Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley

English

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …

The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger

History

Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …

Homeless Women With Children In Shelters: The Institutionalization Of Family Life, Kathryn Feltey, Laura Nichols

Sociology

In this chapter, we examine the shelter experience for homeless mothers, particularly those with young children. We review the literature on women with children living in homeless shelters and draw from the findings of our research on homeless women living in shelters and transitional housing in the midwestern United States from 1990 through 2002. This research included in-depth interviews conducted over a twelve-year period with almost 200 women residing in emergency homeless shelters, battered women's shelters, or transitional housing for single-parent families. For this chapter, we draw from the data on sheltered homeless mothers living with or separated from their …

Academic Aunting: Reimaging Feminist (Wo)Mentoring, Teaching, And Relationships., Laura L. Ellingson, Patricia Sotirin

Women's and Gender Studies

In this essay, we explore the potential of aunting relationships for rethinking feminist selves and relationships, especially in academic settings. Relationships between generations of academic feminists have often been described using mother-daughter metaphors. We suggest some limitations to framing teaching and learning across academic generations (e.g., teacher-student) and among colleagues (e.g., peer review of scholarship) using maternal imagery. We then argue that the figure of the aunt offers a powerful trope for negotiating relationships between the "waves" of academic feminism. Aunts provide a generative alternative to mothering and sisterhood as frameworks for feminist womentoring, teaching, and scholarly reviewing.

Hiratsuka Haruko (Raichō), Barbara Molony

History

Hiratsuka Haruko (1886-1971), pioneering Japanese feminist. Hiratsuka took the pen name "Raicho" (meaning "snow grouse") when she founded the women's literary magazine Seito (Bluestocking) in 1911. Her manifesto-like poem in Seito-"In the beginning, Woman was the Sun" -symbolizes Japan's self-affirming feminism of the 1910s and 1920s, the era of the New Woman. Feminists in the 1970s claimed Hiratsuka as a foremother for this inspirational manifesto. At the center of feminist activities for a decade, Hiratsuka withdrew from leadership roles in 1921 but nevertheless contributed to the consumer, birth-control, and women's arts movements before World War II. After 1945 she devoted …

Embodied Knowledge, Laura L. Ellingson

Women's and Gender Studies

Embodied knowledge situates intellectual and theoretical insights within the realm of the material world. Embodied knowledge is sensory; it highlights smell, touch, and taste as well as more commonly noted sights and sounds. Knowledge grounded in bodily experience encompasses uncertainty, ambiguity, and messiness in everyday life, eschewing sanitized detached measurement of discrete variables. Such an epistemology, or way of knowing, resists the Cartesian mind–body split that underlies Enlightenment philosophy and its persistent remnants, including the scientific method and the glorification of objectivity. Embodied knowledge is inherently and unapologetically subjective, celebrating—rather than glossing over —the complexities of knowledge production. Fieldwork, interviewing, …

Autoethnography As Constructionist Project, Laura L. Ellingson, Carolyn Ellis

Women's and Gender Studies

In this chapter, we explore autoethnography as a social constructionist project. We want to resist the tendency to dichotomize and instead explore how autoethnography makes connections between seemingly polar opposites. Though we see it as a sign of progress that authors desire to tease out differences in autoethnographic projects, we argue that concentrating on dichotomies is counterproductive, given that autoethnography by definition operates as a bridge, connecting autobiography and ethnography in order to study the intersection of self and others, self and culture.

After further detailing in this chapter the limits of dichotomous thinking, we sketch the meanings and goals …

Teaching Lolita In A Course On Ethics And Literature, Marilyn Edelstein

English

The late 1980s saw a resurgence of interest in ethics and literature, with the publication of new books on the subject by major scholars like J. Hillis Miller and Wayne Booth. In recent years, many critics and theorists (including some Nabokov scholars) have (re)turned to ethical questions about literature: Does literature imitate life, and will readers, in turn, imitate the actions (whether virtuous or ignoble) of characters in literary texts? How and why can literary works be ethically beneficial or harmful for their readers? Are authors responsible for any ethical effects-positive or negative-their works may produce in readers? What are …

Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion: Women And Land Tenure In Sub-Saharan Africa, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to …