INTERFACING FEMINISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN HONG KONG: A CASE OF EVERYDAY LIFE POLITICS

Cultural studies, as a cultural and political re-articulation of common sense, knowledge and community practices, aims at opening up new cultural space for criticisms, reflections and action. Originating from the women' movement and later flourishing in the academy as well, feminism espouses similar aims to cultural studies. Both cultural studies and feminist/gender studies have a strong sense of intervening into everyday life politics. This paper is an attempt to discuss how feminism and cultural studies interface with each other, largely based on examples of gender-related everyday life politics taken from the feminist movement in Hong Kong. It will examine issues concerning the conflict of consumption and female subjectivities, the reconceptualization of home and housewives, and the representation of everyday life for women and history writing. It is argued that by blurring, negotiating or deconstructing the boundary or division between positions, identities and domains–such as subject and object, housewives and workers, private and public, personal and political, consumption and production–the re-articulation of knowledge about ‘victim’, ‘exploitation’, ‘home’ and ‘history’ in the feminist movement will not only provide the movement with new impetus and insight to reconsider its strategies in fighting for more cultural, social and economic space for women and other marginal groups at large in Hong Kong, but will also ‘metabolize’ the newly developed discipline of cultural studies in Hong Kong by providing a platform to strengthen the dynamic arm of cultural studies education and research. Based on her feminist and teaching experiences in Hong Kong, the author has highlighted activism and pedagogy as the two important dimensions of feminism and cultural studies in this paper.     

WOMEN,DOMESTICITY AND THE FAMILY: RECENT FEMINIST WORK IN IRISH CULTURAL STUDIES

This article examines recent feminist work on the modernization of the Irish family which occurred during the twentieth century. It argues that social agencies, including prominently the Catholic Church, encouraged women to introduce ‘enlightened’ notions of order and hygiene into the family, while seeking to inhibit the development of individualist aspirations to personal pleasure, domesticity and romance. It also considers the development of literacy and reading habits in Ireland in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, as a clue to the changing forms of women's experience and subjectivity. The article concludes that a balanced account of the benefits and drawbacks for women of Irish family patterns, and of their investment in them, must take full account of tensions and ambiguities in both the traditional and the modernized family.