Introduction: Performing the Self: women's lives in historical perspective

Abstract

Two recently discovered letters have finally established what has long been conjectured, that the English radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay corresponded with each other. The occasion for the correspondence was the publication of responses by both women to Edmund Burke's Reflection on the Revolution in France. The article explores the nature of their responses and analyses the main differences between them. It concludes that the two women were remarkably close in their ideas on democracy, equality and women's rights ideas ultimately circumscribed by eighteenth-century radicals' notions of property and class     

Unleisured lives; Sport in the context of women's leisure

This article examines women's participation and non-participation in sport in the wider context of female leisure. It begins by setting out the reason why women's entitlement and access to leisure should be a major area of concern for feminists, comparable to employment and domestic labour. It then goes on, drawing partly on a study conducted by the author in the new city of Milton Keynes, to explore the dimensions of and constraints within which women's leisure operates, showing that for most women sport does not form a sizeable part of that leisure. Next some possible reasons why sport does not play a major role in women's leisure patterns and experiences are considered. Finally there is a brief discussion of some of the ways in which both sport and leisure could be made more accessible and responsive to the needs and interests of women, by changing not only aspects of sport and leisure, but also women's overall position in society.     

The many lives and deaths of Sofia Kovalevskaia: approaches to women's role in scholarship and culture in grmany at the turn of the twentieth century

This article examines the ways in which the scientific work, life, and death of Sofia Kovalevskaia, the first female professor of mathematics in modern Europe, were represented in approaches to women's role in scholarship and culture in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. Kovalevskaia's greatest scholarly successes and early death coincided with the period of most intense debate on women's admission to higher education in Germany, and her example came to be extensively discussed by supporters and opponents alike. The various ways in which the story of the woman mathematician was portrayed were symptomatic of what was at stake in the question of women's entry to university in the German Empire.     

The women's project: A profile

This paper offers an analysis of the Oprah Winfrey talk show's success as emanating from an ideal typical form of branding that we term “dynamic branding”, in which the gap between production and consumption is almost entirely bridged. Oprah has managed to maintain a dynamic relationship with her viewers based on multiple feedback and feed-forward processes in which consumers' concerns are immediately translated into Oprah's performed identity in her talk show. Such an ongoing exchange of information with her viewers was the basis for Oprah's performance of her own self as a “failed self” embattled with the problems of everyday life, thus creating an equalitarian relationship with her audience. The success of Oprah's brand identity thus derives from its content as much as from the mode of its construction, a mode which involves an intimate and adaptive relationship with consumers that enables Oprah to immediately respond to and incorporate viewers' concerns, values and norms. This paper analyzes in detail Oprah's performed identity with analytical tools informed by linguistic anthropology and brings it into conversation with contemporary branding theories.     

Kinship and friendship: quaker women's networks and the women's movement sandra stanley holton

Women Friends (or ‘Quakers’) were largely absent from the debates on the position of women in Britain in the 1830s-50s. But a significant group of women Quakers emerged at the forefront of organisations formed in the 1860s to campaign for Women's rights, participation in which was still by no means a norm among their co-religionists. A notable presence among them was a group of women Friends, identified here as the Bright circle, linked by kinship, religion and radical politics. This article analyses the relationship between public and private lives among the Bright circle, especially in terms of the strength of the political networks on which they were able to draw. It examines the church culture of Friends in general, the domestic culture of this circle in particular, and the basis of its networks in domestic life. It concludes that the values and activities on which this network was built illustrate the way in which personal and public lives may overlap, so that the women among this circle were able to sustain identities that were authoritative, and simultaneously family-centred, outward-looking and publiclyminded.     

