Feminist Theory recent issues

Intimate public practices: A methodological challenge

Cooper, D. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Researching the irrelevant and the invisible: Sexual diversity in the judiciary

Moran, L. J. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits

Shifting horizons: Reflections on qualitative methods

Smart, C. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

This article addresses the challenges of developing methodologies which build on the insights of early feminist research and methods, but which also incorporate some of the new innovations in sociological, qualitative research. Feminist research has emphasized the need to capture the everyday lives of women (and others) but this is not so easy once it is realized how ‘messy’ everyday life may be and that we may also not have tools adequate to the art of listening and the task of ‘story telling’. In particular there is a need to incorporate a wide range of sensibilities into the creation of feminist/sociological accounts of everyday lives. These include accounting for emotions, memories, intersubjective meanings, and other intangibles. Finally, the article argues that debates over methodologies should not stop with questions of collecting and analysing data, but must also address the problems of how to write the lives of people differently.

Open secrets: The affective cultures of organizing on Mexico's northern border

Hennessy, R. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Taking sexuality and affect as its focus, this article leads us into the uncharted terrain of ‘outlawed affects’, those unspeakable sensations that do not fall easily into established categories and yet meddle with social relations. They are in this sense ‘open secrets’. The article explores some of the challenges for feminist methodology in representing the space where affective and other needs meet in the context of the cultures of labour organizing in the factory communities on Mexico’s northern border

Feminism after measure

Adkins, L. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

This article engages the crisis of measure currently being articulated within social and cultural theory and the associated claim that this crisis should compel an embrace of methods which seek to know the heterogeneous, the multiple, the complex and the vague. Taking the rise of immaterial forms of labour and value as paradigmatic of the crisis of measure, it questions the use of the figure of a domestically labouring woman who lacks ownership of her labour to illuminate this crisis, as well as the structural equivalence currently being forced between ‘women’s work’ (especially the work of social reproduction) and productive activities. It does so with reference to the changing relationship between women and social reproduction, a changing relationship which suggests that at the heart of the crisis of measure is a restructuring of time. This article therefore adds fuel to the view that the relations of temporality are now a key ground for feminist theory.

Melancholic politics and the politics of melancholia: The Indian women's movement

Roy, S. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’.

Why do 'we' perform surgery on newborn intersexed children?: The phenomenology of the parental experience of having a child with intersex anatomies

Zeiler, K., Wickstrom, A. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Few parents-to-be consider that their child may be born with ambiguous sex. Still, parents of a newborn child with ambiguous sex are expected to make a far-reaching decision for the child: should the child be operated upon so that it has either female or male genitals? The aim of this article is to examine, phenomenologically, why parents decide to have their children undergo genital surgery when it is not necessary for the child’s physiological functions. Drawing on phenomenological work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Sara Ahmed, we examine parents’ frustration when their child’s sex is ambiguous and their experiences of the practice of medical sex assignment. We also examine parental identity work when the child has been assigned a sex and the interaction between parents and medical professionals when parents make decisions regarding surgery on their child. Furthermore, we provide a critical perspective on the surgical practice.

Book review: Katerina Kolozova, The Real and 'I': On the Limit and the Self. Skopje: Euro-Balkan Press, 2006. 114 pp. ISBN 9989--136--48--3, 10

Cooper, J. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Book review: Margret Grebowicz, ed., Gender after Lyotard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 238 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--7914--6956--9, US$24.95 (pbk)

Soriel, S. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Book review: Katie Gentile, Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival. Hove: The Analytic Press/Routledge, 2007. 210 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0--88163--438--7, {pound}26.50 (pbk)

O'Brien, R. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Forthcoming special issue of Feminist Theory 'Nonhuman Feminisms'

Hird, M. J., Roberts, C. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:25:39 PST

Feminism(s) and the politics of reproduction: Introduction to Special Issue on `Feminist Politics of Reproduction'

Gerodetti, N., Mottier, V. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:20 PDT

Foetal personhood and representations of the absent child in pregnancy loss memorialization

Keane, H. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Because mourning and memorializing a miscarriage seems to imply acceptance of foetal personhood, feminists have been reluctant to address the often traumatic but common experience of pregnancy loss. Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have argued that adopting a view of personhood as constructed and negotiated, rather than inherent, solves this dilemma and enables the development of a feminist discourse of pregnancy loss. This article aims to make a critical contribution to such a discourse by analysing representations of lost babies and children in online pregnancy loss memorials. It focuses on two genres of representation, idealized angels and medical ultrasound images. It argues that the dominance of a biological model of personhood limits the ability of both forms of representation to secure the status of memorialized children as real. However, pregnancy loss memorials do communicate the anguish of grieving parents, in part through the very unrepresentability of their loss. They also provoke a questioning of the taken for granted subject of `the child', whether imagined or real, absent or present.

