When two become one: sexuality studies and critical studies of men and masculinities

Men think about sex … a lot. Is this a problem or is this a site for reformation? In this paper, we set out to think actively, deeply, about the question of sexuality, to penetrate the limits of men and masculinity studies, and to tease at a range of questions that it seems the field is not attending to for any number of reasons. When men’s studies scholars speak of sex, we often speak of rape culture, violent sex, ideas of entitlement to sex, sex workers and pornography. Many of these approaches would be framed and understood by many as ‘sex negative.’ This paper sets out to think about what a ‘sex positive’ vision of men’s studies might look like – and also to ask if a sex positive vision of the field is even possible, desirable or necessary. In this paper, we braid together sex positive feminist theory, queer theory and men’s studies to complicate the matter of sexuality, both as an actual site of the kinds of things we do, and as a site of psychic and affective possibility.     

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     

Feminist literary studies

Elaine Showalter (ed), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on women, literature and theory (Virago) London, 1985.

Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Making a Difference: Feminist literary criticism (Methuen: New Accents) London, 1985.

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Theory (Methuen: New Accents) London, 1985.     

Minority studies and women's studies: Do we want to kill a dream?

When we engage in integration of new subject matter into the existing university curriculum, or when we speak of mainstreaming into the existing curriculum, we are engaging in the proliferation of the sickness of the dream deferred. The mainstream is very sick, and rightfully near death. We must be about ultimately replacing it through transformation. Yet neither Women's Studies nor Minority Studies has been transformed; we must be involved in a pluralistic, generative, interactive process that transforms Women's Studies, Minority Studies and the traditional disciplines.     

Rural studies in France

The article examines a number of criteria by which to categorise rural households into distinct socio‐economic classes. Based on the author's sample survey of 211 households in the state of Aguascalientes, Mexico, the study argues that an analysis of rural class structure must focus not only on access to the means of production and the extent of participation in the labour market but also on key structural features of domestic units such as household size, generational composition, and the division of labour by gender and age. Statistical tests strongly support the thesis that considerations of household structure sharpen and enrich the concept of class. The results also define and distinguish three main class types in the survey region ‐ commercial, subsistence, and landless households.     

texturing visibility: opaque femininities and feminist modernist studies

This essay examines women’s spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women’s bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women’s illegibility. Women’s visual prominence made apparent their ‘unknowability’, recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms. Representations of women as opaque in the early twentieth century constituted a challenge to ocularcentrism and reveal the centrality of femininity in mass mediations of epistemology and ontology. Drawing on written accounts of women’s opacity in the fashion and beauty press, I argue that attention to spectacles of unknowability can be productive for feminist modernist studies. The texturing of histories of feminine spectacle challenges some tenacious dichotomies that continue to inform accounts of women’s place in the modern, including those of subject and object, and visibility and invisibility. Focusing on opacity leads us to a productive account of the variable visibility of women in the modern, which foregrounds the multiple historical relations of different groups of women to regimes of visibility and keeps in view the diverse ways that differently classed and raced women were positioned vis-à-vis spectacle. The essay draws on feminist and postcolonial theory to suggest that an attunement to the unknowable not only nuances our understanding of a discrete historical period, but can lead the feminist researcher to confront and expand her own gaze in the era of capitalist modernity.     

Gender studies at Griffith University

The opposition to the introduction of a women's studies concentration area (a related set of courses) at Griffith University reveals the close links between opposition by the Right to feminist demands for change, (for example for women's reproductive and occupational choices), and opposition to the introduction of tertiary women's studies courses. The history of this battle at Griffith University also reveals the university's retreat from a commitment to the professional autonomy and competence of the women's studies planning team to a politicisation of the university's internal decision-making process.     

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.     

Self-image complexity and identity formation in adolescence: Longitudinal studies

Using a specially designed Q-sort technique, multiple self-images which were held by each of 60 adolescents were studied. Sixty normal and psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents were tested initially and then every 6 months for 12–18 months. Each subject's self-images were analyzed in terms of their complexity. Results showed that, as predicted, the patients and normals differed significantly. The patients had consistently lower complexity scores on each trial. The patients' and normals' patterns of complexity scores are discussed in terms of their reflecting the ego identity configurations described clinically by Erikson and operationally defined herein.This study was supported in part by a Research Scientist Development Award (Kl-70-178) from the National Institute of Mental Health.Received his medical training at Yale University School of Medicine and his psychiatric training at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Currently continuing graduate training in personality and development in the Psychology and Social Relations Department at Harvard University. Present research interests are in the interplay between fantasy and nonverbal process in interracial adolescent dyads; and in the longitudinal study of adolescent identity development.     

On teaching women's studies in Hungary

The author taught Women's Studies courses for 2 years in Hungary. In the beginning she thought it would be a simple matter, but as she and her students explored the differences in experience in Hungary and the United States, she realized that there were profound epistemological differences. She explores some of those differences here. Evidence presented is taken from student writings and discussions and from oral history interviews.     

Some recent East African peasant studies

Torben Bager, Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 116. Ño price.

John Carlsen, Economic and Social transformation in Rural Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 230. No price.

Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1980, pp. 328, £15.75.

The author discusses three recent books on agrarian Kenya: Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya by Torben Bager, Economic and Social Transformation in Rural Kenya by John Carlsen, and From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1880–1925 by Frederick Cooper. It is argued that the data presented in these books confirm that a middle peasantry preponderates in areas outside the White Highlands, although one of the authors, Carlsen, asserts the contrary. Some fundamental methodological issues with respect to the analay sis of the development of capitalism in the countryside — in particular, the treatment of differentiation of the peasantry — are discussed.