Resisting popular feminisms: gender,sexuality and the lure of the modern

Abstract

This article tracks discursive and political use of gender and sexual equality in nationalist and popular accounts of feminism, focusing on the ways in which such discourses produce a particular linking of time and space in the articulation of ‘the Modern’ in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. It further explores the increasing popularity of feminism in some media and celebrity contexts that have historically been so hostile to it, asking for care in tracking how and under what conditions feminism is cited as ‘universally desirable’ in light of this history. I suggest that feminism is partly reframed in this way insofar as it is newly sutured to femininity rather than masculinity, but also to singular rather than multiple or intersectional understandings of women’s oppression. A related claim of this article is that this shift of affective association with feminism is only possible when that singular cause of gender oppression is firmly understood as sexual oppression. I will be suggesting that if feminism is understood primarily or even only a fight against sexual oppression by men then the oppositional gendered roles that allow for its tethering to nationalism remain intact yet simultaneously obscured. In conclusion the article calls for an appreciation of feminism as a minority pursuit attentive to multiple power relations and histories.     

Fairies and the Devil in early modern England

This article considers the fate of fairies in late-Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England. Specifically, it asks whether these “doubtful spirits” were demonised in the period. Drawing on a wide selection of devotional, literary, and demonological texts, the article argues that English Protestants associated fairies with Satan, but this did not necessarily imply that fairies were reclassified as demons. Rather, they were embedded in a complex of beliefs that connected them with falsehood, Catholicism, and the invisible wiles of the Devil. The operation of these beliefs is examined in the context of cases of witchcraft, as well as the representation of fairies in cheap print.     

Women,work, property and gender in early modern Europe

Natalie DAVIS & Arlette FARGE eds, A History of Women in the West, III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, ISBN 0–674–40372‐X.

Merry E. WIESNER, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, ISBN 0–521–38459–1 hardback, 0–521–38613–6 paperback.

Hilary MARLAND, ed., The Art of Midwifery. Early Modem Midwives in Europe, Routledge, London, 1993, ISBN 0–415–06425–2.

Amy Louise ERICKSON, Women and Property in Early Modem England, Routledge, London, 1993, ISBN 0–415–06267–5.     

Israeli feminist geography: women,gender and queer geographies

Abstract

This article charts the changing knowledges within Israeli feminist geography in the last few decades. It briefly reviews some of the topics that characterize Israeli scholarship, and in particular the ways in which the academic knowledge changed from the focus on women’s geography, to feminist and gendered analysis of spaces, to a more recent focus on sexuality and gender. We argue that it is not that one knowledge replacing others, but rather all knowledges and approaches exist simultaneously within Israeli geography today.     

Queering bathrooms: gender,sexuality and the hygienic imagination

This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736     

Projectors and learned projects in early modern England

Commenting in 1692 on the “Projecting Humour that now reigns” in England, Daniel Defoe nicknamed the period the “Projecting Age.” He dated its start to c. 1680, even as he conceded that “it had indeed something of life in the time of the late Civil War” as well. Defoe was wrong. Decades earlier both Elizabethan and Jacobean commentators had inveighed against the rampant passion for schemes, a perception increasingly documented by scholars. For the most part, however, the appraisal of early modern projects has been confined to the domain of economic and social history. Monopolies, inventions, plans to ameliorate the condition of the poor and infirm, and schemes guaranteeing the enrichment of the nation, have drawn the attention of historians; only sporadic attention has been paid to the numerous scholarly projects that also proliferated during the same period. My intention here is not to be exhaustive, but to offer a snapshot of the large number of proposals that sought to establish new institutions of higher learning, usually through substantial outlays of public capital.     

Legitimation and delegitimation in early modern Europe: The case of England

In the year 1640, the government of England was monarchical; and the King that reigned, Charles, the first of that name, holding sovereignty, by right of a descent continued above six hundred years, and from a much longer descent King of Scotland, and from the time of his ancestor Henry II, King of Ireland …