Feminism and the Complexities of Gender and Health

Abstract

Feminist research and activism have made a distinctive contribution to social studies of health and have also had a significant impact on public health policy. Gender is widely recognised as a key driver in the social determination of health and is a well-established category of analysis in fields such as the sociology of health. As a response to Broom, this article focuses on two ways in which feminist social science has complicated the understandings of gender and health which underlie much health policy and research. The first is the framework of intersectionality, which emphasises the interactions between different aspects of social identity and reveals the limitations of a singular or primary focus on gender in analysing experiences of health and ill-health. The second is the critical analysis of health as a regulatory ideal, prompted by the rise of the ‘new public health’ and its emphasis on individual responsibility for risk reduction. Together these critical insights reveal some of the tensions embedded in feminist goals such as improving women's well-being.     

sexuality,caste, governmentality: contests over ‘gender’ in India

This article tracks the journeys made by the term ‘gender’ in India. From its beginnings in the 1970s as a feminist contribution to public discourse, destabilizing the biological category of ‘sex’, we find that gender has taken two distinct forms since the 1990s. On the one hand, gender as an analytical category is being used to challenge the notion of ‘woman’ as the subject of feminist politics. This challenge comes from the politics of caste and sexuality. On the other hand, gender is mobilized by the state to perform a role in discourses of development, to achieve exactly the opposite effect; that is, gender becomes a synonym for ‘women’. Thus, the first trend threatens to dissolve, and the second to domesticate, the subject of feminist politics. This article explores the implications of both journeys in terms of a feminist horizon.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.     

A picture in black and white: modernism,postmodernism and the scene of ‘race’

‘Writing, in its noblest function’, says He´le`ne Cixous, ‘is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’ Cixous' hopes for the possibilities of writing are the starting point for a very new and startling piece of Australian writing, Kathleen Mary Fallon's ‘how violence made a real mother-of-a-mother of me’, writing that possibly gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ of contemporary Australian black-and-white relations than any other white-signed literary text. What might Fallon's writing attempt to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’? What is the primitive picture, according to Fallon, that so frightens us? Here, I want to explore the questions Fallon's writing asks, and to explore more generally what ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ might mean in the contemporary Australian context, and I do this in terms that might seem at first to be surprisingly anachronistic. I read this very contemporary, some would say postmodern, example of Australian writing in terms of a paradigm that is described by the field of critical studies of literary modernism. This is a paradigm that emphasises what feminist critic Marianne DeKoven calls the ‘irreducible ambiguity’ of some texts, their ‘radical undecidability’, their ‘impossible dialectic’. I am seeking to recuperate this paradigm and the critical impulses that it generates for a project whose objectives are far from those of literary modernism with their alleged origins in a white European and, for some, a masculinist aesthetic of the late teens and 1920s. I am interested in revisiting modernism, not only as a kind of writing practice but as a critical practice, and therefore as a reading practice, one that has possibilities for reading ‘black’ and ‘white’ in Australia now: for reading what might be called the ‘impossible dialectic’ of relations between whites and Indigenes. How might we read Australian writing now, in particular its efforts to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’, that picture that, I argue, frightens ‘us’, as white Australians: the picture in black and white, the original scene, the scene of invasion and dispossession, the scene in which the words ‘terra nullius’ were first uttered, the scene that continues to structure our perceptions of the Indigenous ‘other’ and of our white selves into the present?     

Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminisms

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society.     

Postmaternal,Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.     

archive fanfiction: experimental archive research methodologies and feminist epistemological tactics

This essay proposes that subcultural practices such as gossip and fan writing are feminist epistemologies that can form radical archive inquiry and knowledge production, and creative outputs. Drawing on feminist new materialism and archive theory, I develop a set of principles for practice-based research methodologies that incorporate a researcher’s intersubjective relationship with archive matter (e.g. records, documents, classification systems, social-material contexts) and consider the production of knowledge from such research as forms of fabulation. Fabulation here is seen as part of a critically transgressive epistemological stance that expands feminist critiques of universalising master narratives and archive orthodoxies. My proposition, formed in part through a residency in the Woman’s Art Library in London, is to name such research gestures ‘archive fanfiction’, where experimental and practice-oriented method moves with feminist politics and activism.     

Kiss and Tell: ‘The Writing Cure’ in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997)

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.     

Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean

This attempt to develop an indigenous reading of feminism as both activism and discourse in the Caribbean is informed by my own preoccupation with the limits of contemporary postmodern feminist theorizing in terms of its accessibility, as well as application to understanding the specificity of a region. I, for instance, cannot speak for or in the manner of a white middle-class academic in Britain, or a black North American feminist, as much as we share similarities which go beyond the society, and which are fuelled by our commitment to gender equality. At the same time, our conversations are intersecting as a greater clarity of thought emerges in relation and perhaps in reaction to the other. Ideas of difference and the epistemological standpoint of ‘Third World’ women have been dealt with admirably by many feminist writers such as Chandra Mohanty, Avtah Brah and Uma Narayan. In this article I draw on the ideas emerging in contemporary western feminist debates pertaining to sexual difference and equality and continue my search for a Caribbean feminist voice which defines feminism and feminist theory in the region, not as a linear narrative but one which has continually intersected with the politics of identity in the region.     

Theme: Making us Modern: Australian Writing in Modernity

‘Making us Modern’ brings together articles concerned with the scene of Australian writing and the relevance of ‘modernity/ies’ and ‘modernism/s’ for contemporary writing and reading practices. What is the ‘modern’, who are its subjects, and how has the modern made us—as ‘postmodern’, perhaps? And, who is this ‘us’, anyway? Attempts to theorise modernity and its aesthetics have often taken the white Western male as their subject. Intervening in these theories, however, are the efforts of feminist critics, among others, who seek to install those troubled terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ at the centre of their considerations of modernity, modernism, and reading and writing subjects. The articles in ‘Making us Modern’ contribute to these debates. Twentieth-century Australian modernities have been seen as holding together a mix of trauma and pleasure, constraint and release, sometimes represented in literary texts in seemingly impossible relation. For Esther Faye, writing on the short stories of Australian-Jewish writer Rosa Safransky, the subjective experiences of post-war Australian modernity are characterised by the traumatic dislocation of human subjects in time and space. In Safransky's stories of family and domesticity is seen the trauma experienced by gendered and racialised subjects in the particular context of the Shoah and its aftermath. Although, as she says, ‘the canonical status of the Shoah as the paradigmatic modernist event is increasingly contested’, through a Lacanian reading of Safransky's texts, Esther Faye shows the ways that the Holocaust's radical disruption of time and its dislocation of the Jewish subject in history echoes in its logic the wider deracination of the subject in modernity. It testifies ‘to the traumatic structure of subjectivity itself’, and it testifies, too, to the particular kind of ‘pleasure’ that is constituted in inextricable relation to trauma. In this way, as Esther Faye argues, being Jewish after Auschwitz is a question for all of us.     

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an Anti-Feminist Text: Historical,Psychoanalytical and Postcolonial Perspectives

This article is an attempt to engage with the question ‘Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a feminist book?’ Arguments from historical, psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives are presented and discussed. By summarizing and engaging with both sides of the debate, this article detects the source of the unresolved conflicts surrounding whether Carroll’s novel is a feminist text to be the different sides’ distinctive interpretations of Alice’s social identification. The pro-Alice-as-feminist-icon camp simply identifies her as an active and potentially subversive female role model for women, and thus subsumes Alice under the general category of women by assumption, whereas the iconoclastic camp, including the author of this article, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an anti-feminist text, purports to differentiate the role of little girls and the role of adult women in the Victorian period. It argues that Alice’s supposedly unconventionally unfeminine characteristics do not necessarily imply Carroll’s enthusiasm for women’s liberation from marginality and domesticity, and instead they reveal his misogynistic fear of adult women and his pessimistic and nostalgic mourning for the loss of girlhood innocence and the inevitable corruption that ensues. The fictional character’s conformist ideologies are also detected in her participation in the oppressive system and mindset of British imperialism, which paradoxically further confines her in the oppressed domain of female inferiority and domesticity.     

Mimesis,metaphor and representation: holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

There are complex and interesting representational issues and interpretational practices involved in claiming to ‘know past lives’ and these have particular resonance in feminist terms. These ideas are examined in relation to a particular case study, of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), although the discussion contributes to the ‘women's history and post-structuralism’ debate by eschewing taking up an abstract ‘position’ in favour of examining these ideas through a grounded historical example. A range of representations of Schreiner is discussed, including a photograph which her estranged husband contemporaneously had ‘touched up’ before sending it to some of her friends just after her death, and presentday representations of Schreiner in the emergent feminist canon of claimed knowledge about her. The ideas of mimesis and alterity are used both in relation to photographic representation and also in relation to the use of metaphor to stand for perceived facets of Schreiner's character. Representational issues are fundamental and ought not to be excised from feminist discussion; at the same time, the past and its ‘irreducible things that happened’ must also be taken seriously.     

