Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Doctors And Sheikhs: "Truths" In Virginity Discourse In Jordanian Media, Ebtihal Mahadeen

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article is concerned with the role Jordanian media play in circulating certain discourses on virginity, namely religious and medical discourses, which are presented as "truths" that ultimately maintain the conservative status quo with regards to Jordanian women's sexuality. It is argued that media discussions (on the textual, production, and consumption levels) largely perpetuate patriarchal control over women's sexuality and render invisible more progressive points of view. Simultaneously, critical opinions expressed at any of these levels, while vastly important, operate from within the same discursive fields and are thus rendered less radical.

Motherhood And Sexuality: A 20-Year Content Analysis Of Sexuality-Related Articles In Popular Magazines For Mothers, Leah E. Shipps, Sandra L. Caron

Journal of International Women's Studies

This exploratory study investigated the inclusion of articles related to sexuality in magazines targeted to mothers over a 20-year period. Articles in the most popular parenting magazines, including American Baby, Baby Talk, Fit Pregnancy, Good Housekeeping, Mothering, Parenting, Parents, and Working Mother, were analyzed for sexuality content from 1991 to 2010. The starting point for this research was selected after an obviously pregnant Demi Moore appeared nude on the cover of the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair. The cover, and many others that followed, suggested an acknowledgement of pregnant women as sexual beings. However, it also raised …

Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary Limits, Barbara Penner

Journal of International Women's Studies

I have always been drawn to study intimate yet public spaces – most notably Victorian ladies’ public lavatories and American honeymoon suites. Such research raises larger questions concerning the legitimacy of certain objects of inquiry and of feminist and interdisciplinary work in general. This paper aims to go behind the curtain of academic research and to think about the challenges one faces “back-stage” when investigating spaces or objects connected intimately to sexuality and the gendered body.

From Sociability To Spectacle: Interracial Sexuality And The Ideological Uses Of Space In New York City, 1900-1930, Elizabeth Clement

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper addresses inter-racial sociability and sexuality in New York City before and after the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to northern US cities. Using space and the arrangements of objects in space as my primary evidence, I argue that spatial relations both reflected and created race relations in the urban North and that these practices shifted dramatically over the course of a twenty-year period. While the black proprietors of clubs in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1910s used space to make transgressive interracial sociability possible, by the 1920s, the white-owned clubs of the Harlem Renaissance did the …

The Missing Rhetoric Of Gender In Responses To Abu Ghraib, Alexandra Murphy

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper explores Western responses to the torture inflicted upon Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib facility near Baghdad. More specifically, however, this paper examines responses to photographic representations of this torture, which began to surface in the April of 2004. The analysis that follows engages closely with the status of the photographs as images, arguing that existing critical interpretations fail to account for the particular issues and problems that the visual image presents. Through detailed reference work by Judith Butler and Susan Sontag, this paper will also interrogate the limitations of recent theoretical approaches to the …

‘The Darkness Is The Closet In Which Your Lover Roosts Her Heart’: Lesbians, Desire And The Gothic Genre, Sarah Parker

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper discusses the use of the Gothic genre in two ‘lesbian’ novels: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936) and Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999). The Gothic, I argue, is employed and manipulated in order to counter the repressive effects of ‘lesbian panic’, evident in much women’s fiction (an idea posited by Patricia Smith in Lesbian Panic, 1997).

I begin by constructing a framework for my argument from the disparate yet related scholarship of several theorists, including Terry Castle, Eve Sedgwick, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin. My argument hinges on the claim that lesbianism threatens cultural order – based upon …