The Politician,The Wife,The Citizen,and her Newspaper

Recent dramatic rises in the number of women elected to British parliaments have renewed critical interest in the significance of gender, and ways of theorising and researching women's political representation. However, the central role played by the media in contemporary politics is often neglected in feminist political scholarship. At the same time, the spaces occupied by women in political news journalism and the body politic remain under-explored by media theorists. This article argues that if we are to fully understand the politics of representation and what fairer representation for women might mean, we need to address these neglected dimensions. To make the case, I present an analysis of press coverage of the 1997 British General Election campaign. This seeks to draw together conventionally disparate strands of feminist, political and media theorising in order to highlight the gendered politics of newspaper imag(in)ing, storytelling, and commentary. Improving women's presence in media(ted) political discourse, I conclude, might be one means of strengthening women's symbolic and substantive representation.     

How (not) to “Hollaback”: towards a transnational debate on the “Red Zora” and militant tactics in the feminist struggle against gender-based violence

Abstract

The Red Zora was formed in the mid-1970s as a subgroup within the militant leftist network Revolutionary Cells. Like other militant leftist groups in West Germany, the Red Zora deemed the use of physical force against property, and in some cases people, to be a necessary part of national and international political interventions. But the group had a radical feminist philosophy. Between 1977 and 1995, the Red Zora carried out dozens of attacks with an explicitly feminist agenda. This paper gives a brief overview of the activities of the Red Zora and of feminist responses to the group. Against the background of Germany’s fascist past and political violence in the FRG, feminist activists in Germany were understandably reluctant to discuss ideas and activities that could associate the women’s movement with left-wing “terrorism.” This article shows that “Hollaback!,” #aufschrei and other recent campaigns by feminist activists in Germany have reinforced rather than challenged the feminist silence on the Red Zora. While German feminists have only begun to document the history of the group, activists in other countries show that one does not have to agree with the tactics of the Red Zora to productively engage with the activities of this group.     

Reporting The Women's Movement

This article examines and compares how four British and American newspapers reported the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period, 1968–1982. Through the use of both content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study reveals that despite socio-political differences, both US (The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune) and UK (The Times, Daily Mirror) newspapers used a similar range of discourses when addressing the women's movement and its members. While coverage overall can best be described as fragmented and contradictory, I argue that on the surface, there was significantly more “positive” or supportive articles on the women's movement than previous scholars have noted. However, these news stories rarely addressed the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy oppress women as a group, and often created a demarcation between “legitimate” and “de-legitimate” feminists, the latter being anyone who deviates from traditional feminine norms. Such constructions therefore were not only politically incapable of challenging women's oppression, but helped construct feminism as a dirty word, a connotation which still exists today. This paper will also address the emergence and eventual dominance of oppositional discourses, examining the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies used in both countries to rebuff the movement, its members and their goals.     

Patriarchy,Power, and Female Masculinity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of “butch” within the women's movement. The political potentials of butch in both her refusal of patriarchal constructs of femininity and her transmutation of masculinity will be explored. It will be argued that the butch lesbian threatens male power by severing the naturalized connection between masculinity and male bodies, by causing masculinity to appear “queer,” and by usurping men's roles. However, for “butch” to truly have feminist potential, it also needs to be accompanied by a feminist awareness and a rejection of aspects of masculinity that are oppressive to women. Hence, “butch feminist” need not be an oxymoron, but a strategy for challenging male domination and power.     

Women's and Men's Relative Status and Intimate Partner Violence in India

In recent years, gender‐based violence in South Asia has been of great concern to scholars and policymakers alike. This study explores the effects of women's relative resources on several dimensions of intimate partner violence in India, and tests whether economic resources allow women to “bargain” for less violence, or exacerbate the violence they face. To explore both possibilities, I use data from the 2005–06 Indian National Family Health Survey. The findings indicate that women with relatively higher education, employment, or earnings status than their spouse face more frequent and severe violence than women with lower status. Together, these findings suggest that women's superior material power bases threaten patriarchal norms and are responded to with the use of violence.     

Older Women and the Health Care System: A Time for Change

SUMMARY

In spite of women's active involvement in a woman's health care movement, the mainline health care system continues to hold tight to its androcentric focus. If women are to be subjected to a health care system that employs sexist and ageist practices, the quality of life in their later years will continue to be jeopardized. The purpose of this paper is to first, recognize the existing health care practices which limit the health care opportunities and choices of older women; and secondly, to discuss how such basic feminist principles as education, egalitarianism, empowerment, and inclusion can be used to improve an older woman's experience.     

