Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium

The role of the intellectual is traditionally gendered masculine, and women are excluded from consideration. Contemporary discussions of the 'death of the intellectual' noticeably make no reference to feminist intellectuals. On the other hand, women in academia have been reluctant to adopt the role of public intellectual as conventionally defined. There is an anxiety about the contemporary place of the intellectual, and about the necessity for the distinction made by some feminists between theory and practice, the intellectual and the activist, and where this might lead. In exploring the role of feminist intellectuals over the last two centuries, three paradigms of the feminist intellectual are proposed for consideration: Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with disbelief), for example Florence Nightingale; the feminist Messiah (the exceptional female saviour who would sacrifice herself to change women's lives), for whom the exemplar is Margaret Fuller; and the Dark Lady (the token woman in a community of men), such as de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Indeed, Camille Paglia's rivalry with Sontag lends itself to being interpreted as evidence of her current desire to occupy this 'dark lady' role. In conclusion, after discussing contemporary, late twentieth-century feminism (Natasha Walter, Elizabeth Wurtzel, gurrl power, 'women behaving badly'), the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power is proposed for celebration. Finally, there is Cixous's image of the feminist intellectual as the laughing Medusa, who turns men to stone, but turns laughter on herself.     

The stigmatized Italian visionary and the devout French physician: Palma Mattarelli d’Oria and docteur Imbert Gourbeyre*

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the case of an Italian local celebrity, Palma Mattarelli, born in 1825, and stigmatized at the significant age of 33. From that moment on, extraordinary phenomena multiplied around her: ecstasies, visions, ‘holy’ communion, apocalyptic prophecies. In the climate of renewed Catholic sensibility for extraordinary supernatural phenomena Palma’s fame soon extended abroad. The Docteur A. Imbert-Gourbeyre visited Palma in 1871, and dedicated the second volume of Les stigmatisées to her. Palma’s celebrity was undermined by the hostility of the local church authorities, and an inquisitorial examination of her which ended in 1872 with a negative judgement, ranging her cause in the frame of ‘afettata santità’. Imbert-Gourbeyre was advised not to republish his successful book on her. Yet, the extraordinary phenomena kept on recurring around her till her death in 1888.     

Staging race: Florence Mills,celebrity, identity and performance in 1920s Britain

This article focuses on the time the African American performer Florence Mills spent in Britain in the 1920s. Mills was one of the most popular performers of the period, taking a lead in African American vaudeville productions, she was admired by working class and ‘elite’ black and white audiences. Our paper examines four examples of Mills’ British fan mail alongside newspaper reports of her performances in London. These reveal complex themes of identity, of Britishness, sexuality, gender and class within the context of changing international understandings of race relations in the Inter-war period. We utilise these letters alongside newspaper reports to consider how Mills’ presence in Britain as a performer and anti-racist activist influenced debates and personal reflections on racial identity, sexual desire and belonging to Britain.     

‘Keeping the Ruins Private’: Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction

Abstract

In 1964, the number of registered heroin addicts in Britain was 753. One of these was Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods. Beginning her writing career under the name Helen Ferguson, she wrote conventionally realist novels that enjoyed modest commercial success. In 1939–40, after a number of serious breakdowns and suicide attempts, and now calling herself Anna Kavan, Woods/Ferguson left a Swiss sanatorium addicted to heroin, which had almost certainly been therapeutically prescribed for sleeping disorders and severe depression. From then until her death in 1968, when she was found collapsed over a box of heroin, Kavan had an intermittent but intense relationship with the drug. This essay examines the ways in which Kavan has been constructed as an ‘addict writer’, both by her biographers and critics, and how this designation has influenced critical readings of her work.     

Aerial roots

This poem was written at the request of Antomina Rumwaropen for a ceremony held on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra, Australia, to mark 40 days after the death of her mother Dina Kayukatui. Antomina left West Papua as a very young woman, and then, because of links to the independence struggle, fled Indonesia as a refugee, first to Holland and then to Vanuatu. She came to Australia in 1989, as a refugee with her extended family. Because of political sensitivities she was unable to return to West Papua before her mother’s death in 1995 in her home village of Ransiki near the Bird’s Head of West Papua. Along with several members of her family, Antomina became an Australian citizen in 1997.     

Vera ‘Jack’ Holme: cross-dressing actress,suffragette and chauffeur

This article provides a chronological account of the life of Vera Holme—a militant suffragette in Edwardian Britain, chauffeur to the Pankhursts, actress, and aid worker—focusing on the period 1900–20. The account is based largely on readings of papers, diaries and photographs within her personal archive, held at The Women's Library at the London School of Economics (LSE), as well as identifying references to Holme in secondary texts. The article traces the development of her identity as an unconventional woman by focusing on her work as an actress, driver and mechanic, her lesbian relationships and her increasingly masculine image, in the context of the women's suffrage movement and the First World War.     

