Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Book Review: Ex-Lovers And More Important Losses, Jeffrey C. Alfier

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Ex-Lovers and More Important Losses by Lisa Haynes

A History Of Women In Afghanistan: Lessons Learnt For The Future Or Yesterdays And Tomorrow: Women In Afghanistan, Huma Ahmed-Ghosh

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper, through the history of women in Afghanistan, I want to locate the position of women in the future by lessons learnt from the past. Given Afghanistan’s current situation of poverty, political disenfranchisement and social disarray, I argue that these very deficiencies could be maneuvered to favor the empowerment of women by redefining her role in the family and the community. Afghanistan’s social development can only be ensured through democracy and the reduction of poverty, the success of both being assured through full participation of women, especially in rural Afghanistan. In this paper I would like to trace …

An Ideal Unionist: The Political Career Of Theresa, Marchioness Of Londonderry, 1911-1919, Rachel E. Finley-Bowman

Journal of International Women's Studies

The most prominent unionist woman in the early twentieth century was Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry. During the Third Home Rule Crisis and its aftermath, Lady Londonderry worked tirelessly against Irish self-government. She had been a celebrated political hostess since her husband’s tenure as Irish Viceroy in the late nineteenth century. Now, in this perilous time for unionism, she employed her family and political connections to spread Ulster’s message to England. She also helped to facilitate the formation of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC), an anti-home rule organization, in 1911. She served as UWUC president from 1912 to 1919, directing …

The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “Third World" Feminisms, Vasuki Nesiah

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper advances the argument that third world feminism calls for a re-orienting of our critical energies from merely taking sides in a debate, to questioning the material and ideological lens that interpolates the debate, i.e., the habitus from which we make our stand. Constituted by the tension between “finding the ground on which we make our stand” and the struggle with whether “we are mostly given that territory,” third world feminisms pursue political agendas interpolated by the cracks and fissures of post-colonial nationhood and internationalized feminisms. The ground of struggle is varied – working conditions and economic self-determination, family …

Cape Verde’S Empresarias: Image And Reality, Jean Ludtke

Journal of International Women's Studies

The West African Republic of Cape Verde was under socialist governance from the time of independence in 1975 until its first multi-party government initiated privatization in 1991. The study examines, as of the mid-90s, the emergent entrepreneurial lives of a small group of young women, their views about their work, and their rejection of traditional women’s roles. This lively group has transformed their public image, used it as an organizing principle for action and modified that of the nation. In their revolt against cultural orthodoxy and assumption of new roles this group’s self- and public images have become transformational. What …

Maria Stewart And The Rhetoric Of Mobility, Susan Roberson

Journal of International Women's Studies

Formulating a black feminist rhetoric, a counter-narrative that joins rather than separates the church with politics, Maria Stewart, in the meditations and political speeches of the Productions of Mrs. Maria Stewart (1835) calls on the nation to live up to its spiritual ideals and African Americans to mobilize as a community of Christians. In her own transgression of male-dominated space, becoming the first American woman to speak before a “promiscuous” audience, she enacts the conjunction between spiritual and spatial journeying, the crossing of spatial and ideological limits of race and gender. Countering experiences of exclusion, marginality, and stasis, Stewart constructs …

Separating From Violent Male Partners: A Resistant Act In The Midst Of Power Relations, Vivienne Elizabeth

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article draws on Foucauldian feminist theory to conceptualize separating from violent male partners by women as an act of resistance. Thus conceptualized, leaving takes on a new meaning as a strategy used by women to disrupt abusive power relations, but not necessarily to end their relationships. It is argued that attempts by women to transform their lives through separation needs to be located within a wider social context and that this context needs to analyzed from the vantage point of power. Such analysis points to post-separation identities and needs as significant sites of struggle between women and members of …

“Word Made Flesh”: Czech Women’S Writing From Communism To Post-Communism, Madelaine Hron

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article explores the changes in Czech women’s fiction from communism to post- communism, focusing in particular on Czech women writers’ relationship to literary discourse and feminism. It contends that women writers’ rapport to ideological discourse and literary production under communism is a determining factor in women’s relationship to both writing and feminism. It examines this literary legacy in terms of post-communism, surveying the differences between a totalitarian socialist regime and that of a materialist, capitalist economy, as exemplified in Czech women’s literature. The article offers a survey the major post-communist women writers, including Hodrová, Boučková, Kriseová, as well as …

Seeing Battle, Knowing War: Feminist Re-Visioning In Hortensia Papadat-Bengesçu’S “The Man Whose Heart They Could See”, Jon Dietrick

Journal of International Women's Studies

As an exploration of the themes of disillusionment and the failure of language, Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengesçu’s “The Man Whose Heart They Could See” would seem to share much with better-known men’s writing on the war such as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu: Journal d’une Escouade. But a careful reading of the text reveals some crucial differences from these works. Treating the subject of war not in terms of an easily definable “scene of battle” or “war front” but instead as a deeply entrenched cultural logic in which varied aspects of society are both …

Family Obligations Or Cultural Contraints? Obstacles In The Path Of Professional Women, Marie-Josée Legault, Stéphanie Chasserio

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper provides an account of our research on balancing private life and work among highly qualified information technology (IT) professionals. The authors basically present the findings of an empirical research on balancing private life and work among highly qualified information technology (IT) professionals (mostly engineers and few managers), comparing small loosely structured high-tech firms and big bureaucracies. Authors here build on theories regarding gender and commitment, appraisal and promotions and link these to work time behavior to show up consequences of gendered work time patterns on engineers’ careers.

