USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Astronautic Subjects: Postmodern Identity and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction
Get PDFThis essay will deal with the embodiment, or more precisely, the gendering of space since the 1950s. My focus will be on the figure of the astronaut, which I interpret as a continuation of the cowboy and pioneer character in the context of Western, and more specifically, American culture. In the postmodern age, the astronaut is endowed with an important cultural function: Through the image of the spacewalker, gender can be simultaneously negotiated as a fragile construct - given the fact that the 1950s also marked the establishment of new gender roles and new ideas about sexual identity - and restored as an affirmative category in which issues of national and masculine identity are symbolically merged. 
Review: Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds: Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Having put my hand up to review this book at a time when I was beginning work on a paper focusing on representations of diversity in storybooks for children of queer parents (Riggs and Augoustinos)1, it was unfortunate that I did not actually find the time to read the book until some months later. When I did eventually manage to read the book I was delighted to find many of the themes and concerns that arose from my own work directly reflected in the contents of Curiouser. All of the chapters work neatly together to provide a well-written critique of the functions served by a range of constructions of childhood within Western nations, both historically and in the present
The Erotics and Politics of Masochistic Self-Abjection in Jackass
Get PDFThis paper examines the role of masochistic self-abjection in the construction and operation of heteronormative masculinity in Jackass: The Movie (2002) with reference to the Jackass series, offshoot series, and Jackass: Number Two (2006). The paper begins by analysing how masculinity in constructed through masochistic acts, presented as if rites of initiation that involve the abjection, figurative castration and penetration of the male body. It also considers how males performatively control their \u27abject others\u27 in the service of affirming a stable masculine core. The paper continues to assess the role played by comedy in the film, and questions whether Jackass, and its associated films/series, merely signifies the triumph of low culture or if it highlights a deeper problem with Western masculinity
A Man Sees Red
Get PDFIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:
Something is wrong. Something is not as usual. But nobody wants to notice. Everybody beats about the bush. Just as in the case of the so-called "family drama," which is supposed to be fateful, higher powers seem to direct this fateful election. There is but one tiny difference: In a private family drama (in Turkish: honor\u27s murder) he kills her, because she wants to exit. In this political family drama, he wants to kill her because she enters the stage
"Doleful ditties" and Stories of Survival — Narrative Approaches to Breast Cancer in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Sontag
Get PDFThe article looks at two early nineteenth-century narratives concerned with breast cancer and reads them in the context of Susan Sontag\u27s twentieth-century analysis of the cultural and linguistic over-determination of illness. Frances Burney\u27s "mastectomy letter" (1812) is an early example of a patient\u27s narrative which uses the discursive conventions of sentimental fiction to achieve female empowerment. By contrast, Maria Edgeworth moralizes illness in her novel Belinda (1801) and uses it as a cultural metaphor. While Edgeworth\u27s and Burney\u27s narratives share the historical moment of a shift in illness attitudes and in the technologies of medical diagnosis in the early nineteenth century, Susan Sontag, in her essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), analyses the articulation of an idea of individual illness as a hostile burdening of the individual person with guilt and responsibility. From a transhistorical perspective, all three texts provide further insights into the generic and gendered differences of illness experience and meanings
Performativity, Intertextuality, and Social Change: An Ethnographic Analysis of Taiwanese Gay Personal Ads
Get PDFBased on in-depth conversations with those who have actively been involved in the process of producing and responding to gay personal ads, this paper attempts to challenge the earlier content-centered and socio-psychological analyses concerning gay personals. In addition to analyzing elicited historical testimonials (the personal ads published in print), I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-two Taiwanese gay men who actively posted and/or responded to gay personal ads. In my interviews it soon became evident that the notion of intertexuality and multiple levels of linguistic functions worked together to facilitate the linguistic performance in gay communication, but that the respective importance of these was changed by the transition from print to digital media
The Quiet Feminism of Dr. Florence Sabin: Helping Women Achieve in Science and Medicine
Get PDFThis article recounts the quiet feminism of Dr. Florence Sabin (1871-1953), who took pride in women\u27s achievements and did her best to help women in various fields of medicine and the biomedical sciences. She gave advice to women who sought it, and worked to help them get fellowship and research funds, as well as opportunities for post-graduate training. She brought attention when possible both to the pioneers in medicine and women\u27s education as well as to the younger talented researchers. Her goals were modest but real: help the women who entered science receive the best education available; enable them to do research and publish in top journals; get them fellowships; make their accomplishments known to a broader public so that women\u27s achievements in science would be seen as a norm. She did not succeed in all of even these modest goals. The Depression doomed her plans for a women\u27s Hospital which would have given women post-internship training, and few journalists followed up sufficiently on her attempts to bring other scientists to the public eye. Nonetheless she remained optimistic about the improvements in possibilities since her graduate days.
Review: Judit Gadzi, Andrea Petö and Zsuzsanna Toronyi, (eds.): Gender, Memory, and Judaism
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Although research on Jewish women in Europe has grown quickly in the last two decades, both theoretical and geographical lacunae remain. Apart from the recent memoir collection Hungarian Jewish Women Remember the Holocaust1, Hungary remains one of these geographic gaps in English-language scholarship. The road to such scholarship has proven a difficult one for several reasons. First because of an academic stumbling block: according to editor Andrea Peto, “gender studies are unknown in Hungary” (43). Second has been a reticence of non-Jewish feminists to engage seriously with committed Jewish women. Furthermore, since 1989 major religious institutions, both Jewish and Christian, have emerged from Hungary’s Communist years with traditionally minded rather than forward-looking attitudes toward women and gender roles. Despite these academic and political challenges, in 2006 a group of academics and activists organized a conference to consider the lives of Jewish women in historical perspective. The conference provided the genesis for the edited volume under review, entitled Gender, Memory, and Judaism, a text which both addresses and at times is subject to the aforementioned scholarly limitations
Never Too Old To Learn or Rebel: Two Old Ladies (Twee oude vrouwtjes)
Get PDFThis article studies the literary representation of age and gender in Two Old Ladies, a short story composite written by the Dutch author Toon Tellegen. First, it investigates how Two Old Ladies refers to the narrative structure of the fairy tale and its stereotypical depiction of old women as antagonistic hags or helpful grannies. A referential reading method is substituted for a poetic one in order to arrive at a better understanding of Tellegen’s fiction. Second, the analysis focuses on the conventions of the grotesque as an art form that resists dominant modes of representation and interpretation. Also, in the theories of the grotesque, the body of an old woman often functions as the prototypical grotesque body. Third, the genre characteristics of the short story composite serve to illuminate the dialogical encounter between Tellegen’s different stories. The closure of every single story gets undermined by the act of collecting them. The form of the short story composite turns out to be compatible with theories of performativity. In the article, important insights of gender and age studies are called on to deepen the understanding of Tellegen’s critical practice as a writer in Two Old Ladies.
Review: Srole, Carole . Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices.
No full textIn Transcribing Class and Gender, Carole Srole takes on the difficult task of convincing historians that something they have ignored for years (and frankly, something that sounds fairly boring upon first hearing) is central to our understanding of gender in 19th century America. She succeeds magnificently. Typists, stenographers and clerks don’t sound like they’d make a riveting subject for a monograph, but Srole paints a picture of gender in the 19th century office - and by extension, in the 19th century urban world - that is interesting and enlightening. Srole examines professional journals, short fiction, union records, and popular advertising to help her readers to understand the ways in which office workers navigated the complicated gender dynamics of the workplaces and helped to shape the image of the middle class in America.