Hien's shed: (re)framing images of female immigrant home-based clothing workers

Campaigns in support of home-based clothing workers (or ‘outworkers’ as they are more commonly known in Australia) deploy powerful images of the exploitative underside of fashion. The migrant woman huddled over her machine has become the quintessential image of campaigns directed against this exploitation. This article engages critically with the politics of such image-making. By examining how frames simultaneously shrink and magnify the image produced it raises questions about what these images exclude or expel and whether and how this matters. It also offers an alternative frame of the female immigrant outworker – an up-close portrait of Hien, a Vietnamese woman who works at home sewing clothes in her suburban shed. The article introduces Hien through a condensed collection of her self-narratives, before moving on to consider how a trade union and community-based movement against outworker exploitation mobilised images of suffering and injured Vietnamese women to promote its cause. It asks how these images speak for and represent women like Hien and suggests that their political ‘success’ relies to some extent on the women being ‘unseen’ and made to ‘unspeak’. Finally, through the metaphor of space, it proffers an expanded dimension to the already framed images invoking Hien's shed as a space that both produces and disciplines her: ultimately, a ‘transitional space’ between the external and internal worlds that shape and constrain her.     

Man,Woman and God in Judg 4

This paper attempts to explain the peculiarities of the Deborah narrative. In contrast to other savior- judges, Deborah is a prophetess, a judiciary, and a woman. Her role as a savior differs from other judges in that she is a high commander, but Barak carries out the actual task of battle. Deborah's rule conveys the lesson that God is responsible for victory. This is why she is presented as a prophet and a messenger of God and her personality is not portrayed in the story at all; rather, she is shown as a well-established judge and therefore an anti-charismatic figure. The emphasis on her status as a woman is meant to prevent her from becoming involved in an actual battle; this is left for Barak to carry out. When Barak demands the presence of Deborah on the battlefield, it might be thought that her presence is necessary to gain victory; then, as in the Ehud narrative, an unhealthy dependency between the people and Deborah might have been produced. Deborah responds with a prophecy that a woman will kill Sisera; in this way she reinforces her prophetic role rather than her personality, rectifying the damage caused by Barak's request.     

Beauty,Bath and Beyond: Framing Bathsheba as a Royal Fantasy in 2 Sam 11,1-5

This paper investigates the function of beauty in David and Bathsheba’s encounter in 2 Sam 11,1-5. It argues that the female bather’s pleasant appearance, rather than simply kindling king David’s desire, focalizes the woman as sexually available (and vulnerable) and wraps the whole episode in a royal fantasy of shared intimacy. The focus on Bathsheba’s beautiful body—her wash, her motion towards the king, her self-sanctification and her pregnancy—frames the episode in a very erotic way, suggesting adultery. It conceals the sexual violence committed by the king who sends, takes and sleeps with the woman. David’s violent entitlement to Bathsheba reveals the beauty politics at play in his royal House.     

唐代居住习俗与妇女地位初探

“夫随妻居”、已婚女性长住本家以及夫亡以后归宗,是唐代社会一种颇为流行的居住习俗。从民俗学和性别文化的视角来分析和考察不难看出,唐代社会所流行的这种居住习俗,应是女性人身较自由、女性权益得到一定保障以及女性在家庭生活中拥有较高地位的具体表现。     

Science and fate: Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist

Lina Stern (1878-1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever. Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

梁启超和孙中山女子教育思想之比较

近代,中国资产阶对妇女解放的道路纷纷作出了选择,其中,妇女教育作为妇女解放思想的重要内容之一,获得了重大发展。女子教育的发展是众多要素合力的结果,梁启超和孙中山为此做出了重要的贡献。两人的女子教育思想也有很大不同,主要体现在兴女学原因、教育宗旨及内容等方面,通过对此学习,可加深对二人的了解,有重要的现实意义。     

