Mourned Choices and Grievable Lives: The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Influence in Defining the Abortion Experience in Australia Since the 1960s
This article provides a genealogy of foetocentric grief, an emotion that permeates accounts of abortion in Australia across multiple discursive sites. Foetocentric grief represents women as indelibly mourning their ‘unborn children’ after abortion. The emotion first came to prominence in anti-abortion activism of the mid-1980s. Focus on the purported consequences of abortion for women enabled anti-abortionists to respond to charges that they were unsympathetic towards women who have abortions. Foetocentric grief also transcribes the primary claim of the anti-abortion movement – that abortion entails a mother's destruction of her unborn child – onto the very experience of abortion. Since the mid-1980s, foetocentric grief has moved outside the anti-abortion movement to dominate accounts of the abortion experience in the print media as well as, surprisingly, mainstream pro-choice activism. This article maps the convergence of these trends and examines the political and regulatory effects of foetocentric grief. It argues that foetocentric grief is a culturally enforced emotion that discursively recuperates the figure of the aborting woman to normative regimes of pregnancy and femininity, where pregnant women are envisaged as already mothers to autonomous foetal-subjects.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12220
‘Poor Gordon’: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Masculine Sentimentality
The popularity of the British-born Australian poet and sportsman, Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–1870), flowered after his death. Between 1870 and 1920, he was widely extolled as an exemplar of the Australian bushman and of British imperial masculinity alike. Fans lauded Gordon as a daredevil horseman who had lived in the bush in the Australian colonies’ roaring days. Fascinatingly, though, they expressed their enthusiasm for him in sentimental terms. This article shows that sentimental expressions of devotion to Gordon were part of a distinctive form of masculine sentimentality emerging in Western culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. The proponents of this sentimentality encouraged the members of Western imperial and settler-colonial publics to sympathise with rugged bushmen such as Gordon – to collectively experience their sorrows, griefs and joys. In so doing, they helped to reinforce masculine and settler-colonial power, since they elevated the sentiments of hardy masculine types at the expense of feminine ones. In Australia, sentimental representations of Gordon also helped divert attention from the violence committed by settlers against Aboriginal peoples. Based on the insight that masculinity and sentiment were profoundly intertwined in the day, this article calls for a new way of thinking about the relationship between these two phenomena in the turn-of-the-century era.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12215
‘Intersectionality’, Socialist Feminism and Contemporary Activism: Musings by a Second-Wave Socialist Feminist
1970s socialist feminist theory in the USA, like older socialist feminisms, anticipated much of today's ‘intersectionality’ by recognising multiple forms of domination and refusing to rank them in importance. Today's intersectionality has gone further in incorporating LBGTQ values and in the term's use by many activist groups. That activist appropriation of an originally academic term, arising from critical legal feminism, illustrates a striking example of a feminist label moving outward, no doubt partly through women's studies programmes. At the same time, the concept, in both academic and activist usage, has drifted toward emphasising some aspects of domination while occluding others, especially economic inequality, and occasionally emphasising a pluralist, empiricist understanding of diversity that omits matters of power. This article proceeds by tracing the precursors to intersectionality in second-wave feminism, notably its socialist feminist stream; then considering its development in academic women's/gender studies scholarship; and finally, surveying its use by activists in recent years.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12211
Should we Abstain? Spousal Equality in Twelfth-century Byzantine Canon Law
Spousal equality was not an ideal to which medieval societies generally aspired. Discussions about social order advocated a strict hierarchical structure: the man was to be the head of the household and the master of his wife. Did this subservient state of the wife extend to all spheres of family life or was there a space where spouses could act as equals? In this article I focus on one aspect of Byzantine spousal relations: the marital bed. I argue that there was a difference between lay and clerical couples. Among the Byzantine laity, husband and wife were equally responsible for deciding whether to engage in sexual intercourse. Canon law addressed lay husbands and wives as a couple. Among the clergy, however, the husband's responsibilities towards his flock sometimes required him to decide unilaterally in favour of abstinence. According to the law, it was the cleric's duty to ensure that this happened. As such it was he who was addressed and asked to abstain from his wife. More generally, the clerical status of the husband complicated the situation and needs to be taken into account before any generalisations are made about gender inequality.
Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1111%2F1468-0424.12216