习"三个代表"的重要论述,应该在贯彻落实过程中,坚持三个为本,即:坚持以劳动为本、以德为本和以民为本.