Feelings are “patterns in the weave of our life” 1 – not a basis for a feminist epistemology

Feelings (or “emotions”) have frequently been debated in feminist theory. A large part of this discussion can be considered to aim at a “rehabilitation of the emotions”. However, when feminist theorists make epistemological claims concerning “emotions”, i.e. what philosophy of mind calls “mental states”, we run a grave risk of ending up in subjectivism and thus of reiterating the “private access fallacy” of traditional epistemology. Starting from the feeling of shame (a paradigm for a socially constructed feeling), this article makes a Wittgensteinian reading of “emotions” which offers an alternative to the atomistic, mentalistic and episodical view of mainstream philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein's thrust against foundationalism, his conceptual remarks about “inner experiences”, his anti‐behaviourism and his emphasis on the primacy of action, are all concordant with the social constructionism of the slogan “The personal is political”.     

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.     

‘Been There,Seen it,Done it,I've Got the T-shirt’: British Sex Worker's Reflect on Jobs,Hopes, the Future and Retirement

In the light of postmodern debates in anthropology, ethnography offers anthropologists new ways of representing their objects of study. The politics involved in the production and consumption by feminist scholars and activists of women's representations in the Arab world, and Egypt specifically, provides the starting point of this article. Using an ethnographic text examining manifestations of ‘Islamic Feminism’ in Egypt, I explore problems in addressing the subject of veiling – a continuous favourite among researchers. Grappling with stereotypes, assumptions and pre-interpretations based on what we read before going to the field and the questions we formulate in our minds, I look towards strategies of engagement with research subjects where anthropologists can express their commitments to them. Research ethics and reflexivity offer no formulaic guarantees of better representations, but pave the way towards understanding one's motivations and urges ethnographers to examine the impact of their work, both on the immediate community, and with regard to larger power politics. Given the fluid nature of identities and the relative fixedness of representations, solutions do not appear in abundance. Working outside of unnecessary dichotomies and searching for incongruities presents interesting possibilities for future ethnographic research.     

Gender,Culture and ‘the Spiritual Empire’: the Irish Protestant female missionary experience

This article offers an exploration of the intellectual woman worker in the inter-war years through reference to Rosamond Lehmann's novel, Dusty Answer, and Virginia Woolf's essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. These texts are read in relation to a number of theorists of the intellectual – Joan Riviere, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said. The article recognises the validity of Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz's claim that ‘a systematic working through of theories of intellectuals in relation to gender has yet to be written’. As an initial response to that neglect, it investigates the multiple difficulties for the woman in constructing herself as ‘an intellectual’ and relates these problems to issues of class, gender and the cultural history of the intellectual. The article is framed by reference to two of David Lodge's novels of intellectual life, Nice Work and Thinks, in which the story of feminist literary critic, Robyn Penrose, indicates how problematic the position of the woman intellectual continues to be.     

The Archive Function

As Joan Wallach Scott warns in The Fantasy of Feminist History, the danger of depositing one's personal papers in an archive is that one's papers then become open to misinterpretation. In this article, Scott's fears are enacted in relation to another feminist theorist's archival collection, that of prominent Canadian scholar Barbara Godard who died before she could complete the process of donating her papers to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University. Drawing on personal memories and eclectic textual traces, this article attempts to recover Godard's theory of the archive—a theory she never fully articulated in her lifetime, despite dedicating much of her time and energy to collecting and preserving her own words and the words and papers of her students and collaborators.     

Bad Feelings

While the importance of negativity and negative affects to queer history and theory has been the subject of much recent critical discussion, bad feelings are equally prevalent in contemporary feminist theory. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary overview of a recent negative turn in feminist theory, however, nor to identify the early twenty-first century socio-political causes of this welling up of bad feeling. Rather, its purpose is to consider the way the increasing centrality of studies of affect to feminist histories and politics allows us to reconceptualise these as ‘affective genealogies'. The article examines this by focusing on three representative texts, which it takes as representative of three key moments in the recent affective genealogy of feminism: Rosi Braidotti's Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010); and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011).     

Performing sinners: The Asobi and the Buddhist discourse of Tsumi

This essay addresses how Oprah's book choices are inevitably affective but not necessarily feminist. By reading Oprah's book choices as highly individualistic, I analyze how her choices might be more aggressive and more complex, thereby offering a sense of community rather than the power of individuality to her huge audiences. My argument is based on a belief in Oprah's communicative power, and especially if her book choices were invested with more complications than individual resolutions.     

Women's Organizations and Movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Response to Global Economic Crisis in the 1980s

In this paper I explore the emergence of women's organizations and feminist consciousness in the twentieth century in the English-speaking (Commonwealth) Caribbean. The global ideas concerning women's equality from the 1960s onwards clearly informed the initiatives taken by both women and states of the Caribbean. None the less, the paper illustrates, by use of examples, the interlocked nature of women's struggles with the economic, social and political issues which preoccupy the region's population. I examine in greater detail two case studies of women's activism and mobilization around the impact of structural adjustment policies in the two territories of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. By tracing the connections between and among the organizations and initiatives of women in the region, the paper situates the feminist movement in the English-speaking Caribbean as a continuously evolving one, fusing episodic struggles in different territories, engaging women of different classes and groups, and continuously building on past experience.     