Neoliberalism,Soul Food,and the Weight of Black Women

This article examines the representation of Black women's weight in contemporary diet advertising and African American film. It positions socioeconomic class as a significant factor that distinguishes between “good” weight and “bad” weight. I argue that there is a distinction to be made between representations of poor and working-class fat Black women and middle-class fat Black women. The increased presence of Black women as diet spokeswomen is also questioned. The social construction and filmic representation of the African American cuisine “Soul Food” and the political economic notion of neoliberalism are used as frameworks to deconstruct how notions of self-discipline, personal responsibility, and citizenship impact upon Black women's bodies. As a case study, I examine the careers of Oprah Winfrey and Gabourey Sidibe and the ways in which their weight has been differently coded based on class, the neoliberal rhetoric of “personal responsibility,” and food. I ultimately critique how contemporary media has helped to shape contemporary discourses on Black women's weight.     

Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.     

“Choice” and Feminist Praxis in Neoliberal Times

This article addresses the visual debate around a new image of the autonomous woman emerging on satellite television in West Bengal, India, a region rapidly changing under the influx of multinational finance. While this image appears to promote a revolutionary vision of choice opposing gender stratifications, it responds to the sexual anxieties of a shifting postcolonial context by reconciling women's choices with patriarchal and communalist values. To justify its ostensible “feminist” revolution, the imagery draws upon indigenous oppositional traditions of gender portrayal while flexibly utilizing opposition in the services of an inequitable market.

Even as the neoliberal canon of (free) women and (unfree) labor is narrowcast on regional-language satellite channels throughout Bengal and its diasporas, this canon is being debated through critical embodiments of women, work, and choice in oppositional-feminist cinema. I look, on the one hand, at televisual adaptations of woman-centered works by a foremost gender-activist of the anti-colonial era, Rabindranath Tagore. The adaptive canon is read in tandem with a widely popular game show on Bengali satellite television called The Earning Homemaker. On the other hand, I consider how oppositional-feminist filmmaker Aparna Sen is undoing the prevalent canon of woman's autonomy in her recent films. My point overall is to explore how we could disentangle the oppositional from dominant neo-humanist communication patterns. I argue that we must situate various depictions of women's “choice” within specific relations of power, distribution, and technologies of persuasion—considering what differs and why the differences tend to be elided.     

“It's Up to the Women”

In 1932, Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ) ran an extensive campaign, orchestrated by public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, to persuade American women to end the Great Depression through consumer purchases. Although the campaign failed, it is historically significant, illustrating how PR and magazines worked together to prescribe women's roles—a point little explored by feminist historians. While some women read the campaign hegemonically, others resisted its message, even adapting campaign language to suggest alternative plans. Foremost among these, I argue, was Eleanor Roosevelt (ER), whose 1933 book title, It's Up to the Women, is identical to the campaign's slogan. Attributed to ER alone, the slogan has been reprised in twenty-first-century Democratic presidential campaigns and used elsewhere. Patriotic shopping has also reemerged in recent crises. Although less important to feminists, FDR's (Franklin D. Roosevelt) famous “fear” line from his First Inaugural address resembles language in LHJ's campaign. Thus, the campaign can be seen not only as a site where the contested nature of women's roles was played out but one that illustrates how media language can be repurposed to shape changing cultural and political messages.     

Pregnancy,Then It's “Back To Business”

This essay theorizes the contours of a post-feminist gender regime that utilizes figures such as Beyoncé in order to hail women as self-governing subjects who make the right choices with respect to career, marriage, motherhood, and the disciplining of their bodies. As a black woman, the narrative about Beyoncé's life and choices has specific implications; it positions professional black women as ideal citizens and mothers and also seeks to reconfigure and normalize representations of the black family. The body, specifically the black female body, plays an important role in attempting to transform and normalize these representations. This essay offers one of the few examinations of black women's relationship to post-feminism. Although post-feminism has been conceptualized in ways that ignore black women, I aim to demonstrate why further consideration of black women's relationship to post-feminism is needed. It is my contention that with successful black women increasingly in the public eye, what they say about feminism and how they relate to feminist politics have important implications for how all women, but especially young black women, engage in types of activism that go beyond placing value on individualism at the expense of the collective.     

Japanese women's experiences of pharmacological pain relief in New Zealand

BackgroundIn Japan, most women manage labour pain without pharmacological interventions. However, New Zealand statistics show a high percentage of epidural use amongst Asian women. Entonox (a gas mixture of nitrous oxide and oxygen) and pethidine are also available to women in New Zealand. This article investigates how Japanese women in New Zealand respond to the use of pharmacological pain relief in labour.QuestionsThe study was guided by two research questions: (1) How do Japanese women experience and manage labour pain in New Zealand? (2) How do they feel about the use of pharmacological pain relief?MethodsThirteen Japanese women who had given birth in New Zealand were interviewed individually or in a focus group. The conversations were analysed using thematic analysis.FindingsAlthough in Japan very few women use pain relief, nine women received epidural and/or Entonox out of 11 women who experienced labour pain. The contrast between their Japanese cultural expectations and their birth experiences caused some of the women subsequent personal conflict.ConclusionJapanese women's cultural perspectives and passive attitudes were demonstrated to influence the decision-making process concerning pain relief. It was concluded that understanding Japanese cultural worldviews and approaches to the role of pain in labour would help maternity providers in their provision of appropriate care for Japanese women.     

