Digging for England in Elizabeth’s German Garden: Imperial Romance and National Femininities in the Early Works of Elizabeth von Arnim

Abstract

The author treats von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer as types of imperial romance, showing the ways in which von Arnim quite literally domesticates the genre by adapting discourses of eugenics and racial contest to fit an Englishwoman’s experiences of home-making and gardening in late nineteenth-century Pomerania. Racial fitness is replaced by aesthetic fitness as von Arnim sets up a contest between English and German femininities within the home and garden.     

Challenging the Biological: The Fantasy of Male Birth as a Nineteenth-Century Narrative of Ethical Failure

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë portrays a fully realized heroine who challenges society's and fiction's conventional roles for women. In order to broaden her heroine's role, Brontë had to go beyond the genres open to her — the novel of manners, the Gothic, and the governess novel — to establish a new genre: the feminist fairytale. In establishing this genre, Brontë pinpoints Jane's specifically female dilemma: how to achieve intimacy and still maintain independence.

At once beautiful and terrible, sustaining and destructive, fire is the perfect element to convey a sense of Jane's often conflicting desires. Brontë carefully establishes hearth fires as an index to how included and “at home” Jane feels. Similarly, Brontë uses metaphors of self‐sacrifice and immolation to indicate times when Jane feels her independence is being threatened.

The hearth fires and the metaphorical fires are overshadowed by the “big” fires in the novel, but their consistent, unobtrusive use allows Brontë to reinforce her theme in the simple details of the story and to maintain an attention to craft that is too often undervalued or ignored.     

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist cinema

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre (1998), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.     

Constructions of and negotiations on interaction norms and gender on electronic discussion lists in Norway

The focus of this article is on the genre of Internet-mediated discussion, and the processes that create discussion culture on the Net. Using examples from two Norwegian e-mail-based mailing lists, I argue that the interactional norms that get a hegemonic position in a certain context result from socially and culturally situated negotiation processes. These processes are connected to gender as well as to culture, and the discourse of Netiquette can be said to be connotated to masculinity as well as to North American culture. To what degree are the hegemonic cultural values that form the basis of Netiquette rules understood as normative for the participants in these two Norwegian groups? How do they influence the interaction values that are chosen, and with what gendered consequences?     

Diamela Eltit: Clearing space for critical performance

Reggaeton's success in the international music scene has incited heated debates about the genre's genealogy. The dominant framework for discussing reggaeton's origin often relies on and reifies nation-based claims to the genre, overlooking how reggaeton resists being fixed to any single locale. In this paper I discuss the emergence of the reggaeton subgenre bhangraton (a mix of bhangra pop and reggaeton) and point to some of the ways that it challenged nationalist claims to reggaeton. Reggaetonera and Hindi-vocalist Deevani, in particular, complicates claims about racial, ethnic, and sonic purity that circulate within reggaeton by highlighting how race, gender, and affinity are performed and felt and by calling attention to the genre's multiple circuits outside the nation.     

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.     

Interrogating the Look of the Gaze: Theorizing a Latina Cine-subjectivity

Abstract: This article concerns sexual object choice, transgender subjectivities and emancipatory heterosexuality as imaged in three films: The House of the Spirits (1993), I Like It Like That (1994) and Mi Vida Loca (1994). The author argues, through her examination of the three films, for cinematic ways to refocus and interrogate the look and gender of the gaze, thereby envisioning what the author theorizes as a Latina cinematic subjectivity. The idea of a Latina cinematic subject is presented in order to articulate how at particular moments in the films an autonomous Latina subjectivity is created through narrative and mise-en-scène. It is at these narrative and aesthetic moments that the characters look back at the objectifying gaze, thereby creating a cinematic sexual subjectivity for the characters and a model of agency for the culturally resistant spectator who is doing the looking. The House of the Spirits points to the contradiction of sexual object choice and female desire; I Like It Like That reveals the performative and fluid possibilities of gender, as well as the hybridity of black and Latino cultures; and Mi Vida Loca reflects the struggle for agency in Chicana heterosexual relationships and in their material lives. The author argues that the three portrayals begin important cultural work in the rethinking of sexualities, as they unthink the rigidity of monosexuality, destabilize normative conceptions of gender and reinvigorate agency and egalitarianism in heterosexual relations.     

Stalking Aboriginal culture: the Wanda Koolmatrie affair

Hoax, v.t., n. 1. Deceive, take in, (person) by way of joke. 2. n. Humorous or mischievous deception. Fraud, n. Criminal deception, use of false representations to gain unjust advantage; dishonest artifice or trick. Imposition, (-z) n... piece of deception or advantage taking. Utter, v.t. put (notes, base coin, etc.) into circulation. History of a Deception Wanda Koolmatrie's novel My Own Sweet Time was published in 1994 by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, an Aboriginal publishing house based in Broome, Western Australia. It is now known that Wanda Koolmatrie never existed, and My Own Sweet Time is believed to be the work, either jointly or individually, of two white Australian males known as John Bayley and Leon Carmen. As readers were informed in the biography provided by the publisher, Wanda Koolmatrie: was born in the far north of South Australia in 1949... Removed from her Pitjantjara mother in 1950, she was raised by foster parents in the western suburbs of Adelaide. She married Frank Koolmatrie, who died several years later...     

Misogyny,Dionysianism and a new model of Greek tragedy

The subject of misogyny in Greek culture is widely recognized as of capital importance in understanding our attitude towards women as well as the general culture context within which that attitude is framed. Yet despite the obvious importance of this subject there has been little attention given to the way misogyny in fifth‐centry Athens was an integral part of its greatest art form, the tragic drama. Only when a model of tragedy is developed which accounts for the typological opposition between the male “tragic hero” and Dionysus will it be possible to understand how women function within this particular literary genre as the essential “other” of repressive male consciousness.     