Who Needs [Sex] When You Can Have [Gender]? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing

‘Gender’, understood as the social construction of sex, is a key concept for feminists working at the interface of theory and policy. This article examines challenges to the concept which emerged from different groups at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995, an important arena for struggles over feminist public policies. The first half of the article explores contradictory uses of the concept in the field of gender and development. Viewpoints from some southern activist women at the NGO Forum of the Beijing Conference are presented. Some of them argued that the way ‘gender’ has been deployed in development institutions has led to a depoliticization of the term, where feminist policy ambitions are sacrificed to the imperative of ease of institutionalization. ‘Gender’ becomes a synonym for ‘women’, rather than a form of shorthand for gender difference and conflict and the project of transformation in gender relations. ‘Gender sensitivity’ can be interpreted by non-feminists as encouragement to use gender-disaggregated statistics for development planning, but without consideration of relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology, and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. A completely different attack on ‘gender’ came from right-wing groups and was battled out over the text of the Platform for Action agreed at the official conference. Six months prior to the conference, conservative groups had tried to bracket for possible removal the term ‘gender’ in this document, out of opposition to the notion of socially constructed, and hence mutable, gender identity. Conservative views on gender as the ‘deconstruction of woman’ are discussed here. The article points out certain contradictions and inconsistencies in feminist thinking on gender which are raised by the conservative backlash attack on feminism and the term ‘gender’.     

From ‘Tramp Stamps’ to Traditional Sleeves: A Feminist Autobiographical Account of Tattoos

ABSTRACT

In this article I use a feminist autobiographical approach to present my ‘tattoo narrative’ as a gendered, embodied account in which I map out key moments in my life over two decades through the images inscribed on my skin. Specifically, I examine how my bodily modifications have magnified the social responses to my body as a woman. For example, as a teenager, I acquired a naval piercing and trendy ‘feminine’, discretely located tattoos to satisfy a heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, as a woman in my late thirties, my tattoos satisfy a different purpose. They are larger, bolder, and more ‘masculine’ in line with the evolution of my feminist politics. However, as an academic, the social responses to my tattoos are more complex. In class defined social spaces such as the university where I work, my tattoos cause trouble because they challenge gendered and classed norms for femininity. I conclude by calling for women to engage in autobiographical writing about bodily modification as a critical feminist political act.     

Vacant wombs: feminist challenges to psychoanalytic theories of childless women

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.     

Slovenia’s socialist superwoman: feeding the family,nourishing the nation

In this article we critically reflect on ‘feminist research methods’ and ‘methodology’, from the perspective of a feminist research unit at a South African university, that explicitly aims to improve gender-based violence service provision and policy through evidence-based advocacy. Despite working within a complex and inequitable developing country context, where our feminist praxis is frequently pitted against seemingly intractable structural realities, it is a praxis that remains grounded in documenting the stories of vulnerable individuals and within a broader political project of working towards improving the systems that these individuals must navigate under challenging social and structural conditions. We primarily do this by working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) providing gender-based violence services in research conceptualisation, design and implementation. This raises unique and complex questions for feminist participatory research, which we illustrate through a case study of collaborative, participatory research with NGOs to improve health and criminal justice outcomes for survivors of sexual violence. Issues include the possibility of good intentions/good research designs failing; the suitability of participatory research in sensitive service provision contexts; the degree(s) of engagement between researchers, service providers (collaborators/participants) and research participants; as well as our ethical duties to do no harm and to promote positive, progressive change through personal narratives and other forms of evidence. Given the demands of our context and these core issues, we not only argue that there are no ‘feminist methods’, but also caution against the notion of a universal ‘feminist methodology’. Whilst we may all be in agreement about the centrality of gender to our research and analysis, the fundamental aims and assumptions of mainstream (Western) feminist approaches do not hold true in all contexts, nor are they without variance in mode, ideal degrees of participation and importance to social context.     

Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.     

sexual assault as trauma: a Foucauldian examination of knowledge practices in the field of sexual assault service provision

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. The paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice.