Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.     

Gendered discipline,gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.     

How do gender quotas affect public support for women as political leaders?

Gender quotas have shown themselves to be an effective means of getting more women into political office. Less clear is the broader effect of gender quotas on egalitarian attitudes. This article uses a cross-national dataset of 48 countries worldwide to examine the role of gender quotas in the generation of individual-level attitudes to women as political leaders. Firstly, gender quotas appear to improve perceptions of women’s ability as political leaders in countries where they are present, having controlled for a range of individual-level and contextual influences. Second, this effect differs by sex. For women, the presence of gender quotas alone increases their support for women’s political leadership, something theorised as a ‘vote of confidence’ effect. Thirdly, this effect is not dependent on the type of quota implemented and holds for quotas adopted voluntarily by political parties and those that are brought about via a broader legal change.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.     

COVID-19 and the Limitations of Official Responses to Gender-Based Violence in Latin America: Evidence from Ecuador

As the COVID-19 lockdowns were implemented, Latin American countries raced to announce plans to address gender-based violence in response to the increase in reports of intrafamily abuse. However, states' interventions had limited results. This article explores the Ecuadorian case. The Andean country's emergency strategy was based on reporting violence via the 911 emergency number, a plan that failed to consider that women quarantined with their aggressors would not have the opportunity to make the call. This article lays bare the extent of the gap between policy and practice in gender mainstreaming and the acute consequences of this during the pandemic.     

Harassment and Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates in the United Kingdom

The use of political violence to attain political goals has long been a source of concern. Once thought to be exclusive to countries with high levels of general violence, recent evidence suggests that harassment and intimidation of political elites in the UK is more widespread than previously thought. Using data from the 2017 general election candidate survey, we find that four in every ten candidates experienced at least one type of harassment. Evidence suggests that women and young candidates are more likely to suffer from harassment and intimidation. We conclude by formulating an agenda for future research, focussing, in particular, on the perception of harassment and the effect of harassment on political careers.     

Parties and political change in South Asia

Over the past seven decades and more political parties have become an essential feature of the political landscape of the South Asian subcontinent, serving both as a conduit and product of the tumultuous change the region has experienced. Yet they have not been the focus of sustained scholarly attention. This collection focuses on different aspects of how major parties have been agents of – and subject to – change in three South Asian states (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), examining some of the apparent paradoxes of politics in the subcontinent. Recurring themes are the importance of charismatic leaders and their families (and the corresponding neglect of institutionalisation) and the lack of pluralism in intraparty affairs, factors that render parties and political systems vulnerable to degeneration.     

The neglected female unemployment in Sweden during the Great Depression

ABSTRACT

The unemployment statistics of the 1930s’ Great Depression have often been used as a way of estimating the endurance and severity of the economic crisis in different countries. The Swedish unemployment data have, among other things, been used in comparison with the American data to describe the different economic development that these two countries experienced during the twentieth century. Sweden’s ‘work approach’ to unemployment during the Great Depression has also been highlighted in earlier research as an answer to the question of why Sweden managed the Great Depression quite well and was able to kick-start the development of the welfare state. Unfortunately, the official unemployment data mainly covered men; female unemployment has been neglected both in the official records and in earlier research, and the praised ‘work approach’ only targeted male unemployment. In this paper, a new and previously neglected source of unemployment data is brought into the light in the form of poor relief statistics. From this information, a new estimation of the female unemployment during the Great Depression is made, which questions the grand conclusions that have been reached regarding the connections of the crisis and the later welfare state construction.     

新小说中新女性形象的意义

新小说是晚清被边缘化的文人和文学力图重新中心化的一种努力,同样处于边缘地位的女性也在进行中心化的努力,小说和女性在新小说时期形成了一种文化上的同构性,新小说中的女性想象成为文学现代化和女性现代化的尝试。但由于文化的脱序,女性的现代意识既有正面的提出,也有通过被妖魔化的描写从反面被提出。新小说时期的新女性形象塑造,对形成20世纪现代文学女性形象的传统,起着关键的作用。     

回族妇女“病患”行为研究——以甘肃临夏回族自治州回族妇女“病患”行为为例

笔者在临夏地区的田野调查资料显示,当今影响回族妇女健康的疾病主要是慢性疾病,回族妇女在处置疾病的过程中形成了一定的病患行为,体现了本民族独特文化的影响。本文从医学人类学、医学社会学及女性主义人类学的交叉视角出发,将其病患行为分为5个阶段,也可以称之为5个特点或内容。