‘Notorious Beyond Any Other European Woman of Her Generation’: The Case of Count(ess) Sarolta/Sándor Vay

The paper investigates the curious case of the Hungarian Count(ess) Sarolta/Sándor Vay, journalist and writer, but, above all, a notorious gender bender in late nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The article examines her case in the context of the history of European cross-dressing and of narrative transvestism. The author argues that nineteenth-century dandyism provided an effective cultural framework for Vay’s contemporaries to accept her unconventional presence in fin-de-siècle Hungarian society. Moreover, she claims that Vay’s narrative transvestism may also be construed within the cultural phenomenon of dandyism, as her writing practices prove to be further instruments for her self-fashioning. Finally, she concludes that Vay’s gender performance and narrative transvestism become illustrative examples of instances that both frame and confuse accepted cultural patterns, destabilize gender binarism, and participate in its maintenance.     

On my own terms

Abstract

Carol Conaway prepared this excerpt from her political memoir-in-progress. She examines her experiences as an African American lesbian living her dream of becoming a Jew. The work focuses on how she navigated her initial naïveté about the prejudices she encountered in response to her combination of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and mental illness. Conaway’s work to co-found a community of lesbian and gay Jews in Boston marked a defining moment in her history.     

Mothers, daughters and midlife (self)-discoveries: Gender and aging in the Amanda Cross' Kate Fansler series

In the same way that many aspects of gender cannot be understood aside from their relationship to race, class, culture, nationality and/or sexuality, the interactions between gender and aging constitute an interesting field for academic research, without which we cannot gain full insight into the complex and multi-faceted nature of gender studies. Although the American writer and Columbia professor Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926-2003) is more widely known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction in which she asserted her long-standing commitment to feminism, while she also challenged established notions on women and aging and advocated for a reassessment of those negative views. To my mind, the Kate Fansler novels became an instrument to reach a massive audience of female readers who might not have read her non-fiction, but who were perhaps finding it difficult to reach fulfillment as women under patriarchy, especially upon reaching middle age. Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis and her later fiction as substantiation to my argument, this paper will try to reveal the ways in which Heilbrun's seemingly more superficial and much more commercial mystery novels as Amanda Cross were used a catalyst that informed her feminist principles while vindicating the need to rethink about issues concerning literary representations of mature women and cultural stereotypes about motherhood.     

Passing and Stigma Management: The Case of the Transsexual

The nature of the transsexual's stigma is such that she can pass as a natural female with little difficulty if she chooses to. At the same time, transsexuals do not once and for all become women after their conversion operation. Their ambiguous gender implies at least a double identity: some of the feminized transsexual's social circles remain associated with her former (male) gender, while some center around her new identity. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the transsexual is ongoingly passing than that she has passed. This led to the formulation of two hypotheses: (1) transsexuals compartmentalize their social circles to a greater extent than normals, and (2) transsexuals experience greater incompatibility of their social circles than normals. To operationalize social circles, the family and present friends were chosen. In terms of this operationalization, the findings support the first hypothesis but not the second. It is argued that transsexuals do not experience unusual incompatibility between family and friends because they either minimize contacts with the former, or do so with the latter, or segregate the two. In the final analysis, the transsexual's double identity is not simply a double gender identity, but also the product of participation in the radically different cultures and lifestyles of her rural background on the one hand and her present urban underworld environment on the other.     

Transforming Sex: An Interview with Joanne Meyerowitz,Ph.D. Author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States

Christine Jorgensen's widely publicized sex reassignment surgery in 1952 brought transsexualism to worldwide attention and fostered medical interest in transsexualism. Joanne Meyerowitz has traced the history of Jorgensen's personal odyssey, the medical history of transsexualism, and the broader impact of transsexualism on United States culture. In this interview, Meyerowitz discusses how she came to this project and some of its theoretical and methodological challenges. Finally, she sets her historical work in the context of contemporary gender and transgender politics.     