Briefly, to sum up the rationale, women and men behave differently …

The Gender Blindness Of Good Theorists: An Israeli Case Study, Henriette Dahan Kalev

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this article I use Swirski’s book as a sounding board for a theoretical discussion about issues of marginality and gender in Israeli society. My aim is to discuss a number of issues connected with gender blindness that are prevalent in sociological studies about Israeli society. Namely: (1) What is the sociological manifestation of the phenomenon referred to as gender blindness? (2) Why is it that women are often excluded in theoretical analysis? (3) Why is it that women are marginalized either intentionally or accidentally? (4) What are the causes of women’s invisibility? I explain why Marxist analysis of the …

Identifying Indigenous Health Technologies Used By Women In A Rural Community In Nigeria On The Cord Stumps Of Newborns: A Decrease In Cord Infections And Neonatal Tetanus?, Ifeyinwa Flossy Obuekwe, Ifechukwude Chuma Obuekwe

Journal of International Women's Studies

About two-thirds of births in developing countries take place outside health facilities and almost half of the women are delivered by untrained traditional birth attendants (TBAs), family members or deliver on their own. A wide variety of traditional practices and beliefs are associated with care of the umbilical cord. This paper attempts to identify indigenous health technologies used by women in a rural community – Oregbeni – in Edo State, Nigeria on the cord stumps of newborns, to describe their preparations and applications and also to link these traditional practices with the relevant scientific information to determine the validity of …

Maternalism In Mistress-Maid Relations: The Philippine Experience, Janet M. Arnado

Journal of International Women's Studies

The mistress-maid relationship, grounded in maternalism, provides a glaring example of the class inequality among women. Contextualized in the Third World, this paper examines maternalism both as a complex, hierarchical system that governs the employment arrangement and as a field of negotiation where women exercise agency. Recorded in-depth interviews and focus groups with thirty-one domestic workers and ten female employers were conducted in a medium-sized city in the Philippines between May and August 2000. QSR NUD*IST facilitated the data processing and analysis. This paper describes several forms of maternalism, including “part of the family” ideology, emotional labor, material support, utang …

Irish Women: Uncovering Their Language Of Power, Margaret Garry Burke

Journal of International Women's Studies

In this paper I discuss my experience as an older student studying in Ireland. I connect my encounter in Ireland with a preeminent female Irish poet, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, to research I was conducting on the social evolution of women in Ireland for which I interviewed seven Irish women who came from very different socio-economic and political backgrounds. As an Irish-American who had denied my heritage for most of my life, this experience revealed to me how native-born Irish women, who faced many of the same problems I had encountered as a sheltered suburban housewife, had dealt with repressive state …

Using Imagination To Create New Roles: Diane Wakoski’S Poetry, Nancy Bunge

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Too Much To Ask: Black Women In The Era Of Integration, Sheila T. Gregory

Journal of International Women's Studies

Review of Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration by Elizabeth Higginbotham

Poetry, Donna J. G. Lee

Journal of International Women's Studies

Two poems by Donna J. G. Lee:

• Afternoon in Paleó Fáliron
• Up the Mountain

Introduction: Harvesting Our Strengths: Third Wave Feminism And Women’S Studies, Stacy Gillis, Rebecca Munford

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Individual-Systemic Violence: Disabled Women’S Standpoint, Maria Barile

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article presents an insider reflection on questions of violence and women with disabilities. We explore reasons for the systemic omission of women with disabilities from mainstream research and from services addressing non-disabled women’s experiences. Several questions are postulated. Has segregation of women with disabilities from the mainstream rendered a large part of their experiences, including the experience of violence, invisible? Have misconceptions about the lives of women with disabilities contributed to exclusionary practices within the women’s movement?

This article further submits that violence against women with disabilities assumes many forms, both individual and systemic. It explores several factors, among …

Historical Perspectives On Violence Against Women, Vivian C. Fox

Journal of International Women's Studies

Three great bodies of thought have influenced western society’s views and treatment of women: Judeo-Christian religious ideas, Greek philosophy and the Common Law legal code. All three traditions have, by and large, assumed patriarchy as natural – that is male domination stemming from the view of male superiority. As part of the culture perpetuated by these ideologies, violence towards women was seen as a natural expression of male dominance. This paper contains three main themes. The first establishes patriarchy as an early pattern of military societies and the subsequent emergence of the Judeo-Christian, Greek and legal cultural paradigm as ideological …

Public Health Implications Of The Declining Calcium Intake In Female Adolescents From A Nigerian University, Blessing Ogochukwu Agoreyo, Ifeyinwa Flossy Obuekwe

Journal of International Women's Studies

The importance of calcium for strong bones has long been recognized. It is now also known that adequate calcium intake helps reduce high blood pressure and lessens the symptoms of premenstrual tension as well as possibly protecting against bowel cancer. Over the last several decades, researchers have learnt a great deal about how a nutritionally balanced diet during childhood and adolescence works to prevent the onset of damaging adult diseases. One long – lasting effect of nutritional imbalance during adolescence is osteoporosis, a bone-crippling disease characterized by low bone mass and an increased bone fragility. Once recognized primarily as an …