The Modern(?) Korean Woman in Prime-Time: Analyzing the Representation of Sun on the Television Series Lost

This article investigates the representation of Sun, the most prominent non-white female character on ABC's Lost. Given the importance of Sun's character in terms of visibility for Korean women specifically (and Asian women generally) coupled with the fact that Lost under-represents women in general, her role provides a substantial case-study of gender within the science fiction genre. Through a narrative analysis of the first season, we demonstrate the simultaneously flawed and empowered dimensions of Sun, who challenges some of the stereotypes viewers have come to expect from prime-time drama. Elements of colonialism, interpersonal relationships, and the castaway narrative in Lost are also explored.     

Reviews

Rachel Rosenthal . Edited by Moira Roth. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories . By Peggy Phelan. Routledge, 1997.

Phaedra in Delirium . Written by Susan Yankowitz, directed by Alison Summers, performed by Kathleen Chalfant, Peter Jay Fernandez and Sandra Shipley. Presented by the Women's Project and Productions and the Classic Stage Company, New York City. January 20‐February 15, 1998.

Face to Face . Performed by Peeling the Banana, Second Stage Theatre. New York City, April 27, May 4, May 11, 1998.

Dancing the Self: the Solo Art Form . Featuring choreographers Terry Hollis, Amy Kail, Mark Kenison, Laura Staton, and Kathy Westwater in new solos. The 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, New York City. February 1, 1998.

Jack Smith: Flaming Creature . A museum exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Museum, Long Island City, NY, October 29, 1997‐March 1, 1998.     

Writing independence: Gayatri Spivak and the dark continent of écriture feminíne

Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, by Pat Califia. Cleis Books, 1994.

Stirring, Spinning, Sweeping. Performed by Marilyn Arsem with Virginia Abblitt. Slater Mill Historic Site, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, March, 1995.

The Lesbian Postmodern, edited by Laura Doan. Columbia University Press, 1994.

“Vulvamorphia.” Guest edited by Lillian Lennox. Lusitania #6 (1994).

Wonderland. Performed by Paula Josa‐Jones and Performance Works. Conceived and directed by Paula Josa‐Jones, choreography by Jones and dancers. World premiere at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts. July 7–9, 1995.

Fast Trip, Long Drop, video by Gregg Bordowitz.     

The Cross-Dresser,the Thief,His Daughter and Her Lover: Queer Desire and Romance in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades

When romance fiction consolidated as a genre in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of generic conventions concerning the heterosexual imperatives came about. This article considers how these heterosexual imperatives function as a mask for queer desire in Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades (1926). Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the article identifies in the novel a detailed account of male–male desire through arguing that while the romantic narrative is concerned with the Duc of Avon and Léonie, his former cross-dressing page, the substantial sexual tension in the novel occurs in the meetings and exchanges between Avon and Léonie’s biological father, Henri Saint-Vire. While These Old Shades ends with the presentation of Léonie by Avon as his duchess, it is male–male desire which has (queerly) driven this romance plot to its ‘natural’ conclusion of marriage. The article thinks through what happens when the rivalry, explicitly about desiring a woman, is an implicit homosocial bond and how this functions within the heterosexual imperatives of the romance novel. The article questions how desire functions in the romance novel and, more crucially, how romance fiction can be read as resisting, at least in part, that which has been traditionally understood as their raison d’être—the heterosexual imperative.     

what’s cooking,man? masculinity in European cooking shows after <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Naked Chef</Emphasis>

The cooking show The Naked Chef (1999, 2000, 2001) with Jamie Oliver has often been highlighted as an example of the cooking show genre’s potential for reformulating masculine identity through cooking. Through a series of close readings of a selection of cooking shows from France, the UK and Denmark post-The Naked Chef and through a dialogue with other works on the subject, this article will attempt to identify the tendencies in the constructions and negotiations of masculinity in the cooking show genre following The Naked Chef and to understand these in relation to a revision of masculine identity in contemporary culture. The article is informed by poststructural gender theory and understands ‘doing food’ and ‘doing masculinity’ as two mutually constituting practices. The analyses identify four new tendencies in the construction of masculinity in cooking shows at the beginning of the twenty-first century: 1) rechefisation, 2) the TV chef as a moral entrepreneur, 3) the TV chef and the revitalisation of the national myth and 4) cooking as masculine escapism. The article concludes that the innovation of the masculine identity that was launched in The Naked Chef has not continued; rather, the genre has become a platform for the revitalisation of traditional masculinity discourses.     

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.     

MARRIAGE ‘AMONG THE MURKANS’

Abstract Stella Miles Franklin (1879–1954) is best known for contributions to a uniquely Australian literary tradition. However, during her American years (1906–1915) when she worked in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League, Franklin wrote much unpublished fiction in the New Woman literary genre common to early-twentieth-century US women's traditions. This paper focuses on two such little-known unpublished stories: ‘Uncle Robert's Wedding Present’ (1908) and ‘Teaching Him’ (1909), discussing ways their entanglements with questions of marriage and economics are grounded in Franklin's work and personal life and in the intellectual influences that shaped her writing.     

Shocking Thoughts: A Reply to Anne Bottomley

This is a response to an article published in an earlier issue of this journal (Bottomley, A., Feminist Legal Studies 12/1 (2004), 29–65) in which an article by this author was cited as a prime example of a dangerous emerging 'orthodoxy' in feminist legal theory and subjected to a sustained and critical analysis. The purpose of this response is to reflect briefly on the rhetorical style and the theoretical orientation of that article, and to consider their worrying implications for the practice of feminist legal theory as a whole. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.