Seeing and knowing: Ultrasound images in the contemporary abortion debate

Palmer, J. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Foetal images have been central to the medicalized abortion debate since the 1960s. Feminists have extensively analysed such pictures, arguing that the pregnant body is separated from the foetus and erased from view, and that the rights of women and foetuses are set in opposition. In this article I introduce the latest image in this debate, the 3D sonogram, which is widely reported as new evidence for a reduction in the gestational time limit. Through close analysis of two examples, I argue that the rhetorical use of these images can be characterized by a conflation of knowing with seeing. With the new clarity of sonograms to the untrained eye, image producers are legitimated by a discourse of public information and concerned citizens are called upon to exercise their rights to see/know. For feminist theory, this implies the need for continued analysis of the epistemology of foetal images and renewed focus on the subject position of the viewer.

From reproduction to research: Sourcing eggs, IVF and cloning in the UK

O'Riordan, K., Haran, J. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

This article provides an analysis of the relationships between IVF and therapeutic cloning, as they played out in the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority consultation of 2006: Donating Eggs for Research: Safeguarding Donors. We develop an account of current developments in IVF and cloning which foregrounds the role of mediation in structuring the discursive context in which they are constituted. We foreground the imperative of choice and the promise of cures as key features of this context. We also argue that the intercorporeal exchanges of IVF are materially restructured in relation to cloning research, despite their represented similitude in the consultation document. The discourse of choice in relation to reproductive technologies has become entrenched over the last twenty years. In relation to therapeutic cloning, it has been coupled with, and strengthened by, the discourse of cures. In examining relations between IVF and cloning with specific attention to both mediating imaginaries, and intercorporeal exchanges, we develop an analysis that displaces the rhetoric of choice and cures. This makes visible the limited subject positions available, and the limited possibilities for responding critically to the consultation. Identifying women as the gendered subjects of this consultation and placing intercorporeality at the centre of our analysis illuminates the interdependency of women undergoing IVF, cloning science and the governance of embryo research in the UK.

Popular culture and reproductive politics: Juno, Knocked Up and the enduring legacy of The Handmaid's Tale

Latimer, H. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

This article takes the recent rash of unwanted pregnancy films, such as 2007's Juno and Knocked Up, as an opportunity to revisit Margaret Atwood's influential 1985 novel, The Handmaid's Tale. It argues that the novel deals with the same themes the films evoke during a pivotal time for reproductive politics, generally, and abortion politics, specifically. It argues that the novel offers several lessons and warnings on the nature of reproductive politics that are still relevant today. These lessons are connected to how and why these films are able to `make sense' in naturalizing their heroines' choice to keep an unwanted pregnancy.

Refusing disembodiment: Abortion and the paradox of reproductive rights in contemporary Italy

Hanafin, P. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Employing insights from Italian sexual difference theory on law and rights, this article examines how both the text of the Italian Abortion Law of 1978 and its operation reveal the contradictions within liberal rights discourse on reproductive freedom. The Act itself contains traces of both Roman Catholic and liberal pluralist worldviews and has, since its introduction, been the site of conflict over competing notions of citizenship and legal identity. This article explores the impact of the Act's paradoxical nature on its operation against the background of the complex debates within the different strands of feminist theory in Italy over the question of reproductive freedom.

Fings ain't wot they used to be

Evans, M. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Teresa de Lauretis, Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. with an Introduction by Patricia White. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 320 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--252--07439--4, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN 978--0--252--03197--7, $65.00 (hbk)

Chaudhuri, S. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Krista Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organisers of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) 1904--18. Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2007. 248 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--7190--70020, {pound}55.00 (hbk)

Meyer, J. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, eds, Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. xii + 323 pp. ISBN 9780773531048, {pound}15.99 (pbk)

Sum, N.-L. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 144 pp. (ref. included). ISBN 978--0822340881, $64.95 (cloth); ISBN 978--0822341079, $18.95 (pbk)

Warner, S. L. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Fig Tree Books, 2007. 376 pp. (with index). ISBN 978--0--670--86717--2, {pound}20.00 (hbk)

Evans, M. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Gill Plain and Susan Sellers, eds, A History of Feminist Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 352 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 9780521852555, {pound}70.00 (hbk)

Regan, L. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 202 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--691--12944--0, {pound}18.95 (hbk)

Valassopoulos, A. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. 294 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--271--03301--3, $55.00/{pound}35.95 (hbk)

Turner, E. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Diane Watt, Medieval Women's Writing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 208 + viii pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--07456--3256--8, {pound}17.99 (pbk)

