When feminism encounters New Documentary Movement: an uncompleted academic discussion

This article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over.     

Modernising gender,civilising sex: perverse imaginary in the state feminist politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu

Abstract

The gender sexual politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu has been pivotal in the hegemonic ascendancy of Taiwan state feminism in recent years. Through an examination of Liu’s psychoanalytically mediated essays of cultural criticism, this article traces the contour of Liu’s sexual imaginary within the context of 1990s feminist and queer politics. Liu’s modernising project of gender equality, I argue, upholds heterosexual monogamy as a feminist ideal that seeks to purge all the masculine ills, including perversion and promiscuity. Meanwhile, queers and prostitutes come to be figured as the very negativity that must be repressed. Yet, like the Lacanian Real, they impinge on the symbolic order that Liu ordains as they thwart her desire to civilise sex.     

Heroes of Their Own Life Stories: Narrating the Female Self in the Feminist Age

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a triple legacy of the expressive culture of the 1960s and 70s. Late twentieth century feminism, discourses of gender equality and the advent of modern confessional culture liberated women’s women’s voices, producing self-realising narratives and a shift in women’s facility to produce authentic ‘reflexive projects of the self’. Drawing on oral history interviews with women born in the 1940s in the United Kingdom, Australia and North America, a new concept for a distinct genre of women’s oral history narrative is advanced– the feminography – in which we hear women owning their voices and the stories those voices tell.     

Comment on Hanasaki Kohei: decolonalization and the assumption of war responsibility

Abstract

The first Asian Lesbian Film and Video Festival, held in Taipei in August 2005, brought forth media art, social activism and cultural exchange on one occasion. It provided a rare opportunity to showcase the experience of Asian lesbians, which is vastly different from the experience of those in Western countries. While there were great similarities in their love experiences among the 36 Asian lesbian shorts selected, they also reflected the differences among the Asian countries in terms of local development of tongzhi culture and community as well as the visibility of tongzhis. Among the Chinese communities, Taiwan was seen to be at the forefront of the development of tongzhi culture, Mainland China was new to the movement, and Hong Kong was somewhere in‐between. Japanese and Korean videos took a critical and reflective attitude towards social regulations and mainstream thoughts, although witty and farcical at times. While the Filipinos show a more tolerant attitude to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) community, the major oppressive forces on lesbians were poverty, gender inequality and sexual violence. Only one Israeli documentary was shown at the film festival, which focused on lesbians living in the Jewish Orthodox traditions. The film won international acclaim and attracted much public attention to the issue. Films and videos were found to be an effective means to transcend language barriers and cultural differences for a true cross‐cultural exchange among Asian lesbians. During the few days of festival, a ‘queer nation’, not defined by nationalities or languages, but by the pursuit of love expressions, was constructed around The Taipei House.     

Lesbians,Gay Men and The Production of Scale in East Germany

This article uses the concept of ‘scale’ to analyse the relative importance of local, national and global places, events, and explanatory frameworks in everyday lives in late communism. It uses a case study of lesbians and gay men living in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and asks how these groups negotiated the restrictions of life under state socialism. It argues that both individuals and groups used scale in two ways: as an imaginative tool for making sense of the world, and as a political strategy for dealing with the state. In both cases, ‘scaling’, or choosing the scale at which one located oneself and one’s actions, was a means of disrupting and even contesting the rigid hierarchies of state socialist rule.     

Insulting Jean Massieu: Debating Representational Control of Deaf People in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

In 1876, an educator of the deaf and a ‘deaf-mute’ publicly clashed over topics ranging from the nature of deafness and the identity of those who are ‘deaf-mute’ to the best methods to be used in deaf education and what deaf children following those methods might be expected to achieve. The debate occurred at a point in the nineteenth century when expert authority ‘about’ deaf people was beginning to sweep away deaf people’s own right to self-representation. Although richly nuanced and highly personal, the debate’s occurrence at a period that studies of the history of the deaf community have identified as pivotal to deaf people’s categorisation as ‘disabled’ means that much of its complexity has been lost in subsequent historical over-writing. This article explores the debate in depth. It provides a valuable glimpse into the mechanisms of expertise, and the ways that both non-deaf and deaf experts understood who deaf people were, what they could do, and what their place within society should be at that pivotal time. It also highlights the rich complexity of a much more complex history available to those prepared to dig beneath the surface to expose historical texture.     