‘No More Sarah Hicks’: A Reconfiguration of Antebellum Time and Space for an Elite White Woman

This article considers the life of Sarah Hicks, a young middle class woman born and raised in the cultural milieu of antebellum New York, who, in 1853, married Benjamin F. Williams, a physician and slaveholder from Greene County North Carolina. The article traces her literal journey across the Mason–Dixon line where she encountered southern ways of life that were, in the first instance, bewildering to her. Gender forms the primary focus of the article as Sarah moved from a northern gender ideal of true womanhood to that of the plantation mistress. Her search for a sense of belonging as a southerner suggests a period of transition in her life as she reconfigured what it meant to a woman, wife, and mother in the antebellum world of the slaveholding South.     

Gender relations,development practice and "culture"

Most development practitioners have the following preconceived notions about gender and culture: 1) that gender relations are equated with the most intimate aspects of society; 2) that culture and tradition are immutable; 3) that there is no independent resistance to subordination within the culture; and 4) that religion is culture. These notions interfere with work on developing equitable gender relations and complicate efforts to allocate resources in ways that redress the imbalance of power between men and women. The validity of these notions can be tested by analyzing an experience the author had in 1984 when she published a book on women and development in India. On a publicity tour in Liverpool, England, she addressed an audience composed largely of men from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This audience attacked her book and defended an idealized version of the position of women in the culture of South Asia. They accused the author of being a traitor to her own culture and of being Westernized. A Pakistani woman member of the audience, however, thanked the author for her presentation and reported that she was working with Asian women facing domestic violence. The men understood the cultural identity of South Asia as being composed of identical families dedicated to mutual interest, love, and cooperation. However, this family unit requires the subsuming of women's interests. This myth of the family ignores real life experiences of women who suffer abuse and ignores the fact that the notion of "family" is constantly undergoing change. Development practitioners should use culture as a way of opening up intractable areas of gender relations rather than regarding it as a dead-end which prevents work towards equitable gender relations. A new definition of "cultural sensitivity" would be to acknowledge that contests surround the significance attached by a society to different aspects of social constraints and that these contests often represent challenges to hierarchical social relations.     

NGOs,gender, culture and multiculturalism: a Zimbabwean view

An African woman working for Oxfam in Zimbabwe considers the role of gender injustice in her own work and life. She has encountered discrimination among her colleagues, and she was introduced to the concept that women are inferior when she was in elementary school. When she worked as a nurse, she learned that oppression takes many forms and is maintained by social systems. Consequently, it is almost impossible to counter single-handed. Therefore, she undertook a program of study in adult education which emphasizes working within democratic frameworks in programs based on the concerns of the learners. This led her to realize that it is accepted that women are globally subordinate and that subordination is rooted in customs. Many women will, therefore, defend the injustice in their own lives by stating that it is "cultural." Whereas Northern activists may condemn a custom as barbaric and requiring immediate change, cultural change must progress gradually in order to give women the impetus to keep what is positive and reject what is negative in their cultures. This process of change can be fostered by popular education and by providing exposure to women who can act as role models. Popular education also takes multiculturalism into account and reveals the necessity to trust development workers. A multi-faceted approach is needed in order to challenge culture and promote social change.     

The Suffering Mother and the Miserable Son: Organizing Women and Organizing Women's Writing

This paper examines the contribution of the writing of Julia Kristeva (1941– ) to post‐structuralist ideas about gender in organizations. In particular, it deals with the relationship between her writing and the disciplining of text and, by a parallel movement, with her writings about the body and the regulation of the body. However, it must be said that her writings are ‘extremely difficult and complex, and certainly intimidating and inaccessible to the non‐specialist’ (Lechte 1990, p. 2) but, despite this, Kristeva has come to be considered one of the foremost contemporary French thinkers and her writings have exerted a significant influence on both feminism and postmodernist ideas. Ironically, Kristeva is neither French by birth nor a feminist in the sense that the term is generally understood. Indeed, she has been highly critical of those feminists whom she regards as seeking ‘phallic power’ (Kristeva 1980, p. 208).     

Joan Acker's influence on Management and Organization Studies: Review,analysis and directions for the future

This paper pays tribute to Joan Acker by discussing how her ideas have been utilized in Management and Organization Studies (MOS). Through a systematic review of journal articles citing Acker's scholarship from 2000 to 2017 (September), we show how recent scholarship has used Acker to advance discussions in the field and examine how her work was received, and which promises made by her work are still to be met. We identify avenues to carry her legacy forward with a view to realizing the transformative goal she posed as central to meaningful change in social, political and economic life through scholarship in the field of gender and organizations.     

