Zombie Law: Conjugality,Annulment, and the (Married) Living Dead

This article deploys and extends Ulrich Beck’s critique of ‘zombie categories’ (Beck in J Consum Cult 1 (2):261–277, 2001) to consider how conjugal relationships are brought into being before the law. The argument presented here is that sexual performatives relating to marriage—and especially, in this instance, consummation—continue to produce a kind of social-legal magic, even as the social flesh of their enactment is rotting. Rules concerning annulment relating to wedding ceremonies, consent, disclosure, and consummation demonstrate that certain frameworks of conjugality involve a kind of corporeal magic animating the privileged place of heterosexual marriage. Thus, rules and regulations pertaining to weddings continue to produce and protect heterogendered, sexually dimorphous bodies, even though this privileging is—or at least, is becoming—socially obsolete.     

Carrie N. Baker (ed): Fighting the US Youth Sex Trade: Gender,Race, and Politics

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

Empire in Question: Reading,Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism,Antoinette Burton

Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, by John L. Idol, Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.

Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women's Fiction, 1885–1914, by Kate McCullough. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth‐Century Feminism, by Margaret H. McFadden. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 1999.

Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850–1930, by Martha J. Cutter. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.

Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion, by Missy Dehn Kubitschek. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Contentions Traditions: The Debate On Sati in Colonial India, by Lata Mani. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects, by Rita S. Kranidis. New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Strange Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, by Carole G. Silver. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts, edited by Shannon Hengen. Studies in Humor and Gender. 4. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998.

Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re‐Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy. New York: St. Martin's P, 1999.

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.     

International Law,Social Change and Resistance: A Conversation Between Professor Anna Grear (Cardiff) and Professorial Fellow Dianne Otto (Melbourne)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion.     

Labiaplasty,Race and the Colonial Imagination

This article seeks to interrogate the cultural meaning of cosmetic labiaplasty surgery (CLS) in the Western context through a historical examination of the symbolic function of the labia in relation to the construction of racial difference in early colonial race science discourse. It seeks to think through CLS as materially invested in a transnational masculinist imperial encounter with indigenous women from the Cape of Good Hope, who were identified in the race sciences of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as ‘Hottentots’ (and sometimes ‘Bushwomen’). We suggest that the production of desire in contemporary CLS practice and discourse has its roots in colonial anthropological Western representations of black female sexuality. The fear of abnormality so strikingly invoked in the medical literature and contemporary accounts of women's desire for CLS appears as a displacement of racial abjection onto the genitals and a production of the female body as the border object upon which the desire for whiteness is transcribed. We identify two interlocking features of this production of white desire: the rejection of the animal body and the correction of sexual deviancy, both of which are articulated through race, specifically the racialised ‘Hottentot’ bodies conjured up by the white, colonial imagination.