Escaping to the country: Media,nostalgia, and the new food industries

Over the past decade in the West, television cooking shows have popularized interest in the provenance of food against a backdrop of public concern about the practices of industrial food production. This article explores two series that offer self-sufficiency as a solution to the problem of industrial agriculture. Escape to River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer each centre on a narrative of a city-dweller moving to the country to set up a smallholding. With their nostalgia for an earlier—simultaneously unproblematic and emotionally fulfilling—time of food production, these series imagine a Utopian lifestyle in which audiences are encouraged to choose to produce and consume differently. That it is (middle-class) men who are rediscovering traditional food practices highlights how media discourses surrounding food production can become entangled in gendered representations that give rise to niche food products and experiences designed to ameliorate feelings of risk and uncertainty in contemporary food systems.     

Popular Politicians: The Interaction Between Politics and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1950s–1980s

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s onwards, the Netherlands witnessed a transformation of the emotional codes of politics. A culture of political leadership marked by notions of duty and restraint, made way for self-expression and authenticity. This article argues that the interaction between the spheres of politics and popular culture played a vital role in this transformation. The practices and discourses of popular culture became a significant part of the repertoire through which politicians articulated representative claims. The article traces how politicians negotiated their interaction with popular culture, started to cultivate a private persona and eventually turned into political celebrities.     

‘Mothers Have Become Monsters’: Danger,Distress and Deviance in British Evangelical Depictions of Indian Motherhood, 1757–1857

ABSTRACT

Images of maternal distress and maternal deviance were frequently invoked in order to mobilise British women in support of her ‘heathen’ sisters overseas. Yet these accounts were not uniform in their interpretation of Indian maternity, or its relationship to emerging Victorian ideals of motherhood. This paper explores ideas of maternal danger, distress and deviance as they appeared in evangelical and colonial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revealing complex and ambivalent responses and challenging the idea that Indian woman were simply one-dimensional signifiers of victimhood within gendered constructions of the ‘civilising mission’.     

Women's Work on the World Wide Web: How a New Medium Represents an Old Problem

This article examines how iVillage.com, one of the most popular World Wide Web portals for women, advises them on how to integrate the demands of wage and domestic labor. Specifically, the article focuses on the implications such advice has for gender relations within the family and for feminist politics in U.S. society. Discursive strategies in advice generated by iVillage.com support the ideology of postfeminism, which promotes individual consumer-based solutions for a primarily middle-class audience over politics addressing the gendered division of labor, both within individual families and in social structures. Such commercial Web-site discourses are consistent with those constructed by other mainstream media.     

‘Are You Really Living?’ If Not, ‘Get With It!’

ABSTRACT

Young women were harbingers of social change in postwar Britain; this article addresses discourses that informed their sense of self and expectations. It focuses on magazines produced for, and read by, young women in their mid-to-late teens and early twenties as a prism through which to explore ideas about the teenage self and lifestyle between 1957 and 1970. It argues that a distinctive feature of these magazines was a new ideal of young womanhood that resonated with late-modern discourses of self-discovery and self-fulfilment and which necessitated a lifestyle characterized by independence, experience and opportunity. Though an attractive ideal, it was also problematic for young women and potentially frustrating.     

Reading Irish Women's Lives in Photograph Albums

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide a new approach to photography in Ireland by shifting focus from ‘art’ photography to the processes and practices of snapshot photography. In employing a new methodological approach to photography, it also provides a new way to examine women's history, exploring photography as part of the tactics women used in order to resist or assimilate state- and Church-led discourses of womanhood, which have often been characterized as both oppressive and hegemonic. In order to explore these themes in detail, this article examines the photography collection of Dorothy Stokes, the largest twentieth century amateur collection held by the National Library of Ireland. I situate Stokes's photographs between two traditions – ethnographic photographs of Ireland and ‘snapshot’ images of holidays and family. Stokes self-consciously made use of these two genres, but also disrupted them. Taking photographs and the making of photograph albums became ways for her to comment on Irish society and her place in the nation and to represent and constitute an oppositional private life.     

David Underdown’s Revel,Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660

Abstract

This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only ‘coffee beat club’ became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the ‘coffee beat club’ became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order.     

Musical discovery,colonialism, and the possibilities of intercultural communication through music

ABSTRACT

Discourses of discovery have been important in a wide range of musical contexts, from early modern ideas about musical composition through to current forms of popular music production and consumption. Across these various contexts there are often inherent connections between discovery and colonialism, connections that become most apparent in non-Western socio-cultural and musical settings. In this article, I situate discourses of discovery within the “coloniality of power,” noting how colonial discovery can be more critically described as invention. From here, I turn to the genre of World Music as an example of how musical discovery is underpinned by inherently colonial perspectives, articulations of power, and relationships of dominance and subordination between Western and non-Western cultures. In contrast, I present the concept of interculturalism as a way of thinking about the possibilities of cultural in-between-ness beyond discovery, drawing on the practices of musicians who articulate intercorporeal and intercultural communication through performance.     

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.     