Resistance Is Not Futile: Liberating Captain Janeway from the Masculine‐Feminine Dualism of Leadership

相似文献   

Revisiting Joan Acker's work with the support of Joan Acker

This article is a personal tribute to working with Joan Acker. I worked with Joan in 2012, helping to edit her own thoughts and reflection on how other academics evaluate and used her own theorizing, specifically her seminal work on the gender substructure and inequality regimes. However, while this article is a tribute to Joan, her work and her thinking; it is also a personal thank you to someone I will miss for her generosity and also her activism in challenging inequalities in organizations and beyond. She continues to inspire me and hopefully others to challenge for social justice. In her 80s, Joan remained committed to addressing inequalities in social relations and how these were experienced within a dynamic social and work environment. During our collaboration, she called upon academics to put theory into practice to help address visible and invisible inequalities in organizational processes. This article is inspired by that experience and it will reveal Joan's views about her own, and other academics, theorizing of her two key concepts: the gender substructure of organizations and inequality regimes in organizations and the overlap with intersectionality. This article will offer a unique opportunity to gain insight into Joan's thinking as an academic sociologist as well as a feminist activist thereby uniting Joan as a person with her concepts.     

Integrating feminist and sociological thought: The life and work of helena Znaniecka Lopata

This work is a biographical essay on the academic career of Helena Znaniecka Lopata, a noted sociologist in her own right and the daughter of Florian Znaniecki, a principal contributor to qualitative and humanistic sociology. Lopata’s story documents the difficulties of establishing a career in a social climate that did not place high value on women beyond their wife and mothering roles. Once she defied her cultural expectations, she also had to overcome the shadow of her father’s legacy and, finally, she had to find acceptance for doing research on women’s everyday life experiences. Lopata’s work provides important insights into the sociological study of social roles and of gender as a structural component of stratified social systems. She has published articles on the women’s movement, politics and the family, and the abortion controversy. Her book,Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism, is forthcoming from Unwin Hyman. A version of this paper was presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA.     

Feeling Northern: ‘heroic women’ in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014—)

This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 50s, early 60s: they have themes of escape, they use location to say something about their characters and they take viewers on an emotional journey that is related to the social conditions they inhabit. And yet, she is also putting women, who were often on the periphery of social drama, in the centre. Wainwright takes her viewers on a journey that begins with the anger and injustice resonant with the male protagonists of social realism, but as women, this anger and injustice is worked through in terms of the family and eventually leads to a greater sense of commitment to community and the place she comes from, which, in Wainwright’s work, is the North. In so doing, she expands the genre and gives it a female voice. She offers us a sense of what ‘feeling’ Northern is to women, as well as men. Additionally, she is a screenwriter who is speaking from the position of the working-class North; she is intimate to these communities, not a ‘detached observer.’ And yet, despite these inroads, her work has only recently received praise from the British television Industry.     

White lies: Amelia E. Johnson's Sunday School fiction and the politics of racelessness

Abstract

This article reevaluates the cultural significance and literary complexity of the Sunday School novels published by Amelia E. Johnson during the 'Black Woman's Era'. The critical recovery of this lesser-known African American woman writer and editor focuses on her cultural activism and on the fictional strategies she deployed to challenge the limitations imposed by a white-dominated audience and publishing industry, as well as by the religious orthodoxy promoted by her denominational publishers. Problematizing the critical discourse that opposes her confrontational non-fiction writing to her racially indeterminate fiction, the article foregrounds Johnson's critique of gender, class and racial inequalities, her experimentation with narrative conventions, and her growing sense of disillusionment in the face of unrelenting discrimination, showing how Johnson's writing career illuminates the broader trends of African American women's literature at the turn into the 20th century.     

