Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘To Mr. Barbauld,with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ and the History of Sentimental Cartography

Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem ‘To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony’ (1775; 1825) and its illustrated companion piece, ‘A New Map of the Land of Matrimony, Drawn from the Latest Surveys’, first published anonymously by Joseph Johnson in 1772 but attributable to Barbauld, show their creator playing in original ways with courtly and libertine variants of the map of love and marriage: a genre of allegorical and sentimental map tracing its provenance to ‘La Carte de tendre’ or ‘The Map of the Country of Tenderness’, conceived by Madeleine de Scudéry for inclusion in her multi-volume prose romance Clélie (1654–61) and given illustrated form by François Chauveau. Taken together, map and drawing indirectly serve to illuminate Barbauld's complicated position within Enlightenment feminism and invite new insights into her relationship with the canonical male Romantics, reaffirming her status as a key transitional figure between Neoclassicism and Romanticism in the contribution she makes to the historical debate over the relationship between different arts (and, more specifically, to the historical debate over the relationship between the visual and verbal arts).     

Guada-narco-lupe,Maquilarañas and the Discursive Construction of Gender and Difference on the US–Mexico Border in Mexican Media Re-presentations

This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence, ‘narratives of eviction’ and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward ‘others’. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically, ‘woman as anonymous, replaceable body’; ‘woman as victim of the border city’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘woman as dependent appendage’; and ‘othered Mexican’; to illustrate that the production of knowledge about gendered subjects is a political and discursive practice embedded in national ideologies. Mexican media representations present a rich palette for thinking about constructions of gender and difference along a raced, sexed border. An investigation of the unequal and essentialist elements present in specific newspaper articles offers a fresh perspective on the socio-spatial aspects of particular discursive strategies and their role in underpinning dominant textual images.

Guada-narco-lupe, Maquilarañas y la construccíon Discursiva de Género y Diferencia en la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y México através de representaciones en la media Mexicana. A través de un análisis de tres artículos este ensayo investiga las maneras en que la prensa mexicana funciona para construir la diferencia y el género en relación a la frontera México-Estados Unidos. Yo discuto que la violencia discursiva, las narrativas de evicción, tanto que los silencios están involucrados en la construcción de mujeres como objetos sexualizados y débiles, y la construcción de Mexicanos como ‘racializados’, atrasados, y diferenciados a través del método de análisis de discurso de un periódico mexicano. Para llevar a cabo este análisis, yo elaboro varios momentos discursivos, específicamente, ‘la mujer como cuerpo reemplazable y anónima’; ‘la mujer como victima de la ciudad fronteriza’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘la mujer como apéndice dependiente’; y‘el mexicano diferenciado’, para ilustrar que la producción de conocimiento sobre los sujetos géneros es una practica política tanto que discursiva arraigado en las ideologías nacionales. Las representaciones de los medios mexicanos presentan una pallete amplia par reflexionar sobre las construcciones de diferencia y géneros por la frontera norte, la cuál es a frontera ‘racializada’, y sexualizada'. La investigación de los elementos desiguales y esencialcitas colocados en varios artículos de la prensa mexicana provee una nueva perspectiva sobre los aspectos socio-espaciales de estrategias discursivas específicas y el papel que juegan estos aspectos en sostener imágenes dominantes textuales.     

Cougar figures,gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North America's densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraway's conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this article's discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

The reader of confession in María Zambrano

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is an attempt to understand the concept of ‘confession’ as a literary genre in the works of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano. Firstly, we will try to understand confession within Zambrano's most relevant philosophical concepts, in particular her study La confesión: género literario y método [Confession. Literary Genre and Method]. Secondly, we will offer reinterpretation to confession in dialogue with theories of Reception by Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, and other authors like St. Agustin, Rosa Chacel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Miguel de Unamuno and Michel Foucault. Finally we will highlight the performative aspect of confession as something that is truly relevant to Zambrano’s theory. Zambrano understands confession as a method that can bring people's experiences closer to knowledge, and therefore a method that can change life. In this context, we propose that the reader of confession plays a fundamental role in understanding Zambrano’s conception.     

