Routes of Resistance: Mobilizing Discourses of Opportunity in Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point

Ann Petry’s The Street and Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point provide important representations and affirmations of black people’s use of movements such as educational attainment and economic advancement to create routes to resist inequitable treatment and demand equal access to the benefits of belonging to American and Canadian national communities. In The Street, Lutie employs intellectual and economic movements to achieve her American dream but learns that systematic inhibitions block her intended ascension. In The Meeting Point, Bernice also tries to attain education and make financial strides to achieve her Canadian dream but finds herself barred from fully materializing that dream. Lutie and Bernice continue their quests to fulfill their mobility ideals, despite obstructions they face. Through that movement, which is driven by their knowledge of the implications of their exclusions from promises of the nations they call home, they counter boundaries intended to restrict them. While they do not accomplish fully their upward mobility ideals, their resistance demonstrates their refusal to be denied the benefits of American and Canadian discourses of opportunity. Petry’s and Clarke’s representations of this persistent resistance help inform and give voice to struggles against exclusionary practices blacks in the United States and Canada continually experience.     

‘It’s a different time. It’s a different era. It’s a different place’: the Legacy of Vietnam and Contemporary Memoirs of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

This article examines censorship of US journalists in World Wars I and II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Persian Gulf War, and from war to war, trends in types of censored information. This article also answers whether any censorship has avoided bloodshed or been legitimate, and concludes by examining how, in any future US wars, the government or military could most legitimately ensure safe reporting.     

Explaining Canada–US Differences in Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice: An Empirical Test of S.M. Lipset’s Account

Despite cultural similarities between Canada and the United States, some observers contend that significant differences remain in attitudes and values between the two countries. For example, Lipset has observed that “efforts to distinguish Canada and the United States almost invariably point to the greater respect for law and order and those who uphold it north of the border”. Lipset’s argument is that Canadian values are based on the nation’s founding principles of “Peace, Order and Good Government” while American values stem from the country’s revolutionary origins and are based on the values of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” We test Lipset’s observations, and those of some of his critics, using parallel surveys administered to university students in two institutions on either side of the Canada–US border. This is a very demanding test of his arguments so the supportive evidence we uncover for his arguments is significant.     

Infl uence of China’s imperial examinations on Japan,Korea and Vietnam

China’s imperial examinations greatly influenced the East Asian world. Japan imitated it during the eighth to tenth centuries; its subjects include xiucai, mingjing, jinshi, mingfa, as well as medicine and acupuncture. Korean imperial examinations are the longest and most comprehensive ones among other East Asian countries. Vietnam was the last to abolish the imperial examinations. All three East Asian countries imitated China in their imperial examinations, which greatly raised their cultural levels.     

Spaces of safety and more-than-safety in women’s refuges in England

Many women escaping domestic violence spend time in women’s refuges (shelters) whilst they deal with practical and emotional issues in a safe space. Such spaces are therefore an important place for women’s recovery and empowerment after abuse, but are also complex spaces of displacement. In the UK, there is a wide range of refuge providers, and different models of accommodation and support provision in refuges. Differences, such as those between refuges providing self-contained flats and those with communal facilities and communal activities, can provide very different experiences for the women and their children who live there. In addition, there have been shifts in the policy context of refuges, and increasingly individualistic models of service provision. This article explores women’s refuges as spaces of safety, and of more-than-safety, drawing on interviews with women in the Midlands, South Coast and London, and on participatory creative groupwork with women in the Midlands and South Coast. Refuge spaces require, but also enable, contact and encounter between women; and communal living and group processes can enable interaction and collaboration between women. The article draws on women’s words and images to exemplify these experiences, concluding that the safe spaces of women’s refuges can enable processes of more-than-safety. These collective processes begin to counteract the isolation of abuse and to help prepare women for their lives after the refuge.     

Matters of Sex and Gender in F. J. Gall’s Organology: A Primary Approach

The originator of phrenology, F. J. Gall (1758–1828), saw himself as a natural scientist and physiologist. His approach consisted of brain anatomy but also of palpating skulls and inferring mental faculties. Unlike some of the philosophical principles underlying Gall’s work, his conception of sex/gender has not yet been examined in detail. In this article, I will focus on Gall’s treatment of men and women, his idea of sex differences, and how far an assumed existence of dichotomous sexes influenced his work. In examining his primary writings, I will argue that Gall held some contradictory views concerning the origin and manifestation of sex/gender characteristics, which were caused by the collision of his naturalistic ideas and internalized gender stereotypes. I will conclude that Gall did not aim at deducing or legitimizing sex/gender relations scientifically, but that he tried to express metaphysical reasons for a given social order in terms of functional brain mechanisms.     

Towards individualising couple finance: women’s housing assets and household decisions in Japan

Individualisation, which is increasingly promoted in European welfare states, tends to be absent from policy discourse as well as housing studies in Japan. It is largely because the ‘family as a unit’ is still a dominant approach in their household finance, social security and taxation systems, which also reflects women’s lack of home ownership. However, recent demographic trends such as falling marriage rates, low fertility and increased female labour participation indicate significant diversification in women’s life-course. Thus, today women making their own financial investment and house purchase have increasingly become popular practice. In this context, a new approach beyond the conventional ‘family as a unit’ may be required in the development of a new social contract. Drawing on data from qualitative research conducted among women in their 30s, this article explores the relationship between financial independence, household decisions and asset holding of partnered women in Japan, which reveals contested dimensions of women’s independence and autonomy in household and family life. Through the lens of home ownership, it considers the importance of promoting individual assets in order to foster gender equality in marriage.     

The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.     

Akogare,Ideology, and ‘Charisma Man’ Mythology: Reflections on ethnographic research in English language schools in Japan

In light of recent reflexive ethnography based on frameworks of performativity, this work develops a phenomenological interpretation of my white, male, gaijin (foreign), English-speaking positionality inside Japan's private English conversation schools (eikaiwa). These eikaiwa are ubiquitous in modern urban areas. They are patronized predominantly by women who seek career enhancement, study and/or work abroad, and international romance. To understand the gendered participation patterns inside the eikaiwa I develop a phenomenological understanding of my positionality through a framework based on Occidentalism. This framework is grounded in the ideo-geographically specific notions of seken (surveillance) and akogare (desire). Akogare is instantiated and intensified inside eikaiwa by the performative aspects of staff, students and instructor practices in addition to eikaiwa texts and advertising and popular media discourses while seken, especially gender-normative seken, directed at women is minimized. This framework allows me to present a nuanced account of the interaction of my positionalities with those of the informants.     

Towards an ‘optics of power’: technologies of surveillance and discipline and case-loading midwifery practice in New Zealand

Midwives in New Zealand achieved professional autonomy in 1990 with an amendment to the Nurses Act 1977. Predicated on a natural approach to childbirth it was envisaged that midwifery would counter the trend of increasing medicalisation of childbirth. Some 20 years later, we continue to be concerned by increasing rates of intervention in childbirth including caesarean section operations. Midwifery practice is no longer supervised in a hierarchical arrangement with the obstetrician at its peak, however, we suggest that new and more subtle disciplinary mechanisms have come to the fore post-1990. Drawing on Foucault's concepts of the ‘medical gaze’ and the ‘panopticon’ we describe the ways in which midwifery practice (and through them the bodies of childbearing women) continues to be disciplined to conform to obstetric norms.