The experience and the idea of war in the writings of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This article considers the works of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras as witnesses and narrators of the events of the Second World War. Their two perspectives offer a first, original reflection by women intellectuals on war and violence based on direct involvement. Simone Weil construed her idea of ‘force’ from her first-hand experience of the Spanish Civil War and her participation in the French Resistance, in London. Marguerite Duras offered her personal testimony of war violence (in the French Resistance, in France) intertwining fiction and reality, wavering together autobiography and invention. Duras, in the contrary, tried to represent the unrepresentable by connecting her personal to a collective trauma.     

Bringing Gender into the Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine

Abstract

While William Connolly convincingly analyzes the pervasive anger and drive for revenge inhabiting much evangelical Christian writing, he overlooks the possibility that the emotional economies of evangelical women might differ from those of men. Several studies of right-wing Christian women suggest that grief, specifically grief over a loss related to children, is more formative of their political views than is rage. In contrast to the nostalgia expressed by Connolly's cowboy capitalists for an alleged pure market, these women long for a fictional time in America when the fetus was safe. Conservative religious women's grief and desire to protect vulnerable persons could resonate with progressive political projects of generosity and forbearance toward difference.     

Say What You Like: Dress,Identity and Heritage in Zanzibar

The paper considers the significance of dress to identity and power among women living on the island of Zanzibar. Drawing on her own preliminary fieldwork in Zanzibar (June 2004) and on the work of Laura Fair (2001 Fair, L. 2001. Pastimes & Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post‐abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945, Oxford: James Currey.  [Google Scholar]), the author discusses the ways in which dress (in general), and the wearing of kanga fabrics in particular, offers women a means of communication in an image conscious and historically stratified society. It is argued that kangas are still an integral part of ritual and social activities in Zanzibar and that they shed light on the complex history of the Swahili coast. Placing the ethnography in a broader and contemporary context, the author states that kangas contribute to the intangible heritage of Zanzibar in their encapsulation of the island's oral history, art, social commentary and concepts of beauty. The author concludes by outlining some of the challenges that heritage regimes face in the Indian Ocean region and potential strategies for preserving or managing its mixed cultural resources.     

“We Have Supped So Deep in Horrors”: Understanding Colonialist Emotionality and British Responses to Female Circumcision in Northern Sudan

When the British colonized Sudan, they were horrified by the practice of female circumcision. Unable to comprehend the meanings of this ritual to adherents, they interpreted it as irrational, immoral and uncivilized. British officials conducted a propaganda campaign against the practice, induced clerics to condemn it as un‐Islamic and passed a stringent, albeit ineffective, law forbidding infibulation in 1946. In the process, they turned female circumcision into a site of contest over Sudanese autonomy. Analyzing colonialists’ responses as embodied states of knowing enacted in repressive measures illuminates the collision of culturally constructed emotions in this colonial context.     

太平天国妇女自由问题之民俗释论--兼论妇女自由不能作为太平天国妇女解放之论据

尽管太平天国的妇女政策仍然是封建妇女政策,妇女的地位也没有得到提高,但由于文化、习俗及战争环境等因素的影响,广大妇女在生产劳动、恋爱婚姻、社会交往、人际关系、女性美以及宗教活动等方面呈现出难能可贵的自由精神。太平天国妇女的自由风尚,主要源于广西客家和壮族妇女的习俗以及宗教等因素,并不是由于太平天国采取了解放妇女的主观措施。     

The school of love: Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls

This paper examines Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls in light of sources that reveal the educational culture and intellectual activities of informally organised women's religious communities in northern France, Flanders and other regions associated with the beguine movement. What emerges from this new approach is the Mirror and its author's unambiguous didactic intent – a fact long overlooked in the scholarly literature. Rather than an elitist work with no practical purpose beyond personal, prophetic vision, this paper argues that Marguerite's book engages in debate with contemporaries to show them the imperative for moving beyond epistemological conventions in common currency, while providing them with a set of teachings to do so. As such, both the book and its history provide crucial evidence of beguine religious training, the acquisition of knowledge and the transmission of knowledge amongst networks of women religious, and indeed, much further afield.     

战争期间日本妇女运动家市川房枝的政治转向

市川房枝是日本近代著名的妇女解放思想家,妇女运动的领导者,在战前和战后致力于日本妇女解放运动,但是曾因战争期间参加法西斯军国主义的战时体制,战后一度被解除公职,本文探讨的是1937年日本发动全面侵华战争时市川房枝的政治转向,即由争取妇女参政权运动转到为战时体制服务,在翼赞体制下号召和组织妇女支持侵略战争,并试图通过市川房枝为代表的妇女运动的转向,探求其转向的深层根源。     

Cosmopolitanism nationalism and the heritage of shame: comfort women memorials and the legacy of slavery in the United States

During World War II the Japanese military used approximately 200,000 women, mainly Koreans, as bonded workers they euphemistically labeled, ‘comfort women’. Since 2010, six memorial sites dedicated to the suffering of these women have been built in the United States. Campaigns for these memorials have been led by Korean-Americans, reflecting the importance this issue has in South Korea and within the Korean Diaspora. While a growing body of research has examined the political, social, and gender ramifications of the ‘Comfort Women’ issue in South Korea and on Korean-Japanese relations, less attention has been given to the transnational aspects of this memorializing campaign. What is the purpose of these memorials in the United States? How might visitors to such sites remember and memorialize trauma they know little about and which occurred far away? And how do these memorial sites dedicated to such distant trauma contrast with the absence of memorials for events much closer at hand, such as the historical realities of slavery? I examine these questions through an analysis of a ‘Comfort Women’s Memorial Peace Garden’ dedicated at the Fairfax County (Virginia) Government Center in May, 2014.     

Time to write: convict petitions in the 19th century

Nineteenth-century convicts regularly used their right to petition the state. Their institutionalised lives were spent under repressive and harsh penal systems, designed to inhibit communication, but petitioning provided a channel of expression that must have been sorely absent from the monotony of their life in prison. Convicts commonly used petitions to complain about perceived injustices in their sentencing or to request early release on probation, leaving written records of the different experiences, motivations and objectives of petitioners. These written voices therefore provide the basis for a unique window into convict lives in the 19th century.     

‘I didn’t feel like my own person’: paid work in women’s narratives of self and working motherhood, 1950–1980

Paid work was important to women’s identity formation in post war Britain, especially as they returned to work after having children. The changed economic and social climate in Britain after 1945 expanded the employment and education opportunities available to some women. Class and material conditions guided women’s reasons for returning to work. They increasingly did so part-time, and in lower skilled jobs than before they had children. Understanding the self that women construct must be situated within the circumstances of women’s lives and the social and economic structures in force at that moment of returning.