The story of xiao jie ('working' girls)

Abstract

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti‐colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture‐gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of ‘regional’ languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future.     

Consuming Popular Music: Individualism,Politics and Progressive Rock

Historians have maintained that popular music had an influence upon individuals and in turn society. Yet the historiography of popular music has focused far more on bands and wider social reactions to the music than on understanding how and why fans consumed music. This article demonstrates how a more fan-centric approach can allow for more subtle understandings of the influence and role of popular music in the twentieth century. During the 1970s, progressive rock was an important part of life for many young music fans. It provided them with escape, entertainment and a sense of individualism, community and intellectual reward, much of which centred upon the idea that the genre was different, uncommercial and difficult to access and understand. Progressive rock also encouraged some debate around issues of class amongst the young and helped cement the importance of individualism in middle-class and educated circles. However, many of the values articulated in progressive rock, not least the discontent with contemporary society and the emphasis on intellectual values, were also shared by many within the broader social framework that fans wanted to rebel against. Moreover, other musical subgenres liked to imagine themselves as similarly ‘different’ and thus progressive rock shows that the real significance of popular music for historians is not the music itself but rather how it was consumed and thought about by the fans themselves.     

Globalizing Korean queers? Project L(esbian), the first exhibition of lesbian arts in South Korea

This paper deals with the influence of queer and visual culture in South Korea by concentrating on the example of Project L, the first exhibition organized by self-proclaimed lesbian artists and curators in South Korea in 2005, followed by the group's second exhibition, Gender Spectrum, in 2008. Conflicts between the dominant curatorial approach toward feminist arts and the identity politics of the Project L team are investigated in order to illustrate major theoretical predicaments in which lesbian activists and artists find themselves in feminist organizations and art exhibitions in Korea. As the title “Globalizing Korean Queer” suggests, this paper also examines contradictory circumstances related to the influence of queer theory in non-western countries. A close analysis of Gender Spectrum sheds light upon how a non-western lesbian group utilizes queer theory to understand the distinctive cultural conditions underlying homophobia, beyond merely importing “advanced” theories from the west.     

Being a Man,Being a Member: Masculinity and Community in Britain’s Working Men’s Clubs, 1945–1960*

By 1960, there were more than 3,500 working men’s clubs in Britain, with a combined membership of more than two million people. This article explores their post-war transformation from small homosocial enclaves for drinking and bar-games to larger family-oriented entertainment venues, while they continued to provide social, welfare and educational activities for local communities. Operating on the boundaries of public and private life, they remained alternative sites of domesticity to the home, in which men nurtured relations with both friends and family. Nevertheless, though women and children came to represent a significant presence in the clubs, their cultures remained largely patriarchal and discriminatory. I argue that working men’s clubs provided important sources of agency, community and continuity for their members, during a period of rapid social and cultural change.     

Women,Education and Social Mobility in Britain during the Long 1970s

ABSTRACT

Through analysis of oral history interviews and quantitative source material, this article offers a gendered model of social mobility in the post-war decades. It argues that women born between the late 1930s and early 1950s achieved social mobility through entering post-secondary education after a period of employment, followed by occupational movement into the welfare professions. Women’s mobility primarily occurred in the long 1970s, facilitated by the Wilson government’s investment in the welfare state and its expansion of further education and creation of the polytechnics. This challenges the predominantly masculinised trope of the grammar school as the driver of post-war mobility.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

Jessie,a Girl with Two Moms

The Jessie Books are a seven-book series complete with a dedicated website. Each book features a 5-year-old girl named Jessie who happens to live in a city with her two moms. Each book features Jessie as an ordinary young girl engaging in familiar, life-enriching activities. Across The Jessie Books, the community of caregivers, extended relatives, and intergenerational friends convey the notion of a caring and loving family. This concept of family is relevant to elementary education in light of the expanding diversity in and around schoolchildren. Increasing numbers of school-age children have lesbian mothers and caregivers, or live in dual mom-headed households. For adults who deem The Jessie Books' narrative beyond the scope of young readers, links are made between the storylines and the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Ideally, upon discovery of these texts, their content and integration will be called for and embraced in the elementary curriculum.     

