Interactive narrators and performative readers: Gendered interfacing in Heian narratives

In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how does tea function within representational economies of lesbianism? On the one hand, tea functions as prelude to eroticism and codes for the opacity of lesbian sex. On the other hand, it also works to consolidate stereotypes about lesbianism. In this essay, the author explores the factors that make this almost joke possible – the gendering of tea as feminine, stereotypes about lesbian feminism – and examine ways in which it has been deployed as a form of lesbian shorthand. In working to understand why tea has evoked this stereotype, a sense of American counter-cultures, Orientalism, and historical memory come together to paint second-wave lesbian feminism as out of touch, politically inactive, and intimidated by sex. But what alternatives might tea open towards? Focusing on tea, then, gives us access to economies of desire and pleasure that both build on perceptions of radical feminism and expands upon it by establishing a vernacular of fluids, taste, and tactility.     

董事自己代表和双方代表与公司交易行为之禁止探讨

董事自己代表和双方代表与公司交易行为之禁止是董事遵循忠实义务的重要组成部分。但对其采取“绝对禁止主义”已不适应现代商事经济发展的需要 ,宜采取“原则禁止 ,同意例外”的规定模式。我国《公司法》对此存在缺漏和缺失 ,应在交易信息披露、同意权主体、股东诉讼权等方面予以完善。     

Beyond Electocracy: Rethinking the Political Representative as Powerful Stranger

This year's Chorley lecture examines certain theoretical and practical questions concerning political representation in constitutional democracies and advances three claims. (1) That electocracy (rule by elections) reduces the role of citizens to a series of discrete choice points, often shifting the actual moment of choice to the politician. (2) That a preoccupation with winner-take-all elections encourages representatives in the US to see themselves as powerful strangers with a proprietary interest in their position. (3) That representatives can deepen democracy by functioning as catalysts for citizen involvement not just surrogates for citizen views or identities. Drawing on historic and contemporary examples of ordinary people who mobilize collectively to build new forms of citizen power before and after elections, Professor Guinier adapts the framework of collective efficacy to describe this conceptual move. She argues that vibrant constituencies of accountability can transform the representational relationship to reimagine democracy as self-governance not just self-government.     

Exploring citizenship spheres of inclusion/exclusion: rights as ‘potential for power’

ABSTRACT

Ariely examines the logic of inclusion/exclusion involved in the allocation of social, political and cultural rights to minorities. He argues that the unequal allocation of rights is determined by the degree of potential power inherent in the various types of rights, and that rights with more potential power, such as political and cultural representation rights, challenge the dominant group's position more strongly than rights to social welfare and cultural autonomy. Minorities are included at a higher level in spheres of rights with low potential power, and at a lower level in spheres of rights with higher potential power. He uses the case of the Arab citizens of Israel to illustrate the thesis, reviewing institutional practices of inclusion/exclusion as well as the attitudes of Israeli Jews towards the allocation of different rights as reflected in three attitudinal surveys.     

悲观的乐观主义者——浅议叔本华的悲观哲学

叔本华是西方非理性主义的代表，“生存意志”构成了他的哲学体系的核心主题，并由此成为他悲观主义哲学的基础，但深受康德二分哲学和佛教影响的叔本华还是试图寻找在“此世”中证悟并得到解脱的方法。世界在叔本华眼中是如此悲观的一副景象，却依然没有阻挡他找寻出路的理想，这样的态度本身是积极乐观、值得钦佩的。     

Gender Matters in Politics

Although often ignored by practitioners and academics alike, gender matters in both politics as a practice and politics as a subject of study. This article systematically demonstrates how both the practice and study of politics are gendered in ways that lead to an over‐representation of men. It also argues that both are intertwined in significant ways that need to be unravelled, but also that important changes have taken place in both over the last 30 years. The article goes on to highlight some of the challenges that remain and ends by outlining some of the key themes that should be an important part of an on‐going agenda to improve politics as a practice and as a discipline.     

The servant of two masters: Electoral incentives in the Scottish Parliament

Scholars have pointed out the potential impact of different electoral systems on the incentives for representatives to cultivate personal versus party reputations. The mixed-member proportional system (MMP) allows us to examine the effects of electoral systems on legislators’ incentives. Scholars have argued that MMP may be the ‘best of both worlds’; however, MMP may lead to competing demands on list representatives if they are also allowed to run as constituency candidates, as happens in the Scottish Parliament. I show that this leads to different levels of committee activity—which I use as a surrogate for party activity—from constituency Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs), pure-list MSPs (who are elected via the party list and do not run in constituencies), and dual-candidate list MSPs (list MSPs who also run in constituencies), and that the proximity of elections also affects committee activity for those who run in constituencies.     

Photographing Handsworth: photography,meaning and identity in a British inner city

ABSTRACT

‘If you say “Handsworth”’, the novelist Salman Rushdie remarked in 1986, ‘what do you see? Most people would see fire, riots, looted shops … and helmeted cops … a front page story.’ In the 1980s, ‘front page’ images of violence and disorder had come to define areas of black settlement such as Handsworth. However, for both Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, photography has the potential of unearthing alternative histories of black people in Britain. Connell explores how this might work in practice by taking Handsworth, an inner-city area of Birmingham, as its case study. Following the Handsworth riots in 1985, a photograph of the ‘black bomber’ appeared on the front page of every national tabloid newspaper, and Handsworth became conceptualized by the media as ‘Frontline Britain’. At the same time, there are numerous examples of photographs from within Handsworth that attempt to present a different view of the community: images taken at high-street portraiture studios, community photography projects and the documentary work of the professional photographers Vanley Burke and Pogus Caesar. What such images offer the historian, it will be shown, is not clear cut. Photographs from within Handsworth are suggestive of possible themes in any alternative history of race in Britain, particularly in their emphasis on everyday life. However, Connell shows that it is also necessary to understand what is often the unacknowledged politics behind these images, something that makes them—in differing ways—as problematic as the stereotypical narratives presented on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.