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:
According to the most recent gender report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) “disease outbreaks affect women and men differently, and pandemics make existing inequalities for women and girls and discrimination of other marginalized groups such as persons with disabilities and those in extreme poverty, worse” (COVID-19: A Gender Lens). The COVID-19 crisis has affected and continues to affect every aspect of our lives, raising anxieties, limiting spaces, and intensifying tension and conflict in different areas. In response to the current situation, Gender Forum dedicates a special issue to the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on gender-related issues
“This Is What You Signed Up for”: Oral Histories of New York State Nurses During the COVID-19 Pandemic
No full textOne of the first healthcare providers in New York City to die from COVID-19 was a nurse. When the city was already seeing hundreds of cases a day at area hospitals, particularly in neighborhoods already marginalized by health and economic disparities, nurses at one hospital in the Bronx staged a demonstration to protest the lack of essential personal protective equipment. The astounding response by hospital administrators was to threaten nurses that they would be fired if they continued to speak out regarding their concerns. Like many activists, healthcare providers took to social media to warn the public about the realities of both the COVID-19 crisis and the threats to the health and safety of their own families. However, in at least one Facebook thread, the response to nurses was, “This is what you signed up for.” As scholars of women’s history, we have to wonder about the irony of nurses being lauded as heroes in one breath and criticized as hand-wringing turncoats in another. Did such a callous response have anything to do with the fact that nursing is still considered to be a “feminized” profession? As it turns out, nurses—who are always at the forefront of patient care—were right to raise the alarm. By mid-June, more than 140 nurses in the United States were estimated to have died from COVID-19. Countless others continue to put their lives on the line to do the jobs they have committed to do every day. This article does what some hospital administrators and health officials did not. We listen to nurses. Through oral history interviews, we highlight what nurses in the New York metropolitan area, one of the epicenters of the pandemic, experienced during this staggering healthcare crisis
Review: Shakespeare and Queer Theory (2019) by Melissa E. Sanchez
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Melissa E. Sanchez’ monograph, Shakespeare and Queer Theory (2019) , published in the Arden Shakespeare Series, is situated at the intersection of Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies with Queer Theory, foregrounding how these fields “are not only valuable in themselves, but mutually useful and illuminating” (2) and “have a lot to contribute to that collective project” (55). The idea of the book is to present “queerness as a mode of critique” (Halberstam 2011: 110 in Sanchez 2019: 150), and to explore how “[q]ueer theory reveals the queer within the normal and the ordinary [. . .] [as well as] the normal and the ordinary within the queer” (7). In this sense, Sanchez follows the path of other contributors to the debate, such as Menon (2008; 2011), and Stanivukovic (2017). The book is directed at students and scholars alike and provides a comprehensive introduction to the central concepts, as well as the historical background and origins of the debate. Sanchez furthermore presents the mutual benefit of the intersection of Shakespeare and Queer Theory by supplying her own analyses of several of Shakespeare’s works. Sanchez emphasises that “this book [is not offered] as the ‘truth’ . . . , but as one contribution to an ongoing, productively un wieldy conversation” (2) and “will [hopefully] not be the last word on either topic, but in its very limitations will catalyse newer, stranger theoretical work and political worlds” (178)
Crossing Both Ways: Sarah Jones, The Moth Radio Hour, and the Disruptive Potential of Voice
No full textThis paper examines an episode of popular storytelling podcast The Month, titled “A Walk on the West Side” (2014), in order to explicate and uncover how gender, race, and class might attach to certain voices. In this episode, Jones (a stage performer, writer, and gifted impressionist) first relates her memories of being typecast as black female stereotypes; she then tells the story of being pulled over by LAPD a few days later, under suspicion of sex work. Ultimately, Jones baffles the cops who detain her by affecting a flawless British accent, disrupting their assumptions. Her story—told on the podcast in a myriad of different voices—literally speaks class, race, and gender into being, only to challenge the fixity of these signs, showcasing the simultaneously disruptive and productive potential of speech
Review: Kristen Ghodsee: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In her text Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War, Kristen Ghodsee sets out to examine two key components of the UN International Decade of Women. The first component is how Bulgarian women’s activists made connections with socialist women in Zambia and exchanged knowledge with them. The second component is how Bulgarian and Zambian women’s activists and Second and Third World activists for women’s rights more broadly, allied with one another in the context of the UN Decade for Women. For Ghodsee, the history of Second World women’s rights activists has largely been lost, and this book works partly as a recovery project
Review: Michael J. Bosia, Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman. The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article\u27s introduction:
The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics (2020) edited by M. Bosia, S. McEvoy, and M. Rahman, offers three sections composed of twenty-eight chapters on histories, theories, case studies, and critiques of global LGBT and sexual diversity politics. The handbook’s main intention is to dislodge the centrality of the U.S., and the West in general, in global LGBT studies. The editors therefore support a more inclusive perspective through case studies of a decentralized ‘global’ LGBT world
Review: Fiennes, Natalie. Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Approximately 25% of relationships in the UK begin online, but for same-sex couples, the percentage is nearly three times higher, around 70% (Fiennes 137-138). At the same time, more and more people are putting off sex and relationships, making today’s young people “the oldest virgins on record” (Fiennes 82). In Behind Closed Doors: Sex Education Transformed (2019), Natalie Fiennes explores this evolving landscape around sex, sexuality, and dating, as well as the ways in which we learn about and discuss these topics. Divided into chapters on sex, gender, (hyper)masculinity, body image, sexual consent, contraceptives, virginity, sexual violence, sexuality, pornography, sex work, and dating, this text offers its readers a number of useful entry points into a wide range of topics that Fiennes argues ought to play a larger role in sex education
Posthuman female heroines and postfeminist limitations in HBO’s Westworld
No full textWestworld (2016-present) is one of the most popular and complex television narratives in recent years. Based on the classic 1973 science fiction film of the same title, the show’s first two seasons are set in a technologically advanced Western-themed Park where human guests pay to interact in any way they wish with the hosts/androids that populate its world. Yet, unlike the robots of the 1973 version who easily betrayed their mechanical origin, this time the hosts blur the boundaries between human and machine, real and fabricated, thus posing significant questions about posthumanism. Furthermore, the depiction of the hosts as specifically embodied and gendered artificial beings, also raises questions surrounding postfeminism. These two concepts, namely posthumanism and postfeminism, are interwoven in the representation of two of the show’s main protagonists, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton), two female androids that begin to realize their fabricated reality and develop a new subjectivity. The article argues that despite the emancipating possibilities that an emergent posthuman subjectivity suggests, the show’s posthuman heroines are finally constrained by the text’s humanist and postfemininst limitations
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
By locating this gender forum issue geographically in Australia, this issue provides a specific area focus in gender studies, utilizing theories and approaches from both gender and post-colonial studies and thereby concentrates on giving voice to those marginalized by the myth of the ‘typical Australian’
Eros in the Classroom: Mentor figures, friendship and desire in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The History Boys
No full textThis article focuses on the characters of Hector and Miss Brodie as two particularly complex examples of inspiring yet ambiguous mentor figures in British fiction, and on their various relationships with colleagues and students. Following a long literary tradition, the different teacher-student relationships in The History Boys and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie encompass aspects of platonic friendship as well as erotic desire. I analyse in detail the erotic triangles and instances of erotic substitutions and doubles in both texts by using and adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “homosociality”, before examining Miss Brodie’s and Hector’s pedagogical agendas and their interaction with students in the classroom in order to offer an overview of the non-eroticised aspects of the teacher-student relationships in the two primary texts.