Avenging ‘Bridget’: Irish domestic servants and middle-class America in the short stories of Maeve Brennan

This article will examine the representation of Irish women servants in Maeve Brennan's short stories, first published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, and collected in The Rose Garden (2001). The Irish ‘Bridget’, the most publicly visible, if troubling, image of Irish womanhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, has received much-needed attention from historians and social scientists in the last decade, and is a central figure in discussions of Irish women and diasporic identity in the American context. Drawing on this body of work, and focusing in detail on key stories from the collection, including ‘The Bride’, ‘The View from the Kitchen’, ‘The Anachronism’, ‘The Divine Fireplace’, and ‘The Servants’ Dance', I argue that Brennan's reimagining of the Irish Bridget can be approached as a form of feminist revisionism, as Brennan's stories enter into a charged dialogue with the history of imagining the Irish woman servant as an undesirable but necessary presence in middle-class American domestic culture. Brennan's self-reflexive reworking of this paradigm is informed by her work as a satirist for The New Yorker, and proves an effective means of writing back to this problematic history, as she takes up recognisable tropes and motifs from earlier representations of Bridget in popular and literary culture, and alters them in knowing and subversive ways.     

Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive

Rachael Pringle Polgreen, a freed‘mulatto’ woman who owned an infamous brothel/hotel in Bridgetown, Barbados during the 1770s and 1780s became known to her contemporaries through her role in the (sexual) entertainment of transient naval officers and the visits of Prince William of England. Piecing together ‘evidence’ from her will, estate inventory, a nineteenth‐century novel, a lithograph and an interview with a British officer, I engage Polgreen's complicated and fragmented archive, revealing how Polgreen represents an example of the problems with sources depicting women of African descent who lived in a slave society and the silences that inundate their archive. The first part of this article critically re‐examines pieces of her archive, through which an image of Polgreen emerges incommensurable with narratives of her triumphs. Next, through an analysis of the processes by which Polgreen is historically confined by powerful archival and subsequent historical representations, I challenge previous assumptions about her life. Finally, introducing material from the British parliamentary debates in which an incident involving Polgreen is described and new material from Barbados deeds left by Polgreen's former slave, I expose the nuances of Polgreen's ‘agency’ in a slave society – that which depended upon her sexual subjugation of other women of African descent.     

The Rise and Rise of Ecofeminism as a Development Fable: A Response to Melissa Leach's ‘Earth Mothers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’

This contribution offers a response to Melissa Leach's paper ‘Earth Mothers and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell’, published in an earlier issue of Development and Change. Leach's article examined the rise and fall of the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in environment and development discourses. Specifically, it appeared concerned with the role of ‘the northern ecofeminist’ in popularizing this figure, and the notion that women have a special relationship with the environment. This response points to the reliance on the figure of the ‘northern ecofeminist’ as a foil to gender and development (GAD) discourses, and situates this anxiety over the figure of ‘woman as natural environmental carer’ in the context of some key feminist debates of the 1990s. Conflicts between GAD scholars and ecofeminists can be understood as one manifestation of tensions over essentialism in feminism. Attending to how conflicts over essentialism have been worked through in feminism could productively inform efforts to think through the nexus of gender, environment and development.     

‘Wanting the Children and Wanting K2’: The incommensurability of motherhood and mountaineering in Britain and North America in the late twentieth century

The death of British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, in 1995 while climbing K2 in Pakistan, the world's second-highest mountain, sparked debates in Britain and North America within mountaineering communities and the press. Hargreaves was a contentious figure because she climbed distant, high mountains as the mother of young children, and was thus constructed a ‘bad mother’. Drawing on ethnographic research in Banff, Canada and Nepal in 1999 and 2000, as well as mountaineering and other media, I examine the social anxiety arising over mother-mountaineers, in particular at a mountain film festival in Banff. Hargreaves and American Kitty Calhoun, who was also criticized, were both professional mountaineers and identified themselves as ‘normal working mothers’. I contextualize their maternal subjectivities within the wider public scrutiny over white, middle-class, working mothers at that time, to show how female mountaineers mediated their mountaineering desires within dominant discourses about ‘sacrificial motherhood’, which resulted in ambivalence. Hargreaves wrote in her diary while waiting to climb K2, ‘It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two’. I argue that these women were situated at the intersection of two clashing discourses—mountaineering as a journey far removed from home and motherhood as an intensive presence with one's children bound to home.

