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 editorial:
Ranging from contemporary performance art to the ritual of clitoridectomy to in vitro fertilisation and its dramatic representation, the contributions to Anybody\u27s Concerns explore artistic, medical and cultural practices and discourses concerning gendered bodies
Art of A.R.T.
Get PDFI have sought ways since to write and create dialogues and debates, images and performance poetics that reflect the interior landscape of the involuntarily childless. Such a voice as mine, that of a sub-fertile woman\u27s perspective, tends to appear last, if it appears at all, in media reportage of any hotly topical IVF related case. These are too often sensationalised so as to feed into the popular notion of fertility experts \u27playing God\u27 whilst the sub-fertile are portrayed as selfish heathens or pathetic victims.[...] Aptly, I think, the acronym for Assisted Reproduction Tech-nologies is A.R.T.[...]. My play Yerma\u27s Eggs, though not a didactic work, aimed to bring the audience close-up to the infertile experience and bio-ethics in an immediate, emotional and interactive way as only live theatre can do. I wanted to explore how to get under the skin of the infertile subject, represent different cultural and sexual-choice perspectives and bring the bio-ethical debate on A.R.T. into a theatrical space, emotionally and deliberately in-conclusively
Review: Gabriele Griffin, ed. Who\u27s Who in Gay and Lesbian Writing. London: Routledge, 2002.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
It is an open secret that the biographical guide or dictionary is the most intertextual genre of all academic writing - and the least acknowledged to be so. Looking up individual entries in several dictionaries (possibly in the course of researching for a \u27new\u27 biographical abstract oneself?), one encounters very often one and the same portrait of a writer. Editing and compiling a biographical guide neither seems to be a very original task nor do existing articles on individual authors, unlike book-length biographies or studies, seem to enjoy something like a copyright - they are common academic knowledge. Of course there is only so much one can present within a limited space and most of this space is taken up by the presentation of unchanging factual knowledge such as birth dates, education, publications, maybe suggestions for secondary reading. However, a foray into several lexica and dictionaries should ideally be rewarded by a more differentiated portrait of the person one is in quest of, not just slightly differing versions of the same.
Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia
Get PDFI suggest that Australian sources of the late Enlightenment and Romantic period, written between 1788 and 1850, do portray Indigenous Australian populations as nonreligious, indolent and idle, hideous and uncivilized cannibals. The men are portrayed as less repulsive than the women, who are constantly under the oppressive power of their men. On the other hand, promiscuity and loose morals on the side of women seemed to demand a firm hand of the men over the women. Aboriginals represented in these sources do not own the land because they do not till it, they disrespect property rights and live as nomadic hunter/gatherers without fixed houses and useful implements. Their number was thought to be rapidly decreasing, due to their cultural backwardness. Their lack of a proper language with a developed vocabulary made them less than human, almost on one level with primates. If one takes these discursive entities together, there evolves an image of a \u27creature\u27 that is utterly rejected and excluded from humanity
Interview: "No one claps at the end of a novel" - A Conversation with Laura Wade
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the interview:
Laura Wade\u27s play Colder Than Here premiered at Soho Theatre directed by Abigail Morris in February 2005 followed shortly afterwards by her Royal Court Theatre debut Breathing Corpses, directed by Anna Mackmin. Laura was subsequently joint winner of the prestigious George Devine Award 2005, and also won the Pearson Best Play 2005 award for Breathing Corpses. The interview took place in London in July 2005, when Laura was working on a revised version of Colder Than Here for its New York opening as a MCC Theater Production in September 2005. Currently, Laura is working on new play commissions for Soho Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, and Hampstead Theatre as well as adapting an unfinished Jane Austen novel for the stage, under commission to West End producer David Pugh. Laura\u27s newest play Other Hands, from which we feature an extract in our fiction section, has recently premiered at Soho Theatre. Laura was awarded the 2006 Critics Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright
Review of Sherrie A. Inness (ed.): Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