Drinking as a Feminine Practice: Post-Feminist images of women's drinking in Swedish women's magazines

Previous feminist analyses have pointed out how the news media demonize women who drink, labelling them as irresponsible, disturbing or behaving “like men.” Popular media such as women's magazines, however, construct alternative representations, that frame women's drinking encouragingly and as part of a successful and “modern” femininity. This study carries out an analysis of fashion reports from six Swedish women's magazines, published between 1984 and 2008. It concludes that despite the fact that women's magazines create an alternative to problematizing portrayals of women who drink, this does not necessarily make them unproblematic from a feminist point of view. While the prevalence of positive and encouraging images may be interpreted as indicating a change towards more gender equal or gender neutral depictions of drinking; this article argues instead that these images should be regarded as parts of a discourse that celebrates stereotypical femininity and reproduces gender difference. As such, the present article brings new perspectives to the complex discourses that give shape to ideas about gender and alcohol in general, and women's drinking in particular.     

Hidden in Public View

This study analyzes the visual representations of women in Bulgaria from the 1950s to the 1980s, as depicted in photographs in the official daily newspaper of the communist party. The study is theoretically informed by feminist theories of media representations and engages specifically with Gaye Tuchman's idea of “symbolic annihilation,” which referred to Western media's condemnation, trivialization, and omission of women in public discourse. However, this analysis adapts Tuchman's theory to the specificities of socialist societies, where women's participation in public life was ideologically mandated. The authors propose the concept of “symbolic glorification” as a correlate to Tuchman's idea, and argue that symbolic glorification was a necessary part of ideological efforts to claim that women's participation in the labor force and political life was a sign of true emancipation. Nevertheless, the visual data reveal that certain aspects of femininity, related to motherhood and sexuality, were symbolically annihilated as a way to make female identities conform to ideological goals. The paper concludes by raising questions about the ways in which the ideologically constructed identities of women during socialism may impact on a feminist agenda after the end of the Cold War.     

Feminism and women's film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959

Feminist film criticism is widely thought to have started in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the “Images of Woman” debate associated with critics such as Marjorie Rosen provided the foundation for later developments in feminist film theory. Antonia Lant has recently claimed the immediate post-1950 period to be a barren time for female-authored publications on film and cinema. This article argues that, contrary to received wisdom, the post-war period (1945–1959) in Britain was a time when women's film criticism flourished, with writers such as Dilys Powell, C.A. Lejeune, Catherine de la Roche and E. Arnot Robertson enjoying high-profile careers. Moving beyond a simple recovery of women's “hidden histories,” this article highlights the points of connection between the post-war period and later film criticism informed by second wave feminism. Through a case study of de la Roche and Robertson this article explores how women critics in this period were similarly preoccupied with screen representations of women and women's roles within the film industry, anticipating the later concerns of Rosen and others. I argue that a cross-media focus is a productive method for generating insights into women's critical agency at this time, and conclude that women's film criticism demonstrates something of the wider shifts taking place in gender relations in British society.     

“Difficult,Messy, Nasty,and Sensational”

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.     

Positioning the self

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy.     

Predictors of Feminist Activism Among Sexual-Minority and Heterosexual College Women

Engagement in activism is related to several aspects of social development in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Therefore, it is important to examine the correlates of different forms of activism, such as feminist collective action, among all youth. However, previous research has not investigated young sexual-minority women's engagement with feminist collective action. This study examined predictors of college-aged heterosexual and sexual-minority women's commitment to and participation in feminist activism. Sexual orientation, number of years in college, social support, experiences with discrimination, and gender identity were tested as predictors of commitment to and participation in feminist activism with a sample of 280 college-aged women (173 heterosexuals and 107 sexual minorities). Similar predictors were related to both commitment to and participation in feminist activism. However, for sexual-minority women, but not heterosexual women, the number of years in college was correlated with participation in feminist activism. Young sexual-minority women reported more participation in feminist activism than did heterosexual women, even after controlling for social support, discrimination, and gender identity.     

Sexual Messages in Black and White: A discourse analysis of Essence and Cosmo

The research presented employed critical discourse analysis to examine advice columns on sex and women's sexual freedom as expressed in two popular women's magazines, Essence and Cosmopolitan, over a three-year period. Essence has a Black female audience, Cosmo a predominantly White female audience. Critical discourse analysis is concerned with language as a primary force for the production and reproduction of ideology and belief systems that come to be accepted as common sense. The study asked whether and to what extent sex talk in these two magazines mirrored tenets of sexual liberation as set forth by “second-wave feminism.” Findings showed that while both magazines reinforced women's right to sexual pleasure and to ask for what they wanted, Essence came closest to mirroring the tenets of women's liberation by advocating women's right to say no to men's bad behavior and to be their own persons. By contrast, Cosmo advised women to be innovative in exciting and keeping their men and to be more flexible in managing men's less than desirable behavior.