Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

女性主义研究方法及其在女性学专业课程中的运用与探索

女性主义研究方法既把女性作为研究对象，又把女性作为知识的生产者，向传统人文社会科学的方法论提出了质疑，挑战了传统人文社会科学的研究视角。2012年湖南女子学院女性学专业获批，开设了20多门与性别研究相关的专业课程。在这些课程的教学中贯彻女性主义研究方法，既是女性学课程体系特色教学的体现，也是我国女性学专业建设的重要环节。     

Leaders or Laggards: engendering sub-national governance through women's policy machineries in Spain and Poland

More than three decades of international best practice and a rich body of scholarship demonstrate that women's policy machinery (WPM) is a crucial tool for promoting feminist policymaking. A new and unstudied form of WPM is emerging at the sub-national level. In this paper, we examine the effects of (1) regional leftist party governance and (2) sub-state durability on feminist policymaking. We employ Stetson and Mazur's model of effective, feminist WPM and operationalize policy Influence and Access provided to feminist groups. Drawing on four regional cases within Spain and Poland, we use field research, interviews, and party documents to examine whether regional leftist party governance and federalized state structure are associated with WPM ‘Leaders’ in feminist policymaking. We find that regional leftist governance is associated with WPMs that offer feminist policy and empower feminist groups; however, sub-state durability modifies the impact of party governance. We conclude with suggestions for further research.     

美国女权主义法学平等与差异观研究

女权主义者由于受到后现代思潮的影响,否定统一、抽象的平等标准,不赞同把两性是否存在差异作为讨论平等问题的基点,但实际上后现代女权主义法学更加关注差异问题,并且拓展了差异的含义和范围。通过对平等与差异观的研究我们可以看出各女权主义法学流派之间并不是简单的批判和否定,从激烈纷繁的辩争中我们可以发现各流派关于平等和差异的讨论是一种辩证的否定之否定的关系。     

Shocking Thoughts: A Reply to Anne Bottomley

This is a response to an article published in an earlier issue of this journal (Bottomley, A., Feminist Legal Studies 12/1 (2004), 29–65) in which an article by this author was cited as a prime example of a dangerous emerging 'orthodoxy' in feminist legal theory and subjected to a sustained and critical analysis. The purpose of this response is to reflect briefly on the rhetorical style and the theoretical orientation of that article, and to consider their worrying implications for the practice of feminist legal theory as a whole. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Between rock and a hard place: narrating nona hendryx's inscrutable career

Elaborating on the imperialist grasp of rockism, Kelefa Sanneh writes 'There's a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for doo-wop groups and folk singers and disco queens and even rappers—just so long as they, y'know, rock.' What's striking is how closely Nona Hendryx's career fits within these categories—doo-wop singer, disco queen, rocker—yet, she still hasn't received her due, even within that flawed, proverbial rockist Hall of Fame. Building on Mark Anthony Neal's rich analysis of the proto-disco trio LaBelle and their prophetic collaboration with singer/songwriter Laura Nyro in the early 1970s, this paper traces the lengthy and varied solo career of former-LaBelle, Nona Hendryx. My argument takes as a point of departure the challenge of telling a 'non-rockist' story about how Hendryx rocks, how she doesn't, and why issues of legibility and legacy rest on these questions. I investigate the consolidation of race, gender and genre in the formative period of the 1970s, when rock and disco were situated within popular media as warring sub-cultures. In particular, I track the ways that the purported artifice of disco and its associations with blackness, gayness and overtly performative, 'feminine' modes of display render Hendryx's later experimentation with other genres of music illegible, even to her most devoted fans.     

浅谈林白小说中女性意识的游离现象

作为1990年代女性私语化写作的典型作家,林白小说一贯被认为是具有大胆而鲜明的女性意识的。然而,细细地品读其一些作品,却会发现她的女性意识在大胆激进中有游离现象。     

TENUOUS BORDERS: GIRLS TRANSFERRED TO ADULT COURT*

There are tremendous gaps in our theories and knowledge about girls who have committed crimes deemed so serious as to justify adult sentencing. This study is guided by a feminist approach to “give voice” to 22 girls incarcerated in a women's prison in the Midwest. Through in‐depth interviews, the girls describe their lives before prison and their perceptions of being tried and convicted as adults. Consistent with other research on female offenders, these girls reported lives fraught with violence and victimization, sexism, racism, and economic marginalization. This study calls for a more careful and complex look at issues of victimization, agency, and responsibility among female offenders, particularly those proclaimed “adults” by the legal system.     

The Partisan: Carl Schmitt and Terrorism

This article critiques and expands upon the jurisprudence of law’s violence from feminist and lesbian/gay/queer perspectives. The incorporation of gender and sexuality into the jurisprudence of law’s violence, via the social experiences of women and gay men, highlights the masculine and heteronormative character of law’s violence, while bringing into view particular forms of law’s violence, and forms of extra-legal but thoroughly legitimate heterosexual male violence, that have remained invisible in previous accounts. A feminist analysis of violence also suggests that law’s regime of violence is neither totalising nor inevitable, and that possibilities for resistance, if not avoidance, do exist.     

The man who envied women

Boredom is a permeating, trespassing force – an intensity not necessarily recognized as such. This essay approaches the aesthetics of political failure, and in particular, the cinematic intensities of boredom as affective expressions of post-traumatic malaise. Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), one of only three Chinese narrative films to represent the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, draws upon an aesthetics of banality to dramatize the epistemological limits and resultant trauma of 6/4, a historical event subsequently repressed in mainland Chinese media. Refusing melodramatic catharsis, the film’s stalling and stupefying effects perform both the amnesiac circumstances surrounding 6/4, as well as the compassion fatigue that followed. Even more surprisingly, Lou’s overuse of sex, a dull instrument by the film’s end, constitutes Summer Palace’s privileged sight/site of boredom. Indeed, sex, rather than constituting the censored obscene act, stands in for something far more offensive. Summer Palace frenetically pivots around an open secret, the historical memory of Tiananmen, as nervous sensation is composed within and without the text, centering on women’s bodies. Drawing on close textual analyses, this essay contends that the excessive contours and shapes of the memorial wound in Summer Palace take on the particularly anxious forms of dull sex in a messy Square.