This collection of essays is a testimony of a relevantly recent efflorescence of tough women in mass media. As Sherrie A. Inness, its editor, states in the introductory chapter, the book is a natural continuation of numerous studies about the impact of tough women on popular culture, such as her own publication Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture (1999), her edited anthology Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls\u27 Cultures (1998), or Martha McCaughey and Neal King\u27s compilation, Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (2001). Whereas these collections focus on the earlier hard-boiled protagonists from the 1980s and 1990s-including Sarah Connor of "Terminator", Ripley of "Alien" or Thelma and Louise-Inness\u27s most recent book analyzes images of tough heroines from the last decade, exploring the cultural role these strong women really play in contemporary society. As the essays delineated in continuation corroborate, tough women are still designed to appeal to a primarily male audience, since they are expected to be womanly, physically attractive and heterosexually appealing. On the other hand, their sex appeal is not reminiscent of traditional passivity, as these heroines challenge the patriarchal social structure by defending other women and fighting the men who threaten them. These female protagonists exhibit aggressive behavior, quick wit, and intellectual skills, an array of attributes allotted traditionally to men. They become popular heroines and as such, they shake up women\u27s role in American pop culture
"The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux
Get PDFThis article focuses on the poetry and short stories of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay and seeks to investigate possible reasons why the black feminine body in Kay\u27s texts is often represented as either diseased or in a state of conflict. Thompson demonstrates how a longstanding mythical association between blackness and disease may have affected black subjectivity. Her claim is that the mental and physical states of dysfunction that Kay utilises may be read as a metaphor for a bifurcation of the mind and body due to a damaging discourse that has designated her body as "other." Thompson argues furthermore that, because black women may experience their environment differently from white women (due to prejudice and ostracism for example), such a rift could be due to living in a largely racist society
Review: “To Tell the Kitchen Version”: Architectural Figurations of Race and Gender in Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Harriet Wilson\u27s Our Nig
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
I propose to engage the spatial dimension of antebellum domesticity by exploring architectural figurations in two texts by African American women authors. This reading, first of all, seeks to challenge prevailing assumption about the antebellum American home as a culturally coherent and cohesive space that finds its conflicts with the world outside rather than within its own. Quite to the contrary, the structures of domestic architecture allow writers to engage complex systems of social ordering, the spatial signification and enforcement of as well as the resistance against socio-cultural hierarchies. In the context of thus interrogating architecture as a system of cultural signification, I focus on the kitchen as the room that most centrally hosts narratives of gender and racial difference
Into the Room and Out of the Closet: (Homo)Sexuality and Commodification in James Baldwin\u27s Giovanni\u27s Room
No full textDavid, the narrator protagonist of Baldwin\u27s Giovanni\u27s Room, is teetering on the brink of yielding to his homosexuality when, as an American tourist in the Paris of the fifties, he meets the tragic Italian immigrant, Giovanni. The circle of acquaintances that the raconteur frequents spins to propel him to one location that would challenge his self-representation: Giovanni\u27s room - the metonym of his newly appropriated sexual identity. Once David enters Giovanni\u27s dilapidated room, he virtually enters a realm of no return, a social inferno, yet also a heaven and haven of unrepressed sexuality. When the protagonist leaves his lover\u27s lair, he escapes the closet he has inhabited, consciously or not, for most of his life and accepts the truth of his sexuality. Furthermore, "the closet" objectified, Giovanni\u27s room stands not only for the recognition of David\u27s homosexual identity, but also for the social and political oppression that comes with it, being that the closet, as theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evinces, "is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century" (71)
Discrimination Against Women Lawyers in England and Wales: An Overview
Get PDFTraditionally, the legal profession has been a white male profession; women\u27s and ethnic minorities\u27 entry is quite recent. Despite the opening up of the profession, white males still account for the vast majority of senior positions, even though women have been present long enough to be part of the selection pools when vacancies for senior positions arise. One may infer from this observation that discrimination does take place in the legal profession in spite of the anti-discrimination legislation which has been implemented since the 1970s. What is at stake is a cultural legacy that disregards women and creates a glass ceiling preventing them from reaching the upper rungs of the ladder. In order to give an overview of discrimination against women lawyers in England and Wales, the author first presents the legislative and historical background, then focuses on various manifestations of sex discrimination in the legal profession (the pay gap, the glass ceiling and maternity leave), and lastly illustrates these issues with a case stud