Search

The article reviews the book "Gender Stereotyping Transnational Legal Perspectives," by R. J. Cook and S. Cusack.

The article reviews the book "World Wide Women, Globalizzazione, generi e linguaggi (Globalization, Genders and Languages)," edited by Franca Balsamo.

The article reviews the book "Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States," by Carolina Bank Muñoz.

The article reviews the book "Sexual Politics in Modern Iran," by Janet Afary.

Foregrounding the voices of minority women in England, Scotland and France, Minority Women and Austerity provides a rich and compelling account of austerity’s lived effects. Through its intersectional analyses and historically attendant frame, the book locates minority women’s experiences of austerity not as fundamentally “new” but rather as an extension and sharpening of conditions of “routinized crisis” and inequality. In doing so it compels its readers to ask: whose crisis counts? In this review paper, I summarize the book’s key contributions. In particular, I discuss the book’s theorizations of “political racelessness” to critique the erasure of minority women’s experiences and activism. I reflect on what this means for those researching austerity and its deleterious effects, and for those participating in anti-austerity activism. I end by discussing the analytical tools that the book offers for interrogating the Left’s response to on-going austerity within a post-Brexit Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Houses, Secrets, and the Closet investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, sensation novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the 'closet' - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities. Both Eve Sedgwick's theories of the 'closet,' the history of 'homosociality,' and the 'paranoid reader,' and more general theories concerning the workings and politics of secrecy serve as a basis for this argument. Close readings of several extensive narratives demonstrate how (and why) the masculine secret becomes increasingly 'sexualised' in the course of the examined timespan. By doing this, a thus far neglected continuity between the modern 'closet' and the much older, but socially important male secret that has been a literary theme since the earliest novels will be illustrated. The eighteenth century Gothic novel serves as a starting point. The Gothic castle's owner almost always has a secret which is hidden in his castle. An early example of this is the story of Count Bluebeard, which has been influential in both the English and pan-European literary traditions. Bluebeard hides the corpses of all his former wives in a room in his castle, a fate that awaits every woman who tries to disclose his secret. Hence, Bluebeard's secret serves a double function: for him, it is an instrument of power since he possesses knowledge that is denied to his wives; this knowledge is concealed in such a way that the women cannot access it spatially. On the other hand, Bluebeard's secret also causes a kind of masculine paranoia: he constantly lives in fear of disclosure. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto confronts the reader with a male protagonist whose paranoid need to protect the secret of his illegitimacy and disso- ciate homosocial power from the threat of homoeroticism makes him a misogynistic tyrant. His 'phallic rage' is not only fatal for the bodies of the women around him, but also ultimately destroys the house of patriarchy itself. Ann Radcliffe takes up this theme in The Mysteries of Udolpho, creating the fictional architecture of a Bluebeard's castle which, through its labyrinthine structure, and seemingly impenetrable mystery of locked and unlocked doors, enacts patriarchal terror on the female heroine's mind and body. At the same time, however, Radcliffe questions the ultimate efficacy of such masculine violence, and contrasts Udolpho's failing, masculine spaces with feminine 'alternatives' that provide the novel's (dead and alive) women with the means to have a (secret) room of their own. Finally, William Godwin's Caleb Williams explores the paranoid structure of homosocial masculinities, problematising an obsessive preoccupation with 'honour,' and alluding to the increasingly virulent dilemma of a homoeroticism that gets associated with homosocial secrecy. In eighteenth-century Gothic, then, we already find all the elements of masculine crisis that will continue to preoccupy writers throughout the nineteenth century.With the rise of the middle classes, new forms of privacy, and the emergence of the novel as the genre that explores the workings of the private mind, modern concerns with gendered definitions, increasingly troubled by evolving dichotomies of 'sexual' definition, found their expression in the fictional architectures of the Gothic. By the mid-nineteenth century, these 'closets' had been 'domesticated' in, among other forms, the writings of the sensation novelists. In The Woman in White,Wilkie Collins portrays male characters who struggle (and fail) to define for themselves a stable masculine identity. Weak, ill, and effeminate, the men witness epistemological and spatial power shift to the novel's female characters. The men's paranoid attempts to claim narrative authority over the story and its characters' fictional lives foregrounds the genre's preoccupation with secrecy, and its relevance for politics and rhetoric of gender and sexuality. In No Name, a novel similarly inhabited by male characters of questionable health and virility, Collins further problematises the performative nature of gender roles, and has his actress-heroine