Sources of Damasios Error A Reply to Damasio

Lina Stern (1878–1968), a neurophysiologist and biochemist, was born in Russia. She studied at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where, after graduating, she conducted original research in physiology and biochemistry. In 1918, Stern was the first woman to be awarded a professional title at the University of Geneva and headed the department of Physiological Chemistry. She is deservedly considered to be one of the first scientists to entertain the concept of a blood-brain barrier. In 1929, Stern founded the Institute of Physiology in Moscow, of which she was director until 1948, when it was discontinued. Under her leadership, multidisciplinary groups of colleagues worked on the problems of the blood-brain and tissue-brain barriers and homeostasis of the brain. In 1939, Stern was elected full member of the Academy of Sciences and became its first female member ever.

Most scientists manage to conduct their research by adjusting to the political and social situations surrounding them. Lina Stern did not follow this path. This small woman of complete devotion to science took the drastic decisions that altered her life. Though destiny was not kind to her, Lina Stern did not compromise. Despite a threat of execution, prolonged imprisonment, and exile she was never broken as a scientist and always maintained her dignity.     

Simultaneous love: an argument on love,modernity and the feminist subject at the beginning of the twentieth century

This article explores an argument on love as it was articulated within the framework of the ‘New Ethics’ sexual reform in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. While many commentaries on the alienating impact of modernity projected authenticity onto the ‘non‐modern’ woman and her love, the feminist authors at issue in this article promote ‘modern love’ as a medium of women's participation in modernity. Furthermore, they address the problem of love's temporality and non‐exclusivity. Yet, the engagement with these topics is a tricky one because non‐exclusivity and impermanence are at the same time dismissed as ‘decadent’ ways of loving and attributed to ‘archaic’ Europe and non‐European cultures.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

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.     

The reader as writer,the author as con artist: Nuala O'Faolain and the criminal narratives of Chicago May

Nuala O'Faolain seeks to revise the life story of May Churchill Sharp, an international con woman born in Ireland, in hopes of establishing a feminist identification with her. But O'Faolain's claim for her writing of a kind of authorial authenticity ultimately precludes an identification with Sharp, as Sharp's narrative – like all narratives – is a criminal narrative which renders feminist ‘authenticity’ impossible to achieve, something O'Faolain herself refuses to acknowledge.     

试论爱尔维娜的反抗

爱尔维娜长期受资本主义文明教化,“理性”意识强大,然而她的“血性”意识也在萌发,二者构成尖锐冲突。她的遭遇表明,文明压抑人的自然本能,把人变成为生活中的死人。她在“血性”意识支配下对文明社会的反抗,为人们指出了一条摆脱死亡命运的道路,体现了作者通过倡导“血性”意识,进而拯救人类的思想。     

Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals,Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos

‘Imagining Cihuacoatl’ examines the conundrum of the multiple identities of the ‘serpent woman’, a Mexica goddess, analysing her relationship with other goddesses in the Nahua pantheon. She and the others were marked in a particular sexualised and gendered manner in the Nahua world. This article argues that Cihuacoatl and the fertility goddesses cannot be conceptualised in a symbolic universe that has binary divisions between male and female, nor can they be analysed by the methods currently employed in the social and cultural history of sexuality. This article follows images of various goddesses of warfare and fertility from pre‐conquest and early post‐conquest texts, suggesting ways in which the Spanish attempted to reconceptualise all of them into a framework of demonic sin. ‘Imagining Cihuacoatl’ will interrogate the sexual performance involved in Nahua ritual, lost in the translation not just from Nahuatl to Spanish but from a system that linked sex with rites of fertility to one that linked sex with sin. ‘Imagining Cihuacoatl’ shows that Gayle Rubin's call to develop a theory of sexuality separate from gender is a project fraught with contradictions, and one that remains incomplete.     

The European Sky-God.

