USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the frontmatter and editorial:
The progressively heated events surrounding the election of the of the US Democratic Party presidential candidate have led to a discursive explosion sparked and fueled by questions of gender and political power. All the more reason to update our special issue of 2006 by including Julie Biando Edwards\u27 analysis of the gendering of the 2008 presidential race. While both Merkel\u27s and Rodham Clinton\u27s election campaigns have to be considered in their respective historical and discursive contexts, a transcultural cross-reading elucidates the strategies of (non-)gendered campaigning employed by Rodham Clinton, Merkel, and their male competitors respectively
We Are Chancelloress! One Angie does not collapse the male bastion - but she has opened the gate
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A strange atmosphere was in the air during the weeks before and after the election. For a long time, no election campaign had agitated people that much. This extreme polarisation certainly was not caused by the two big parties: for the one candidate was the incumbent SPD-chancellor, who in office had distinguished himself as "comrade of the bosses"; the other candidate was a christian democrat, who had almost exclusively courted economic leaders in her election campaign. So, something else must have been behind the voters\u27 surprising return to an outmoded polarised thinking - for reality is more flexible.
Reviewe: Patricia Hill Collins. “From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism.”
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In her new book From Black Power to Hip Hop, a collection of previously published essays, Patricia Hill Collins probes the contested spaces of racism, nationalism, popular culture, and feminism in an attempt to expand the struggle for a truly democratic society for all. The first section, "Race, Family, and the US Nation-State" (chapters 1-2), features two essays that take an in-depth look at the intimate connections between motherhood and national identity. Section two, "Ethnicity, Culture, and Black Nationalist Politics" (chapters 3-4), offers two essays on the usefulness and efficacy of Afrocentrism, while section three, "Feminism, Nationalism, and African American Women" (chapters 5-6), offers strategies for empowerment
Review: Deborah Clarke. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
An association between automobiles and masculinity has existed in American popular mythology since the earliest days of motoring. The association relies upon understandings of gender that have been subject to negotiation throughout the twentieth century — in part due to social changes linked to the rise of car culture. Deborah Clarke’s Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America examines how cultural portrayals of women and cars have registered and participated in shifting conceptions of female identity and female agency
Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: Re-reading Gender Studies Epistemology Through Black Feminist Critique
Full text linkWhat emerges from Saidiya Hartman\u27s, and Hortense Spillers\u27s work about slavery which I am reading as a rather elaborate argument taking off where Toni Morrison left it with Beloved, is a picture of foundational violence which helped put the modern Euroamerican world\u27s white subjectivity in its place. One of the ways this happened was the structural obliteration of access to gender, that is, gendered subjectivity for black human beings, male or female, while at the same time making black human beings, and particularly females, the target of white transgressively abusive desires of all shades and forms. I will draw out the implications of contemporary meditations on the slave trade for Gender Studies\u27 epistemological horizon. I will follow Hartman\u27s and Spiller\u27s evolving arguments by way of a close reading which challenges (white) gender studies borders erected around the sanctity of gender as the founding difference of western societies
How to Fail: Female Medical Students and Women Doctors in Popular Fiction around 1900
Full text linkThis article is based on novels in the German language, translations into German included, whose protagonists or important minor characters are woman doctors or female medical students. The time frame begins with the admission of women to (European) universities in the second half of the 19th century and extends into the middle of the 20th century. How did authors cope with this new figure, the female (medical) student, the woman doctor? The subject of failure shows up surprisingly often in early stories about female medical students and woman doctors. Following several subjects which were negotiated in the contemporary discourses of the time, I am going to demonstrate the ways that led women respectively female literary characters who wished to become physicians to failure: nursing, success (as strange as it sounds), nonexistent role models, and the fear of loneliness, all expressing conflicts due to gender stereotypes
Cultural Bastards: Caribbean-Canadian Humor in Shani Mootoo\u27s Out on Main Street
Full text linkWife battering and murdering, prostitution and suicide have long been hushed incidences that nevertheless have finally been addressed by some Indo-Caribbean writers, one of which is the Canada-based artist and writer Shani Mootoo. In her novels Cereus Blooms at Night, He Drown She in the Sea, and Valmiki’s Daughter, her poetry collection The Predicament of Or, and her short story collection Out on Main Street, Mootoo picks up the culturally specific ways of inscribing a culture of violence and shame onto Indo-Caribbean female sexual identities in ways that Mehta has described as being "associated with a series of taboos and restrictions imposed by male-ordered strategies of confinement and inhibition" (192). Even while living in Canada, Mootoo exemplifies Mehta\u27s claim that Indo-Caribbean women find it difficult to free themselves – and the works they produce – from the haunting national and diasporic legacies of repression and invisibility. A reading of Mootoo\u27s work as an example of the interlacing of sexuality and diasporic Caribbean identity reveals that a reconfiguration of "home" in terms of optional exile does not erase one\u27s innate ethics, but actually magnifies them, since diasporic communities like the Indo-Caribbean tend to maintain their "cultural identity through migrating notions of gender-role conformity" (Mehta 209). "Shut your arse up, before it have trouble between we in this street." (V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street
Gender Politics With Margaret Thatcher: Vulnerability and Toughness
Full text linkThis paper looks at Margaret Thatcher’s political career in the light of gender. The thrust of the argument is that Margaret Thatcher’s career can best be understood when interpreted as a combination of vulnerability and toughness, in which toughness was a shield against vulnerability. Thatcher started her political career in the 1950s, at a time when very few women held parliamentary or government posts in the United Kingdom or any other country in Western societies. It was of paramount importance for female politicians in the past to downplay their gender. The important political figures were all male, so it was the male perspective that counted. Women politicians were less prominent and should be as self-effacing as possible. Margaret Thatcher tried to make herself invisible through perfection. A perfected political image and a perfected image of her private and family life was her answer to the problem of being a woman in a man’s world and the vulnerability this implied. Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs show just how vulnerable she was as a female politician despite the tough image she often projected
Sitting/Walking/Practice: Reflections on a Woman’s creative process
Full text linkThis article is a “musing on the processes of practice-as research in performance and screen when ‘self’ is the source of creative inspiration” and is a poetic attempt to give form, in word and image, to creative process. The writing is informed by and emerges out of experiences of Authentic Movement, Focusing, Jungian dreamwork, walking and photography. The aim is to articulate something of my creative processes when engaged in an explicitly subjective practice-led research process. This article embraces the imaginal and the somatic in an attempt to bring together symbolic material generated from a uniquely woman’s experience