Writing women's rites: Excision in experiential african literature

This article examines “excision” (a.k.a. “female circumcision,” Female Genital Mutilation [FGM] or, more recently, Female Genital Cutting [FGC]) in African Women's first-person accounts. While considering the shift from female third-person narratives to “experiential” texts, the article also outlines three steps—(1) in-passing; (2) auto(-)biography; and (3) suturing—in delineating the herstory of the representation of excision in postcolonial African literature, which in turn, contributes to the general shift in the literary text from rite to mutilation so that women's rites now clash with human rights.     

voicing the non-place: precarious theatre in a women's prison

Based on the personal experience of the author, who is involved in theatre projects with women convicts, the article moves across issues of detention, migration, and precarity. Foucault's concept of governmentality is instrumental in describing the arbitrary exercise of power on incarcerated people and their precarious living conditions. Life in jail is especially uncertain for clandestine migrants. In the article, recollections from the rehearsals of the show I racconti del corpo (Tales of the body) alternate with images and quotes from the play, poems by women convicts, and reflections on detention as the ultimate condition of precarity for migrant women.     

blowing the love-breath: healing men in Caribbean women's writing

Caribbean women writers (such as Erna Brodber and Opal Palmer Adisa, who are discussed in this article) often include men in women's liberatory quests as participants: helpers, healers or caregivers. The close connection between sexuality and emotions in this body of writing can be read through a new model of affective feminist reader theory, which embraces and redefines from a feminist perspective the affective fallacy (over-interpreting a text based on one's feelings) so dreaded by the New Critics. This article interrogates how to read through affects across multiple intersecting differences between the text and the reader (such as race, class, culture and gender). A self-reflective negotiation between an outsider reader and a text's healing communities reveals the limits of the reader's ability to participate. The affective fallacy in this context becomes a useful tool for reading, but here it seeks a very different goal from that for which it was previously used. The transcultural feminism of difference relies on affectivity and emotions as a political force and a method for meaning; however, knowing the boundaries of one's affects prevents one from intrusively taking on the other's suffering through sympathetic reading. Women's sexual healing processes in the novels discussed in this article are not self-evidently or solely gynocentric in the Caribbean context: men are often active participants in these processes, and thus also in gender reconfigurations. Participation in these affective moments between the novels’ women and healing men is made possible by the reader's parallel process of embracing and curtailing her affective responses to the suffering of the other.     

ambivalent optimism: women's and gender studies in Australian universities

This article describes the place of Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities as a way of thinking about the place of feminism in the academy. It begins with a story of one such small programme at a time of stress and locates this story in an account of change in Australian universities over the last 20-plus years. The narrative traces a contradictory domain in which women, feminist scholarship and Women's and Gender Studies are enmeshed. The article draws on feminist literature about Australian universities to argue that while neo-liberal university environments are clearly places where masculinist values prevail, the flows of power around individual Women's and Gender Studies programmes cannot be simply predicted. Women's and Gender Studies programmes are thriving in some universities (on a small scale). As well as institutional imperatives Women's and Gender Studies programmes are engaged by specific intellectual challenges and some of these are sketched with reference to the Australian context. Asserting the need for dedicated research and teaching that focuses on gender, the article concludes that Women's and Gender Studies programmes in Australian universities are energetic places for this to occur. It proposes an ambivalent optimism to describe its assessment of these programmes and their viability as future places of work for feminist scholars.     

Giving Afghan Women a Voice: women's writing in Afghanistan

This article considers how far women's rights have improved in Afghanistan since the intervention by the international community in 2001. It examines this question through the author's experience of working with an Afghan women's writing group. It looks at the tension between allowing Afghan women to voice their experiences, and the danger of their writing embracing depictions of the female as ‘victim’. It concludes that while depictions of Afghan womanhood may appear to promote ‘negative’ images, the women themselves offer positive role models.     

Scottish women's studies

Abstract

This article outlines the content of the first Women's history course established in Bulgaria, at Sofia University, in 1999. The course focuses on Bulgarian women over the period from 1840 to 1940 and includes discussion of statistical data about Women's lives, the family, education and employment, as well as Women's subjectivities and cultural identities. Attention is also given to the analysis of powerful discourses about Women's role in society and the challenge of the Women's movement to these ideas. Wherever possible, comparative material from other Balkan societies and Western Europe is explored, as well as gender differences between men and women