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.     

Positivism as cultural policy: art and social change in the works of Comte and Saint-Simon

When discussing positivism today, it almost systematically falls into the realm of epistemological discourse. This discursive turn is primarily the by-product of the social sciences’ now-traditional approach to positivism—a turn which has been seen as largely dismissive of positivism for its antiquated and reductionist approaches to research. Without trying to make an apologetic account of positivism, this article reframes it in its broader social and historical dimensions. In particular, this article aims to illustrate how positivism—as a social and political movement—conveyed a cultural policy. In other words, this article attempts to re-engage with the intellectual legacy of positivism to resituate its significance in cultural and artistic terms in French culture, society and beyond. By drawing on the notion of implicit cultural policy, this article retraces the steps of positivism and specifically builds a case for its influence on French cultural policy in the Third Republic.     

The cultural politics of shit: class,gender and public space in India

In this article we seek to interrogate the cultural, political and economic conditions that generate the crisis of sanitation in India, with its severe implications for the poor and the marginalized. The key question we ask is how to interpret and explain the spectre of ‘open defecation’ in India's countryside and its booming urban centres. The discussion is divided into three parts. Part one examines the cultural interpretation of ‘shitting’ as symbolic action underpinned by ideas of purity, pollution and ‘the body politic’. Part two takes the political economic approach to gain further insights into contemporary discourse, performance and cultural politics surrounding toilets and open defecation in India. Part three examines civil society activities, state campaigns and media accounts of open defecation to explore the disruptive potency of everyday toilet activities, and how these interplay with issues of class, caste, and gender. Drawing on interviews and a review of ethnographic work, we seek to interrogate the idiom of modern sanitation, with its emphasis on cleanliness, progress and dreams of technology, as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Indian modernity.     

Religion and political principle: New studies on the political theory of the english revolution

William Lamont, Richard Baxter & the Millenium, Croom Helm, London, 1979.

James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke & His Adversaries Cambridge University Press, 1980.

C.C. Weston & J.R. Greenberg, Subjects and Citizens: The Grand Controversy Over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

George Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of The Long Parliament, Sutton Courtney, Oxford, 1982.     

Migratory movements: evolutionary theory in the works of J.M. Synge

Synge's interest in evolutionary theory is well-documented, and his plays are often viewed as representations of an Irish culture in decline. In response, this article argues that Synge's tramps, tinkers, and outcasts function as figures for species migration and cultural renewal. To demonstrate that Synge's drama has a footing in the science of speciation, the article details the extent to which Synge was directly familiar with works of evolutionary theory. Although he read Darwin and Herbert Spencer at about the same time, their respective influences show up at much different stages of his literary career. While Synge's earliest prose is most strongly influenced by Spencer's progressivist interpretation of evolution, Synge's Spencerianism soon gives way to a Darwinian interest in the bizarre affinities between the human and animal worlds, as well as to an appreciation of difference rather than a fetishisation of fitness.     

Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women,men and place in the United States

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.     

Consumption of Chinese goods in southwestern Europe: a multi-relational database and the vicarious consumption theory as alternative model to the industrious revolution (eighteenth century)

This article discusses the application of new technologies, software coding and computer analysis in the social sciences and humanities, mainly in the field of economic history. In the last two decades, the use of new computer technologies among historians to develop theories and solve questions has fostered a vibrant historiographical debate. However, these new digital tools have largely been used as an end in themselves, rather than as a means to develop hypotheses and answer questions. This has prevented researchers from fully exploiting such technologies in their field. In this article, I discuss how I designed a new multi-relational database using the “Access” package and SQL language to test the “industrious revolution” hypothesis and present the “vicarious consumption” theory as an alternative model for analyzing the eighteenth-century circulation of Chinese goods in the Western Mediterranean region. It presents the cross-referencing method I used to analyze the historical information I collected, mainly from probate inventories and trade records. This method makes it possible to navigate through the data in a way that goes beyond the traditional use of “excel” tables.     

两个世界,还是一个世界?--论美国华裔文学作品中华人的"文化认同"问题

尽管美国学术界已对一批美籍华裔作家创作的文艺作品给予了特定的关注,但这些作品至今仍然没能成为美国文学传统的一部分;大多数美国读者还是把这些作品视为"局外人"或"另类人"的故事.本文试图从审视海外华文文学的角度,对这批作品中的两篇著名小说做一些探讨.本文所讨论的两篇作品分别是谭恩美的长篇小说<喜福会>和汤婷婷的长篇小说<顽猴爷的赝书>.在讨论中,本文将专注于两篇小说所反映的一个海外华人共有的问题,即"文化认同"问题.作为华人移民的第二代,谭恩美和汤婷婷都在其小说中着重表现了中国移民的母体文化与美国主流文化的对峙,居美华人与其他族群的冲突,以及居美华人自身男女之间、两代人或几代人之间的矛盾."文化认同"的问题就存在或产生于这类对峙、冲突和矛盾中.本文认为,两篇小说不仅揭示了以上种种的矛盾和冲突,而且还都努力为居美华人走出"文化认同"的危机指出了方向,当然两位作者所采用的视点和处理手法很不一样.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.