The Real Thing: Transsexuality and Manhood in Rose Tremain's Sacred Country

Thinking about Mothers

Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, £13.99.

Roszika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago Press, 1995, £12.99.

Nancy Scheper‐Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Los Angeles: California University Press, 1992, £15.00.

Female Tones and Timbres

Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds.), Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth‐century French Narrative, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

The Joy of Footnotes

Darian Leader, Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, London: Faber and Faber, 1996, £9.99.     

Selfless androgyny: Gregory Rose as ‘virile woman’ in Olive Schreiner's the story of an African farm

While Lyndall, the feminist heroine of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, articulates and enacts a critique of the position of women in male-dominated society, Gregory Rose's transformation from a vain and self-centred man into a nurturing female nurse is an important part of Schreiner's feminist vision. His womanhood both complements and critiques Lyndall's ‘virility,’ allowing Schreiner to present a fictional version of her theoretical ideal of selfless androgyny.     

The Warnock report: The politics of reproductive technology

The Warnock Report (the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, requested by the government of Great Britain) is a crucial text in the discourse on reproductive technologies. This paper is an investigation of the Report to find out exactly what is being said about women's bodies. I explore the relationship between the state and science, between ideology and technology, and the attempt of the Warnock Inquiry to construct a meaning of technology practice.After a brief introduction, the scope of the report is considred in part I. Part II discusses the Inquiry's treatment of infertility and the family. It includes sections on artificial insemination, invitro fertilisation, egg donation and surrogacy. The analysis reveals the Inquiry's preoccupation with the meaning of motherhood and social control of breeding. Women as women are not a presence in the discourse. Part III covers the Report's consideration of scientific research. I show that genetics is an inextricable part of research associated with artificial reproduction and that there exists an undercurrent eugenic meaning of genetics in the discourse on reproductive technology. An epilogue ties together the main points of my analysis.In short, what the text of the Report revealed was that the state and science require that women's bodies be available to serve the patriarchal nuclear family and the needs of scientists. The state empowers science because politicized technologies can be utilized by the state to intervene in population control. This is the logic behind eugenics and the policing of women's sexuality via reproductive technologies.