Masculinity and the Dance of the Dragon: Reading Lovelace Discursively

The exploration and examination of the construction of masculinity is increasingly emerging as an integrated part of the study of gender in society in general, and in the Caribbean in particular. We are constantly in search for new sources of material which tell us about the ways in which men construct their masculinity in Caribbean society. In this paper I draw on the imagery and ideas provided by the literary text. I interrogate the novel The Dragon Can't Dance, written by Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace. The writer uses the metaphor of the dragon, the costume donned by the main protagonist Aldrick in the yearly Carnival masquerade, as a mask which disguises the need for Aldrick to confront his own masculinity under poor, urban conditions in Trinidad. In the struggles and confrontations between urban working-class men and women in the community of Calvary in Trinidad, the novelist teases out the different constructions of masculinity in the various characters he portrays. I explore the novel, focusing particularly on the ways in which this construction is embedded in the struggles over issues of identity, ethnicity, reputation and honor. While the novelist is clearly able to read into the mind of the male in society, his renditions of the female are not so incisive. However, this is not a shortcoming as the women, though not as well-rounded characters in the novel, play key roles in the definition and shaping of masculinities. This reading of the novel illustrates that the literary text suggests itself as a critical site for further explorations of the illusive data on gender and especially that on masculinity.     

Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Beyond hagiography: new books on gay and lesbian life writing

Abstract

The records of women's rights organisations active in Birmingham during the 1870s and 1880s indicate that these societies were dominated by women and men from families connected with the city's leading Unitarian chapel, the Church of the Messiah. In this article, I explore this phenomenon as a way of illuminating the relationship between religious belief and feminist activism. The shared social, economic and political values and progressive outlook of the Unitarian elite underpinned their emergence as a feminist network. This collective reformist consciousness was channelled into concern to improve the position of women by the ‘feminist gospel’ preached by Henry Crosskey, the minister of the chapel from 1869 to 1893. Furthermore, Crosskey's influential role, along with the substantial presence of other Unitarian men in local women's rights associations, reveals how denominational affiliation could operate to stimulate male support for feminism.     

re-reading horror stories: maternity,disability and narrative in Doris Lessing's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Fifth Child</Emphasis>

The central issues raised in much of feminist literary theory's early scholarship remain prescient: how does narrative engage with the social‐historical? In what ways does it codify existing structures? How does it resist them? Whose stories are not being told, or read? In this article I use Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child (1988) as a text with which to begin to address the above questions by reading with attention to the mother story but also the ‘other’ stories operating both within and outside of the novel; in particular I am concerned with the convergence of maternity, disability and narrative. The novel's co-implication of sexual difference and corporeal difference reveals the ways in which the mother's story is both made possible and authorized by the disabled body of her child, and by his inability to tell his own story. Yet, if The Fifth Child is a horror story that uses the disabled child's body as its ground, it is also about the horror of maternity, in its conception and attendant choices. In this fictional story as well as in the social‐historical narrative circulating at the time of its publication in the late 1980s, both child and mother are indicted in their otherness and it is ultimately impossible to separate one from the other.     

An Interview with Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi was the first Algerian woman writer to publish a novel in the Arabic language. Her work is therefore very significant in the context of Arab women's writing and feminism. Her novels express a unique understanding of social and political events, and convey the impact of these events on individuals by combining love stories with political and social history, fused together in present time. The interview examines Ahlam Mosteghanemi's novels and the impact of colonization and post-colonization on Mosteghanemi, her writing, Algeria and the Algerian people. Mosteghanemi's decision to write in Arabic and the themes of her novels are directly informed by the Algerian war of independence and as such can be seen both as a statement of independence from the Eurocentric homogenization of language and discourse, and as a feminist political statement. The interview seeks to deconstruct the widespread image of feminist literature as a genre that attempts to explore the female experience through an unnuanced binary focus on the opposition between the male and female within a patriarchal society. The interview pays particular attention to the rich symbolism of Mosteghanemi's novels. Even in the English translation there is a strong sense of the historical and geographical reality of Algeria, an ancient country repeatedly invaded by colonizing forces, and struggling again in the modern world to establish an independent identity. The interview looks at some of the significant themes raised by Mosteghanemi in her novels. In addition to this, the interview pays particular attention to the issue of translation in Mosteghanemi's novels and to her attitudes towards her readership.     

