Being in Nothingness:

This paper examines the existential experience of adolescents in prison. Qualitative, in-depth interviews have been undertaken to explore the dimensions of time, space, and "others" which come together in what Novak called, the "experience of nothingness. "     

The Artist is Present: performing the icon

This article considers the work of performance artist Marina Abramovi?, focusing on the use of reperformance, the practice of hiring others to recreate historical performance works, in her 2010 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, The Artist is Present. Brawner utilizes Abramovi?'s artistic work with iconography and icon making and draws on her own experience as one of the retrospective's reperformers to highlight both the affective work that went into the creation of the show as well as its function as a religiously inflected meditation of celebrity and art stardom. The artist's work is explored through sources including New York Times art critic Holland Carter's turn of phrase “diva hokum,” a pejorative here reclaimed to mean the process of one's own icon making, a control of image and message that becomes integral to the structure of the work, and a balancing act between the performance and its afterlife.     

living a body myth,performing a body reality: reclaiming the corporeality and sexuality of the Indian female dancer

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers' bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a framework within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004.     

Being women in a male preserve: an ethnography of female football ultras

This article looks at the characteristics of contemporary sports audiences from the perspective of gender, focusing on the phenomenon of female ultras or ‘professional’ football fans. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an Italian football ultras group composed of male and female fans, this paper offers an analysis of female participation in communities of organized supporters. In examining the role and position of women inside the considered group, the paper pays attention to their perception of the existing gender differences showing how female ultras explain inequalities on the basis of ‘natural’ and ‘innate’ differences and capacities between men and women. Existing patterns of male dominance are supported by female fans’ own discourses and performance of their gender identity in the ‘male preserve’. Rather than questioning male dominance and gender hierarchies, female supporters’ efforts appear aimed at being recognized as ultras ‘despite being women’.     

Gender-reveal parties: performing community identity in pink and blue

The gender-reveal party has become the latest trend to publicize and commoditize what was once a private, intimate moment in parenthood. As this trend has grown in popularity, it has sparked a divisive discourse and reasserted normative ideals of gender. This article explores the representations and conversations surrounding this trend across newspapers, magazines and Internet sites. Approaching this phenomenon through performance and performativity illustrates how these parties highlight issues of liminality, gender, communitas and visibility. The gender-reveal party offers a performative space at the threshold of life, a liminal moment drawing on the power of communitas while creating a sense of permanence and security in the categorization of sexual and gendered difference. Uniting a community permits a collective reshaping of the now-sexed/now-gendered baby through rituals linked to binaried perceptions of identity. It allows adults to recuperate what they have learned from their own gendered constructions, reinscribing expectations and assumptions onto the unwritten body of the unborn and propelling these ideals into the digital, social, public world.     

Jewish joke telling in Muttersprache Mameloschn: performing queer intervention on the German stage

This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer disidentification, I propose that the act of Jewish joke telling by a young lesbian plays out as a new queer project of intervention in this play that confronts both antisemitism and culturally positioned sexual hegemony.     

Still sucked into the body image thing: the impact of anti-aging and health discourses on women's gendered identities

Health norms have changed over the past three decades, imposing more responsibility for health onto the individual. There are gendered implications of these changes which, when combined with increasing anti-aging pressures, have the potential to intensify the disciplinary relationship women have with their bodies. This paper, based upon interviews with 14 women, examines the impact of dominant health and anti-aging discourses on women's body practices, including exercise, makeup, clothing and diet, and ongoing construction of gendered subjectivity. Findings suggest that the women in this study are motivated to do particular body practices because of their concern with having a healthy and youthful ‘looking’ body. The women's stories reveal that anti-aging and health discourses function to reinforce normative bodily demands of femininity and consequently to intensify disciplinary control of their bodies. While the pressure to fight the appearance of aging is not new, the increasing association of aging with ill health, even illness, in conjunction with the promotion of health has implications for women's relationship with their bodies and sense of self.     