subvert the male-homosocial order in liminal spaces which, in themselves, already point towards the unstable ground on which the 'house of patriarchy' is built. Mary Elizabeth Braddon takes these themes a step further. In Lady Audley's Secret, she not only reverses the gendered dynamics of the Bluebeard theme, placing a woman at the centre of spatial and epistemological control, but also suggests a 'way out' of the destructive mechanisms of patriarchal-masculine paranoia, providing her 'queer' male characters with a dream-like, triangulated existence in a fairy-tale ending which, albeit ironically, celebrates deviance as an essential antidote to excessive normativity. Henry James at around the turn of the twentieth century skilfully turns this praise of deviance into a 'queer rhetoric' which never quite says what it actually 'means,' but always productively opens up textual spaces that invite the 'paranoid reader' to see 'sexual' meaning where it never becomes explicit. In"The Aspern Papers," James takes up the theme of epistemological power and its spatial organisation having shifted to women. The tale's protagonist, a male editor, not only struggles to penetrate a woman's secret where none might be, but also displays a sentimental attachment to the fetishised letters of a dead poet, the editor's desire for whom forecloses any heteronormative solution to the story's gendered conflicts. Similarly, in "In the Cage," James demonstrates the blackmailability of paranoid masculinities in creating a female telegraphist whose position at the centre of communication exchange enables her to put pressure on one of her male clients through a mere rhetoric of knowledge. Explicating knowledge of a secret, as James shows, can be more powerful than actually knowing the secret's content. In "The Jolly Corner," finally, paranoia finds its 'sexual' expression in the protagonist's agonised wish and fear to confront his suppressed 'alter ego,' the unnameable knowledge which - ironically - his female friend seems to have penetrated long ago. The destructive dynamics of paranoid masculinity, and its excessive need to dissociate itself from the threats of both 'queerness' and 'femininity' are only a problem, James appears to suggest, so long as one insists on the need to 'speak one's name.' James proposes an alternative: a textual celebration of the ambiguous, the 'sexually' non-explicit, and the open space of possibility. The book's last chapter includes a reading of Sam Mendes' 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. Both a relic from the Cold War and its hyper-masculine rhetoric of a defence against the 'Evil Empire,' and, from the start, a never-quite-serious parody of the very machismo Bond has come to represent, the world's most famous secret agent, and his more than half a century old cultural career are a perfect starting point for an analysis of current concerns with gender roles and the importance of secrecy. Bond, after all, works for the British Secret Service, and thus represents one of the organisations that have come to be modern society's abstracted versions of the figure of Count Bluebeard: intelligence agencies are in control of secret knowledge and its circulation, to the exclusion of the majority of the population. Skyfall here serves as an example to demonstrate how the major nodes around which this book's argument is built - masculinity, secrecy, sexuality, and space - continue, in their interconnectedness, to form an important set of analytical tools for an understanding of some of our culture's most central concerns. Skyfall shows that, in the twenty-first century, a cultural preoccupation with issues of gendered power relations and sexualities has lost nothing of its allure. The Gothic, too, still provides today's storytellers and audiences with a rich imagery of spaces that illustrate and make graspable a psychology of the self that has its roots in the eighteenth century. One of the aims of this book is to bring together research that has been done in gender and queer studies, history, philosophy, and sociology, in order to demonstrate that any attempt to thoroughly understand the ways masculinities have been negotiated and defined in literature since the eighteenth century needs to take into account the difficult (and exciting) relationship between genders and 'sexualities.' Homosocial, patriarchal masculinities, in the long nineteenth century, were not only, albeit crucially, structured around misogyny, but also around varying degrees of homophobia. Literary explorations of the homosocial, heterosocial, homoerotic, and heteroerotic dynamics of modern Western patriarchy have, as the book illustrates, been 'queer' before they could be 'gay,' but this queerness, far from being a marginal phenomenon, makes up much of the allure of these stories, and accounts for the pleasure of engaging with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for developing an ethic(s) of climate change is characterized by the far ranging and complex moral questions that arise through the anthropogenic warming of the earth. This paper provides a literary review of recent advancements in climate change ethics, primarily concerning the issue of climate justice. The books examined are The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy, by Darrel Moellendorf; Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed--and What It Means for Our Future, by Dale Jamieson; and Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change, edited by Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Gender Dynamics and Post Conflict Reconstruction," edited by Christine Eifler and Ruth Seifert.