Rudd, G. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Book Review: Geetanjali Gangoli, Indian Feminisms: Law, Patriarchies and Violence in India. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 162 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--7546--4604--4, {pound}55.00 (hbk)

Roy, S. — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:06:21 PDT

Correction

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

The politics of love: Women's liberation and feeling differently

Hesford, V. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity are fraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains of women's `ordinary' lives during the era of the women's liberation movement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of the early women's liberationists — their attempts to bring the personal into view as the dense, affect laden, site of social reproduction — can offer us a countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the `private' domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US national public sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment — the time of women's liberation — in this one, the essay stages a comparative reading between two novels, Doris Lessing's A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and June Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter (1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, both have as their subject the dense and complex relations between political action, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction, and reading the two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both `the political' and `the personal' were contested terms, their meanings challenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in some cases, transformed.

Globalization, the `new economy' and working women: Theorizing from the New Zealand designer fashion industry

Larner, W., Molloy, M. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

This paper arises out of research on the New Zealand designer fashion industry. An unexpected success story, this export-oriented industry is dominated by women as designers, employees, wholesale and public relations agents, industry officials, fashion writers and editors, in addition to women holding more traditionally gendered roles as garment workers, tastemakers and consumers. Our analysis of the gendered globalization of the New Zealand fashion industry exposes a number of disconnections between women's positions in this industry and the literatures on globalization, clothing and fashion. We argue that the New Zealand designer fashion industry not only embodies new ways of working associated with the movement of first world women into the labour force, but its very success is underpinned by these changes. Our conclusion is that more work is needed to explicate links between globalization and first world women's entry into the labour force.

This body which is not mine: The notion of the habit body, prostitution and (dis)embodiment

Coy, M. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

This paper explores women's accounts of prostitution in terms of the lived experience of the body, drawing on life story narratives and arts images created by women in the sex industry. These narratives show that women's experiences of prostitution constitute a spectrum of (dis)embodiment that is inflected, not determined, by settings and contexts. Theoretical approaches to embodiment were sought that acknowledged tensions between violation and a sense of empowerment. Therefore, the ontology of selling sex, and associated experiences such as violence, drug use and self-harm are explored using feminist applications of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the `habit body'. A key focus is how the body is constituted by embodied experiences of abuse (e.g. the work of Parkins and of Weiss), and how women negotiate ownership of the body within commercial sex transactions. This highlights the process of repositioning the body by selling sex, in accordance with the accumulated experiences of the habit body. Thus, to borrow from Wendy Parkins, women perceive that they are acting meaningfully through the body, even when reproducing dynamics of objectification and dissociation.

Against abjection

Tyler, I. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject'. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilized Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the repetition of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing. It argues that employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This entails a critical shift from the current feminist theoretical preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality' of `encounters with the abject' to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social and political locations.

The politics of gender, witnessing, postcoloniality and trauma: Bosnian feminist trajectories

Husanovic, J. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Although the ways in which the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and politics have grown and developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last decade are largely unaccounted for in feminist scholarship, their lessons, insights and potentials are relevant for scholarship and politics that weaves through the traumatic knots of postcoloniality and biopolitics. This article looks at the politics of witnessing through a creative approach to losses and the potential politics of hope in such a context. It engages with several lines of inquiry through a dialogue of `local'/`global' feminist and postcolonial theory and practice, through subaltern lenses of transnational feminist solidarities and informed by the lessons of non-institutional public spaces of thinking, judging and acting as instances of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the field of cultural production within Bosnia. Continuously re-emerging postcolonial/biopolitical fractures, induced by the global/local political economy of capital and violence, also produce political (cultural/artistic/public) practices of witnessing which shake and reshuffle our quests for social and political transformation. Embracing them effectively is one of the most important lessons of Bosnian (postcolonial, post-war, post-communist . . .) ambivalences and forbearances. Such hopeful political navigation through injustices and injuries inflicted by global/local regimes of biopolitics and capital is fundamentally about reinvigorating the scholarship and politics of gender, witnessing, postcoloniality and trauma along creative feminist trajectories.

`To theorize in a more passionate way': Carol Lee Bacchi's diary of mothering and contemporary post/academic writing strategies

Livholts, M. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Book review: Laura Maria Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry. London: Zed Books, 2007. 268 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--1--84277--860--9, {pound}16.99 (pbk)

Poudel, M. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Book review: Janet O'Shea, At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 240 pp., 21 illustrations. ISBN 978--0--8195--6836--6, US$70 (cloth); ISBN 978--0--8195--6837--3, US$26.95 (pbk)

Katrak, K. H. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Book review: Anna van der Vleuten, The Price of Gender Equality: Member States and Governance in the European Union. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 210 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--7546--4636--5, $99.95/{pound}55.00 (hbk)

Strid, S. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

Book review: Susan Gubar, Rooms of Our Own. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 236 pp. ISBN 0--252--07379--7, {pound}11.99 (pbk)

Sheridan, S. — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:42 PDT

`I am not a woman writer': About women, literature and feminist theory today

Moi, T. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write.

