Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Bent Familia De Nouri Bouzid : Enjeux De L’Amitié, De La Clairvoyance Féminine Et Du Questionnement, Hélène Tissières

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Bent Familia by the Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid breaks down silences by questioning norms and power structures, including patriarchal authority. Centered on an exceptional friendship between three women and examining their preoccupations as well as their needs, the film reveals the empowering forces of sharing, insightfulness and engagement. Through the character of Aïda and the intertwinement of arts – in particular music and painting – the film dismantles absolutes and illusions. It encourages deep questioning in order to trace new paths, valuing the clear-sighted contributions of women in a continuously changing society.

« La Femme Qui Pleure » : La Nouvelle D’Assia Djebar Et Le Tableau De Picasso, Farah Aïcha Gharbi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article is a study of the dialogue that is maintained between the novel « La femme qui pleure » by Assia Djebar and the Picasso painting that bears the same title. This article also aims to show author’s achievement of the liberation of the feminine subject through an aesthetic means, in other words, through an angle that allows for an encounter between that which has been written and the painting, which combined give the women the right to the word and the image portrayed. The form and the structure that are shared between the novel and the painting appear …

Review: Gourd Girls, Teresa Pacheco

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the non-fiction book "Gourd Girls," by Priscilla Wilson.

Review: Lucky, Wendy S. Wilmoth

Georgia Library Quarterly

Review of the memoir "Lucky," by Alice Sebold.

Race In Feminism: Critiques Of Bodily Self-Determination In Ida B. Wells And Anna Julia Cooper, Stephanie Athey

Trotter Review

If, as Angela Davis has argued, "the last decade of the nineteenth century was a critical moment in the development of modern racism," the same can be said of the development of modern feminism. Late nineteenth-century feminism, like institutional racism, saw "major institutional supports and ideological justifications" take shape across this period. Organizations of American women, both black and white, were shaping political arguments and crafting activist agendas in a post-Reconstruction America increasingly enamored of hereditary science, prone to lynching, and possessed of a virulent nationalism. This essay takes a historical view of "womanhood," bodily self-determination and well-being, concepts now …

Allen Keiswetter On Women In The Middle East: Past And Present By Nikki R. Keddie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 416pp., Allen Keiswetter

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Women in the Middle East: Past and Present by Nikki R. Keddie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 416pp.

Picking Barbie™’S Brain: Inherent Sex Differences In Scientific Ability?, Alison Nash, Giordana Grossi

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

The idea that the underrepresentation of women in scientific fields stems from inherent sex differences in scientific abilities has recently re-emerged. We critically examine the argument for biological differences in these abilities, focusing on two central claims: 1) There exist measurable sex differences in mathematical and scientific aptitude, and 2) biological predispositions underlie these differences. A review of the research reveals that findings of differences in math and science performance are not reliable and depend on the measures used. Furthermore, the key evidence for biological predispositions comes from poorly designed studies with equivocal findings. Therefore, our review indicates that the …

Misplaced Focus: Assumptions About Sex Hormones And Acl Injury In Female Athletes, Jennifer Croissant, Emily Schmit

Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought

Explaining Anterior cruciate ligament {ACL} injury rate differences between female athletes and male athletes by the role of female hormones is misplaced. We are not in 19.th.century to think, that a woman is “unable” because of her hormonal prepositions and to see this as a “women’s problem”. These injuries require further exploration before they can be labeled as “sex-specific” and as having intrinsic or biological causation. There are different sport opportunities (girls are supposed to be focused on some “feminine” sports and are becoming involved in athletic later than boys) and expected results, which are measured in the same age …

Le Lecteur Face Aux Stéréotypes : Entre Participation Et Distanciation, Valérie Lotodé

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In some of Rachid Boudjedra’s novels, the study of stereotyped representations proves particularly operational to define the interaction between virtual reader and characters. This article aims to analyze the reader’s reactions to stereotypes. It also attempts to show how the reader oscillates between a participatory reading – during which, recognizing a traditional ideological speech, he is charmed by fiction – and a distancing reading. By means of the analysis of female and male archetypes, this paper will also reveal the implicit reader’s face, and more specifically his/her sexual identity.

