“It's here,it's that time:” Race,queer futurity,and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames

This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism.     

“The tender mother”: The social construction of motherhood and the lady's magazine

My aim in this essay is to explore the politics of one of the seemingly least political forms of literature, the woman's magazine. Specifically, I will analyze the ideological content of the Lady's Magazine, one of the most popular and profitable of British monthly miscellanies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth‐centuries.¹ In this essay I will explore the role the Lady's Magazine played in the development of the idea of the “tender mother,” a concept which was key in the formation of the cult of domesticity and in the development of the ideology of “woman's sphere” as a realm distinct and separate from the man's world of work.²An underlying assumption informing this essay is that the concept of motherhood was (and still is) culturally constituted,³ and that literature, including popular literature found in magazines, has played an important role in this process.⁴ In the Lady's Magazine's portrayal of motherhood we can see one of the means by which the ideology of motherhood, in particular, the concept of the tender mother, was created, legitimated, and perpetuated.⁵     

Junior high school students’ use of their afterschool hours in Ghana: The role of household assets

Studies have examined a broad range of factors for how students use their time, but few attempts have been made to explore the nuanced link between different types of asset ownership and students' use of study time, particularly in resource-limited countries. This study uses data from junior high school students in Ghana to examine how students spend their time after school hours, the predictive influence of different types of household assets, and the extent to which these trends and relationships vary by gender. Polynomial quantile regression models were fitted across three quantiles (24th, 53rd, and 76th percentiles) to align with one hour, one and half hours, and two hours of study time. Results show that the average student spends well above the recommended 90 minutes on their schoolwork during afterschool hours, regardless of gender. Multivariate results indicate that owning limited assets tends to have a negative relationship with use of study time, but higher levels tend to be positively related to use of study time. Also, the predictive influence of asset ownership varies by asset type, and higher levels of asset ownership favor girls more than boys. Given this study's realtively small sample size, caution must be exercised in generalizing the study findings to the general population of junior high school students in Ghana. In light of the study's limitations, the finding of varying asset effect may have practical implications for asset development programs designed to enhance the well-being of low-income families.     

The “Crisis” of Gender Equality: The Norwegian Newspaper Debate on Female Genital Cutting

This article examines how tensions between feminism and multiculturalism conflate in a media debate on female genital cutting. The following questions are addressed: how is gender equality problematized, in what ways is the gender equality approach challenged, and what are the main solutions to prevent female genital cutting. The empirical analysis is based on the newspaper debate that followed the Norwegian Broadcasting Company's (NRK) documentary on female genital cutting in June 2007. The findings of our study do not support a claim that gender equality would be challenged by accommodations to multiculturalism. Our conclusion is that it is difficult to disconnect policy-making aimed at combating female genital cutting from the processes of stigmatization. Rather, by advocating the type of measure that is the most contested by the actors of ethnic minority organizations, the proponents for adopting routines of genital examination ultimately contribute to a problematic pattern, where the political debate about the situation within ethnic minority groups is run and dominated by the majority.     

The “Will to Empower”: Managing the Complexity of the Others

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to essentialist identity politics. In this article we want to ask, however, if the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality really is the solution to the problem of potential essentialism and reductionism in feminism. Or does intersectionality rather reproduce the problem of reductionism and the logic of identity in new, more sophisticated forms? Can feminism at all avoid essentialism and processes of othering? Is it possible to come to terms with the “will to power” inherent in all research by demonstrating a “will to empower”? The purpose of this article is not to evaluate whether different intersectionality studies are capable of accounting for complexity and thereby making it possible to avoid essentialism, reductionism, and othering. The purpose is, rather, to highlight and discuss some implications of the constructionism of intersectionality. As we will try to show, the constructionism that is claimed to form the basis of intersectionality, in opposition to additive approaches to social differences, is sometimes compromised for the sake of accountability.     

The dreaded body: disgust and the production of “appropriate” femininity

While some literature has explored women’s feelings about social identities like fatness, race, disability, queerness, and aging, little research has examined, from an intersectional perspective, how women construct a dreaded or viscerally disgusting body and how this produces “appropriate” femininity. This paper utilized thematic analysis of qualitative data from a community sample of 20 US women (mean age = 34, SD = 13.35) to illuminate how women imagined a body they dreaded. Responses indicated that defective femininity, having “freak” body parts, fear of excessiveness, loathing a particular person’s body, and language of smelliness and disgust all appeared, weaving together women’s fears about fatness, dark skin, and becoming old or disabled. Implications incorporating visceral disgust to examinations of body image, and the intersectional foundations of women’s dreaded selves, were discussed. Further, imagining “Other” bodies may produce especially vivid narratives around social biases and internalized oppression.     

Emotions,objectivity and voice: An analysis of a “failed” participant observation

Based on a participant observation of a feminist bookstore, this paper investigates interconnected issues of emotion, objectivity and the “gendering” of an academic voice. In it, I document how graduate students and other academics are taught to do research through a masculinized discourse of objectivity, ignoring the intensity and emotionality of locating ourselves in meaning-laden spaces. I argue that researchers must document, investigate and analyze their emotions along with their data, using reflexivity as a method for combining subjectivity and analytic rigor. To that end, I reexamine a “failed” research project, analyzing my emotional responses to uncover important social dynamics of the research location.