《Journal of Gender Studies》2012,21(3):249-261

This paper explores the women's stories in Pat Barker's three earliest novels: Blow Your House Down Barker, P. 1984. Blow Your House Down, London: Virago.  [Google Scholar] , Liza's England Barker, P. 1986. Liza's England, London: Virago.  [Google Scholar] and Union Street Barker, P. 1982. Union Street, London: Virago.  [Google Scholar]. Using Kristeva's Kristeva, J. 1986. “Women's time”. In The Kristeva Reader, Edited by: Moi, T. Oxford: Blackwell.  [Google Scholar] concepts of temporality from ‘Women's time’ Kristeva, J. 1986. “Women's time”. In The Kristeva Reader, Edited by: Moi, T. Oxford: Blackwell.  [Google Scholar], it takes as its starting point the idea that Barker's women are trapped in a harsh cyclical timescale by gender, class and place. Motherhood therefore becomes another form of imprisonment, particularly when father figures are absent. Despite this, there are moments in the texts when women do experience connections that could be described as a more positive version of this cyclical time, one that gestures towards a female tradition, or genealogy. As this suggests, bonds between women in these novels, particularly mothers and daughters, are complex and often troubling, eschewing any easy version of female solidarity. They are more adequately described as bonds based on ‘a complex mixture of fascination and distaste’, evoking Luce Irigaray's work on relationships between women. This paper examines these bonds between women in the light of the work of Kristeva and Irigaray, focusing particularly on the relationships between mothers and daughters, arguably those at the centre of these ambivalent emotions.  相似文献   

    

《Journal of Gender Studies》2012,21(1):61-76

Women's empowerment is a major concern in the developing world and is emerging as an important indicator of the development of a society as well as the status of women. In this paper, we study empowerment of women in families which have experienced the migration of their male members. A direct relationship between migration of a husband and a woman's empowerment is difficult to establish. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile examining whether women have experienced any change in their freedoms in terms of decision making, mobility and restrictions. Our measure of women's empowerment is based mainly on three indicators, viz. their decision-making powers, restrictions placed on them and their mobility. Analysis of these three indices of women's empowerment has been achieved through multinomial logistic regression models on data from India's 2005–2006 National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3). The findings of this study show that out-migration of men has not had a significant impact on the emancipation of women. The common factors which increase the decision-making power and mobility of women and lessen the social restrictions placed on them are age, their educational attainment, marital duration, occupation and residence in urban areas.  相似文献   

    

《Journal of Gender Studies》2012,21(2):129-138

This paper investigates intersections between female career, feminist activism and the desire for mothering as dramatised by Timberlake Wertenbaker in The Break of Day. Wertenbaker’s 1995 play displays strong intertextual links with Chekhov’s Three Sisters; however, while Chekhov anticipated women’s paid work to constitute a solution for a multitude of societal problems, Wertenbaker focused on the long-term consequences of women’s employment, including the deferral and inability of bearing children. Despite the Chekhovian parallels, The Break of Day is a contemporary play that explores the fatigue at the end of the second millennium alongside the identity crisis experienced by thirty-something women, whilst also contemplating, in an ambivalent-cum-optimistic mode, the future. I argue that the fashion in which Wertenbaker engages with her protagonists’ past, present and future indicates a tendency to survey the transformations in women’s lives from the seventies to the mid-nineties. In fact, I claim, Wertenbaker’s protagonists replicate the very trajectory of women’s presence in the public sphere: from the hey-day of the Women’s Liberation Movement to times that re-interpret the successive feminist interventions, in order to meditate on the future of feminism and overcome the current crisis.  相似文献   

    

《Journal of Gender Studies》2012,21(4):423-443

This paper describes the significance of interpersonal context in the making of moral judgments. The study reveals the dynamics of moral development with regard to gender and age. The article draws on the social comparison orientation (Guimond et al. 2006) and questions Gilligan's (1977) structuralist position. The study focuses on the developmental aspect of morality in children aged between 7 and 12, and it specifies how gender identities are context and social role-specific and their impact on information processing. The study engaged some 240 children who finished incomplete narratives. The basic question concerned the process of solving implicit moral dilemmas and its possible dependence on care orientation (associated with femininity) or justice orientation (associated with masculinity). The analysis showed significant developmental changes with age: girls become more care-oriented but only towards opposite-sex peers, whereas boys become more justice-oriented but also only towards opposite-sex peers. The results of this study suggest, in accordance with Gilligan to some extent, that ‘care’ and ‘justice’ become naturalized ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identities. However, in contrast to Gilligan's theory, we observe that these identities develop only in opposition to each other, are social context-specific, and coincide with gender role acceptance in the early teenage years. In other words, the study suggests that in the course of social comparisons, gender becomes an important catalyst for moral conduct.  相似文献   

    

