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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Is Women’S Studies Dead?, Marysia Zalewski
Is Women’S Studies Dead?, Marysia Zalewski
Journal of International Women's Studies
This article considers the recurring criticisms of Women’s Studies. The desire for the demise of Women’s Studies is not new yet recent demands for its end have come from Women’s Studies scholars themselves. I review the arguments for and against the termination of the field and, although the arguments against Women’s Studies are compelling, I argue for its continuation. This paradoxical conclusion is reached by reconsidering the “for and against” debates through Wendy Brown’s use of Jacques Derrida’s “spectre” and Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history.” Thus, despite the seduction of the discourse of conventional argumentation performed through the deconstructive critique …
Lost Between The Waves? The Paradoxes Of Feminist Chronology And Activism In Contemporary Poland, Agnieszka Graff
Lost Between The Waves? The Paradoxes Of Feminist Chronology And Activism In Contemporary Poland, Agnieszka Graff
Journal of International Women's Studies
The complexities of Polish gender politics can be conceptualized as a series of paradoxes. Until recently, Polish feminists had denied the very possibility of a Polish women’s movement. This article argues that Polish feminism resists the chronology of “waves”: it uses styles and tactics characteristic of the third wave (irony, high theory, camp, cross-dressing, etc.) to achieve typically second wave aims (reproductive rights, equal pay, etc.). It then engages with a historical paradox: the phenomenon of backlash before feminism. Rejecting the political in favour of the personal was compatible with psycho-sexual dynamics already in progress – these were a defence …
From Suffragist To Apologist: The Loss Of Feminist Politics In A Politically Correct Patriarchy, Ashleigh Harris
From Suffragist To Apologist: The Loss Of Feminist Politics In A Politically Correct Patriarchy, Ashleigh Harris
Journal of International Women's Studies
This article discusses the ways in which feminist politics have been dissolved since the 1980s, most notably in the popular cultural sphere, so as to make feminism appear anachronistic. It considers how various discourses and texts have sought to efface the political impetus of feminism through claims to political correctness. Young women are thus interpolated into a more insidious patriarchy that re-inscribes female shame, guilt, passivity and silence in both professional and personal contexts, at the same as it espouses the discourse of equal rights. Many are not only apologizing for the equal rights that been “granted” to them, but …
Women’S Space “Inside The Haveli”: Incarceration Or Insurrection?, Daphne Grace
Women’S Space “Inside The Haveli”: Incarceration Or Insurrection?, Daphne Grace
Journal of International Women's Studies
While the Hindu and Muslim veiled woman may respectively appear to be relics of traditional class and religious values, or as icons of the eroticised female body of colonial desire, she still appears as a powerful – and ambiguous – indicator of meaning in contemporary literature. Both Asian and Euro-American theorists have recognised the equation in imperialist through between the feminised nation and the trope of the veiled woman. Yet how far is the figure of the Indian woman invisible as well as silent? This article discusses how gendered representations of women represent the changing role of women in terms …
Global Feminisms, Transnational Political Economies, Third World Cultural Production, Winnie Woodhull
Global Feminisms, Transnational Political Economies, Third World Cultural Production, Winnie Woodhull
Journal of International Women's Studies
Third wave feminism is located historically in relation to de-industrialization in the 1980s and the 1990s’ boom in information technologies and transnational finance, which exponentially increased disparities of wealth and power worldwide. Given the global context of third wave feminism’s emergence, this article argues for a consideration of the many forms and expression of feminism the world over, and of the ways they converge with and diverge from western feminisms, both politically and culturally. After briefly discussing the economically oppressive and culturally homogenizing tendencies of globalization, the article looks at the democratizing potential of today’s global media networks. I end …
Feminist Futures: Trauma, The Post-9/11 World And A Fourth Feminism?, E. Ann Kaplan
Feminist Futures: Trauma, The Post-9/11 World And A Fourth Feminism?, E. Ann Kaplan
Journal of International Women's Studies
This article will engage with the possibilities of feminist futures. That there is no monolithic feminism is a good, it at times uncomfortable, fact: positions, actions and knowledge – constantly being contested, questioned, and debated – mean that feminism is alive and well, and always changing in accord with larger social, historical and political changes. However, the ways in which social and political conditions on both local and global levels are impacting on feminism must be addressed. The post-9/11 world is one in which we need to re-think what feminisms have achieved and how the various groups positioned under the …
The Ana Sanctuary: Women’S Pro-Anorexia Narratives In Cyberspace, Karen Dias
The Ana Sanctuary: Women’S Pro-Anorexia Narratives In Cyberspace, Karen Dias
Journal of International Women's Studies
This article explores cyberspace as a site in which women who are struggling with anorexia can find sanctuary from the surveillance of the public sphere. Feminist geographical and sociological work on the body and critical analysis of medical and psychiatric discourses inform the analyses of the text, narratives and images presented. I locate women’s (dis)embodied cyberspace experiences in the context of the pathologization of women and within attempts to silence their voices. Through these women’s narratives, women’s engagement in the interpretation of their experiences can be observed. What women struggling with anorexia may not be able or ready to say …
Mothers Of Future Kings: The Madonna Redux Phenomenon, Colleen Denney
Mothers Of Future Kings: The Madonna Redux Phenomenon, Colleen Denney
Journal of International Women's Studies
The visual culture that created Diana was motivated by Victorian constrictions of motherhood that enforced notions of stability and lineage. This article examines the cultural metaphors of nurturance – the “Madonna redux phenomenon” – in images of Diana, and in her predecessor Princess Alexandra. I argue that images of royal motherhood are staged affairs, constructed and performed as part of the Princesses’ main role as dutiful and loving mothers. Finally, I point up how moments of agency can be achieved within these images and how Diana, “the postfeminist princess,” embraced these moments.
Beyond Trashiness: The Sexual Language Of 1970s Feminist Fiction, Meryl Altman
Beyond Trashiness: The Sexual Language Of 1970s Feminist Fiction, Meryl Altman
Journal of International Women's Studies
It is now commonplace to study the beginning of second wave US radical feminism as the history of a few important groups – mostly located in New York, Boston and Chicago – and the canon of a few influential polemical texts and anthologies. But how did feminism become a mass movement? To answer this question, we need to look also to popular mass-market forms that may have been less ideologically “pure” but that nonetheless carried the edge of feminist revolutionary thought into millions of homes. This article examines novels by Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy and Erica Jong, all published …