Women,torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

ABSTRACT

In the years since the fall of the civil–military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, considerable attention has been paid to first-person testimonies of human rights victims. A great number of these have been by women who narrated sexual political violence. However, while there has been work done on the relation between terror, trauma, and spectacle in postdictatorial television shows, rarely has this also included a gendered perspective. In this article we seek to open this area of discussion by evaluating the manner in which women’s televised testimonies of political sexual violence have been constructed on late night talk shows in Chile, using recent history and memory theory, as well as feminist theory on the representation of sexual violence in mass media.     

Black Feminist Activism: Theory as Generating Collective Resistance

Black feminist scholars have theorized ways in which power permeates our everyday lived experiences. The authors of this article, a university faculty member and a grassroots community activist, share their collective Black feminist activist efforts to find spaces of resistance and empowerment within oppressive conditions in the city of New Orleans.     

A qualitative study of temporary reentry from significant others’ perspective

Using data collected through participant observation and in-depth interviews with 13 mothers of study abroad students in China, this study explores, from the mothers’ perspectives, patterns of social interaction between them and their children during their short-term reentry. It shows that the mothers’ confusion about their children's cultural identities led to their confusion about their motherhood identity and the renegotiated rules of interaction that virtually transformed mother–child relationships into host–guest relationships. The courteous and apparently friction-free interactions between mothers and their children were laden with latent relational distress and tension. The study suggests that reentry is not an individualized process of psychological and behavioral adjustment on the part of returnees only, as suggested by the existing literature; rather, it is co-produced by returnees and their significant others through communication. It also suggests that effective interaction between returnees and their significant others may be the key to reducing reentry stress.     

Tackling the Issues: Meaning Making in a Telenovela

This article focuses on a Venezuelan telenovela, El País de las Mujeres (The Country of Women), broadcast to high ratings in Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Drawing on feminist media studies and cultural studies, I conducted textual analysis of the serial and in-depth interviews with the production team and audience members. I analyzed the production, mise-en-scene, and consumption of the representations of sexual harassment, domestic abuse, abortion, and homosexuality that are present in this telenovela's storylines. The analysis suggests that the inclusion of topics that have been part of the public debate for some time are accepted by viewers, whereas those that are controversial or not publicly discussed are not readily sanctioned by the audience. In addition, the study illustrates how telenovelas' stories and themes contribute to the public debate about social issues, and how production and consumption, traditionally represented as opposing forces, are deeply articulated.     

The Eton Montem custom c. 1750–1844: privilege,pageantry and sanctioned misrule

Montem, a triennial customary march by Eton scholars, consolidated into a public expression of patrician social identity under the patronage of the monarchy in the late eighteenth century. This analysis of Montem’s history traces its development from a boy-led pageant of misrule to a public performance of elite patriotism. The custom, which attracted national attention, sheds new light on boy governance and self-fashioning in the period’s elite schools. This article argues that a study of Montem disrupts the standard historiographical narrative of anarchy and violence in the great schools and suggests that boy culture was more complex than previously acknowledged.     

Building the Foundation of Acceptance Book by Book: Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and/or Transgender-Themed Books for Grades K–5 Multicultural Libraries

This article is an analysis of picture books and chapter books involving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender characters. Over 30 picture and chapter books were reviewed, each of which would be appropriate for use in elementary classrooms. For grades K–2, several picture books highlight different types of families, including families that have two moms or two dads. For grades 3–5, four chapter books that subtly and matter-of-factly include same-sex parents or lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender characters are recommended. A discussion focuses on the significance of including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender families and characters in the school-sanctioned curriculum beginning in the elementary grades. Families with same-sex parents is an increasing demographic in the United States; an inclusive curriculum would allow all children to see their families represented. For elementary students with “traditional” families, an inclusive curriculum extends their conceptions of family, ideally building the foundation for acceptance.