‘El deseo de niños y el deseo de K2’: la inconmensurabilidad de la maternidad y el alpinismo en Inglaterra y Norte América en los finales de siglo XX

La muerte de la alpinista británica, Alison Hargreaves, en 1995 mientras escaló K2 en Pakistán, el segundo pico más alto del mundo, resultaba en debates en Inglaterra y Norte América en las comunidades de alpinismo y los medios de comunicación. Hargreaves era una figura discutidora porque como una madre con niños pequeños, escalaba montañas altas y lejos, y como consecuencia fue construido como ‘mala madre’. Haciendo uso de medios de comunicación de alpinismo y otros, y una investigación etnográfica in Banff, Canada y Nepal en 1999 y 2000, examino la ansiedad social surgiendo de alpinistas madres, en particular en la festival cine de Banff. Hargreaves y la americana Kitty Calhoun, que fue criticado también, eran alpinistas profesionales y se identificaban ‘madres trabajadoras normales’. Contextualizo sus subjetividades maternales dentro del escrutinio del público a las madres trabajadoras blancas de media clase y muestro como median las alpinistas femeninas sus deseos de escalar dentro de discursos dominantes sobre ‘la maternidad expiatoria’, lo que resulta en ambivalencia. Escribío Hargreaves en su diario cuando esperaba a escalar K2: ‘Me está comiendo—deseando a los niños y deseando a K2. Siento que se me parte en dos’. Argumento que estas mujeres se situaron a las intersecciones de dos discursos en conflicto—alpinismo como un viaje que está muy lejos del hogar y la maternidad como una presencia intensiva con los niños que están obligado al hogar.     

Localism,signification, imagination: de-stabilizing sectarian identities in two fictionalized accounts of ‘Troubles’ Belfast

This paper is a critical discussion and interpretation of literary representations of the city of Belfast with a particular concern with and focus on sectarian forms of nationalism and place-based identity. It identifies various constructs of place particular to the city as articulated by Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man and Mary Costello's Titanic Town, two ‘fictionalized’ accounts of 1970s Belfast written and published in the 1990s. A ‘dialogical’ methodology is deployed in order to engage with these texts and to challenge and reinterpret various enduring and problematic narratives of sectarian spatiality. The social and geographical identity formations articulated, reflected and constructed therein are, I suggest, variously uncritical and disconnected. Sectarianism in particular can be seen as an empty discourse of signs. Its social and geographical consequences, however, are ‘real’ and measurable; the discursive and the material operating seamlessly as one socially effective and self-reproducing process. The paper argues then, that such forms of entrenched partisan localism are sterile, subjective and contingent, and that the resulting social division is simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘imagined’.

Le localisme, la signification, l'imagination: déstabiliser les identités sectaires dans deux récits fictifs des «Troubles» de Belfast

Irlande du Nord, représentation littéraire, sectarisme, lieu, identité

Cet article est une discussion critique et une interprétation de représentations littéraires de la ville de Belfast qui porte et met d'avantage l'accent sur les formes sectaires relatives au nationalisme et à l'identité propre au lieu. Un nombre de concepts relatifs au lieu urbain qui trouvent leur expression dans Resurrection Man de Eoin McNamee et Titanic Town de Mary Costello sont identifiées. Il s'agit de récits «fictifs» sur le Belfast des années 1970, rédigés et publiés dans les années 1990. La méthode «dialogique» est utilisée afin d'attirer l'attention sur ses textes et de mettre en cause et réinterpréter les divers récits immuables et problématiques entourant la spatialité sectaire. Je propose que les formations identitaires sociales et géographiques qui s'y manifestent, trouvent leur expression et qui sont élaborées manquent de discernement et sont coupées de la réalité. Le sectarisme peut en soi être perçu comme un discours creux sous forme de signes. Les effets d'ordre social et géographique sont toutefois «réels» et mesurables; les éléments discursifs et les matériaux interviennent uniformément dans un processus socialement efficace et se reproduisant par lui-même. Le présent article soutient par ailleurs que de telles formes de localisme à outrance et teinté de partisanerie sont stériles, subjectives et contingentes et que la division sociale qui en découle et à la fois «vraie» et «imaginée».

Localismo, significación, imaginación: la desestabilización de identidades sectarias en dos relatos ficcionalizados de los ‘Problemas’ en Belfast

Irlanda del Norte, representación literaria, sectarismo, lugar, identidad

Este papel es un discurso crítico e interpretación crítica de representaciones literarias de la ciudad de Belfast que se centra, en particular, en las formas sectarias de nacionalismo e identidad con base en un lugar. Identifica varios constructos de lugar que son particulares de la ciudad, articulados por Eoin McNamee en ‘Resurrection Man’ y Mary Costello en ‘Titanic Town’; dos relatos ‘ficcionalizados’ de la ciudad de Belfast en los años 70, escritos y publicados en los años 90. Usamos una metodología ‘dialógica’ para estudiar estos textos y para desafiar y reinterpretar varias narrativas duraderas y problemáticas de la espacialidad sectaria. Sugiero que las formaciones de identidad sociales y geográficas que se ve articuladas, reflejadas y construidas en ellas no son críticas y son desconectadas. El sectarismo, en particular, puede ser interpretado como un discurso de signos vacío. Sin embargo, sus consecuencias son ‘verdaderas’ y medibles; lo discursivo y la material funcionan perfectamente como un sólo proceso que resulta socialmente efectivo y que se reproduce a sí mismo. El papel entonces sugiere que estas formas de localismo partidista son estériles, subjetivas y contingentes, y que las divisiones sociales que resultan de ellas son simultaneamente ‘verdaderas’ e ‘imaginadas’.     

MakingGüeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product's representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

Creando güeras: La venta de identidades blancas en la televisión Mexicana de media noche En este artículo, hacemos un análisis sobre los discursos de ‘blancura’ y de color con respecto a la población en México a través de una discusión sobre ‘White Secret’, un producto cosmético para aclarar la piel que es muy disponible en México. Por un análisis de un ‘info-nuncio’ que sale por la televisión anunciando el producto ‘White Secret’, exploramos los entretejemientos de la construcción de blancura en México y como este ‘info-nuncio’ manipula imágenes de los cuerpos de güeras (mujeres de piel clara) y tecnología cosmética avanzada. Reflexionamos acerca de las maneras que el producto ‘White Secret’ pueda hablar a concepciones más amplias sobre la construcción de identidad y blancura y además, discutimos que tal exploración indica la necesidad de interrogar los limites epistemológicos y geográficos de la comprensión actual de la construcción de blancura basados en los contextos Latino Americanos y Anglo Americanos.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Towards a Female Topography of the Ancient Greek City: Case Studies from Late Archaic and Early Classical Athens (c.520–400 BCE)

In this article, I seek to move beyond the traditional, polarised model of ancient Greek cities which views the civic sphere as gendered male in contrast with the domestic sphere which was gendered female. I argue that this model oversimplifies a much more complex set of relationships, leading scholars to underplay the possibilities for female agency within the built environment of the Classical city (polis) and to underestimate the scope of women's activities within Greek society more generally. Taking Athens as an example, I suggest that space was not rigidly divided between ‘public’ and ‘private’ zones. Instead, a number of factors led to flexibility which enabled a woman to enter civic space in order to carry out a variety of activities on her own behalf, on behalf of her household and also as a representative of her household in the context of the wider community. The civic context was thus an inverse parallel for the domestic sphere which, although constructed as female, was clearly also an important arena for male activity.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

From the Absent Mother to the Oppressive Mother to the New Mother in Lucía Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio

This article examines the transformation of maternal and paternal images that occurs in Lucía Etxebarria's 2004 novel Un milagro en equilibrio. Sandra Schumm argues that the novel engages and transforms the postwar archetype of the “absent mother.” Using Schumm's study as a springboard, my article takes this argument further by showing how Etxebarria rewrites a second maternal archetype, the “oppressive mother,” a figure that symbolizes patriarchal values and the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women. At first, protagonist Eva Agulló characterizes her mother, Eva Benayas, as one of these oppressive mothers, a characterization that Etxebarria has also employed in her two most famous novels to date, Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Un milagro en equilibrio marks a change in Etxebarria's treatment of mothers because, as the novel progresses, Agulló questions and then complicates this portrayal. The Benayas that emerges is a complex woman influenced by personal, familial, and national conflicts. Conversely, Agulló's father comes to assume more culpability for family abuse and dysfunction as Agulló associates him with Francoism. This reassessment of maternal and paternal roles demonstrates Etxebarria's own evolution in maternal representations as it dialogues with and recreates previous works such as Ana María Moix's 1969 novel Julia and Ana María Matute's 1959 Primera memoria and 1969 La trampa—three foundational novels that also employ tyrannical maternal figures. In rejecting the oppressive mother role she had assigned to her mother, Agulló rewrites a long history of maternal figures associated with the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women.     

STRUCTURE AND AGENCY: CONTESTED CONCEPTS IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

The concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ have been of central significance to geographic research. This paper focuses on recent debates in critical social geography, and the contributions of Marxist, feminist, and postmodern perspectives to rethinking the structure-agency question. Significant changes in conceptualizing structure and agency are outlined, from early work in Marxist geography to current efforts to grapple with postmodern culture and identity. The paper demonstrates that critical geographic approaches to structure and agency have become more inclusive and nuanced, as researchers have addressed challenges posed by critiques and new perspectives. It concludes by considering the significance of place, space, and social difference in mediating processes of social change and thus in concrete explanations of how the ‘dialectical dance’ of structure and agency unfolds within particular locales. Les concepts de «structure» et d' «action» ont une importance capitate dans les recherches en géographie. Cet article porte sur les débats qui ont récemment eu cours dans le domaine de la géographie sociale critique et sur les contributions apportées par les tenants des points de vue marxiste, féministe et postmoderne dans la reconceptualisation du rapport entre la structure et faction. On y mentionne les importants changements qui ont eu lieu dans le domaine de la conceptualisation des structures et des actions, des premiers travaux effectués en géographie marxiste jusqu'aux récents efforts dé-ployés pour mieux saisir la culture et I'identité postmoderne. Ce texte démontre que dans le domaine de la géographie critique, on voit la structure et faction d'une manière plus englobante et plus nuancée à mesure que les chercheurs se sont penchés sur les défis soulevés par les critiques et les nouvelles perspectives. Nous finissons par évaluer la place qu'occupent I'endroit, I'espace et la différence sociale dans la médiation des processus du changement social - et ainsi dans les explications concrètes des variations de la « danse dialectique » de structure et de faction dans des milieux particuliers.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

Auctoritas as sanctitas: Balthild's depiction as ‘queen-saint’ in the Vita Balthildis

This paper assesses the representation of Queen Balthild of Neustrian Francia in her seventh-century Vita as a new kind of saintly figure, a ‘queen-saint’ rather than as a traditional saint-queen. Balthild made herself unpopular among certain factions of the Frankish nobility during her son's minority by interfering in Church matters. In particular, she compelled bishops to grant episcopal exemptions to monasteries and promoted her own, unpopular, candidates to Neustrian dioceses, leading to her identification as a ‘modern-day Jezebel’ by her enemies, and her banishment to the monastic community at Chelles. Modern scholarship on Balthild, led by Lynda Coon, has assumed that Balthild's biographer was keen to erase from popular memory her actions as queen, actions which could be interpreted as inappropriate behaviour for a saint, and that the Life reflects this by emphasising Balthild's more stereotypical saintly behaviour as a nun once she had retired to Chelles. However, it will be argued that, rather than underlining her humility, the author of the Vita Balthildis was in fact keen to show that her interference in Church matters should be seen as contributing to her identification as a saint, by stressing that her autonomous and authoritative use of her power was actually a positive attribute.