“Sharenting,” parent blogging,and the boundaries of the digital self

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether “sharenting” (sharing representations of one’s parenting or children online) is a form of digital self-representation. Drawing on interviews with 17 parent bloggers, we explore how parents define the borders of their digital selves and justify what is their “story to tell.” We find that bloggers grapple with profound ethical dilemmas, as representing their identities as parents inevitably makes public aspects of their children’s lives, introducing risks that they are, paradoxically, responsible for safeguarding against. Parents thus evaluate what to share by juggling multiple obligations—to themselves, their children in the present and imagined into the future, and to their physical and virtual communities. The digital practices of representing the relational self are impeded more than eased by the individualistic notion of identity instantiated by digital platforms, thereby intensifying the ambivalence of both parents and the wider society in judging emerging genres of blogging the self.     

Notes to Contributors

ABSTRACT

Later eighteenth-century newspapers have been credited with shaping and reflecting readers' politics and growing sense of regional and national identity. However, historians have long ignored the role that newspaper proprietors played in the construction of those newspapers. Through a close study of one provincial proprietor, John Ware of Whitehaven, this article demonstrates that newspaper owners were shrewd operators in the public sphere. They were businessmen and women for whom the imagined community of readers was a real community of friends and business associates.     

Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

ABSTRACT

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.”     

Postnational family/postfamilial nation: family,small town and nation talk in Marcos and Brocka

Abstract

This article explores the concept of authenticity, and its articulation with longstanding Japanese discourses of modernity, among contemporary Japanese lifestyle migrants in New York City. Considering the cases of artists in particular, it examines how migrants narrate the ideals and goals of life in New York City, thereby elaborating on concepts of the self, authenticity, meaning, and national cultural identity.     

Authors' Biographies

ABSTRACT

This article critically engages with a contemporary play, Aur Kitne Tukde, staged in the Hindi language in various cities and towns in India and Pakistan, about gendered violence during Partition. It unsettles the master narrative of ‘honour’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘choice’ and women's ‘agency’ on Partition. The article also highlights the significance of the play in breaking the silences around Partition in the theatre, which, as compared with other cultural and literary mediums, reaches out to a larger section of people in unique ways. It underlines how the whole production of the play was a process of traversing and sharing the journey and trauma of Partition not only for the actors but also for the audiences. The article also tries to problematize the whole question of violence and its representation.     

Space and the City

ABSTRACT

Influenced by interdisciplinary studies and the ‘spatial turn’ in social history, this article explores the relationship between space and the construction of gender identity amongst the poor to middling sorts of seventeenth-century Norwich. To this end I have considered gendered interaction in different ‘types' of space: domestic, private space, ‘borderline’ space – such as the alehouse or threshold – and, finally, the public space of streets and markets. Each section explores the relevance of recent spatial historiography in the Norwich context, and evaluates whether men and women inhabited different ‘worlds' in the city, not only in terms of their physical movement or access to certain places but also, more importantly, in terms of how their presence was perceived, and thus their identity shaped by others. The empirical basis is primarily defamation depositions of the Norwich Diocese Court, largely used by the middling sorts, contextualized where appropriate with secular court records.     

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.     

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.     

A prison audience: women prisoners,Shakespeare and spectatorship

ABSTRACT

In 2017 the Donmar Warehouse presented The Tempest to women prisoners at HMP New Hall, UK. The production was part of a trilogy of Shakespeare plays directed by Phyllida Lloyd, each staged with an all-female cast and each set within a women’s prison. Over the five years of developing this trilogy the Donmar undertook extensive research and development into the prison context, including in collaboration with York St John University’s Prison Partnership Project. This paper explores the prison audiences’ experiences of The Tempest, examining how they responded to seeing their own lived experiences on stage, filtered through the prism of Shakespearian plot, characterisation and language. In particular, this paper focuses on moments of identification, where the women found direct resonance and self-recognition with the characters and experiences in The Tempest. At the same time it draws on discourses from dramatherapy and aesthetic theory to argue for the importance of various forms of emotional, empathetic and psychical distance. Using close analysis of the spectators’ responses, it describes how for the prison audience the result was an oscillation between identification and distance, a reading of “me but more than me” that produced a powerful affective and reflective impact.     

Femininity Perceptions of Cross-ethnic Forenames: A Comparative Analysis of Latina and European American Women

ABSTRACT

Research shows a tendency to ascribe high importance to the gender associations of a forename. To examine community-specific conceptions of gender as well as how groups position themselves in relation to others, this study analyzed the gender-marked perceptions of women’s forenames, with rater ethnicity and name ethnicity as independent variables. Bilingual Latina American and monolingual European American women assigned femininity ratings to a series of Hispanic, Anglo, and ethnolinguistically neutral forenames. The names also varied by the sub-attributes of translatability, letter ending, gender specificity, and semantic class, among others. Rater ethnicity significantly correlated with perceptual patterns, as both groups attributed more femininity to same-ethnicity names. However, neutral names received the highest ratings overall. Some ratings appeared to be highly dependent on experience, suggesting limited intergroup contact. The data also suggest a greater general sensitivity to gendered naming on the part of Latinas. The implications of perceptual differences for intergroup relations are discussed.