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.     

The Epistemological Challenge of Higher Education Student Volunteering: “Reproductive” or “Deconstructive” Volunteering?

Abstract: This paper addresses student volunteering as an important socio‐cultural trend which is generally taken for granted and un‐interrogated. We explore tensions inherent in the practice and articulation of higher education student volunteering, via biographical narratives of contrasting student volunteers and employ Rose's (1993, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press) theory of “paradoxical space” to unpick and understand these narratives, as this has proven a generative approach to re‐conceptualising students’ engagement with universities and communities. Building on this theoretical approach, we propose a new conceptual framework to analyse students’ learning and understanding of social justice through volunteering. This framework contrasts reproductive altruism, or volunteering which reproduces social inequalities, with a deconstructive form that provides students with resources to recognise and challenge power relations and inequality in society.     

Suffolk Leechcraft

Inspired by The Lore of the Land, published by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson in 2005, a Dutch version of this book, comprising local and regional legends, was published in the Netherlands in 2010 by Willem de Blécourt, Ruben Koman, Jurjen van der Kooi, and Theo Meder. The editors selected over three hundred and fifty legends, representative of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, for the volume. Some were real ecotypes, having been appropriated by local communities and having led to the erection of associated statues, often for touristic and commercial purposes, as well as for shaping collective identities, while others were almost forgotten tales. The editors also found, somewhat unexpectedly, that quite a number of popular legends had been composed and constructed by romantic writers in the nineteenth century, and that these older legends were much more popular than the recently-invented ones. As the editors also included a number of contemporary legends, they discovered that one such legend had already become popular enough to have a statue erected and a song composed in its honour.     

Pig diet in medieval York: carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes

This study investigates bone stable isotopes from pigs from medieval York, to characterise the pigs' diet and to explore their contribution to isotopic values from contemporary human bones. Pig bones from the Swinegate (N?=?9) and Coppergate (N?=?14) sites were used for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis to test the hypothesis that the majority of pigs in medieval York were yard-kept and fed on scraps and fish waste, elevating their nitrogen ratios. The results show that the Swinegate and Coppergate pigs gave nitrogen isotope values similar to contemporary sheep and therefore that animal protein made little or no dietary contribution. One sample showed C and N results consistent with more animal protein in the diet, and we propose that this could have been a yard-kept pig consuming human refuse. The majority of the data indicate that the pigs were eating a largely herbivorous diet and that pigs in medieval York may have been raised in rural or woodland locations rather than in the city.     

A bloodied bond: Fly River heads and body image in Beatrice Grimshaw's colonial landscapes

In a paper published previously in the Irish Studies Review I discuss the anthropomorphic features of Beatrice Grimshaw's landscapes in relation to colonial fears of the unknown. Following on from this I argue in the present work that this trope, ubiquitous in colonial literature, is exacerbated in Grimshaw's oeuvre by a body image or body image tendencies associated with penetrability, the foundations of which would have been laid long before she first saw the delphinium skies of the south. Grimshaw's body image, her realisation of her own physicality, is the primary focus of this essay. Drawing on the research of psychologists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, I explore Grimshaw's conception of body boundaries, the boundaries of the touristic self and the indigenous Other. Such an analysis requires an examination not only of the body, and its extension dress, but also of physical terrain, the spaces and places, landscapes of the past and the present, home and the away, within which these cartographies of flesh and bone move.