“He would know,but i just have a feeling”: gender and oral history1

Abstract

While feminist historians have long used oral history, and continue to revise the ways oral sources can be employed, historians of masculinities have been slow to embrace new approaches to oral history. Using interviews conducted with women and men for a community study, this article suggests that a gendered, relational reading of oral history is instructive, not just in showing how different men and women's experiences have been, but also how their memories have been shaped by prevailing ideas of gender-appropriate behaviour and values. This raises the issue of the form as well as the content of oral history being gendered.     

Provisional pleasures: the challenge of contemporary experimental women poets

This article is an introduction to contemporary experimental poetry by women. It considers the reasons for the resistance to such work in this country. It refutes arguments made against it, for example that avant-garde writing is elitist or not related to women's experience. It further suggests why this writing, in particular in its complex engagement with issues of language, subjectivity and gender, should in fact be of great interest to the woman/feminist reader. In particular, it suggests parallels between the concerns of this work and those of feminist poststructuralism. Above all, throughout the piece, it attempts to introduce the ‘provisional pleasures’ of the contemporary avant-garde to the reader, introducing, quoting and providing multiple interpretations of the work of several diverse writers in this tradition. It aims to provide a sense of the linguistic and formal innovations of these writings, alongside a sense of their relevance to questions of female subjectivity and of women's relationship to the dominant discourses of our time.     

A picture in black and white: modernism,postmodernism and the scene of ‘race’

‘Writing, in its noblest function’, says He´le`ne Cixous, ‘is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’ Cixous' hopes for the possibilities of writing are the starting point for a very new and startling piece of Australian writing, Kathleen Mary Fallon's ‘how violence made a real mother-of-a-mother of me’, writing that possibly gets closer to the ‘heart of the matter’ of contemporary Australian black-and-white relations than any other white-signed literary text. What might Fallon's writing attempt to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’? What is the primitive picture, according to Fallon, that so frightens us? Here, I want to explore the questions Fallon's writing asks, and to explore more generally what ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ might mean in the contemporary Australian context, and I do this in terms that might seem at first to be surprisingly anachronistic. I read this very contemporary, some would say postmodern, example of Australian writing in terms of a paradigm that is described by the field of critical studies of literary modernism. This is a paradigm that emphasises what feminist critic Marianne DeKoven calls the ‘irreducible ambiguity’ of some texts, their ‘radical undecidability’, their ‘impossible dialectic’. I am seeking to recuperate this paradigm and the critical impulses that it generates for a project whose objectives are far from those of literary modernism with their alleged origins in a white European and, for some, a masculinist aesthetic of the late teens and 1920s. I am interested in revisiting modernism, not only as a kind of writing practice but as a critical practice, and therefore as a reading practice, one that has possibilities for reading ‘black’ and ‘white’ in Australia now: for reading what might be called the ‘impossible dialectic’ of relations between whites and Indigenes. How might we read Australian writing now, in particular its efforts to ‘unerase’, to ‘unearth’, that picture that, I argue, frightens ‘us’, as white Australians: the picture in black and white, the original scene, the scene of invasion and dispossession, the scene in which the words ‘terra nullius’ were first uttered, the scene that continues to structure our perceptions of the Indigenous ‘other’ and of our white selves into the present?     

Equality versus difference and gender versus class in Danish women's history

The articulated goals of feminist research and politics in Denmark have been changing during the last twenty years, from “liberation” to “equality” and now perhaps to “difference”. Open theoretical debates on these changes have been rare in the Danish context, but the need for such debates has been made topical by the latest theoretical and political discourses in Denmark on equality and difference, gender and class. The American feminist historian Joan W. Scott has shown the detrimental effects to feminist research and politics of constructing the concepts of equality and difference as binary oppositions. She argues that women's equality with men could be claimed on the basis of sameness/ similarity as well as on the basis of difference. The same detrimental effects occur, however, when sameness/similarity and difference, gender and class, are constructed dichotomously. The history of the women's movements in Denmark around the turn of the century shows that some women have tried to avoid such dichotomies. Other women have contributed to them, however, and their arguments have been sustained by the hegemonic discourses of the time. Women's history research is part of competing discourses on gender. It may have political impact on the gender relations of today. Therefore, an important purpose of feminist history is to expose the way dichotomous discourses act against feminist goals, and to avoid making such discourses part of one's own theoretical framework.     

‘A crisis in woman's history’: Frances power cobbe's duties of women and the practice of everyday feminism

The article explores the ways in which Cobbe's Duties of Women grapples with new challenges facing the late nineteenth-century feminist movement, with an emphasis on the particular force of Cobbe's text that results from her unique role as a mainstream journalist of mid-Victorian feminism to non-feminist-identified audiences. It argues that Duties of Women participates in the ongoing negotiation of the representation of suffrage, both within feminist communities and in the ways that feminism is represented and understood by a non-feminist public. Specifically, the author argues that Cobbe's lecture series and book are generically linked to the conduct book. They offer advice for the appropriate daily practice of emancipated womanhood at a time when significant changes in feminist practice, such as the increasing emphasis on suffrage, threatened, in Cobbe's view, the larger public perception of that movement.     

Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.