Feminizing Politics

Sons and Daughters of Darkness

Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, £17.20 pbk.

Fin‐de‐siècle Fictions

Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, £35, £12.99 pbk.

David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, £47.50, £15.95 pbk.

Historicizing the Uncanny

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth‐century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, £27.50, £11.99 (pbk.).

Erotic Aesthetics

Suzanne Nalbantian (ed.), Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives, London: Macmillan, 1997, £40.

Topic of Cancer

Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, London: Routledge, 1997, £45.00, £13.99 pbk.     

Norway as an Example in the UK Women’s Suffrage Campaign

This article analyses the character and meanings of references to Norwegian experiences in the UK women’s suffrage campaign. It argues that the references to Norway served two main purposes. Firstly, they served as evidence of all the good things that would happen as a result of women gaining the vote, such as wage equality and social reform. Secondly, they played a significant part in establishing a counter-narrative to the anti-suffragist warnings of all the terrible things that would follow women’s suffrage. The study also discusses the limitations of political exchange and shows how different political contexts came into play in the debates on the validity of the Norwegian example.     

Tokenism or representation? The political careers of the first African women in Kenya’s Legislative Council (LEGCO), 1958–1962

This paper re-visits Kenyan history at the point of transition to independence but this time, with a focus on women’s history. It examines the political careers of the first African women in colonial Kenya to be nominated to Kenya’s colonial-era LEGCO (Legislative Council). They were nominees of the country’s governor. The process that led to their nominations was neither transparent nor consultative, their terms were short and the extent to which they fostered broader working alliances with women outside the LEGCO was equally limited. These were the consequences of a nomination process that served the cosmetic interests of the state in the absence of a bolder effort to address the lack of women in the LEGCO, and the broader structural problems that cultivated gender inequalities which were then manifested in the low-level of women’s involvement in the country’s political arena.     

村民自治与中国农村政治稳定

村民自治制度,实质上是市场经济背景下我国农村资源分配机制的改革。它不但拓宽了中国农民制度化政治参与的途径,培育了他们的民主意识和能力;而且压缩了农村政治权力过度介入资源分配的制度空间,有利于缓和现阶段农村的利益矛盾,从而有助于保持中国现代化进程中的农村政治稳定,为国家深化改革奠定了坚实的基础。     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.     

Chapter 8: The “Citizen” in Youth Civic Engagement

SUMMARY

The concept of citizenship is a central, necessary, and defining feature of youth civic engagement. Any effort to educate young people for citizenship entails an implicit idea of what a “good citizen” is. There are a number of different and sometimes competing versions of what is a “good citizen.” This chapter reviews “standard” accounts of citizenship in political theory and offers lived citizen as a critical expansion and bridging dimension to current discourses of citizenship. We develop this idea through our readings of the three initiatives in conversation with the writing of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. Our reading of Arendt and Dewey provides a grounded, embodied, and fluid understanding of the relationship between doing citizen activities (PA, YIG, YSC), becoming citizen (learning through interaction), and being citizen.     

An Exploratory Study of Youth Mentoring in an Urban Context: Adolescents' Perceptions of Relationship Styles

The goal of this study was to empirically distinguish a range of mentor relationships and to evaluate their differential influence on adolescent outcomes. The study makes use of data that were collected as part of a national evaluation of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America. The evaluation included 1138 youth, ranging in age from 10 through 16 (M=12.25), who were assigned randomly to either a mentoring relationship or a control group and followed for 18 months. A series of analyses, based on the matched youth's accounts of the relationships, suggested 4 distinct types of relationships (i.e., moderate, unconditionally supportive, active, and low-key). The 4 groups tended to distinguish themselves from one another on the basis of perceived support, structure, and activity. Relative to the controls, youth who characterized their mentor relationships as providing moderate levels of both activity and structure and conditional support derived the largest number of benefits from the relationships. These included improvements in social, psychological, and academic outcomes. Implications of the findings for research and intervention are discussed.     

加强医院工会思想政治工作的基本原则

医院工会思想政治工作是医院思想政治工作中的重要组成部分。有针对性地开展思想政治工作,是工会应履行的职责,也是应研究和探讨的课题。医院工会加强思想政治工作应围绕医院的中心工作,为职工解决生活中的实际问题,加强民主管理,加强医院文化的教育功能。     

‘Situated Knowledges’ and New Materialism(s): Rethinking a Politics of Location

Abstract

Playing a pivotal role in foregrounding a feminist politics of difference, a politics of location embodies what can be termed second-wave concerns that continue to inform contemporary feminist modes of inquiry and research. However, the attention to material specificity that locatability performs has emphasized the identity of the speaking subject at the same time as it has acknowledged materiality's entangled engagements as suggestive of the complicated production of any identity. In her 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges’, Donna Haraway both raises and responds to the challenge of a feminist politics of location in a way that anticipates a convoluted politics of the subject, in particular where she is not satisfied to relinquish universality and objectivity, or the ‘non-local’, in her provocative thinking through of situated knowledge production. The partial perspective she uncovers insists that the capacity for identity is addressed as a political gesture, with a reminder that any appeal to perspective is a non-innocent participation in what it helps to produce. In taking up Haraway's essay, the author engages with the problematic nature of a politics of location that is confounded by the direction of its critical interventions, and in such a way anticipates and performs new (feminist) materialist concerns. Questioning the nature of non-locatability and its political imperatives, the author suggests an ‘annunciative politics’ through which to consider some of the implications of Haraway's figuring of the partial perspective, to ask after feminism's political impetus with the tensions raised in Haraway's argument kept alive.     

关于加入WTO后高校思想政治工作的思考

加入WTO后给高校思想政治工作带来了新的发展机遇和新的挑战。为此,要树立时代、开放、务虚与务实相统一等三种观念;充实法制法规等五项新内容;构建高校思想政治工作网站等三种途径来加强和改进高校思想政治工作。     

深化国有企业厂务公开的思考

厂务公开是推进企业民主政治建设和党风廉政建设的一项系统工程。在国有企业建立现代企业制度的过程中 ,如何使厂务公开实现工作重点上的转移 ,进一步健全制度和完善机制建设 ,在工作规范方面切实加大力度 ,确保厂务公开工作不断得以深化。本文结合国有企业开展厂务公开工作的实践 ,特别是胜利油田开展厂务公开工作的实践 ,就这个问题进行了一些探讨。     

入世后高校工会加强职工思想政治工作探析

我国工会的本质特征决定了加强职工思想政治教育是我国高校工会实现教育职能的重要组成部分。加入WTO,对我国的高等教育将产生重大影响,我国高校工会必须切合WTO实际,有针对性地加强职工思想政治教育,促使广大教职工积极推动教育创新,增强教育竞争意识,抵御西方敌对势力的西化分化图谋,提高依法治教水平。     

在深化企业改革中推进职代会制度的创新和发展

针对职代会建设遇到的新问题,在深化企事业改革中推进职代会制度的创新和发展,应切实规范和落实职代会的各项职权;总结吸收厂务公开工作创造的成果和经验,赋予职代会制度新的生命力;建立健全职工董事、职工监事制度,积极探索公司制企业职代会与股东会、董事会相互融合、相得益彰的运行模式;推广厂务质询制度,强化职代会闭会期间、厂务公开过程中的民主监督;畅通中央企业源头参与的渠道。