Close But Not Close Enough

The authors comment on an earlier aritice in Society by Eugene Goodheart and offer a novel hypothesis about the origins of religion.

forbidden tastes: queering the palate in anglophone Indian fiction

We examine pregnant women’s experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal–foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women’s experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women’s experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal–foetal relations and, more specifically, for the ‘moral pioneering’ (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women.     

cultivating the edge: an ethnography of first-generation women farmers in the American Midwest

In the US, an emergent cultural icon of resistant agriculture, the agrarian heroine, attests to growing popular interest in first-generation women farmers. Drawing on practice theory, historical geographical materialism, intersubjective ethnography and feminist scholarship, this ethnography focusses on three first-generation women farmers growing organic vegetable crops for the Chicago market, with critical attention to the body, the land and their uses. By applying permaculture’s theory of ‘the edge’ anthropologically, this study explores the work these women do to cultivate relational spaces that promote fluidity, diversity and solidarity in opposition to industrial agriculture and the homogenising forces of globalisation. The portraits that emerge problematise popular representations of first-generation women farmers.     

Notes Towards a Surfacing of Feminist Theoretical Turns

This article suggests that feminist theoretical turns are illuminating to study, as they make explicit how Western feminist theory is interested not only in the content of different theoretical turns, but also, relatedly, in how these turns move feminist theory in particular directions. Exploring some of the current and historical debates about turns in feminist theory, I pay particular attention to how they might be understood in terms of a wide range of work on the non-linear temporalities of feminist theory. I suggest that one way to understand the non-linear temporalities evident in debates over feminist theoretical turns is through a ‘turn to the surface’. To explicate this suggestion, I offer a series of five indicative issues, terms and ideas, which emerge both from recent work on the surface and feminist theory, and from my attempts to think conceptually about turns, surfaces and the relations between them. These are: (i) reflexivity, (ii) possibility, (iii) lines, (iv) knots, and (v) diagrams. I conclude by raising a number of further points that emerge through an attempt to engage in the surfacing of feminist theory.     

Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition

Sex change surgery has been practised in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Therefore, a medical and judicial process of transition has been regulated accordingly. However, this has not resulted in either the legalization of sex change surgery, nor in the recognition of transsexual identity within Iranian substantive law. Sex change surgery is allowed through Islamic law, rather than substantive law, in response to the existing social facts and norms, on the one hand, and structural cooperation with medical system, on the other. In this article, I argue that the Iranian heteronormative law’s understanding of transsexuality has amounted to the misrecognition of trans persons’ status within law and society. Using semi structured interviews, intersectional content analysis, and feminist methodologies, the findings indicate that transsexual bodies have gained meaning through religious and medical discourses within a framework of power relations, and that Iranian transsexual persons have reconstructed and redefined gender and gender relations in a way that informs their understanding of gender and sexuality beyond the existing Islamic legal and social norms. Moreover, intersectional analysis of the interviews demonstrates how the legal misrecognition of transsexuality creates space for a discourse which in itself leads to the misrecognition of other gendered identities, such as homosexuals and transwomen.