Traditional beliefs and customs concerning pregnancy and childbirth are still numerous and vivid in Romania and among Romanian inhabitants in neighbouring countries. Fieldwork on this theme carried out over several decades has resulted in a large body of material showing the special position of a pregnant woman in traditional Romanian society. This paper deals specifically with Moldovan birth tradition and concentrates on society's view of the pregnant woman and her unborn child as indicated by the large variety of beliefs and traditions aimed at protecting her and her child. It is evident from this material, that both the prospective mother and society are expected to be aware of, and to engage with, traditional precepts concerning the healthy development of the foetus and the achievement of an unblemished birth. It is also clear that the role and influence of the former untrained midwife in the magical protection of the mother and her child are still part of cultural memory in Moldova. The idea that a pregnant woman has the ability to bring rain in times of drought seems to emanate from a traditional perception of her as embodying fertility powers linked or analogous to the earth's germinative capacity.     

Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have been defined by constructivist epistemology and, more specifically, within the framework of constructive psychology.     

(De)queering Hatshepsut: Binary Bind in Archaeology of Egypt and Kingship Beyond the Corporeal

The representations of Egyptian female king Hatshepsut are, as a consequence of a binary heteronormative sex/gender bind, continuously queered in scholarship. Statements on her body and identity are often made by directly equating her representations with the corporeal. This paper offers a critique of the heteronormative interpretations of Hatshepsut, which often identify her as a cross-dresser, gender-bender or “woman with a beard.” An alternative approach will be attempted with the discussion of her imagery in the context of queer and Actor Network theoretical encounters. This paper argues that the binary bind of the sex/gender system can be traversed through a complex network of actants, including bodies, ancestors, relatives, gods, and material culture.     

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.     

La Quintrala's Confessions: The Contesting of Female Agency and Indigeneity in Two Popular Chilean Visual Narratives

Doña Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, known as ‘La Quintrala,’ a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman of mixed ancestry accused of torture, witchcraft, and murder, has persisted as a recurring figure in the Chilean imaginary. While literary representations of this figure have been well explored, this article contributes an examination of two visual narratives, paying particular attention to the manner in which genre and context influence the repurposing of this violent woman: the 1986 teleserie La Quintrala, produced by Chile's state-owned television station (TVN), and the Chilean newspaper Las últimas noticias's 2008 comic ‘La Quintrala y el Cristo de Mayo.’ The teleserie, a product of the Pinochet era, positions her as an antithesis to the ideal Chilean woman, simultaneously denying her agency and condemning her. The comic echoes the rhetoric of the Concertación governments as it prominently links La Quintrala's downfall and redemption to the genesis of modern Chile at the cost of her distinctive racial and gendered characteristics. Ultimately, each work employs the structure of confession to recall her crimes while rejecting the female agency and racially mixed heritage La Quintrala represents.     

‘That's What Being A Woman Is For’: Opposition To Marital Rape Law Reform In Late Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1976 until 1994, Australian states and territories introduced a raft of reforms to sexual assault laws. Most of these were welcomed, and were seen to reflect women's changing status within a modernising society. One reform, however, was especially contentious. The British law had proclaimed that a woman could not be raped within marriage: the marital bond included a husband's right to sexual access to his wife. Following South Australia's lead, all Australian jurisdictions introduced changes to this law, making it a crime to rape a woman within marriage, either before or after separation. It was a fundamental challenge to the way familial authority was conceptualised, established and policed. In a period where feminism had infiltrated many layers of political and social life, we might expect that this change to the law would have been greeted with relief and even celebration. The response to changes to marital rape laws was, however, both muted and ambivalent. Even feminist groups did not offer unequivocal support, and in general public opinion was at best reserved. Further, many conservative groups understood the new laws as an assault on the sanctity of the family itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources in the mainstream and alternative media, as well as parliamentary debates, government enquiries, academic studies and legal reports, this paper will explore the multifarious responses to legislative change. It uncovers the complex ways sexual violence and female bodily autonomy were understood within and beyond the borders and boundaries of the home and family.