Becoming a Woman: self-fashioning and emotion in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

This article explores the self-fashioning of a bourgeois woman in nineteenth-century France by analysing Geneviève Laurent-Pichat's letters to her father. Geneviève's illegitimacy compounded the emotional difficulties of her path to womanhood, but it also illuminates the processes by which bourgeois girls learned emotional self-management and shaped a self that fitted their assigned social position. Geneviève's letters also enable a reassessment of the role of letter-writing in women's self-fashioning. Engaging in family correspondence was central to the upbringing of middle-class girls, but its protocols reinforced the norms of conventional femininity. Family correspondence thus directed opportunities to explore and constitute the self into acceptable channels, creating a paradoxical feminine self whose fulfilment lay in self-denial.     

Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of a Feminist Museology

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different possibilities possible.     

Feminist Materialism and Covid-19: The Agential Activation of Everyday Objects

ABSTRACT

This article takes up and make the case for the study of Covid-19 through the lens of feminist new materialism and asks how this approach might draw out perspectives and insights overlooked by other frameworks. I begin with a brief introduction to Covid-19 followed by an analysis of the virus through the lens of feminist new materialism by drawing on the work of Karan Barad (2003), Rosi Braidoitti (2011), and Jane Bennett (2004). I contend that the interconnected frameworks articulated by each of these theorists provides the basis for a more robust understanding of the viral non-human (Covid 19) and everyday objects (the toilet roll and medical masks) whose agentic power is embedded in larger assemblages of natureculture. This kind of analysis is urgent in light of our current media-saturated, interconnected, highly politicized, and expert-adverse environment.     

The Intimidating Other: Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Feminism in Estonian Print Media

The article studies anti-feminist rhetoric in post-socialist Estonian print media, specifically the Postimees, the most widely read quality daily in the country, in a ten-year period (1996–2005). The textual corpus is analyzed with a method informed by the critical discourse analytical work of Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999) and Lazar (2005), focusing on lexical framing and social (re-)contextualization of the created frames. The analysis demonstrates that print media, as a social gate-keeper, have contributed to the creation of a localized discursive “feminism”, anti-feminist by nature, as a useful ideological gate-keeping tool: it wards off influences that might potentially threaten the status quo and, at the same time, disciplines Estonian women and men into accepting the tenets of the dominant neo-liberalist ideology as the only common sense in the context of gender and other social issues.     

Woman and home in Australia

Jill Julius Matthews, Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia (George Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1984; Kerreen Reiger, The disenchantment of the home: modernising the Australian family 1880–1940 (Oxford University Press) Melbourne, 1985.     

Becoming a Naxalite in rural Bihar: Class struggle and its contradictions

Ever since its inception during the 1960s, the Naxalite movement in India has been the focus of scholarly interest and political analysis. In spite of internal splits and external repression by the state, this agrarian mobilization continues to gain ground in Bihar and elsewhere. Both achievements and contradictions of such Maoist-inspired agency and ideology are examined via the life story of a Naxalite – an organic intellectual – from the Dalit community. Of particular interest are the difficulties of having to protect family members, as well as positive developments, such as shifts in the language of struggle (from caste to class), and negative ones at the level of political consciousness (the persistence of traditional beliefs, receipt of pro-poor funding from the state).     

Contextualism, Feminism, and a Canadian Woman Judge

Feminist legal scholars have never cut the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada as much slack as the second. Yet the first, Justice Bertha Wilson, introduced the contextual method into the Court’s jurisprudence. Her approach to contextualism is consistent with one of three feminist legal methods that Katharine T. Bartlett identifies. More specifically, it is consistent with Bartlett’s feminist practical reasoning. However, Justice Wilson’s contextualism is not without its critics. The most challenging, Ruth Colker, contends it must work in conjunction with a distinctive substantive principle. Justice Wilson took a different approach, aligning the contextual method with the constitutional principle of proportionality. Thus construed, this paper argues, contextualism represents a new approach to feminist judging.