Attitudes to marriage and prostitution in the writings of olive schreiner,Mona Caird,Sarah Grand and George Egerton

Abstract

In recent years scholars have carried out valuable research into aspects of Victorian sexuality. This article offers some insights into the many and varied attitudes taken in the late nineteenth century towards marriage and prostitution, highlighting the fact that a number of advanced thinkers actually dared to speak of marriage itself as a form of prostitution. Four major figures of the fin-de-siècle period are discussed: Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton.     

The critic as feminist: Reflections on women's poetry,feminism, and the art of criticism

And the sigh of that child

Is white as an orchid …

As the white hush between two se ntences.

—from “Jean Rhys” by Derek Wolcott

     

Heterogeneous images of (mobile) technologies and services: a feminist contribution

Over the course of the life of the policy of apartheid, the South African State undertook an exercise of classifying the population into different racial categories. These racial classifications were accepted by most but also disputed by many individuals who appealed to be reclassified into other categories or were forcefully reclassified. Interwoven with the processes of racial classification and objections against classification were the laws against inter-racial coupling. The police arrested and the courts prosecuted thousands of individuals for unlawful sex with persons regarded as of other races. This article employs four illustrative cases to show how a certain idea of whiteness was constituted, elaborated, and rooted. The analysis undertaken in this article is grounded on the reports carried in the annual Survey of Race Relations in South Africa about the population of South Africa in the 1960s, a period that has been referred to as the hey-day of apartheid. The article underlines the role of sexuality in the making of whiteness, linking the intention of the immorality laws with the creation of whiteness generally and dominant white masculinity specifically. The State is shown to have been a principal actor in the rendition of sexuality as constitutive of whiteness. The article concludes that over the years the idea of sexuality and sexual immorality as conveyed by the apartheid legal Acts ended up distending the conception of being white, reshaping the development of personal and social relations of whites to each other and to members of groupings.     

The perils of mrs pooter: satire,modernity and motherhood in the lower middle class in England, 1870-1920

Abstract

This article examines some contrasting representations of lower middle-class women, marriage and motherhood in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Alongside traditional cutting images of white-collar men were misogynist criticisms of suburban women as obsessive consumers and irresponsible child-rearers who lowered racial and cultural quality. By contrast, the women who wrote about themselves in an 1898 Daily Telegraph series on working wives focused on practical problems faced by working mothers, traversing the same themes of the double burden, adjusting employment to childcare imperatives, and ‘quality time’ with children, which remain symptomatic of the problems of ‘modern’ motherhood     

Stealing into the wild: conservation science,plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures

Faced with pressing climatic changes, scientific and industrial interests are vying to develop crops that can survive drought, floods and shifting pest regimes. Increasingly, they look for solutions in an unlikely place: the gene pools of wild plants. Crop wild relatives (CWR) – species closely related to crops, including their ancestors – offer breeders the allure of retracing the domestication bottleneck, infusing genomes of modern crops with ‘lost’ genetic variety. Yet wild relatives also confront threats from climate change, urbanization and expansion of industrial agri-food. Thus, CWR, seen as both salvational and threatened, have become an international conservation and food-security priority. It is my contention that, in their common project to harness wild-relative potential, conservation and breeding science are co-evolving to extend seed commodity relations into new spheres. I examine enclosures along two fronts: first within ‘systematic CWR conservation’, where ‘in situ’ approaches, typically regarded as empowering and sustainable alternatives to ‘ex situ’, instead may support a complementary system of value extraction; second, in breeding and biotechnology research, which produces new value for CWR while profoundly shaping upstream conservation priorities. An important finding is that although today’s ‘ex situ-centric’ complementarity favors dispossession, an ‘in situ-centric’ approach could foster democratic renewal of biocultural diversity.     

resisting heteronormativity/resisting recolonisation: affective bonds between indigenous women in southern Africa and the difference(s) of postcolonial feminist history

This article recognises that any attempt to theorise the first wave globally must specify the use of the term ‘global’, so as not to elide the specificity of local differences, and must critically account for how feminist struggles among postcolonial, indigenous women are intertwined with a resistance to a history of colonialism and racial domination. While more than a demand for equal access to the symbolic order on the basis of gender alone, Western feminists must study carefully the cultural and gender implications of work by indigenous women in postcolonial contexts which do not easily fit into familiar theoretical paradigms that mimic the development of Western feminism, given the heterosexist biases of Western feminism historically. To what extent does the very form of historicisation of feminist struggles in the West repeat the colonising gesture when attempting to historicise the struggles of women in postcolonial contexts where the three waves of feminism as an organising framework, however loosely constructed, are transplanted to locations where they did not emerge historically? Through an examination of feminist work coming out of southern Africa, the article argues how attention to affective and erotic bonds between women in Lesotho provides a critical response to the heterosexist biases of African cultural nationalism, as well as to the colonising tendencies of feminist and queer enquiry in the West that do not account for the primacy of the performativity of sexual expression rather than its discursive naming as a precise sexual identity. The article concludes by asking for a reconceptualisation of the temporality of feminism not limited to its periodisation in the West, but informed by the specificities of feminist struggles locally and globally, including erotic autonomy as a viable praxis of decolonisation and a heightened self-reflexivity about the imperialist gestures guiding the production of (feminist) history and scholarship.     

paradise,built in hell: decolonising feminist utopias in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Top of the Lake</Emphasis> (2013)

Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion’s return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show’s central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake’s formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion’s oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of utopia.     

Darning, doylies and dancing: the work of the Leeds Association of Girls' Clubs (1904-1913)

The Leeds Association of Girls' Clubs (LAGC) was set up by a group of women, including Hilda Hargrove, Dr Lucy Buckley and Mary and Margaret Harvey, to promote collaboration between the city's girls' clubs. The organisation epitomised women working in partnership whilst reflecting their differing philanthropic and political interests. However LAGC's collaborative approach resulted in liberal consensus which downplayed the significance of girls' working conditions. Throughout the decade LAGC's focus was its annual competitions. These featured utilitarian and decorative handicrafts (darning and doylies) enshrining both frugality and aspiration, alongside dance and drill which channelled girls' vigour. Nevertheless, LAGC's resilience resulted in an organisation which is still in existence.     

Educated doubt: women,religion and the challenge of higher education,c. 1870-1920[1]

Abstract

The advent of higher education for women, with its emphasis on reason, on scientific thought and on critical approaches to knowledge, constituted a potential threat to religious belief. The stories of male ‘doubters’ are legion but what happened to thoughtful women, confronted with challenges to their belief systems? This article shows that educated doubt was not only a male affliction. Women responded to the challenge in a variety of ways. Some rejected belief, turning their religious impulses to aesthetic or social ends. Others brought scientific reasoning to bear on religious phenomena, hoping to ‘prove’ the existence of spirituality. Some saw in science and reason a further manifestation of the spiritual impulse; in education further possibilities of the life of the spirit. A common thread unites the responses, the search for a voice, an authority which women sought in the new secular institutions of higher learning.     

Imagining (the) Difference: Gender,Ethnicity and Metaphors of Nation

This article critiques the way in which three feminist authors reinscribe traditional liberal values when seeking new ways of thinking about the nation. It suggests that in rejecting affective or embodied metaphors, such as community or kinship, the authors fall into the trap of reinscribing values which have historically excluded women and ethnic or racial minorities from full participation in the polity. The article argues for a rejection of the affect/rationality model which underpins these arguments and suggests that new metaphors for the nation will emerge as those who have been excluded claim a place in the polity.     

Thinking land law differently: Section 70(1)(g) and the giving of meanings

Elements of this article first appeared in a paper given at the Hart Conference on Property, 1993.