The many lives and deaths of Sofia Kovalevskaia: approaches to women's role in scholarship and culture in grmany at the turn of the twentieth century

This article examines the ways in which the scientific work, life, and death of Sofia Kovalevskaia, the first female professor of mathematics in modern Europe, were represented in approaches to women's role in scholarship and culture in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Kovalevskaia's greatest scholarly successes and early death coincided with the period of most intense debate on women's admission to higher education in Germany, and her example came to be extensively discussed by supporters and opponents alike. The various ways in which the story of the woman mathematician was portrayed were symptomatic of what was at stake in the question of women's entry to university in the German Empire.     

A Life in Pictures: Looking for Elizabeth Senior

This essay follows the author’s search for forgotten art historian Elizabeth Senior (1910–41). Using a quest narrative, it traces the process undertaken to piece together the life story of a remarkable young woman, including Internet research, visits to archives and correspondence with family members. Killed at just aged 30 by a bomb during the Blitz in 1941, Senior left a quite substantial body of editorial work and writing. Editress for the inaugural volumes in Allen Lane’s King Penguin series, Senior also wrote multiple reviews for the Burlington Magazine and the British Museum Quarterly, as well as her own art historical books on portraits of Henry VIII and his wives, and on portraits of Christ (co-authored with Ernst Kitzinger). A collaborator and friend to many Jewish émigré art historians, including The Story of Art author Ernst Gombrich, Senior played an important role in facilitating the safe passage of many fleeing the Nazis for England in the 1930s and 1940s. Unmarried at the time of her death, Senior was survived by a 10-week-old baby, whom she had stashed under a table for safety when a bomb landed on her flat.     

‘Merely Birds of Passage’: Lady Hariot Dufferin’s travel writings and medical work in India, 1884–1888

This article examines the travel writings and medical work in India of Lady Hariot Dufferin, Vicereine of India between 1884 and 1888. Lady Dufferin accompanied her husband, the Viceroy Lord Dufferin, through various social and political engagements in India, and carved her own niche in colonial and post‐colonial history as a pioneer in the medical training of women in India. The article examines her travel writings on India and explores the nature of her complicity in the Raj, as well as the gendered nature of the separate public role she created for herself in relation to her ‘zenana work’ in providing medical care for the women of India. The author suggests that, through her work, Lady Dufferin challenges and extends the theoretical paradigms of post‐colonialist and feminist critiques of empire.     

The Untimely Stevie Smith

Abstract

This essay considers the role of the untimely in the work of Stevie Smith. It explores motifs of belatedness in her reception history, suggesting how her own authorial persona and public presentation encodes this response. It examines the notion of the last-minute in her work, focusing on motifs such as disruption, elongation and delay. It suggests how her revision practice responded to the idea of being ‘too late’, with the moment of publication providing her with further prompts to revise her work. It focuses on final words and endings in her poetry and frames her interest in Christianity through ideas of temporality and form.     

A Longitudinal Investigation of the Development of Weight and Muscle Concerns Among Preadolescent Boys

The study examined the impact of body mass index (BMI), negative affect, self-esteem, and sociocultural influences in the development of weight and muscle concerns among preadolescent boys. Body dissatisfaction, importance placed on weight and muscles, weight loss strategies, and strategies to increase muscles were evaluated. Participants were 237 boys aged between 8 and 11 years who were tested at three assessment periods 8 months apart. The main predictor of boys’ body change strategies was their perceived pressures to modify weight and muscles from parents, peers, and the media. The other main predictor of boys’ body change strategies and the sole predictor of body dissatisfaction was BMI. Self-esteem and negative affect were found to be weak and generally nonsignificant predictors of boys’ body image concerns and body change strategies. Additional studies that examine the risk and protective factors associated with boys’ weight and muscle concerns are needed to assist in the development of prevention programs for preadolescent boys.Lina Ricciardelli is an Associate Professor at Deakin University. She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests are body image concerns, disordered eating and substance abuse among youth.Marita McCabe is a Professor at Deakin University. She received her PhD in 1981 from Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests are in body image across the lifespan, sexuality, and chronic illnessJess Lillis is graduate student at Deakin University, She completed her undergraduate work in 2000 at Deakin University, Her research interests are body image concerns and negative affect among youthResearch Fellow at Deakin University, She received her D Psych in 2000 from Deakin University, Her interests are in disordered eating and depression among adolescents     

Jesusa Rodriguez: An inconvenient woman

For the symposium “Where Is Ana Mendieta,” I discussed and projected PowerPoint images, starting with my 1963 Eye Body – 36 Transformative Actions as a precedent for the explicit, artist body as both image and image-maker. This work, as well as Body Collage, Water Light/Water Needle and Meat Joy, provided a practice for Ana's intensive submersion with her body as subject. Images of our parallel affinities within natural forms and materials were shown, establishing our urgent permissions to regard the sensory, psychic realms in which our bodies manifested energy against cultural constrictions and prohibitions. Also shown was my homage Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta inspired by a dream instruction sent by Ana shortly after her death.     

