Contextualizing the Construction and Social Organization of the Commercial Male Sex Industry in London at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

Feminist theories are concerned to analyse how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated, by understanding how patriarchal relations control and constrict them.(Abbott and Wallace, 1997: 284)Feminisms start from the position that women are oppressed within a society, which is patriarchal and socially constructed within knowledge which is malestream. This traditionally defines men such that they are rendered subordinate, within a social world constructed by men. Feminisms are engaged with making transparent patriarchal constructs, and illuminating the ‘spaces’ within which women-realities can become more visible.This paper presents research undertaken by two key services working with male sex workers in central London. The insights gained from this research are discussed, as they allow comparison between the traditionally subordinate position of women and the contextual experiences of the ‘hidden’ population of male sex industry workers. It demonstrates, that like women, for male sex workers, hegenomic and heterosexist constructs ensure that they also occupy a subordinated position within society.     

跨入新世纪的祝愿

当揖别旧世纪的钟声在浩瀚的天宇中久久回荡的时候,我们迎来了新世纪的第一抹晨曦。值此辞旧迎新之际,本刊编辑部的全体同仁向广大读者、作者朋友和一切关心、爱护、支持和帮助本刊的朋友们送上我们最诚挚的祝福,祝愿朋友们在充满希冀与挑战的新世纪的第一年里,取得更大的成绩!回首甫逝的一年,令我们激动和振奋。在党的领导下,在邓小平理论和江泽民同志关于“三个代表”重要思想的指引下,我国的改革开放和社会主义现代化建设事业取得了举世瞩目的辉煌成就,综合国力得到了增强,国际地位日益提高。同时,我们也看到,在新经济和经济全球化浪潮的…     

Feminism Means Business: Business Feminism,Sisterhood and Visibility

ABSTRACT

By interviewing self-proclaimed feminists with small-scale businesses who sell feminist commodities, the aim of this article is to understand why and how the market has become an arena for doing feminism and what this can tell us about contemporary feminism. Using theories of postfeminism and popular feminism in combination with Lacanian discourse theory, the analysis shows that feminism is renegotiated into ownership by reshaping the feminist discourse of sisterhood into business support and advice. Furthermore, competition is reshaped into a positive value of expanding the feminist community, and making profit is reshaped into a feminist discourse of equal pay. Business feminism produces an individual, visible, affluent and entrepreneurial feminist subject who does not challenge economic structures or ownership conditions.     

Feminism and the academy

R.D. Klein and D.L. Steinberg (eds) Radical Voices. A Decade of Feminist Resistance from Women's Studies International Forum’ (Pergamon Press) Oxford, 1989. M. Paludi and G.A. Steuernagel (eds) Foundations for a Feminist Restructuring of the Academic Disciplines (Haworth Press), New York, 1990. L. Stanley (ed) Feminist Praxis. Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology (Routledge), London, 1990.     

Discursive Desire: Catherine Belsey's Feminism

This is an account of an interview with one of Britain's foremost literary theorists, Professor Catherine Belsey. The interview was conducted in Ghent, Belgium in 1997. The discussion spans all of Belsey's works, from the earliest, Critical Practice (1980), to her latest publication, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999). In this piece, Belsey openly and unpretentiously discusses her feminist commitment, her sometimes controversial critical positions, some of the influences on her careers and the importance to her of her teaching.     

Media Review: Feminism During the "Doldrums"

The vigour of a field of history is usually assessed by reference to the quality of its historiography. Its health may also be judged by its presence in the curricula of educational bodies, public interest, and the prevalence and robustness of journals and societies dedicated to it. This article employs these criteria, sometimes overlooked in diagnosis of the condition of labor history, to explore its predicament in Britain. It documents the weight of labor history in the academy, its fragmentation, the declining numbers of scholars and their diminished sense of common identity as historians of a unified subject. Despite intellectual vitality indicated by the literature, institutional decline and centrifugal tendencies pose questions about the strength, even the reality, in practice, of the definitional field asserted in theory. The position appears unfavourable, compared with countries such as the USA and Australia. Popularization of labor history in the labor movement and among the public, proffered as a path to renewal, also poses problems.