Making The “Unfit, Fit”: The Rhetoric Of Mainstreaming In The World Bank’S Commitment To Gender Equality And Disability Rights, Rebecca Dingo

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In the 1990s The World Bank president James Wolfensohn urged Bank policy- makers to consider gender in their development policies; in 2004 the Bank made a similar commitment to include people with disabilities in their programmatic plans. Examining materials from Bank archives and from “The World Bank: Disability and Development” conference in 2004, this essay demonstrates the contradictory arguments put forth by the World Bank’s gender, disability, and development programs.

Disability As Embodied Memory? A Question Of Identity For The Amputees Of Sierra Leone, Maria Berghs

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines the problematic construction of amputee identity in Sierra Leone society after the decade long civil war through discourses and imagery of amputees presented in the media. Empowerment by NGO’s and other charities lead to a reaffirmation of amputee identity in which notions of class, ethnicity, and age may not play a big role, but gender certainly remains a relevant cultural marker.

Isolation And Companionship: Disability In Australian (Post) Colonial Cinema, Kathleen Ellis

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Despite reflecting a postcolonial rethinking of identity throughout the 1990s, disability was positioned as ‘Other’ in Australian national cinema. The intersection between culture, gender, nationality, and disability is evident in films located in traditional colonial spaces (The Well, The Piano). This article concentrates on the fascination 1990s Australian filmmakers had with disabled women; otherwise strong characters who redundantly fulfill cultural expectations of femininity. A disability perspective illustrates the link between disability and sexism in Australian Cinema.

Monsters In The Closet: Biopolitics And Intersexuality, Nadia Guidotto

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I focus predominantly on the hermaphrodite (intersex, in modern discourse) and its relationship to other abject bodies in history to show how biopolitics creates and regulates populations of monsters in order to establish and sustain a particular structure in society. This particular structure is based on what Judith Butler has called the heterosexual matrix, which I will extend to include racial and liberal elements.

I Don’T Ask God To Move The Mountain, Just Give Me The Strength To Climb It”: Disability Stories Of Southern Rural African American Women, Aline Gubrium

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this article, I focus on the life stories of African-American women living in a rural community in the South, particularly on their career trajectory stories. Life in this small community leaves little to offer in terms of work, with most women working either in a clothing factory in town, in the state prison located on the outskirts of town, or working in nearby University Town as nursing assistants or custodial workers—all jobs which rely on the participants’ strenuous labor and which often result in disabilities (often related to back or hip injuries) and the participants’ consequent inability to work …

Review Of Kounandi (Film From Burkina Faso) By Apolline Traoré, Barbara Hoffman

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

The Technology Of Immortality, The Soul, And Human Identity, Richard A. Jones

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I argue that human beings will soon achieve immortality, but that that immortality will be neither the theistic promise of resurrection of the body nor the soul. Rather, I suggest that technological immortality—the ability through pure techné to reproduce any human life ever lived—is not only possible, but inevitable. Moreover, more than a cursory survey of the biological sciences, computer technology, and fictive literature, this essay also examines the normative dimensions of this near-future reality; ought we or ought we not?

Entremundos/ Among Worlds: New Perspectives On Gloria Anzaldúa Edited By Analouise Keating, Colleen Kattau

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Cultural Rehabilitation: Hansen’S Disease, Gender And Disability In Korea, Eunjung Kim

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay explores how leprosy was used to enforce cultural inferiority, which resulted in the oppression of affected people in Korea. The literature shows that images of lepers as cannibals infiltrated family lives in the communities and made institutionalization inevitable. Contemporary cultural representations depict marriage between disabled men and nondisabled women as a symbolic bridge between the segregated space of "lepers" and the "healthy." Such efforts reinforce the normative power of heterosexual marriage.

Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism,Sexism And (Psychiatric) Ableism, James Overboe

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Liberal discourse has argued against the pathology of differences that stem from being gendered or racialized. Yet, liberal discourse continues to pathologize the differences that derive from disabilities whether physical, mental, and/or developmental. This paper considers the position of a woman who is the site of the coming together of being gendered, being aboriginal, and being psychiatrized, and argues that her vitalism that has been psychiatrized benefits her subjectivity.

Gender, Disability And The Postcolonial Nexus, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This study will focus on intersecting gender, disability and Postcoloniality nexus and will foreground the contributions to and interventions from gendered disability perspectives within selected postcolonial cultural works in India and the Indian diaspora, including literary works, films, performances and activism. The articulation of intersecting identity perspectives, inclusive of disability, is a significant though ignored area within Gender, Disability or Postcolonial studies. Bringing these areas together within the current modes of interdisciplinary inquiry involves crossing the boundaries of identity categories and cultural locations.

The Disabling Nature Of The Hiv / Aids Discourse Among Hbcu Students: How Postcolonial Racial Identities And Gender Expectations Influence Hiv Prevention Attitudes And Sexual Risk-Taking, Bruce H. Wade

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This analysis reveals how some African American college students respond to the discourse on HIV / AIDS as a social disability. The methodology includes surveys (n = 217), focus groups and interviews with convenience samples of students attending a consortium of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. The findings show that the perceived risk of HIV is high in this community, that nearly half of students use condoms inconsistently even though they are well aware of the risks of unprotected sex and their levels of HIV / AIDS knowledge are high. Social stigma, gender role expectations, an …

(Post)Colonising Disability, Mark Sherry

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Disability and postcolonialism are two important, and inter-related, discourses in the social construction of the nation and those bodies deemed worthy of citizenship rights. This paper acknowledges the material dimensions of disability, impairment -and postcolonialism and its associated inequalities – but it also highlights the rhetorical connections which are commonly made between elements of postcolonialism (exile, diaspora, apartheid, slavery, and so on) and experiences of disability (deafness, psychiatric illness, blindness, etc.) The paper suggests that researchers need to be far more careful in their language around experiences of both disability and postcolonialism. Neither disability nor postcolonialism should be understood as …

Colonial Discourses Of Disability And Normalization In Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’S 53 Cm And Fatou Diome’S Le Ventre De ’Atlantique, Julie Nack Ngue

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I examine recent Francophone immigrant narratives in a disability studies framework to reveal the ways in which colonial discourses of illness and disability on the Black female body haunt contemporary discussions of immigration and integration. While these novels portray female immigrant bodies as subject to constant surveillance and examination within multiple institutions of ‘normalization,’ they also expose oppressive discourses of illness and disability in order to challenge the paradigms of normality and homogeneity which undergird French treatment of immigrants.

Editorial, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

April Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“Women Come Last in Afghanistan ” by Ann Jones. Salon.com. February 6, 2007.

The Trouble With Rights, David L. G. Rice

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Do human rights imply enforcement powers? Do they require police or armies? How many soldiers would it take to secure universal human rights? What sort of weaponry would suffice?

The Limits Of “No-Limit”, J. Peter Pham

Human Rights & Human Welfare

One must acknowledge and even admire the passion that writer and photographer Ann Jones brings to the different causes she embraces as she meanders along the paths of her rather eclectic career, now spanning over three decades. Her first book, Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973), examines how her students, in a predominantly African-American college, were being shortchanged by the system. In the late 1990s, she took off across Africa in search of a legendary tribe ruled by women and supposedly noted for its embrace of “feminine” principles of tolerance, diplomacy, and compromise, and returned to publish a travelogue-cum-utopian Weltanschauung set in …

Oppressing Women: Who Benefits And How?, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Women are the world’s oldest marketable commodity. “Good” women are marketed by their fathers, or brothers, to other men as wives. “Bad” women are incarcerated, raped, killed, or prostituted. Methods of marketing women range widely in kind: from simple one-on-one bargains, where two men exchange daughters or sisters; to exchange of women for material goods; to use of women to pay debts; to renting out women by the hour or minute to other men for sex.

Global Health And Global Hegemony, Randall Kuhn

Human Rights & Human Welfare

As the new director of a unique graduate program in Global Health Affairs, coming from the world of basic research, I have been faced with the need to reconcile a central paradox of American power and hegemony: I conduct my work as an American citizen and often with U.S. government funding in the hope that it will make a positive or at least neutral impact on my world. Yet my government (not only under the present administration) initiates imperial adventures that cause untold damage to the health, welfare, and survival of individuals throughout the world.

Archaeology, Language, And The African Past, Roger Blench

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.