Behind the Back:

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from pillar to post: understanding the victimisation of women and children who experience domestic violence in an age of austerity

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women’s equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women’s services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.     

Behind Harold's Bloomsday Book: Gothic Secrets in Literary History

Harold Bloom's influential theory of literary influence has been widely regarded as utterly patriarchal, and yet some feminist critics have adapted rather than attacked it. The theory argues that a great poem aggressively rewrites and thereby conceals its precursor in order to appear as completely original. Bloom's theory of precursors invites in its turn an application of itself to itself, and his Anxiety of Influence seems to trail several possible antecedents, such as Shakespeare and Freud. A more powerful precursor, however, is a novel written by a woman: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . Just as Bloom's theory postulates only fathers replicating themselves through generational struggle and identification, so Mary Shelley's Gothic shocker represses the mother as both a source and an object of desire. What Bloom's theory thus represses behind its model of masculine sublime poets is a feminine Gothic novel. There is, however, a crucial difference: whereas Shelley's novel is profoundly critical of Victor Frankenstein's paternal shortcomings, such overweening Gothic masculinity provides the very basis of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973), conceived as it is in the immediate post-Vietnam era. Such strong revision notwithstanding, behind the strong critic who re-asserts American masculinity after Vietnam stands the madman in the laboratory, and behind him stands the repressed mother, otherwise known to literary history as the Madwoman in the Attic. What she reveals is that literary history is Gothic rather than sublime, and that it will not ultimately cover and compensate for the worst creation of men: war itself. Even the enquiring spirit of the New Historicism emerges as a function of this Gothic exposure.     

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.     

The value of narrative in understanding Mongolian and Australian women's journeys of survival recovery and remaking of self,through and beyond domestic violence

In this article I argue that a narrative method and analysis may work across cultures to aid in the understanding of women's experiences of survival, recovery and remaking of self following domestic violence. This article draws on a cross-cultural narrative analysis of eleven Mongolian and eleven Australian women's stories of survival, recovery and remaking of self following domestic/intimate partner violence. The very diversity of the Mongolian and Australian women offers a case for the value of narrative method. The focus of the article is the rationale for and explanation of feminist, qualitative, cross-cultural and narrative research methods which underpinned the study. Interspersed throughout the discussion are illustrative excerpts from the women's stories which support the argument that there are some deep similarities between the experiences of Mongolian and Australian women.