The article reviews the book "Envy, Competition and Gender: Theory, Clinical Applications and Group Work," edited by L. Navaro and S. L. Schwartzberg.

The article reviews the book "Zhongguoshi xinlun: Xingbieshi fence" (New Perspectives on Chinese History: Gender History) edited by Lee Jen-der.

The article reviews the book "Critical Studies in Rural Gender Issues," edited by J. Little and C. Morris.

The article reviews the book "Im Zeichen des Geschlechts. Repräsentationen, Konstruktionen, Interventionen," edited by Celine Camus, Annabelle Nornung, Fabienne Imlinger, Angela Kolbe, Milena Noll, and Isabelle Stauffer.

Adele M. Fielde (1839-1916), at one time an unmarried missionary of the American Baptist Mission Union (ABMU), was known in her old age as a writer, a social activist，a scientist and a champion of women's rights. She was famous for her work in training "Bible-women" (or female evangelists) between 1873-89 in Chaozhou prefecture in northeast Guangdong, South China. After laboring as a missionary teacher in the Orient for almost twenty-five years，Pielde resigned from missionary service in November 1889, insisting that her connection with the ABMU be ended permanently before her return to America. Current research looking at her: final “divorce” from her: missionary career offers an inadequate explanation for her actions. This paper seeks to revisit this question by focusing on the cultural and social difficulties Fielde encountered in Chaozhou. An examination of Fielde's diary，her personal correspondence (letters to and from the ABMU and firiends)，books，articles and pamphlets，along with her co-workers， correspondence and the records of the АВМU, reveal that the public reason Fielde gave for her resignation--heart disease--was solely for the public record; whereas in fact it was her changed religious beliefs and disappointment with mission work that were the two decisive factors prompting her resignation, in which there were also some clear gender inequality issues involved as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews several books about gender inequality including "The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, Fourth Edition," by Joni Seager, "Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work," by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, and "African Sexualities: A Reader," edited by Sylvia Tamale.

The article reviews the book "Gender in Israel: New Studies on Gender in the Yishuv and the State," edited by Margalit Shilo and Gideon Katz.

Reviews two books. "Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Culture Work," by Rachel Blau DuPlessis; "The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory," edited by Ellen Rooney.

The article reviews the book "Rethinking Men and Gender Relations: An Investigation of Men, Their Changing Roles Within the Household and the Implications for Gender Relations in Kisii District, Kenya," by Margrethe Silberschmidt.

The article reviews the book "Gender & Well-Being in Europe: Historical & Contemporary Perspectives," by Bernard Harris, Lina Gálvez, and Helen Machado.

Reviews the book "Spirits of Palestine: Gender, Society and Stories of the Jinn," by Celia E. Rothenberg.

Reviews the book "Sex and Gender in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 47th Recontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001," edited by Simo Parpola and Robert M. Whiting.

The article reviews the book "Framed by Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World," by Cecilia Ridgeway.

The article reviews the book "Inclusive States: Social Policy and Structural Inequalities," by Anis A. Dani and Arjan De Haan.

This article takes the occasion of the publication of two lengthy volumes about the life and work of Claude Lévi-Strauss to assess certain elements of Maurice Godelier's Marxist encounter with structuralism. While providing an overall view of each book, and the way they speak to each other, I also explore particular dimensions of Godelier's engagement with Lévi-Strauss, including in relation to Godelier's attempt to introduce psychoanalysis into his Marxist-structuralist equations. Four broad themes are addressed: the horizontal and vertical dimensions of kinship as alliance and descent; domination and the so-called 'exchange of women'; Godelier's limited appeal to Freud, especially in relation to his near occlusion of Lacan; and Godelier's 'suspicious' humanist relationship to sacred belief as ideological illusion. This last matter leads to a concluding section which, drawing on Loyer's biography, contrasts Godelier's version of late Enlightenment humanism with what was arguably the more radically expanded humanism of the mature Lévi-Strauss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]