USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Review: Tina Campt: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
In Other Germans, Tina Campt offers a significant and timely contribution to German Studies, Holocaust scholarship, and research into the function of memory within a greater historical and cultural context. In the author\u27s own words, her work "examines the historical discourses that preceded and enabled the emergence of a Black German subject"; further, she "analyzes how the processes of racial and gender formation designed by National Socialism to purge non-Aryans from the landscape of German society contributed in paradoxical ways to the production of some of the subjects it sought to expunge" (2). In order to set herself apart from other research into Germany\u27s National Socialist past, Campt writes that, "this work examines the generative effects of this totalitarian government and the processes of racialization and gendering that constituted its fundamental organizing techniques and practices" (1-2). Thus, Campt begins to make the case for the value of her scholarship, observing that the era of National Socialist control is most often considered only or at least primarily for its "destructive capacity" (1-2)
Spousal Politics and the Bipartisan Positioning of Hillary Rodham Clinton
Full text linkTowards the end of the first Republican Presidential debate, moderator Chris Matthews asked the candidates the following question, "Seriously, would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?" The question, which drew laughter from the men standing at the podiums, is neither as ridiculous nor as innocuous as it may at first appear. The former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, responded with a question of his own, an incredulous "You\u27ve got to be kidding?". By way of elaboration Matthews, who had asked the question with a straight face, replied "No, I\u27m not. His wife\u27s running — have you heard?" It can be argued that such a question, and Matthews\u27s subsequent point of clarification, set the tone for the ways in which the complex issue of gender will be handled in the 2008 Presidential Election. With that single inquiry into the candidates\u27 thoughts on Bill Clinton, Matthews at once evoked the most powerful Democratic candidate, and the party frontrunner, without mentioning her name or asking the Republicans to engage with her as a political rival. Instead, Hillary Rodham Clinton was relegated to that role which has been for years her greatest source of political and personal trouble — Bill Clinton\u27s wife
At the Limits of Materiality / At the Limits of Discourse: Feminist Struggles to Make Sense of Depression in Women
Full text linkDepression presents feminist theorists with a significant problem: it makes sense to many of us to point out the ways that depression, as a concept, is constituted discursively. In particular, depression seems indelibly tied to powerful biomedical discourses, and also, for women, to the equally powerful discourses that dictate what a "good woman" should be. Yet to highlight these discursive dimensions of the phenomenon seems to preclude both an acknowledgement of depression as a source of pain and an acceptance of any form of treatment for this condition other than dramatic social change. This article explores the limitations of strictly material and strictly discursive explanations for women\u27s depression, and suggests that a feminist model existing in-between these two dualities is essential to a more comprehensive understanding of women\u27s depression experiences. The narratives of women who experience depression provide a rich source of knowledge by which to deconstruct materialist and discursive approaches to women\u27s depression. A narrative approach also allows us to escape the confines of scientific/positivist research, which has proven inadequate to fully encapsulate the phenomenon of depression in women. The article concludes with an evaluation of the material-discursive models for understanding women\u27s depression recently posed by feminist psychologists Janet M. Stoppard and Jane Ussher
Review of Nadia Valman. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
Nadia Valman’s book is a well-researched and cogently argued study of the image of the Jewess in nineteenth-century British literary culture. If, as the blurb on the dust jacket puts it, the author desires to challenge “the emphasis in previous scholarship on antisemitic stereotypes in this period,” she impressively succeeds, as she shows how Jewish femininity could be the locus of a wide range of discursive negotiations. Through five extensive case studies, Valman demonstrates that the Jewess was simultaneously cast as an object of idealisation and an object of interventionist strategies which aimed at her conversion or “civil improvement.” Whether these strategies were evangelical or emancipatory, conservative or radical in nature, the issue of gender was always a complicating factor: it confused the other “categories of difference” of the discursive formation at stake, and often revealed their instability and contradictions.
Review: Lynette Goddard. Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance.
No full textStaging Black Feminisms reflects a direct influence of the theoretical framework established by lesbian feminist Barbara Smith. Twenty years after the publication of her controversial 1978 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Smith reflected that she “was influenced by the bold new ideas of 1970s lesbian feminism” (Truth That Never Hurts, 3) when she expressed her displeasure with the cultural illiteracy of white scholars, heterosexist blind spots and general homophobic impediments in African American literary scholarship. The recognition of a Black women’s literary tradition was yet emerging and Smith insisted that the establishment of a Black feminist framework was primary for an adequate critique of Black women’s art. Smith challenged her contemporaries to develop a criticism that “would owe its existence to a Black feminist movement while at the same time contributing ideas that women in the movement could use” (11). While much advancement has been made towards that end in American literature studies, Lynnette Goddard shifts our attention to similar flaws in an arena of Black British women’s art.
Women Writers and the Pathologizing of Gender in 18th-Century English Mad-Discourse
Full text linkOne concern in the history of gendered psychiatric confinement is not that the field lacks good scholarship but that the extant scholarship is focused too narrowly on its height during the 19th century, neglecting the important temporal beginning of the trend in the 18th century. In the United Kingdom, it was in the 18th century that the move to confine became more widespread, prompted at the community, and more specifically, at the family level. This essay traces the philosophical changes in medical discourse as the move toward confinement began focusing more on the incarceration of women and the specific problem of their bodies as newly sexualized beings. Prior to the 18th century, the Galenic, one-sex model dominated both medical and social discourses. It was in the 18th century that women’s bodies became pathologized which prompted the ‘feminization’ of mental illness. Interestingly, women writers of the period both reiterated and resisted this pathologizing of the female body through their mad-discourse, that is, their writing-about-madness. Although the ratio of female to male madhouse admissions disproves the prevalent belief in the mass-incarceration of the ‘deviant’ woman, Francis Burney, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Eliza Haywood each reflect an emerging vision of this trope. It was the nature of confinement that so effected women’s writing reiterating the concept of the deviant woman unjustly confined which, in turn, helped advance this idea in popular culture and eventually into medical discourse. It was this cycle which led to the trope becoming reality in the 19th century as women internalized this threat because of its unique dangers to what was believed to be their inherent female qualities.
The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery
Full text linkWritings about female breast reduction surgery have primarily focused on the size, location on the chest, and the techniques for such surgical reduction. Few have looked at how the areola is handled, nor whether there is an underlying racial context in decisions about this part of the female body. This multi-disciplinary, multi-technique, part analysis, part auto-ethnography seeks to open up and broaden the discussion, asking the question whether subliminal racial preferences play a role in surgeons’ decisions
Generations Connecting: Alzheimer\u27s Disease and Changes of Cultural Values
Full text linkThe emphasis of American culture on the autonomous and independent individual, and on the search for identity in opposition to defined cultural and societal rules, can be seen as a value that is undergoing rapid change. In American Studies, the quest of the individual for a self-determined life in opposition to the norms of society has often been defined as the central cultural narrative, in which the desire of the individual to seek and define an identity within or without the community is the driving force of the plot. In feminist literature, more specifically, the search for a single, private self has often been linked to the daughter’s relationship to her mother within the family structure. However, this quest for identity takes on different forms when the daughter is confronted with a mother whose identity, due to Alzheimer’s disease, is no longer discernable, and whose memory of whom she is and was has vanished. This loss of memory concerning not only everyday incidents but also one’s very relation to others marks a starting point of a new definition of self in relation to others and reverses a mother-daughter to a daughter-mother relationship
Men in Gray Flannel Suits: Troubling Masculinities in 1950s America
Full text linkThis essay deals with American family life in the 1950s. In its first part, the text scrutinizes how the corresponding gender stereotypes were culturally shaped by an array of discursive enunciations and a vast number of social and political practices. A closer look at the 1950s focus-on-the-family will reveal that the breadwinning father was not at all the undisputed hegemonic male stereotype of the age. A conflict between differing norms of masculinity has to be attested: On the one hand, after World War II the restoration of the father to the leading position in the family promised to stabilize post- and cold war-America, on the other hand critics bemoaned a loss of virility among the fathers of the 1950s. A fear of masculine decline permeated American society, caused by the conformist urge and the obviously limited options of suburbanized and corporate life. Talk about a “crisis” among heterosexual white men was everywhere, and this supposed crisis was perceived as a crisis of America at large. The troubling masculinities in 1950s America will take center stage in the second part of my essay. This will be exemplified by an analysis of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1950s book and movie, whose protagonist Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) epitomized the American suburbanite who felt overpowered by the requirements being addressed to him as a man
“The Women’s Parliament:” Political Oratory, Humor, and Social Change
Full text linkWhy does humour change minds in politics when logic cannot? This article explores this question in the context of the suffragist movement in Manitoba, Canada in 1914, when the Women’s Political Equity League found logical arguments ineffective in persuading provincial legislators to grant women voting rights. When the provincial premier rejected their petition, the Political Equity League staged a series of burlesques around the province of Manitoba in which they reversed the roles of men and women to make the issue of enfranchisement more salient to voters. These satires of the reigning premier have been credited for making women in Manitoba among the first to vote in the Western World. I draw on several rhetorical theories of humour, including those of Cicero, Campbell, Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, to account for the societal shift in support of votes for women as a result of this parody. I conclude that when well-supported and trenchant logic proves ineffective in bringing about social change, innovative emotional appeals can provide the impetus for listeners to laugh uproariously and then rethink what may have been entrenched political or ideological beliefs