《Journal of Gender Studies》2012,21(3):320-334

Trading is one of the strategies that Ghanaian women have adopted to overcome poverty and improve their well-being. Using in-depth interviews, this study examines the specific commercial activities that are undertaken by women in cross-border trading, the coping strategies that they use to address the difficulties that confront them, the impact of women's trading activities on their lives, and how these are linked to their subjective understanding of poverty and well-being. The analysis shows that women can lift themselves out of poverty through informal cross-border trading activities in spite of the challenges and risks they face. Such trading activities have enabled them to support themselves and to meet the needs of their households, and this has created a sense of life satisfaction, happiness, and self-fulfilment. The study recommends that trade and trade-related programmes developed at a national level must include the needs and concerns of female cross-border traders. This should include educational and sensitization programmes on trade laws and women's rights issues.  相似文献   

    

《Japan Forum》2012,24(2):263-271

Abstract

During the 1980s, Tokyo saw a change in its pattern of development, from the wholesale rebuilding of actual neighborhoods to the manipulation of the visual environment and of the information provided thereby. Understanding cities as an apparatus or control system designed to manage the production and consumption of individuals, this article explores the significance of this shift towards the design of cities as a medium for information. Typified by the development of Shibuya, in the south-west of Tokyo, dominated in large part by the Parco department store, the city not only provided information, but itself became information and thereby a commodity to be consumed, evident in the emergence of magazines that constituted it as such. Cities thereby changed into an apparatus that sought to manage the totality of an individual's desires, also prompting a turn to semiotics as a way of comprehending the information city.  相似文献   

    

《Japan Forum》2012,24(2):287-300

Abstract

Shibuya in the 1970s became the scene for the emergence of a postmodern culture, wherein urban space was differentiated, staged and mediatised, so as to become an integrated advertising environment. This was enabled by and produced a particular geography, but was the result most directly of a conscious strategy on the part of Parco, its dominant retailer. The segmented area could therefore be consumed by its visitors, as women's magazines at the time were being consumed by their readers, with the reader and visitor simultaneously seeing and being seen within the new urban/media space. This article traces this process, emphasising the new kind of agency that was acquired by women in the process, but also the rapid disappearance of this new sense of possibility, constrained not only by the limits of consumerism and by a mid-1980s decline in consumption, but also from the more general uncertainty that became apparent towards the end of the decade. By the turn of the century, postmodern culture had disappeared in Tokyo. Inasmuch as Shibuya's earlier self can still be discovered in Taipei, Seoul and beyond, however, its lessons continue to resonate today.  相似文献   

    

《Japan Forum》2012,24(2):273-285

Abstract

With the advent of information society in the 1960, followed by the architectural mega-structures of the 1980s, Tokyo saw the emergence of a new kind of urban consciousness, where space was no longer experienced as something that divided up objects, but rather became adhesive and glue-like. In response to this, the 1980s also saw a turn to semiotics and a boom in discourse on the city, as intellectuals sought to find the artefacts and so piece together the natural history of the new urban environment. This article explores the significance of both developments, suggesting how the creation of an urban wunderkammer points to the baroque decay of the city itself. This decay is prefigured, the article suggests, by the city's origins as a swampy wetland, its status as the capital for an emperor who is both archaic and mortal, and the postwar standardization of housing, which permitted a family two children but no more. However hard the city strives through continuous redevelopment to evade its own ruin, it remains condemned to decay and haunted by ghosts.  相似文献   

    

《Japan Forum》2012,24(2):189-203

Abstract

Japanese women's history has been regarded as marginal to historical investigation for a long time. The subject hardly existed before 1945 and even after that date many academic historians were reluctant to accept women's history as a part of Japanese history. However, the social and political climate of the 1980s in particular, favourable in many ways to women, gave opportunities for Japanese women's historiography to promote itself and also brought the subject fuller academic recognition. Exciting and innovative research on Japanese women's history has been carried out over the past decade or so. Much of this has been conducted not only by ‘academic’ women's historians, but also by freelance writers, journalists and amateur historians, that is by people who have been less saddled with traditional historical methods and expectations. The study of Japanese women's history has now reached the point where the subject no longer requires justification.

This paper gives an overall picture of the development of Japanese women's historiography from about 1920 to 1985. It outlines major publications on the subject, which helped promote the standards of its scholarship, and evaluates these, making some comparison with Western counterparts. It discusses the most likely developments in the subject for the future.  相似文献   

    

《Japan Forum》2012,24(2):135-137

Abstract

It has become fashionable to write off lifetime employment or long‐term employment (LTE) in Japan as a relic of the past. In a sense this is comforting, since it suggests the Japanese are not immune to the maladies of advanced capitalism and industrial decline, and obviates the need to take Japanese employment institutions seriously. Yet it is significant that, even after an unprecedented recession, there is little statistical evidence for the demise of LTE. Japan's unemployment rate remains the lowest among OECD countries. A colloquium was organized to examine the fate of LTE, and the institutional and policy complex which supports it, in the context of prolonged recession and restructuring. Edited contributions here examine recent restructuring and employment adjustment measures, with case studies, the employers' and unions' perspectives on the future of LTE, and prospects for new job creation and revitalization of the economy. They identify forces for, and probable directions of, change, but they also point to the durability of key elements. The consensus supporting LTE and Japan's ‘employment society’ has not crumbled. Japan should be taken more seriously at job summits on tackling unemployment in OECD countries.  相似文献