Autonomy as a disposition to non-domination in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that there is a notion of autonomy which can be extrapolated from Wollstonecraft’s work: central to this notion is the need for us all to adopt a disposition to non-domination.Thus, an individual is autonomous when she is not dominated but also, how she behaves towards others is significant, for she is only truly autonomous if she does not dominate others. I argue that such a disposition can be read in Wollstonecraft as something which cuts across the public/private divide. It is based on the notion that individuals are always capable of being rational in both of these spheres. There must be a disposition to non-domination because Wollstonecraft demonstrates how domination is corrupting, and when this disposition is lost we find ourselves faced with myriad concerns from slavery to multiple forms of social oppression. Domination creates relations of dependency. It is arbitrary and contingent and makes us relate to each other with a marked lack of compassion. Instead, Wollstonecraft stresses we have a duty to treat others as equals and key to this duty is the need to not dominate others. Finally, I highlight how Wollstonecraft suggests such a disposition is to be gained through education.     

Perceptions of work by pious Muslim students: a comparison between the Netherlands and Turkey

There are widespread ideas about Muslim women being oriented to life at home and not participating in paid labour. This article explores notions of work in the groups of practicing Muslim, veiled Turkish-Dutch students of higher education in the Netherlands and Turkish veiled higher education students in Turkey, as the best-prepared group of women for a future in paid work. The primary objective of this article is to see how respondents think about their futures with regard to paid work. Their views are compared drawing on in-depth interviews analysed using grounded theory. The article shows that respondents in both settings have a keen interest in taking up paid work while also raising families. However, ideas of work differ in the two settings. As the Turkish-Dutch are faced with rather gendered expectations in their local community, for them paid work is perceived more along gendered lines taking into account one’s roles as wife and mother. Their choices of profession are rather gender-specific. However, Turkish respondents do not encounter gendered discourses of marriage and homemaking as strongly. Their choices of profession are less gender-specific; rather they choose their professions regarding perceptions of how much money they would make. The article shows that the different discourses regarding gender roles and work shape how they think about paid work differently in the two settings.     

Being Part of the Family: Social and Working Conditions of Female Migrant Care Workers in Italy

This paper will present a study examining the social and working conditions of immigrant women who work in the family and the field of elderly people's assistance in private houses in Italy. The research will focus on categories such as social class, “race”, and gender, variables that stratify and naturalize the inequalities inbred in the social relations between immigrant caregivers and the families they work for. I will seek to illustrate through these perspectives how an affective and family life of their own is denied to these care workers. I will further investigate how the relationship between the care worker's body and the elderly care receiver's body becomes structured and characterized each time differently on the basis of gender. Moreover, I will take a closer look at the relationship of the female worker with her own body and disease, and also at the relationship of the care worker with death and money.     

创新:新时期高校共青团工作的主题

新时期高校共青团工作面临着挑战与机遇,创新成为新时期高校共青团工作的主题。高校共青团工 作必须从工作思路、工作内容、工作手段、工作机制等方面进行创新,不断推进高校团组织的建设。     

Center Stage: Humiliation,Being Found Out,and the Myth of Supercompetence

Youth workers operate within a professional climate in which competence is perceived to be linked to a worker's ability to respond quickly and effectively to whatever situations clients may present. Many youth workers perceive their own inability to respond in moments of stuckness as indicative of their own failing and lack of professional skill. They often view their colleagues as more equipped and competent than themselves and fear having their own struggles exposed. This chapter describes the third of five themes associated with youth workers' experiences of not-knowing what to do: humiliation and the fear of being found out. In addition to presenting the dominant theme, this chapter discusses the two variations on the theme, as described by youth worker participants: (a) The worst public humiliation and (b) They'll know I'm a fraud. Implicit in both variations is the weight of youth workers' attempts to measure up to the field's myth of supercompetence in their practice.