Imagining a Life

ABSTRACT

Born in Ohio in 1876 to wealthy parents, Natalie Clifford Barney is today better known for the freedom of her lesbian life-style than for her writing. Nevertheless, she was a serious writer, and consciously engaged in writing from a specifically lesbian point of view. With her lover Renée Vivien, she attempted to revive the cult of Sappho, and thus to revitalize a lost lesbian literary tradition. Through her weekly salon, Barney encouraged women writers, serving as a mentor and muse, and often as a lover. She enjoyed enduring friendships with many well-known women and men of letters, such as Gertrude Stein, Remy de Gourmont, Colette, and Dolly Wilde. Fictional characters based on Barney appear in novels by Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Liane de Pougy, Djuna Barnes, and Radclyffe Hall. Barney's own writing consists of one novel (The One Who Is Legion, an eccentric meditation on gender and personality); a few collections of plays, poetry, and “portraits” of women; several volumes of memoirs; and two major volumes of “pensées,” or aphorisms, in which she comments on society, politics, and sexuality using a variety of urbane personae. Natalie Barney's work deserves more recognition than it has received, and her life still can serve as a model of self-creation uninhibitied by social strictures.     

Paulo Freire in the Composition Classroom

The composition classroom in which students can relate and assess their attitudes and suppositions about sexuality and gender through building on the narrative of their lives, is vital to transforming homophobic attitudes and social structures. Paulo Freire's theories of transformative education and his concept ofpraxishelp to create this classroom. The author discusses how she createspraxisin her classrooms, which she believes is essential to social, legal, and political change: to consolidating and expanding increased equity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, indeed to all marginalized peoples.     

Young women who underwent induced abortion

Premarital sex is becoming increasingly more common in China. As a result, there is a greater need for pregnancy termination, often in very young women. This paper presents case vignettes of 4 Chinese women who were forced, by a variety of circumstances, to undergo induced abortion. C, a 23-year-old shop assistant, was planning marriage and had obtained housing when she discovered she was pregnant. However, her shop manager, whose sexual advances she had spurned, refused to give her a letter of reccommendation for a marriage certificate. M came from the countryside to Shanghai, hoping that through her work as a maid, she would be able to amass modern possessions such as a television and stereo. When this proved impossible on her wage of 40 yuan/month, she engaged in prostitution for 10 yuan/night and did not even know the name of the man who impregnated her. W, a 13-year-old aspiring actress, found that having sexual relations with the director of her theater troupe was the only way to get a leading role. She won the role, but was unable to perform due to her pregnancy. B, a college woman, planned to marry when she learned she was pregnant but broke off the relationship when she discovered the extent of her financee's possessiveness. She became engaged to another man, but he rejected her when she revealed that she was not a virgin. These vignettes demonstrate the extent to which modernization has placed Chinese women in complex psychological situations as they struggle to liberate themselves from traditionalism.     

Challenging cultural constraints: a personal testimony

DISHA is one of the oldest Oxfam project partners in Uttar Pradesh, India. DISHA works with rural women and rope-makers; it encourages village-level women's organizations to fight against obstacles to women's empowerment and to institute income-producing activities; and it provides legal, educational, and health care services. In this article, a Muslim woman tells the story of her involvement with DISHA and how that involvement gave her the courage to reject the restrictions of purdah and of the wearing of the bourkha. This woman was married at age 13. She suffered ill treatment at the house of her in-laws and returned to her father's home with her 3 daughters. Her husband eventually joined her at her father's house. She was approached by a coordinator of DISHA and asked to apply for a job. She was offered the job, which she accepted. When she started going into the villages, she felt that the restrictive dress of the bourkha interfered with her ability to work. With the permission of her father and her husband, she set aside the bourkha. She had to endure criticism and censure for this action, but eventually people have been won over to her position as they have seen the positive results of her work on behalf of society. After having 5 daughters, she finally had a son. Now she is determined that her daughters will never wear the bourkha, even if they must remain single as a result of this resolve. She feels that DISHA has given her the power to overcome oppression in her own life, in the life of her family, and in society.     

用中国语言打造创意饰品

出身于艺术之家的张沙娃,从小就接触各类艺术,这样的经历陶冶了她的性情,也赋予她对艺术的敏锐审美嗅觉。2005年她和好友方海燕共同开办了一家原创首饰小店并创立“SU素”品牌,如今她们已在全国设立多家代理店并拓展到海外市场。