The Young-Girl in Theory

This essay situates Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl within a long history of leftist art and theory that uses the figure of the girl to respond to, reflect on, and even to attempt to subvert the various subjective crises of late capitalism. At the same time, and reading Tiqqun against the grain, it asks whether the Young-Girl might be of any use for thinking through the new questions about subjectivity and representation that neoliberalism has presented for feminism.     

评艾丽丝·沃克的前期长篇小说创作——兼及当代美国黑人女性写作

艾丽丝·沃克是当代美国著名的黑人女作家和"黑人妇女写作文艺复兴运动的灵魂人物",她的前期长篇小说根植于南方黑人社区生活,尤其关注黑人妇女的生存状态,关注她们的苦难和抗争.针对黑人妇女受种族主义和性别主义的双重煎熬处于分裂精神状态的情势,沃克孜孜以求"完整的生存",并提出了独创性的"妇女主义"理论,以实现包括男人和女人在内的全人类的生存与完整.因此,沃克的前期长篇小说成为当代美国黑人女性文学的光辉典范,其志在重塑黑人主体人格、以文学探索生存意义的执著写作正在改变美国黑人文学的边缘地位,引领着黑人种族文化步入开放的未来.     

Rethinking Constructs of Maternity in the Novels of Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold

This article explores how Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante place the feminine—and indeed often the maternal—body at the very centre of their narratives. The body—as a locus that filters the broader tensions and conflicts experienced by their female protagonists—in fact emerges as a key site of ‘contestation’ in their works. Through a close analysis of a selection of ekphrastic images, and photographic metatexts in particular, the author draws attention to how the two authors employ textual negotiations of the feminine body to question and problematize normative conceptions of femininity and motherhood. Ultimately, the author suggests that they not only challenge but also shift the perspective of, or indeed refocalize the dominant visual narrative of, the maternal/feminine body and the long history of objectification of the latter. In so doing, the author situates the two writers at the forefront of rethinking contemporary constructs of maternity and femininity.     

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an Anti-Feminist Text: Historical,Psychoanalytical and Postcolonial Perspectives

This article is an attempt to engage with the question ‘Is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a feminist book?’ Arguments from historical, psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives are presented and discussed. By summarizing and engaging with both sides of the debate, this article detects the source of the unresolved conflicts surrounding whether Carroll’s novel is a feminist text to be the different sides’ distinctive interpretations of Alice’s social identification. The pro-Alice-as-feminist-icon camp simply identifies her as an active and potentially subversive female role model for women, and thus subsumes Alice under the general category of women by assumption, whereas the iconoclastic camp, including the author of this article, reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an anti-feminist text, purports to differentiate the role of little girls and the role of adult women in the Victorian period. It argues that Alice’s supposedly unconventionally unfeminine characteristics do not necessarily imply Carroll’s enthusiasm for women’s liberation from marginality and domesticity, and instead they reveal his misogynistic fear of adult women and his pessimistic and nostalgic mourning for the loss of girlhood innocence and the inevitable corruption that ensues. The fictional character’s conformist ideologies are also detected in her participation in the oppressive system and mindset of British imperialism, which paradoxically further confines her in the oppressed domain of female inferiority and domesticity.     

Restitution, Rectification, and Mitigation: Negligent Solicitors and Wills, Again

A solicitor, when drafting a will, can owe a duty of care in tort to the intended beneficiary of a bequest under that will. The Court of Appeal has recently confirmed that where a solicitor has misdrafted the will, the intended beneficiary can sometimes rectify it, and recover the intended gift. The pattern of this rectification is restitutionary, raising the question analysed in this article of whether an intended beneficiary can have a direct personal action in restitution to reverse the unjust enrichment of an unintended recipient. It seems that, though fraught, such an action may indeed in principle lie.     

Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian

ABSTRACT

Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple ‘cure’ but rather a process of questioning and learning from the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice.     

The Faux Debate in North American Suffrage History

The history of the US women’s suffrage campaign in the twentieth century has often devolved into a debate about whether mainstream politics or militant agitation won the day. This article argues that this division—between those who credit Carrie Chapman Catt and her pragmatic approach and those who trumpet Alice Paul for her campaign of White House protests—is a faux debate. A reading of American history suggests that any political movement for social change—from civil rights to LGBTQ rights—requires a one-two punch. The inside politico engages the powers that be, courting sympathy, while the outside agitator throws rocks at the establishment’s gates, stirring fear about the risks of inaction. The coming centennial of the nineteenth amendment’s ratification offers an opportunity to assess whether this scholarly battle over credit is anything more than a historical distraction, and to lament the missing veins of scholarship lost in its gaze.