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.     

Being Part of the Family: Social and Working Conditions of Female Migrant Care Workers in Italy

This paper will present a study examining the social and working conditions of immigrant women who work in the family and the field of elderly people's assistance in private houses in Italy. The research will focus on categories such as social class, “race”, and gender, variables that stratify and naturalize the inequalities inbred in the social relations between immigrant caregivers and the families they work for. I will seek to illustrate through these perspectives how an affective and family life of their own is denied to these care workers. I will further investigate how the relationship between the care worker's body and the elderly care receiver's body becomes structured and characterized each time differently on the basis of gender. Moreover, I will take a closer look at the relationship of the female worker with her own body and disease, and also at the relationship of the care worker with death and money.     

The Work of Sacrifice: Framing gender politics, racialization and the significance of Islam in the lives of Ajda Pekkan and Konca Kuris

This essay examines the roles of women's lives in contemporary Turkey as 'the work of sacrifice' wherein tragedy and irony take place simultaneously. I will present one of the major Turkish female singers, Ajda Pekkan, articulating her relationship to womanhood as an endpoint on the continuum that represents the 'Turkish women'. In contrast, I will assess the case of Konca Kuris, a Turkish Muslim feminist, who stands at the other end of the continuum, and explore her tragic death as a primary sacrifice. Western discourse has framed the 'woman question' in a way that problematizes secularisms and Islamic practices. This problematization will serve as the initial momentum to assign sacrifice as a notion that lies in between the object—secular Islam—and the subject—Turkish women—of analysis. Thus, 'sacrifice' will be explored as a performative notion, in order to understand, mediate and measure gender performativity in contemporary Turkey.     

‘We must give them an education,large, liberal and comprehensive’. Catherine Vale Whitwell: teacher,artist, author,feminist and Owenite communitarian

This article was provoked by the author’s conviction that its subject was a great deal more significant than a marginalised woman on the fringes of Owenism, the reformist movement promoted by Robert Owen during the early nineteenth century. It examines the life of Catherine Whitwell, formally identified in studies of Owen and in histories of education as teacher cum artist in the school at New Lanark, Owen’s factory community in Scotland, and also one of several women writers on astronomy. Otherwise little was known of her activities or the contexts in which they occurred. There are many gaps in the record and her footprint is often illusive, but much new information in widely dispersed archives, periodicals, digitised newspapers and secondary sources helps cast further light on her background, a career embracing work as proprietor of girls’ schools, author of works on astronomy and mathematics, promoter of sciences for women, advocate of women’s education, artist and communitarian. The context of Whitwell’s work is reviewed with reference to recent relevant literature and followed by a case study explaining her association with Owen, speculating on her role in visualising his plans for communities of co-operation designed to relieve distress and create greater equality, then describing her teaching career both at New Lanark and later at Orbiston, the first British Owenite community near Glasgow. The study concludes with a brief review of her post-Owen work running girls’ schools and an assessment of her role in the development of education and disseminating knowledge, particularly for young middle class women and working class children in the first half of the nineteenth century.     

Emily Wilding Davison: centennial celebrations

The centenary of the death of the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was marked in the summer of 2013 by an impressive variety of commemorative activity. This Viewpoint discusses a few of the events staged and books published, considering the way in which Emily Davison is now presented to us. Has her reality become obscured by the drama of her death?     

Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework based on the dichotomy between naive realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’ nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid.The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever.     

Reconfigurings of Non-violence as a Matter of Sustainability and Response-ability

In this paper, we explore non-violence and the responsibility for non-violence inspired by Karen Barad’s work on the material–discursive notion of response-ability. Our analysis, by way of thinking with theory, is based on a careful engagement with the life of one woman, Lena, as told by her in writing and interviews between the years 2007 and 2015. Based on her talk about violence and non-violence in her life, we produced three stories of non-violence “in-becoming”. Through these stories, our aim is to shed light on non-violence as relational; that is, how it is reconfigured in the complex entanglements of bodies, things, abstractions, and histories and how these different entanglements enable an ethically sustainable response for non-violence. In the end, by foregrounding relationality, response, and sustainability, we argue that nurturing sustainable non-violence could be enriched by expanding the focus from individual agency or collective action to the co-constituted conditions of possibilities for response-ability.