Feminist heterosexual imaginaries of reproduction: Lesbian conception in feminist studies of reproductive technologies

Nordqvist, P. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Reproductive technologies, such as self-arranged donor conception, clinical donor insemination and in vitro fertilization, now have an established place in lesbian reproductive practices, providing a route to conception which separates reproduction from heterosexual intercourse. This article explores how lesbian reproduction figures within feminist studies of reproductive technologies. It critically engages with representations of reproduction and structures of sexuality in early and more recent feminist studies of reproductive technologies. Specifically, the article investigates constructions of reproduction, technology and sexuality in key ethnographic studies by Sarah Franklin, Charis Thompson and Rayna Rapp. The findings suggest that heterosexuality is foundational to, and yet invisible within, this feminist research into reproductive technologies. Endorsing Chrys Ingraham's concept of a `heterosexual imaginary', I argue that this research reproduces a heterosexual imaginary of procreation, continuously representing conception as heterosexual despite the separation of conception and heterosexual sex realizable through reproductive technology. It effectively renders lesbian reproduction inconceivable.

Gender in the making of commercial worlds: Creativity, vitalism and the practices of marketing

Cronin, A. M. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

If capitalism is being increasingly understood as performative and processual, and if these understandings are being folded into capitalism's production of itself, what place does gender have in performing the commercial world? This article argues that the significance of gender as genre or type has been overlooked in the recent literature on the performance of the market or market relations. While the role of economic theories and management practices in making markets has been examined, and the place of women in organizations has been explored, little attention has been paid to how gender as a productive process marks the creation and maintenance of market relations. Using material from a recent ethnographic study of the advertising industry, I examine how advertising practitioners incorporate vitalist understandings of market relations and of knowledge-producing activities into their practices. Framed as `creativity' and `innovation', these discursive practices perform what practitioners understand as a reproductive function in commercial life.

Regulation and rupture: Mapping tween and teenage girls' resistance to the heterosexual matrix

Renold, E., Ringrose, J. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire.

The fantasy of the global cabbage patch: Making sense of transnational adoption

Dubinsky, K. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Islamic feminism: Haleh Afshar, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case-study. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 256 pp. ISBN-10: 0333771206, ISBN-13: 978--0333771204, {pound}27.99 (pbk) Katherine Bullock, ed., Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005. 237 pp. ISBN-10: 0292706669, ISBN-13: 978--0292706668, {pound}12.99 (pbk) Azza Karam, Women, Islamisms and the State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. 304 pp. ISBN-10: 0333688171, ISBN-13: 978--0333688175, {pound}30.99 (pbk) Valentine Moghadam, ed., From Patriarchy to Empowerment. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007. 414 pp. ISBN-10: 0815631111, ISBN-13: 978--0815631118, {pound}29.40 (pbk) Haideh Moghissi, Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis. London: Zed Books, 1999. 128 pp. ISBN-10: 1856495906, ISBN-13: 978--1856495905, {pound}17.99 (pbk) Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. 192 pp. ISBN-10: 1851684638, ISBN-13: 978--1851684632, {pound}14.99 (pbk)

McDonald, L. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Feminist theory and science: Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2006. 320 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 9780745635965 (pbk) Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 272 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0--8223--3566--2 (pbk) Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004. 125 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0--8223--3365--1 (pbk)

valentine, k. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Book review: Sabine Hark, Dissidente Partizipation: Eine Diskursgeschichte des Feminismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. 457 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 3--518--29353--2, 16

Schlichter, A. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Book review: Michaele L. Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso, eds, W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 290 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 978--0--8223--4042--3, {pound}12.99

Bashevkin, S. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Book review: Elaheh Rostami Povey, Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion. London: Zed Books, 2007. 159 pp. ISBN 978--1--84277--855--5, {pound}16.99 (pbk)

Billaud, J. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Book review: Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. x + 182 pp. (incl. index). ISBN 0--8223--3690--1, {pound}14.95

Lamb, E. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST

Book review: Lisa Diedrich, Treatments: Language, Politics and the Culture of Illness. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 224 pp. (incl. index). ISBN-10: 0--8166--4698--8, ISBN-13: 978--0--8166--4698--2, {pound}14.00 (pbk)

Johnson, E. — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:50:56 PST