Thomas Malthus and maternal bodies politic: gender,race, and empire

Abstract

This essay explores the uneasy fit of representations of the Victorian monarchy and maternal metaphors of state with Malthusian doctrine and the debates over colonial initiatives and population pressures. Malthus's work on the principle of population authorized a potent mid-Victorian narrative which viewed the exalted body of the mother – and, by metaphoric homology, that of the state – as diseased, corrupt, and in imminent danger of putrefaction and decay. In Malthusian discourse, the colonies became the absolute sign of the pathology eating its way to the heart of the body politic. Malthusian discourse re-gendered the early nineteenth-century social body so that it became a silent, passive space upon which discursive expressions of the masculine could act. In the process, it also brought together troublesome conceptions of both race and gender to make a case for imperial progress and expansion     

Militant Women: representations of Charlotte Corday,Louise Michel and Emmeline Pankhurst

This article contains a cross-cultural comparison of constructions of politically militant women, beginning with Charlotte Corday of the French Revolution, continuing with Louise Michel of the 1871 Paris Commune, and concluding with Emmeline Pankhurst and the British suffragettes. The study reveals that as Michel's opponents attempted to ridicule and discredit her, they resurrected representations of Corday, modifying and aging them to fit her. The suffragettes' opponents similarly resurrected representations of Michel to ridicule them, but not as successfully. In response, Pankhurst's and the suffragettes' self-representations skillfully countered the anti-suffragists' dated and inaccurate representations of militant women as unhappy and unattractive spinsters.     

You can visit Hotel Mommy: maternal bodies as browsing/consuming biotourists

The technologically charged public domain of cyber(cultural)space, often constructed in opposition to women, femininity, and maternity, can also be a contested scholarly space with the potential to question dominant discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and maternity. The cyber-realm has also interconnections to webs of commercialism and the commodification of female and maternal bodies. In order to investigate this topic's interconnections in this paper, I turn to an examination of cybermaternity in the commercial maternity web pages of the Internet. In summary, I argue that mainstream and commercialized maternity websites are domains of paradox, with the possibility of overturning the previously mentioned dominant discourses even as they are saturated in commerce, desire to render maternal bodies completely knowable and conventional tropes of maternity. To further this investigation, I turn to Kim Sawchuk's theory of biotourism to examine discourses of medico-technology and the desire to observe the inner workings of the pregnant body. I argue that this biotouristic desire is enabled by the immediacy of the websites and delivered in the jocular tone of mainstream maternity magazines. In order to further examine possible manifestations of biotourism, I also make use of Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation: the tendency of particular media to represent and refashion other media in response to general Western cultural desires for immediacy.     

Construction,control and family planning in Tanzania: some bodies the same and some bodies different

The benefits of family planning for those who desire it, and the possibilities of coercion against those who do not, are well-known aspects of international population policies. Family planning technologies, more than simply a means for preventing conception, are involved as identity artefacts in the construction of bodies and in the reproduction of power relations. As such, modern contraceptives, organized by and implemented through, donor-funded programmes constitute a discursive apparatus through which scattered hegemonies are disseminated. Women's use of family planning, traditional and modern, allows them to counter the expectations of these hegemonies at some times, and to embody them at others. Both service providers and clients, construct identities, referenced through women's bodies, using the discourses of international population control and family planning. This paper uses data collected in Tanzania to understand how notions of modernity in the family planning programme construct Tanzanian female bodies as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, how these discursive inequalities reflect and compound material disparities and how these logics come into play in the ways that women construct themselves and each other.     

Masculinity and female bodies

The visibility of feminine-to-masculine (FTM) transgenderism increased considerably in the 1990s. The late modern/postmodern concept of the body as malleable in service of (gendered) identity presentation facilitated this upsurge in two ways: first, transgenderism became intelligible in society through this discourse. Second, representations of masculinity became increasingly corporeal, performative, and thereby more adoptable for a female-bodied person. In addition, certain developments in the politics and circumstances of the transgender organizations, previously dominated by MTF transgenderists, now advanced the activity and participation of FTMs in particular. The rise of female masculinity underlines the general change of masculinity towards more emphasized corporeality.     

Performing breastfeeding: embodiment,ethics and the maternal subject

Many feminist sociologists would agree that most breastfeeding research to date has been primarily undertaken from the perspective of medical and public health discourses. While there is evidence of a shift in research on breastfeeding to qualitative studies that focus on the lived experiences of breastfeeding women, this article addresses a number of concerns remaining in the literature surrounding breastfeeding. First, it questions the absence of breastfeeding as a legitimate philosophical topic, and, as a corollary, the invisibility of breastfeeding women as moral or ethical subjects. Second, by drawing on Michel Foucault's account of ethics and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, it is suggested that breastfeeding is best conceptualized as a gendered and embodied ethical practice rather than an aspect of one's being. Finally, this materialist approach to theorizing breastfeeding is discussed in relation to the Lucy Lawless poster that was released in Aotearoa New Zealand to launch World Breastfeeding Week in August 2002.     

oceanic corpo-graphies,refugee bodies and the making and unmaking of waters

This essay considers the challenges that the gendered and raced transnational subaltern refugee subject poses to the order of ‘the liberal state’ and ‘the liberal subject’, and argues that the latter are bound up in complex ways with entrenched understandings of the ocean as elementally distinct from land. This distinction, constituted by the freedom of the sea-going individualist liberal subject, invariably raced as white and gendered as male, to range across the waves in search of new worlds to conquer, is one that is continually reproduced both in popular culture's contemporary sea romances, and in the spatial and legal demarcations of the nation and its limits. In the diverse forms of traffic flowing from south to north, the historical oceanic mobility of this unfettered liberal subject (always shadowed and weighted down by its invisible freight of non-white bodies) now meets the transversal movements of the contemporary transnational subaltern as complex subject. Through the narratives of two refugees to Australia, the article traces the possibilities of an embodied refugee poetics for inscribing new geographies across the global borderlands.     

beautiful dead bodies: gender,migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and dead women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe.