http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fs/ Feminist Studies http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0014.107 Marnia Lazreg Spring 1988 ï~~FEMINISM AND DIFFERENCE: THE PERILS OF WRITING AS A WOMAN ON WOMEN IN ALGERIA MARNIA LAZREG At the heart of the feminist project, East and West, is a desire to dismantle the existing order of things and reconstruct it to fit one's own needs. This desire is best expressed in Omar Khayyam's cry: "Ah love! Could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire Would not we shatter it to bits-and then Remould it to the heart's desire!"' However, feminists, East and West, differ in the grasp they have on this "sorry scheme of things" and the tools they use to "shatter it to bits." They also differ as to whether the process of remolding things can take place at all. Indeed, Western academic feminists can rediscover their womanhood, attempt to redefine it, and produce their own knowledge of themselves hampered only by what many perceive as male domination.2 Ultimately, Western feminists operate on their own social and intellectual ground and under the unstated assumption that their societies are perfectible. In this respect, feminist critical practice takes on an air of normalcy. It appears as part of a reasonable (even if difficult) project for greater gender equality. By contrast, the Algerian and Middle Eastern feminist project unfolds within an external frame of reference and according to equally external standards. Under these circumstances the consciousness of one's womanhood coincides with the realization that it has already been appropriated in one form or another by outsiders, women as well as men, experts in things Middle Eastern. In this sense, the feminist project is warped and rarely brings with it the potential for personal liberation that it does in this country or in Europe. The Feminist Studies 14, no. i (Spring 1988). Â~ 1988 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 81 Feminist Studies 14 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0025.315 Fall 1999 ï~~NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Kathleen A. Brown is an assistant professor of history at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. This article is part of her ongoing biographical study of "Mother" Bloor. Her other work includes studies of sexuality, family, and the creation of community on the American Left. She is currently working on an essay on lesbian feminist poet Elsa Gidlow. Jane Chia has lived and worked in Singapore since 1989. She is an art educator, art researcher, and art practitioner. Her research interests include women's art history and feminist aesthetics, the development of three-dimensional abilities in students from multi-ethnic backgrounds, and biographical research. Diana Khor teaches at Hosei University in Japan. Her research on Japanese feminism began a process of unlearning a positivistic training in sociology and opened up new activities for her, such as teaching Japanese students English through discussions of gender issues and a book project for the same purpose. Her current research focuses on the construction of gender in Japanese society. Gayle Letherby works at Coventry University and Catherine Williams at University College St. Martins, both in Britain. Between them they have many political and academic interests and share among other things a commitment to theorizing on the complexity of non-motherhood. Ruth Stone's most recent books are Ordinary Words and Simplicity (Paris Press); Who Is the Widow's Muse? and Second Hand Coat (Yellow Moon). She is a professor in the English department at SUNY Binghamton. Carolyn Strange is a historian who teaches criminal justice history at the Centre of Criminology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has published articles and books on the history of crime, deviance, and sexuality in Canadian and Australian history. She is currently working on a manuscript that analyzes retellings of a 1920 "man-woman" murder case in Sydney, Australia. France Winddance Twine teaches in the sociology department at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and she serves as an associate editor of Signs. She is the author of Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (Rutgers University Press, 1997), coeditor of four volumes, and winner of the National Educational Film Festival award (1992) 747 Feminist Studies 25 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.201 Nicola Beisel Summer 2010   The issue begins with Rajani Bhatia’s essay, “Constructing Gender from the Inside Out: Sex-Selection Practices in the United States,” which won the 2009 Feminist Studies Award for the best essay written by a graduate student accepted in that year. A feminist familiar with critiques of preferences for boys in India, Bhatia studies experimental and commercial practices that now allow families in the United States to select the sex of a child. Even though many of the well-off white women who use these services select girls rather than boys as their offspring, she still finds such practices problematic. Bhatia analyzes the rhetorics of popular journalism and pro-parenting Web sites to show how U.S. mothers tie gender to children’s sex and simultaneously create identities for themselves as mothers who fantasize about the pleasures of sharing ballet lessons and Barbie dolls with their daughters. Although their participants see themselves as empowered by the choices of new technologies and the market, Bhatia suggests that the analysis of “sex selection as a form of gender-based violence” in the less developed world might apply as well to the new technologies of sperm sorting and sex selection among privileged parents in the United States. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.202 Rajani Bhatia Summer 2010   For more than a decade now, mass print and television media have been heralding the development and marketing of new technologies as the answer to a long quest for scientifically proven methods for selecting the sex of a child. MicroSort and PGD are new methods of sex selection used in conjunction with assisted reproduction such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intrauterine insemination (IUI). MicroSort involves sorting sperm based on the chromosomes determinative of sex. PGD is a diagnostic technology that involves testing embryos produced through IVF for the characteristic of sex and then preselecting embryos for implantation based on sex preference. MicroSort and PGD both circumvent the politically contentious abortion issue because they are applied before pregnancy (although PGD may involve the discarding of viable embryos). The importance of this feature in the U.S. context cannot be overstated, and it is precisely what makes these technologies so marketable. At the same time, prospective customers of sex selection increasingly have found each other on the Internet, developing a collective identity based on their desire for a child of a particular sex. Patient/consumer activism via the Internet provides sympathetic, self-help spaces that allow individuals to express their intention to preselect their offspring’s sex or their disappointment at birthing a child of the “wrong sex.” Taken together, these developments signal a new era in which there is a potential for the practice of sex selection in the United States to become increasingly normalized. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.203 Amrita Pande Summer 2010 Feminist scholars have devoted considerable attention to assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, amniocentesis, and ultrasound; but there remains a paucity of ethnographic material about these technologies, in particular about surrogacy. Surrogacy is an exceptionally rich area for feminist ethnographic work because of its disparate and profound impacts on two sets of women–the gestational surrogate and the child’s intended mother. Surrogacy, a practice in which a woman agrees to carry a baby to term for someone else who then keeps the child as her or his own, has mostly been a conversation about moral and ethical debates that seldom veer far from the view that surrogacy invariably equals subjugation. More recently, scholars have focused on the impact of surrogacy on the cultural meanings of motherhood and kinship or on the rationale behind surrogacy laws and regulations in countries such as the United States. With the exception of Israel, where surrogacy is tightly controlled by the state, this literature revolves around surrogacy in the global North. This article extends the literature on commercial surrogacy to the global South by looking at the unique case of India, where commercial surrogacy has become a survival strategy and a temporary occupation for some poor rural women. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.204 Sharon Erby Summer 2010 “Get on. Get in.” Brenda was behind the boys, pushing them toward the car. 5:36 a.m. She should’ve left over five minutes ago, but J.T. couldn’t find his shoe. So now she’d be pushing it to get them dropped off and make it to work by 6 o’clock. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.205 Christa Craven Summer 2010 As Valerie Lee explains in her book Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings, African American midwives have unquestionably come into vogue again, ironically “not for delivery of babies, but for their stories.” During the past few decades, the narrative accounts of these stories have become particularly valuable to the contemporary movement for midwifery. In part, this trend has stemmed from a desire to document the history of midwives in the United States during a time when many of the women who practiced in the early and mid-1900s are reaching the end of their lives. For many midwives and their supporters, it has also supported contemporary efforts to professionalize midwives. Yet, this history is a complicated one. Scholars such as Gertrude Fraser have critiqued the tendency among contemporary proponents of midwifery to equate the history of African American midwives–who were largely eliminated by the late-twentieth century through racist healthcare initiatives–with the contemporary struggles of primarily white, middle-class midwives and mothers seeking homebirths. Yet, as Robbie Davis-Floyd and Christine Barbara Johnson emphasize in Mainstreaming Midwives: The Politics of Change, contemporary midwives are not a monolithic group and their efforts to professionalize have frequently come at a cost when one group has been privileged over another. In some cases, the process of professionalization has revealed familiar racialized hierarchies, as Sheryl Nestel demonstrates in her critique of white midwives’ complicity in the exclusion of immigrant women and women of color (“visible minorities”) from Ontario’s midwifery movement. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.206 Laura Briggs Summer 2010 Feminism can boast a substantial record of ambitious, contentious, and smart scholarship on reproductive technology stretching back to the years just after the birth in the United Kingdom of Louise Brown, the first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, in 1978. Although the use of reproductive technology, along with adoption and surrogacy, is statistically rare, questions about these events have commanded disproportionate attention from feminist scholars, as a vantage point from which to understand more typical forms of reproduction and family making. Furthermore, reproductive technology, more than most family-making practices, invites us to analyze the ways that reproductive lives are marked by inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. These preoccupations emphasize the symbolic, social, and cultural relations of the reproductive technology (reprotech) clinic, encouraging a kind of scrutiny that the pain clinic or the cancer clinic has not been similarly asked to bear. Assisted reproduction seems to invite scholars to reflect on where reproduction is headed. But there is a lot at stake in these clinics and in this scholarship, and there is good reason to be grateful to the scholars who have taken up these questions. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.207 Ruby C. Tapia Summer 2010 In 2002, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute hosted the debut of historian and curator Rickie Solinger’s photography exhibition Beggars and Choosers. Since then, the show’s fifty-plus images of historically reviled maternal bodies have traveled and been exhibited in academic, artistic, and community venues all across the United States. Speaking to the show’s overtly political aspirations, Solinger describes it as an attempt to “interrupt the curriculum” that makes a commodity, a racialized economic privilege, out of the fundamental human rights to reproduce or not to reproduce. Indeed, the show deploys a number of critical narrative devices to interrupt widely shared visualities of one of the historically most classed, racialized, and sacralized sentimental objects in the United States–motherhood. Comprised almost entirely of black and white documentary-style photographs taken between 1967 and 2002, the “voices” (via text panels) of eighteen of the pictured women and contextualizing facts (also on text panels) about the socioeconomic realities and public policy decisions that produce maternal experience along stark lines of race and class, Beggars and Choosers is an assembled declaration that “motherhood is not a class privilege in the United States.” The exhibition has been the occasion for countless critical conversations about the racial and class politics of maternal imagery in forums ranging from art galleries to university classrooms, museums to community centers, lecture halls to roundtables. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.208 Cindy Elmore Summer 2010 The gender war starts in the hallway, even before the courtroom doors are opened. Gravitating to other women in twos and threes, the women murmur quietly about their last time in court. One complains that her former husband spent $500 on a tattoo yet told her that he had no money for their daughter’s school supplies. She adds that her child support should be higher, but the other ex-wife–she glances down the hallway toward a blonde, thirty-something woman–“got to social services first.” Later in court the two women will be side by side to face a judge and the common father of their children, akin in their recent lack of child support. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.209 Laura Bier Summer 2010 In contemporary Egypt, as in much of the global South, the primary site of institutional control over women’s reproduction is the state family-planning program, established in 1966 with the goal of reducing fertility and controlling population growth. Egypt’s national family-planning program was a cornerstone of Gamal Abdel Nasser regime’s state-building program and plan for the development of a society based on the principles of Arab socialism. The Egyptian program was one of nearly twenty established in what was called “the developing world” in the two decades following the end of World War II. Its primary aim was to combat what the government perceived as a crisis of overpopulation caused by declining infant mortality and elevated fertility rates among rural and working-class urban women. Critics of such programs have foregrounded the ways in which such programs take control away from women by subordinating reproductive rights and individual choice to demographic policy and state development imperatives. In such analyses, it is most frequently the individual body that is the subject of emancipation; empowerment and agency reside in the ability of the individual to make choices free of coercion, whether that be coercion from family members, patriarchal social norms, political projects, or the state. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.210 Lyn Lifshin Summer 2010 Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.211 Psyche Williams-Forson Summer 2010 Other women used to cook for my husband. Or to state it more clearly, before and after we got married several women from within my husband’s Ghanaian community would cook for him. I liken the experience to a communal collective–a tapestry of women’s work that contributed to the physical, spiritual, and cultural nourishment of my household. Generally speaking, this culinary collective or relationship of plurality in planning, preparing, and presenting meals reinforced the complex nature of food and the ways in which the quotidian language of cooking performs as a crucial mode of communicating identities. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.212 Summer 2010 The world of feminism has suffered great losses in two recent disasters. The January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti took the lives of three prominent Haitian feminists, and a plane crash in Smolensk, Poland, on April 10 resulted in the deaths of nine influential feminists and activists both in government and in the women’s movement. In light of the importance of these women in their countries, and in light of the fact that so much of the work of feminist women is glossed over, forgotten, or erased after their deaths, we take this space to mourn, to remember, and to commemorate these women’s lives and work. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.213 Summer 2010 Rajani Bhatia is currently a doctoral candidate and instructor in the department of women’s studies at the University of Maryland. As the former coordinator of the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment, Bhatia worked on campaigns to produce feminist critiques of Malthusian population control ideologies and policies and to expose coercive contraception and sterilization practices and right-wing environmentalism. Her current research centers on sex-selection practices in the United States, aiming to situate them within a transnational politics of reproduction. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.214 Summer 2010 Rajani Bhatia and Polly Myers are the winners of the 2009 Feminist Studies Award for their articles, “Constructing Gender from the Inside Out: Sex-Selection Practices in the United States” and “Jane Doe v. Boeing Company: Transsexuality and Compulsory Gendering in Corporate Capitalism,” respectively. Feminist Studies 36 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.301 Uta Poiger Fall 2010 The articles in this special issue on Sex and Surveillance explore the myriad ways in which states, corporations, and other institutions have sought to define, constrain, and exploit sexual expression and gender deviance. In the cases discussed here–for example the Boeing Corporation’s policy on gendered attire, the regulation of male homosexuality in cold war Germany, the medicalization of asexuality, or the ideological policing of “safe spaces” at an unnamed Midwest college campus and at feminist gatherings in the United Kingdom–sexuality raises multiple anxieties and becomes an instrument for the advancement of other agendas. Whether that other agenda is corporate profits, as in the case of the Boeing Corporation, a “healthy” nation, as in the case of postwar Germany, or white privilege, as in the case of the Midwest campus, the location of sexuality at the intersection of private experience and public life has made it both vulnerable and extraordinarily resilient in the face of social, legal, and economic attempts at control. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.302 Polly Reed Myers Fall 2010 Jane Doe, a self-identified male-to-female transsexual who desired anonymity, was a Boeing engineer from 1978 to 1985. In 1985 she began undergoing counseling to prepare for sex reassignment surgery and changed her dress and physical appearance to reflect her gender and sex identification. She also notified her supervisors and coworkers that her physical appearance would change. Company leaders struggled with how to respond to what seemed to them to be new, potentially dangerous issues. Boeing’s personnel department asked Doe’s supervisor, Barry Noel, to “formulate a company position on it.” Lacking both precedent and policy, Noel described his responsibility as “plowing new ground,” a comment that exposes the sexist mind-set of company leaders as well as the entrenched position of gender discrimination in corporate culture and policies. After several months of trying to create a policy, Boeing managers asked Doe to dress in a “gender neutral fashion” and wear either male or “unisex” clothing. Doe tried to negotiate the boundaries of Boeing’s request for “gender neutrality” while simultaneously attending to pre-operative directives to dress as a woman for up to a year prior to surgery. She had to negotiate between an intense pressure to conform to masculine norms and an expression of her gender that was pathologized and stood outside corporate norms. The coercive gender norming Doe faced was reinforced through corporate disciplinary measures that amounted to compulsory gendering. Boeing leaders forced Doe to choose a “normal” gender that was part of larger patriarchal heterosexual prescriptions. As C.L. Cole and Shannon L.C. Cate note, this “compulsory gender binarism” is inherently limited and discriminatory under patriarchal systems. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.303 Marilyn Chin Fall 2010 There was a so-and-so Mr. Famous Poet, who had a bad reputation around the country for sexually harassing graduate students. The usual fare was that he would go on a college book tour, get stark-raving drunk, and chase dark, exotic-looking female students (yes, he preferred the exotic ones) and try to lure them to his hotel room. He was as well known for his gluttony and voracious appetite for gourmet food, drink, and lechery as he was for his poetry, faux pastorals with shepherdesses and woolly sheep all over the green hillocks of Arcadia. Because he was so famous, nobody bothered to tell him that groping female graduate students was no longer cool. Nor in his acclaim did he realize that policies had been put in place in universities to address such behavior. He could actually get fired. Likewise, nobody bothered to tell him that his poetry was no longer relevant. The great Norton anthology in the sky had already replaced his entries with a younger, hipper Croatian-Navajo surrealist. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.304 Robert G. Moeller Fall 2010 In the two articles that follow, Jennifer Evans and I address a common topic: how did post-World War II Germans use the law to regulate male homosexuality? At issue were proposals to reform Paragraph 175, the provision of the criminal code that prohibited sexual relations between men. This introduction offers some background on the history of Paragraph 175, the shared past to which the two postwar German states responded in ways that were at once similar and different. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.305 Robert G. Moeller Fall 2010 On a spring afternoon in April 1958 in a room in Passau in southern Germany, a group of two women and twenty-six men convened to discuss what happened when adult men got together for the purpose of mutual masturbation. Was it comparable to anal sex? Fellatio? Rubbing one’s erect penis between the legs of another man until ejaculation was achieved? Was it as good as coitus in heterosexual sexual relations? The participants in this discussion were not the editorial staff of a magazine aimed at a male homosexual readership, convening to discuss how best to boost circulation; nor were they representatives of the Volkswartbund, a rabidly homophobic organization connected to the Catholic Church, which since its origins in Imperial Germany in the late-nineteenth century had battled “moral decline” and had labeled male homosexuals as Public Enemy Number One. Rather, they were members of a commission appointed by the West German Ministry of Justice, joined by other legal experts, to offer advice on a proposed reform of the criminal code. On that day in April, their long march through the massive draft law had reached the provisions that applied to homosexuality. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.306 Jennifer V. Evans Fall 2010 Fears concerning sexual intransigence, deviance, and seduction have a long history in Germany, as elsewhere, surfacing in sexual scandals, medical texts, psychiatrist notations, the columns of newspapers and boulevard press, and in debates about the criminalization of same-sex relations. By the end of the Weimar Republic, both opponents and supporters of decriminalization agreed that adolescents were particularly vulnerable to seduction by adult male homosexuals. The Nazis relied on this idea when they expanded Paragraph 175 in 1935, adding a new paragraph, 175a, to the legal code to address intergenerational sex, male prostitution, and the threat of seduction. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.307 Evelyn Torton Beck Fall 2010 There are many kinds of knowledge projects. Most typically, in the academy, they grow from long-standing research agendas and are grounded in extensive knowledge. Yet sometimes, we are taken unawares by a sudden, unexpected passion, and we follow it, love-struck, into unfamiliar places. This is what happened to us in a small, centuries-old town on the Danube called Szentendre, about an hour’s journey north of Budapest, where, following the advice of a Hungarian-American friend who knew of our interest in women’s art, we found ourselves searching for Vastagh György Street, site of a museum dedicated to the work of Margit Kovács (1902-1977). We knew almost nothing about her but her name and her reputation as some kind of “potter.” Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.308 Suzanne Raitt Fall 2010 Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928, by Martha Vicinus, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, by Sharon Marcus, which appeared three years apart, reveal both the richness and the discontinuity in the twenty-first century of what used to be called “lesbian studies.” Both volumes are significant contributions to lesbian studies, women’s cultural history, and the broader history of sexuality. Martha Vicinus played a vital role in the formation of these fields, and Sharon Marcus’s prize-winning book builds on Vicinus’s achievements while charting a new way forward. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.309 Aimee Parkison Fall 2010 I drive alone and get lost along the way, my cheap red car, a pre-owned 1994 GEO Metro, winding into gravel roads leading to beautiful old houses. These houses are like the trees that surround them, able to shelter heavy snows. Parker lives on Ridgeway Avenue. His house is nice, respectable, and efficient like his housekeeper, who is just leaving as I come to the door. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.310 Catherine O. Fox Fall 2010 Writing about her experiences as an activist, Minnie Bruce Pratt interrogates her assumptions about the function of safe spaces in feminist coalition building. After coming out as a lesbian and losing her children to a homophobic ex-husband, she describes her desire for “a place where [she] could live without the painful and deadly violence, without the domination: a place where [she] could live free, liberated, with other women.” However, even as Pratt begins to envision a different place, or community, from which to create nonoppressive ways of interacting with other women, she reveals how her desire for what she calls a “safe place” is dangerously rooted in her history and identity as a privileged woman and in a noninnocent understanding of what constitutes safety. She writes, “I had not admitted that the safety of much of my childhood was because Laura Cates, Black and a servant, was responsible for me; that I had the walks with my father because the woods were ‘ours’ by systematic economic exploitation, instigated, at that time, by his White Citizens’ Council.” She explains that “my experience of a safe space . . . was based on places secured by omission, exclusion or violence, and on my submitting to the limits of that place”–limits such as being a good mother and obedient wife. To carry over those notions of safety into feminist coalitions would necessitate bringing the very values that she actively attempts to deconstruct in challenging her privileges and prejudices. She goes on to reflect upon how her notion of safety had been based upon finding a comfortable and secure place where she could simply be herself, how her notion of safety was conflated with feeling “protected” and with a history of racism, sexism, and heterosexism through the “chivalric” behavior of white men. Pratt’s purpose is not to undermine the dream of a new world, a world free of psychic and physical violence, but to examine how the vision of safety that operated in the early women’s movement was limited by white, heterosexist notions that sought safety and security for a few women at the expense of many women. Ultimately, she insists that new places must be forged in coalitions through a process of struggle, examining our own assumptions and privileges, challenging not only others’ ignorance, but our own ignorance, and seeking new ways of interacting with those who are differently positioned from ourselves. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.311 Karli June Cerankowski Fall 2010 Feminist studies, women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, transgender studies . . . asexuality studies? Although asexuality may not necessarily belong to its own field of study (yet), and may not make an easy fit with any preexisting field of study, the emergence and proliferation of the asexual community pose interesting questions at the intersections of these fields that interrogate and analyze gender and sexuality. As we know, these fields are neither independent of one another nor are they easily conflated; and they are ever shifting, revising, expanding, subdividing, and branching off. Where, then, might we place the study of a “new,” or at least newly enunciated, sexuality? How do we begin to analyze and contextualize a sexuality that by its very definition undermines perhaps the most fundamental assumption about human sexuality: that all people experience, or should experience, sexual desire? Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.312 Shelley Puhak Fall 2010 Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.313 Leigh Gilmore Fall 2010 It often seems that girlhood has congealed into a single sad story in which imperiled girls await rescue, with limited hope or success. In this story, girls appear in perpetual crisis and permanently vulnerable not only because of dire circumstances but also because of something intransigent and intrinsic to girlhood itself. Girls in crisis make an ethical claim upon our attention, and they should; but the permanently vulnerable girl is a deceptively apolitical and amoral figure that blots out representations of gendered autonomy (political, ethical, and personal). By focusing on girls in this way, women do not appear as moral and political agents lodged in material conditions of harm, capable of analyzing these conditions and proposing means of remediation. The figure of the vulnerable girl is tied to the absent figuration of women as fully human and as political agents. As such, this representation recalls colonial and orientalist histories and the representational politics of racialization; and it is in this figuration that the vulnerable and racialized girl in crisis has become the focus of human rights campaigns, corporate philanthropy, and service learning projects based in the United States. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.314 Deborah M. Withers Fall 2010 Since 2007 the U.K. feminist activist community has been fervently engaging with the relationship between transgender politics and feminism. In this short article, I will report on the development of these debates within different feminist spaces that engage online and offline communities. In the process, I will reflect on the possibilities that concepts generated through the debates, such as the notion of “polytrans”-friendly space, can offer for a feminism that continues to grapple with transgender. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.315 Fall 2010 Feminist Studies author Marilyn Buck died of uterine cancer on August 3, just two weeks after being paroled from prison in Texas. She had been imprisoned since 1985, serving an 80-year sentence. Buck described herself as “a U.S. anti-imperialist political prisoner, imprisoned for actions in solidarity with the New Afrikan Independence movement and in opposition to U.S. political and military aggression around the world.” Her political activism began with her consciousness of women’s oppression and racism. She continued to advocate for liberation and justice while in prison through her poetry and writing. Her work appeared in the Feminist Studies “Prison Issue,” 30, no. 2 (Summer 2004). Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0036.316 Fall 2010 Evelyn Torton Beck is women’s studies professor emerita at the University of Maryland and an Alum Research Fellow with the Creative Longevity and Wisdom Initiative of the Fielding Graduate University from where, in 2004, she earned a second Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She is the editor of Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Persephone Press, 1982/Beacon Press, 1987) and has published widely on themes that bridge gender, sexuality, the healing power of art, creativity, and social justice. She is currently reworking her comparative study of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo. Karli June Cerankowski is a Ph.D. candidate in the program in modern thought and literature at Stanford University. Her research interests include feminist and queer theories, trauma studies, performance studies, and popular culture. With Milks, she is working on an edited volume that explores asexuality from queer and feminist perspectives.Marilyn Chin’s award-winning books of poems include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, and Dwarf Bamboo. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (W.W. Norton, 2007) and in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2003). She teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.Jennifer V. Evans is associate professor of modern European history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She has written articles and a book on the regulation of same-sex sexuality in Nazi and cold war Germany and is preparing a manuscript on pink-triangle victims during and after the Holocaust. Her current research projects include exploring the use of Web 2.0 in countering the rise of neo-Nazism and analyzing the role and place of fascist aesthetics in 1970s and 1980s queer pornography.Catherine O. Fox is an associate professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, where her research and teaching focus on queer, feminist, and rhetorical theories. Her work has appeared in the journals College English, JAC, Pedagogy, and Third-Space. She is currently working on a project that incorporates principles of mind/body/spirit into feminist pedagogy and writing instruction.Leigh Gilmore is the author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Cornell University Press, 1994) and a coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). She has been the Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Scripps College, professor of English at the Ohio State University, and visiting professor in rhetoric and women’s studies at University of California, Berkeley.Elizabeth Marshall is an assistant professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University. Her research on the representation of girls and girlhoods in children’s literature, popular culture, and women’s memoir has been published in College English, Gender and Education, Girlhood Studies, and Rethinking Schools.Megan Milks is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program for writers at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her interests include feminist, queer, and masculinity theories; experimental fiction; and narrative psychiatry. Her fiction has been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including Western Humanities Review, DIAGRAM, and Everyday Genius. With Cerankowski, she is coediting a volume of feminist and queer approaches to asexuality.Robert G. Moeller teaches modern European history at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also the faculty advisor for the UCI History Project, a professional development initiative that serves middle and high school history teachers in Orange County, California. He has published widely on the social and political history of Germany in the twentieth century.Tracy E. Ore is a professor of sociology and currently serves as the interim associate provost of Undergraduate Education and Student Support Services at Saint Cloud State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999. Her teaching and research areas include sustainable agriculture, race and ethnicity, and the global politics of food. Her most recent text is The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, 5th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2010).Aimee Parkison has received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize. She writes and publishes fiction and poetry. She has an MFA from Cornell University and is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing. Her story collection, Woman with Dark Horses (Starcherone Press, 2004), won the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize. Shelley Puhak lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her first poetry collection, Stalin in Aruba (Black Lawrence Press, 2009) was awarded the 2010 Towson University Prize for Literature. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New South, Southeast Review, and many other journals.Suzanne Raitt is professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Her books include May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford University Press, 2000), Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press, 1993), and Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” (St. Martin’s Press, 1990). She has published numerous essays and articles in journals including Modernism/modernity and History Workshop Journal, and she is on the editorial collective of Feminist Studies. Deborah S. Rosenfelt is professor of women’s studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author or editor of numerous books and essays on North American women’s literature and culture and on women’s studies and issues in higher education (most recently, “Feminisms and Literatures,” in A Companion to American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter [Wiley-Blackwell, 2010]). She was a visiting professor of gender studies at Central European University in Budapest in 2008, where she first encountered the work of Margit Kovács.Deborah M. Withers, author of Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory (HammerOn Press, 2010), is a researcher and writer living in the United Kingdom. Her current research focuses on recovering the cultural politics of the women’s liberation movement in the United Kingdom. She is researching and curating an exhibition about Sistershow, a Bristol-based amateur theater feminist group, for May 2011. Feminist Studies 36 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.101 Spring 2011 In fall 2000, Feminist Studies published a special issue on gender studies in India and the South Asian diaspora, reviewing the trajectory of women’s movements and identity formations and offering potent writing on citizenship, community, and nationalism. Over ten years later, this special issue presents important advances in feminist scholarship on the region. In a decade that has witnessed the official decriminalization of homosexuality, a vibrant sex workers’ movement, female politicians holding the reins of state and national governments, expanding markets, and horrific violence against religious minorities, feminists have both refined and recast the scope of their analyses. Some of the most important contributions are found in scholarship on sexuality and intimate relationships, offering alternatives to standardized binary formulations of sexual desire and subjectivity. Whereas the forms and ramifications of marriage–its minimum age, its property, and status implications–have long been objects of critique in Indian feminism, recent scholarship moves the debate forward by de-centering the heterosexual couple, tracing desires and identities that flourish beyond hegemonic dictates. This special issue covers archival, ethnographic, filmic, and case law sources that underline the instability of the heterosexual couple. It presents a range of conjugalities by documenting various arrangements of procreation and household economies: from devadasi women gifted to goddesses, to lesbians who wed, to rapists who marry their victims as a means to atone for their violence. It offers scholarly and creative reflections on the place of sexuality in the formulation of gender categories, the nuclear couple, and caste differences. Drawing on the rich historical and anthropological record in India, the essays and artistic works in this issue provide an engaging set of reference points and a new politics of visibility on questions of intimacy, conjugality, and sexuality. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.102 Naisargi N. Dave Spring 2011 Queerness, definitively, is no longer “a question of silence” in Indian arts and letters. When Mary John and Janaki Nair published their important edited volume A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of India in 1998, with “lesbian” and “gay” largely relegated to a brief section on “alternate sexualities,” so much was just on the horizon. Deepa Mehta’s Fire, a film about the love affair between two sisters-in-law in a middle-class Hindu home, would soon lead to lesbian organizations increasing their ranks across India and the word “lesbian” becoming a household word, if still a deeply uneasy one, in urban milieus. The campaign against the antisodomy statute, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, would soon acquire its momentum, pulling into its center film stars, feminists, former judges, writers, and of course queer women and men from India and its wide diaspora. Gay Pride would become an annual rite in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, bringing thousands of queer people–cheekily masked to proudly half-naked–to celebrate queer life on India’s streets. This intensity of queer practice has been nearly matched in scholarship about it. Since 1998 there have been over a dozen books published about queer sexuality in India, from collections of activist narratives, to literary and film criticism, to history and mythology, to ethnographic studies of gay men’s lives. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.103 Lucinda Ramberg Spring 2011 For the Dalit (“outcaste”) women that my research in the South Indian state of Karnataka has focused on, marriage is not to men but to a devi (goddess). When they are “given,” or dedicated by their families, to the devi Yellamma, they become her wives. By virtue of this dedication they become responsible for the worship (seva) of Yellamma; they become her priests (pujaris). In turn, Yellamma provides for them. As several dedicated women put it to me, “She is my husband, she takes care [of me].” As wives of Yellamma, they embody her presence in the towns and villages where they live and are entitled to bestow blessings and ask for fruits of the harvest in her name. For a devotee of Yellamma to fail to make offerings to a jogati (as they most commonly refer to themselves), who comes to the devotee’s house or assists them in carrying out a ritual, is to risk the wrath of a devi whose power is renowned in the region. In short, the dedication of girls to the devi Yellamma initiates a network of exchange relations, mutual obligations, and forms of care that flow among Dalit dedicated women, dominant caste devotees of the devi, and the devi herself. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.104 Prathibha Nandakumar Spring 2011 Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.105 Mytheli Sreenivas Spring 2011 Feminist scholars of colonial southern India, a region administered as Madras Presidency by the British regime, have been intrigued by the figure of the devadasi. Married to a Hindu temple deity in a ceremony akin to an upper-caste Hindu wedding, devadasi women rendered ritual and artistic services within temples. In exchange for their service, they typically received an income from the temple. As “wives” of the deity, they were prohibited from marrying mortal men; however, many devadasis maintained sexual relationships with upper-caste male patrons. As women whose existence appears at odds with normative frameworks of conjugality and sexuality, devadasis offer scholars the promise of a recuperative history that renders visible forms of subjectivity largely absent from the colonial archive. Research documenting devadasis’ modes of sociosexual reproduction lends some credence to this recuperative promise. Emphasizing devadasis’ roles as dancers and ritual specialists, several studies argue that these dedicated women enjoyed opportunities more varied than those available within heterosexual monogamous marriage. Consequently, the colonial-era campaigns to “reform” devadasis by ending temple dedication may actually have narrowed the range of options available to them. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.106 Ruby Lal Spring 2011 The question of the archive has long occupied historians and non-historians alike, who have theorized the politics of archival research, unfolded the many meanings of the “archive,” and questioned the political and intellectual implications of its enticements. For a while now, scholars of South Asia have made key contributions to this critical exploration. They have investigated the question of the archive and its relation to historiography; challenged the grand narratives (nation, empire, community, history, “family”) assumed to be easily visible in the official archives; worked with the idea of the “fragment” (as something that interrupts and opens up new questions and avenues of inquiry); raised critical questions about speech and silence (“the woman question”; “can the subaltern speak?”); and focused on understanding and troubling everyday forms of resistance and theorizing on behalf of the other. This array of writings has not only contested the category of what is “admissible” into the historical record but has also raised profound concerns about what constitutes the “real,” problems of representation and chronology, the boundaries of history, and history’s relationship to modernity. So why turn to the question once again? Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.107 Svati P. Shah Spring 2011 Chitra Ganesh was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has attracted a following in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Over the past decade, she has become recognized as an artist whose work contributes much to the thinking on “feminist,” “queer,” and “South Asian” contemporary art. At the same time, Ganesh’s work has also been recognized for elucidating the productive complexities of having an aesthetic, style, and subject matter that elude the national and conceptual boundaries that currently constitute the ways in which the art world frames and promotes the work of emerging artists. In so doing, Ganesh’s work troubles the art historical orthodoxies that demand categorizing contemporary art through easily bounded notions of “East” or “West,” “feminist,” “figurative,” “political,” or “conceptual.” In addition to all of these, Ganesh’s work has also been described as mythic, postcolonial, and rebellious, as it brings together a diverse array of images and referents from Indian mythic poetry; the Progressive Artists’ Group (one of the most influential groups of modern artists in India, formed in 1947 and active until 1956); comics and graphic novels from the United States, India, and Japan; Mexican muralism from the early-twentieth century; contemporary street art and graffiti; as well as phantasmagorical motifs from Egon Schiele, Hieronymus Bosch, and Albrecht Dürer and autobiographical meditations in the vein of Bhupen Khakar, Frieda Kahlo, and Ana Mendieta. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.108 Shefali Chandra Spring 2011 On August 24 of 1884 , a Marathi-language article that excavated in voracious detail the sexual practices of white women in India, erupted upon the political scene in Poona City. Published in the conservative Marathi-language weekly, Poona Vaibhav (Glory of Poona), and simply entitled “Strishikshan,” or women’s education, the article’s primary purpose was to critique the inauguration of the Poona Indian Girls’ High School. The school had already provoked strong reactions for its apparently radical agenda of bringing the language of the colonial modern to Indian women. The article from the Poona Vaibhav, while setting out to voice its dissension against the new school, immediately veered toward a detailed examination of the sexual practices of Indian and European women. Describing first the conduct of prostitutes in Indian society and then comparing such conduct to the manners and customs of European women in India, the writer boldly documented how the sexual desires of white women far exceeded the standards of sexuality maintained by Indian female prostitutes. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.109 Sangita Gopal Spring 2011 In the final sequence of Danny Boyle’s 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal and Latika’s lips freeze in a brief on-screen kiss. Almost immediately, Boyle goes to credits intercut with a Bollywood-style song and dance number that enacts how this kiss feels to the long-suffering, long-separated sweethearts. This couple is twice constituted–first through a kiss and then in the performance register of the romantic duet. By formally separating the kiss from the song, Boyle evokes the uneasy relationship between these modes of affection in popular Hindi cinema. By locating the kiss in the film proper but consigning the song to the credits, this Bollywood-inspired global blockbuster revises the aesthetic codes of Hindi cinema where the song sequence rather than the kiss has historically functioned as an engine of couple formation. I begin this article withBoyle’s film, for it captures fundamental shifts that are ongoing in popular Hindi cinema whereby the kiss, banished from the screen since the 1930s, is making a reappearance, while the song sequence that has long served as the primary expressive device for constituting the romantic couple is being sidelined. At this moment of change, it is worth investigating why the song sequence rather than the kiss emerged as an engine of couple formation in Hindi cinema and what this aesthetic preference can tell us about the symbolic value of conjugality for a commercial cinema trying to negotiate its relation to modernity and nationalism. I will explore these questions by focusing on the 1930s, the first decade of the sound film in India, a period in which conjugality’s relation to song got crystallized. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.110 Minal Hajratwala Spring 2011 Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.111 Mandakranta Sen Spring 2011 Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.112 Srimati Basu Spring 2011 Did we triumph as feminists when rape (on the street, in the dorm, at war) was recognized as violence (and not just a property violation), and states enacted sanctions and protections against rape? For many of us who petitioned and marched to demand remedies against sexual violence, it was a feminist axiom to understand rape as an archetyped mark of patriarchal dominance deeply resistant to legal accountability. Despite problems such as botched prosecutions or shamed silences or the intransigence of law, bringing recognition to sexual violence was indeed a symbolic success. However, the satisfaction of legal remedies is also eclipsed by the problems of their very institution: the decoding and use of these laws in a variety of settings raises questions about meanings of violence and sex, agency, and consent. Although it may be disconcerting to interrogate the terms of the fragile protections granted by laws against rape, I do so in this article not in an attempt to undo those gains but to examine the context of rape legislation in systems of exchange, property, and marriage. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.113 Rajee Seth Spring 2011 Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.114 Spring 2011 Some say that campus activism, especially feminist activism, is dead. But news of the following instances of campus activism puts the lie to the myth that those in the university exist in an ivory tower where idle theorizing occurs without a commitment to real-world problems. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.115 Spring 2011 Srimati Basu is associate professor of gender and women’s studies and anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her research on women and inheritance has been published in She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety (SUNY Press, 1999). She is also the editor of the Dowry and Inheritance volume in the Issues in Indian Feminism series (Macmillan/Zed Books, 2005) and has written on property, law, kinship, and violence. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.116 Spring 2011 Feminist Studies is pleased to announce the creation of a new award for academic excellence, the “Claire Goldberg Moses Award for the Most Theoretically Innovative Article.” This award, to be given to the most theoretically innovative article published in Feminist Studies each year, was created to honor Claire G. Moses on her retirement as editorial director of Feminist Studies, a position she had held since 1977. Feminist Studies 37 1 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.201 Matt Richardson Summer 2011 For some time now feminists have struggled with the challenges that transgender subjectivity brings to sexuality and gender binaries, especially in the understanding of the category “woman.” There have been several compilations that have touched on the subject, such as Transgender History, the Transgender Studies Reader, and Transgender Rights, as well as special issues of a range of social science and interdisciplinary journals. Queer historian, writer, and filmmaker Susan Stryker has been on the forefront of such efforts, deftly linking participants in exchanges over common questions and issues as the editor for her transgender anthology and transgender special issues for the interdisciplinary journals–the GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. In her introduction to the Transgender Studies Reader, Stryker draws our attention to the lack of contributions from people of color and the urgent need for a “transgender studies” that more adequately and carefully engaged the “complex interplay between race, ethnicity, and transgender phenomenon.” Bobby Noble makes a similar point in the review essay, “‘My Own Set of Keys’: Meditations on Transgender, Scholarship, Belonging,” with which we begin this special issue. While providing an overview of some of the field-defining books that have been published over the past decade, he comments also on some of the limitations of a predominantly white referent for transgender subjectivity as currently represented in critical theory. Noble also points to a burgeoning set of material that is beginning to emerge from scholars of color on this topic grounded in a queer of color critique. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.202 Bobby Noble Summer 2011 As I sit down to prepare the writing of this essay, I am struck by the profundity of a series of conversations staged in Jules Rosskam’s experimental documentary, Against a Trans Narrative (2008). Rosskam seeks to question the political use but also the existence of one single master narrative that explains transgender both as a political narrative but also as a personal one. The documentary is troublesome, in the best sense of the term. It delves deeply into the many narratives and discourses circulating over the past ten years or so about transgender in feminist contexts, queer communities, across age differences, as it materializes through racial differences, as a medical and clinical practice, and as the subject of much agonizing debate for transgender people as well as for their partners before, during, and after transition. Rosskam does not shy away from the controversial conversations and in fact uses an intelligent mix of the elements of the documentary form (the authorial voice-over, confessional one-on-one conversation, group encounter sessions) and combines them with fictional scenes (the reading of a script by actors, the staging of different scenes as rehearsal and then again, as the “real” scene, and so forth) to render the single transnarrative all but impossible. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.203 Emily Skidmore Summer 2011 As with any new academic field, transgender studies has created its own pantheon of canonical texts and heroic figures. One of the most celebrated figures has been Christine Jorgensen, and not without good reason; when the news announced in late 1952 that the former GI had undergone sex reassignment surgery in Denmark, it created a maelstrom of media attention and introduced many Americans to the concept of transsexuality. Jorgensen remained in the news throughout the 1950s as she appeared on television talk shows, starred in her own nightclub show, and her 1967 autobiography was adapted and released as a motion picture, titled The Christine Jorgensen Story, in 1970. Her engaging personality captured the imagination of many Americans, both past and present, and she has remained the most prominent individual within historical treatments of transsexuality. However, Jorgensen was not the only public representation of transsexuality in the mid-twentieth century. In April 1966, for example, African American transwoman Delisa Newton graced the cover of Sepia, and her autobiography was the subject of a two-part series featured in the magazine. Similar to much of the press coverage of Jorgensen, Sepia’s coverage of Newton highlighted her lonely childhood and her fervent desire to one day be a good wife. However, whereas Jorgensen’s story appeared in numerous mainstream news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek and widely circulated newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, Newton’s story appeared only in the African American press and tabloid newspapers such as the National Insider. The disparity between the media reception of Jorgensen and Newton highlights the significance of race within media representations of transsexuality and suggests that such public narratives of transsexuality are not simply about gender but also about race, class, and sexuality. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.204 Elizabeth Bucar Summer 2011 In the turbulent first decade of the twentieth-first century, Trinidad, Colorado, a predominantly Catholic town with a population hovering around 9,000, came to share its long-standing title as “the Sex-Change Capital of the World” with Tehran, Iran, a city of almost eight million and the literal capital of an Islamic theocracy. Or so it would seem, if one reads the articles published in international mainstream media outlets (such as the Los Angeles Times and the London-based Guardian) that write in astonished terms of the support for and purported popularity of sex reassignment surgeries (SRS) in Iran. Despite Newsweek’s hint at a global statistic about which countries host the most surgeries, the media’s concept of “capital” actually has little to do with comparisons or with numbers; rather, it revolves around the way that specific locations have garnered significant attention because the practice of SRS in these places at first seems to challenge Western mainstream conceptions of “liberalism” regarding sex and gender. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.205 Trish Salah Summer 2011 Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.206 Rebecca Rossen Summer 2011 On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S. concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York City’s Town Hall. For this occasion, Koner, who was Jewish, premiered Chassidic Song and Dance, in which the choreographer portrayed a young Hasidic Jew. To a certain extent, the folksy and mystical Chassidic Song and Dance was not so different from the other dances that constituted Koner’s repertory in the early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening into a bouquet of foreign types–Hindu goddess, Moorish gypsy, Javanese temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian peasant girl. However, Chassidic Song and Dance offered one critical distinction. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner portrayed female characters; in Chassidic Song and Dance, she presented herself as a boy–in Jewish drag. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.207 Marlon M. Bailey Summer 2011 KC Prestige, a butch queen (a gay man) and member of the Legendary House of Prestige’s Detroit Chapter at the time, attended the Xstacy Ball in Chicago, along with Prestige members from the Richmond, Cleveland, and Philadelphia chapters during the July 4th holiday in 2003. At 3 a.m. the venue where the Xstacy Ball was held was shut down, and the continuation of the ball was moved to an after-hours spot. When KC and his fellow house members stopped at a gas station on the south side of Chicago to pump gas, Prestige was approached by two men, one of whom hit him in the face and knocked him unconscious. Luckily for KC, his fellow house members, Rico Prestige and Father Alvernian, were at the gas station as well and came to his rescue. Rico fought the men, apparently while KC was unconscious, and one of them pistol-whipped him. Soon after, Father Alvernian grabbed a bat from Jaylen Prestige’s car and hit one of the assailants in the head. The two men ran off, but they took KC’s watch, necklace, T-shirt, and earrings, and a diamond ring from another Prestige member. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.208 Matt Richardson Summer 2011 My lover and I broke the fall of the last televangelist. He landed directly on the soft underside of our bellies, leaving us without air for some time. He got up, without thanking us, speaking in platitudes and dialing his limo driver. When he finally noticed us, he looked at me and knew right away that I was not born with a penis. We heard a chill run up and down his spine. I took my boyfriend’s hand. Faggots? he said, spitting. The question mark landed on my chest and the F tangled in my facial hair. I was picking Gs out of my afro for days. My boyfriend, he scanned with x-ray perception and dismissed him as banal. Garden variety queen. But the likes of me he had never seen before. He circled me, scanning me up and down–a faggot that is not one? Why? Why not stay a woman instead of becoming an abomination, he asked. I kissed my lover, full lips to full lips. Finally, I said, I took seriously the responsibility you gave me to save Black men from themselves. So, I found the one inside myself and now I’m taking very good care of him.(In homage to Pat Parker) Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.209 Gabeba Baderoon Summer 2011 In her keynote address to the “African Same-Sex Sexualities and Gender Diversity” conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in February 2011, Desiree Lewis pointed to Zanele Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine I as exemplifying the utopian possibilities of queer liberation. With Lewis, we observe the complex and playful textures of Ms. D’vine’s self-possessed performance of gender in the photograph, her waist draped in beads woven in the colors of the South African flag, a brightly decorative yet slightly stiff necklace around her neck, and the sole of one of her bright red shoes worn through. The setting of long grass marked by discarded plastic bags in which Ms. D’vine poses at first recalls then unsettles an image of rural Africa by testifying to the continent’s urban realities. Lewis notes that this vivid and “emphatically queer” image “blurs markers of tradition and modernity . . . and defies the usual emphasis on violence, on health, on statistics” that reduces African sexuality to an instrumental litany of deficits and disease. Instead, in Muholi’s photograph Ms. D’vine observes no requirements of authenticity and no strictures on self-expression and, therefore, to Lewis, appears “entirely free, dethron[ing] normality, heteronormativity, and homonormativity.” In her camp persona, Ms. D’vine consciously inhabits a marginal and original space, rather than a pragmatic and respectable one, and thereby embodies the promise of freely imagined possibilities for the self. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.210 Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley Summer 2011 In Kingston, Jamaica, at the Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference in June 2009, I presented a paper on a panel entitled “Centering Sexuality: Desire between Women.” The session’s presentations, which focused on literary representations and metaphors of female same-sex eroticism, engendered a lively question-and-answer period that ended with an extremely astute and thoughtful query posed to the entire panel. A colleague asked if, in tracing newly queered tropes of the region, we were not running the risk of once again hypersexualizing the Caribbean–of again portraying its islands as the warmest, sexiest, juiciest, most open-watered lay of the hemisphere’s land. The novel that I discussed in my presentation was the beautiful, rich Erzulie’s Skirt, by Ana-Maurine Lara; and my quick response–as time ran out and we were rushed from the room–was that perhaps the way out of that conundrum was precisely through Ezili (also known as Erzulie, as in Lara’s novel), the Haitian Vodou lwa (spirit) of femininity and sensuality. That is, perhaps one way to escape the impossible choice between rendering Caribbean sex and sexuality either invisible or hypervisible might be through serious engagement with the ways of knowing gender, sexuality, and personhood enunciated in the epistemologies of Afro-Caribbean religions, epistemologies that could be engaged in ways not easily recuperated by global Northern voyeurisms. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.211 Vanessa Huang September 2011 Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.212 Sharon Doetsch-Kidder Summer 2011 Ruby Bracamonte is a Latina trans activist and national spokesperson on issues of violence against transgender people. She grew up in El Salvador in a middle-class family that became working class after her parents’ divorce, when she was seven or eight. Her father was an electrician, and her mother worked in a factory. She lived with her mother after the divorce, but her father continued to pay for her to attend an international school, where she studied English. She fled El Salvador in 1986, at the age of sixteen, after surviving kidnapping and gang rape. With more than thirty other Salvadorans, she traveled to Mexico with a guide, then spent a few days waiting in a house in Tijuana. She was awakened in the middle of the night, packed with a group of people into the back of a truck, and driven to Los Angeles. A family friend bought her a ticket to the Washington, D.C., area with money Bracamonte’s father had sent. There, she stayed in Maryland with family friends, who received money from her parents. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.213 Karla Mantilla Summer 2011 Working for social justice is rarely a straightforward, unproblematic process. It often entails finding a way to reconcile passionately held political convictions with a multitude of outside intervening practicalities. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) has had to struggle with just such a challenge recently when the state in which the organization planned to hold its annual conference, Georgia, passed a law targeting immigrants. With their annual conference scheduled for November 10-13 in Atlanta, NWSA had to decide whether to participate in a boycott of the state–the kind of tough choice that several academic organizations have recently had to face when locations for their annual meetings have also become sites of controversy. In 2010, for example, the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association were faced with similar decisions about whether to participate in a boycott of the state of California, where they had previously scheduled their annual meetings, due to the state’s passage of anti-gay Proposition 8, which barred gay marriage in California. Both organizations made the decision to go forward with their meetings as previously planned but added programming to their conferences to affirm their opposition to the anti-gay legislation. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.214 Summer 2011 Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar and the author of the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body (Kwela Books/Snailpress, 2005) and A Hundred Silences (Kwela Books/Snailpress, 2006). She was a 2009 Future of Minority Studies/Mellon Fellow in the “Queer Studies in Transnational Contexts” Summer Institute at Cornell University and holds a 2010-2011 research fellowship in the Islam, African Publics, and Religious Values Project at the University of Cape Town. She teaches women’s studies and African studies at Pennsylvania State University. Feminist Studies 37 2 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.301 Judith Gardiner Fall 2011 This issue of Feminist Studies both expands feminist history and interrogates that history as it has been institutionalized in women’s studies programs. One set of essays revisits key moments in feminist art and the academy in the 1960s and 1970s, covering efforts to champion women’s cultural production and autonomy. Other essays contribute to an ongoing refinement of transformative practices within the academy: they reflect on faculty hiring processes, syllabus construction, teaching practices, and the uses of technology. This issue also inaugurates a new multiperspectival format for News and Views, featuring three different commentators engaging with the question of women and the Arab Spring. Finally, we offer a cluster of poetry and fiction on the theme of disability. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.302 Amy Brandzel Fall 2011 This article suggests that it is critical for the disciplines of women’s studies and women’s history to interrogate the project of the intellectual history of feminism as revealed in curricula, syllabi, and course readers. Such an interrogation can illuminate numerous dilemmas that continue to reverberate throughout both disciplines, including the contestations over the definitions and limits of “feminism,” “theory,” and “history.” But even more importantly, an examination of this shared terrain allows us to question what women’s studies needs from women’s history and vice versa. The relationship between the two is far from straightforward, and since each continues to be marked as simultaneously “established” and “outdated” within the academy, we might ask whether the history of feminism has been used as a means to (re)establish the legitimacy of both. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.303 Becky Thompson Fall 2011 Since its inception in the late 1960s, women’s studies has brought substantial change to curricular, pedagogical, and epistemological practices in the academy. The initial “add and stir” approach to including women in the curriculum has largely been replaced by a sophisticated analysis of gender, race, and class; a transnational focus; and a complex understanding of women’s embodiment. Feminist attention to pedagogy has succeeded in illuminating multiple forms of learning as well as the multiple ways that power manifests itself in the classroom. Women’s studies-inspired theoretical formulations — including standpoint theory, mestiza consciousness, and intersectional frameworks — also reverberate across the academy. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.304 Breanne Fahs Fall 2011 A peculiar problem arises when stories of social change — and the radical figures of those stories — persistently stay in the past tense. Much of what is known about the birth of radical feminism has been lost in archives, stunted by its out-of-print status or otherwise obscured by mainstream feminist efforts to make feminism palatable to a wider audience. As such, opportunities for intergenerational knowledge making and intermovement dialogue have been lost to many feminists who came of age after the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my ongoing work, I have sought to reestablish intergenerational links by gathering oral histories of early radical feminists. This article focuses in detail on the much understudied Ti-Grace Atkinson, whose role in the early radical feminist movement has received less recognition than it should. I present parts of an interview with Atkinson examining the impact of radical feminism, its ideological and political origins, key figures in the movement, her connection to key feminist figures, and lessons feminists have both succeeded and failed to learn while building and sustaining a progressive social movement for gender justice. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.305 Jane Gerhard Fall 2011 Eve Ensler’s 1998 play The Vagina Monologues opens with a deceptively simple statement about her longing for a woman-centered community: “I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas — a community, a culture of vaginas.”  Surely the most successful of feminist-themed cultural products in recent memory, The Vagina Monologues has become a popular feminist ritual where women with little else in common beyond their vaginas come together and affirm their differences. The play and the nonprofit V-Day organization founded to channel audiences’ enthusiastic support of it represent the power of a popular form of US feminism or a form of feminism that has found a niche in the cultural marketplace since the 1970s. Other examples of commercially popular feminist-themed cultural products abound: Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Contemplated Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), and the one-woman stage show by Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1986); Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple (1982), made into a film in 1985, along with 9 to 5 (1980), Tootsie (1982), and Thelma and Louise (1991), as well as the chic literature-to-film/cable hybrids, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996, 2001) and Candice Bushnell’s Sex and the City (1997, HBO 1998–2004, 2008). This popularized form of feminism has a history worth exploring, one that sheds light on contemporary debates over the proper modifier — post, Third Wave, or simply “new” — for today’s feminism. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.306 Monika Lee Fall 2011 Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.307 Maura Reilly Fall 2011 (1960) Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.308 Ann Cefola Fall 2011 “Demoiselles 7” refers to the oil painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Picasso (1881–1973). The huge 8' by 7'8" canvas made “a radical break from traditional composition and perspective,” created an uproar among the artist’s Parisian colleagues, and helped to spawn Cubism itself. On seeing the painting, artist Georges Braque (1882–1963) said: “It is as if someone had drunk kerosene to spit fire.” Jokingly called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso’s friend, art critic André Salmon (1881–1969), the title references Barcelona’s red-light district, often called Avignon Street (Carino D’Avinyó) after the French town, once a symbol of loose living. Originally, the canvas included a medical student representing “the life of the mind” and a sailor “the flesh,” prompting Picasso to call the canvas The Philosophical Brothel. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.309 Roberta Salper Fall 2011 In spring 1970 i had been hired for a one-year position as the Distinguished Visiting Professor and only full-time faculty member in the newly created Women’s Studies Program at San Diego State College (SDSC), the first full-fledged women’s studies program to be approved in the country. I took a year’s leave of absence from another position to work with the women who had struggled and won the right to start the nation’s first women’s studies program in fall 1970. Their achievement was an extraordinary feat. It came about because of what I came to recognize as a combination of extreme democracy and extreme authoritarianism. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.310 Lila Abu-Lughod Fall 2011 Lila Abu-Lughod (LA): Rabab, you have been a thoughtful activist/scholar in Egypt for some time. You were in Tahrir Square and remain involved in the unfolding of this revolution. I want to begin by asking you to reflect on the way the Western media seem obsessed with the role of women in this revolution. We both think a lot about the way women’s activism can’t escape the symbolic significance of the “Middle Eastern/Muslim woman” question. Both of us have been asked constantly to comment on “women in the Egyptian revolution.” Both of us have been annoyed by this question. I’d like to know how you think about the relationship between Egyptian women’s actual forms of participation and the media obsession with what the uprisings mean for women. How do you handle the questions you get? What do you think lies behind these questions? Can you offer us a better way to think concretely about women’s participation? Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.311 Sahar Khamis Fall 2011 Many observers have interpreted the selection of Tawakkul Karman for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize as a nod to both the “Arab Spring” in general and to the particular role that Arab women played in it. Karman, now known as the “mother of the revolution” in Yemen, has been a symbol for thousands of women who stormed the streets in many Arab nations, risking their lives and exposing themselves to harm in their quest for dignity, freedom, liberty, and democracy. Observers of this massive wave of political revolt cannot help but notice the visible and remarkable role that women are playing in it. And it is a range of women: young and old, Muslim and Christian, religiously conservative and liberal, veiled and unveiled, rich and poor. This range of women signifies a new moment of unity, solidarity, and cohesion, mirroring the egalitarian, grassroots movement that they have come out to support. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.312 Bridget Harris Tsemo Fall 2011 In this review essay I focus on recent feminist scholarship that contributes to the ongoing project of decentering power within feminist pedagogy. The essays in Ann Elizabeth Armstrong and Kathleen Juhl’s Radical Acts: Theatre and Feminist Pedagogies of Change, Ruth Nicole Brown’s “autoethnographic” Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy, as well as Robbin D. Crabtree, David Alan Sapp, and Adela C. Licona’s Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward argue for a liberatory pedagogy that challenges many patriarchal norms and hierarchical relationships that continue to haunt the feminist movement. By taking feminist theory out of the ivory tower and applying it to spaces where progressive gender politics is needed, such as an after-school program and street theater, these books take important necessary steps. The editors and authors each have distinct goals, but the essays and narratives collectively challenge previous modes of combating power within a feminist pedagogical framework and promote teaching methodologies that can transform the world. Significantly, they each engage the contradictions, struggles, inconsistencies, and often pain that accompany pedagogical practice. Instead of avoiding conflict, these writers embrace the uncomfortable fissures and attempt to find ways to heal. They challenge who gets to teach, what one gets to teach, and where one can teach. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.313 Lana Hechtman Ayers Fall 2011 Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.314 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz Fall 2011 In the music industry, the B-side is the filler, the side that exists to fill out the A-side, make it whole. For me it has come to represent what might happen. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.315 Heather Fowler Fall 2011 I have long wished my daughter were born ugly. Walking across the kitchen this morning, she radiates sex and youth in the sunrise light skirting through her window. Her lilac skirt flirts with her legs. The cream blouse I bought her weeks before contrasts with her pale skin. Dark hair slicked back, the oval of her face etched with pallor except for the remnants of bruises on her left cheekbone. Blind, she walks past the table in her apartment quickly, like a seeing person, because she is home, where everything is immaculately placed. She seems just another young woman, preparing for her day, except that she is not, except that she was raped last week. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.316 Emily Carr Fall 2011 Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.317 Stephanie Ricker Schulte Fall 2011 This review places recent books (re)defining cyberfeminism in the larger trajectory of scholarship on the internet in order to illustrate the relationships between the two fields. For example, it illustrates how the internet itself and the scholars who studied it offered feminists a productive new framework through which to rethink their collective projects as diverse, horizontally organized, and global. In this sense, both the technology itself and early attempts to understand it participated in the important shift toward global and transnational feminisms. This essay also, however, illustrates how early internet scholarship was deeply marked by utopian-dystopian binary-driven research that characterized online spaces as either good or bad and that focused on “the virtual” and “the physical” as separate spheres. In some ways, this bias impinged upon many early studies of cyberfeminism, which tended to either demonize or celebrate the possibilities of online feminism. However, early cyberfeminist works added to the body of internet scholarship by introducing established feminist critical valences to studies of the internet. These scholars attended to the tacit value systems embedded in both networking technologies and their antecedent structures; they also focused on how people used the internet and redefined the technology through their use. Feminist Studies 37 3 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0037.318 Fall 2011 Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, teaches gender studies and anthropology, and directs the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. Her scholarship has focused on cultural forms and power, the politics of knowledge of the Muslim world, and the dynamics of gender and questions of human and women’s rights in the Middle East. Her books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (University of California Press, 1986/2000), Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (University of California Press, 1993/2008), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 1998), and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Feminist Studies 37 3