The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire Ripper case, it emphasizes how (...) in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation. (shrink)

Los procesos históricos suponen diferentes impactos a los diferentesagentes históricos. Los procesos que dieron forma al mercado capitalista neoliberalimpusieron al varón blanco heterosexual como único agente oficial de los procesos históricos.Esta imposición supuso la base para la construcción del actual sistema patriarcal.Este artículo se pregunta cómo estos procesos históricos afectaron a la mujer. Cómo laagencia femenina ha sido condicionada por el capitalismo. Este ensayo busca observarcómo los procesos de consumo y producción de masas han afectado a la construcciónde la agencia (...) femenina durante el periodo del capitalismo temprano. La conclusióneste periodo necesitó condicionar la construcción de la agencia femenina mediante sutransformación en patrones de consumo y producción que satisfagan las necesidadesdel propio sistema capitalista. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a shift in attitude among some feminists towards the practice of cosmetic surgery away from that of outright rejection. Kathy Davis, for instance, offers a guarded `defence' of the practice as a strategy that enables women to exercise a degree of control over their lives in circumstances where there are very few other opportunities for self-realization. Others, such as Kathryn Morgan, Anne Balsamo and Orlan, though highly critical of the current practice of cosmetic surgery, go even (...) further than Davis in advocating its redeployment as a tool to subvert the dominant patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. In this article I critically appraise this `rehabilitation' of cosmetic surgery, arguing, in the case of Davis, that she leaves unchallenged the social structures of inequality responsible for women's dissatisfaction with their bodies. The proposal to use cosmetic surgery as a tool of political critique is equally problematic insofar as it shares with the cosmetic industry its instrumentalization of the body as mere matter, which is almost infinitely transformable, and also effaces the economic inequalities within which such body transformations occur. (shrink)

The article confronts two issues, first the question of women and consumption and second the fashion industry as a feminized sector. In the first instance the argument is that recent scholarship on consumption has been weakened by an inattention to questions of exclusion from consumption and the production of consumption. Income differentials as well as questions of poverty have dropped off the agenda in this debate. Attention instead has been paid to the meaning systems which come into play around items (...) of consumption. This has led to a sense of political complacency as though consumption is not a problem. For the many thousands of women bringing up children at or below the poverty line it clearly is. The second part of the article takes the fashion industry as an example of a field where perspectives on both production and consumption are rarely brought together. This produces a sense of political hopelessness in relation to improving its employment practices, especially for very low paid women workers. The argument here is that greater integration and debate across the production and consumption divide could conceivably result in policies which would make this sector whose employees on a global basis are predominantly female, a better place of work. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relationship between veiled, Islamist, women and modernity in Turkey where the woman question is indeed exemplary of the tension-ridden relations between modernity and Islam. By examining the veiled women's rejection of modernity I argue that it is wrong to read Islamism as an actual questioning of modernity. Traditional Islam is not the key element in understanding the veiled women's identity; rather, at the core of the issue is the reproduction of identity under conditions of (...) modernity. First, I look at the Islamic understanding of women; second, I consider the relation of Kemalism to women, so as to understand oppositions between modernity and Islam on the woman question. Finally, the veiled women's rejection of modernity is analysed by means of taking its self-contradictions into the centre of the argument. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - particularly the work of Luce (...) Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (shrink)

The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration of favourite household animals. The emergence of the pet cemetery, towards the end of the 19th century, is a significant step in itself, but this was only (...) one element in a radical reappraisal of the place of non-human animals in human sensibility and spirituality. For some bereaved pet-owners, the old question of the immortality of animal souls was retrieved and transformed, and sustained by a raft of unorthodox theological and spiritual speculation. The significance of this late Victorian and Edwardian response to non-human animals is assessed and treated as a problem of ethics, as a counterweight to the dominant anthropocentrism of past times and ours. (shrink)

Dress serves as a discursive daily practice of gender, and this article explains the dress practices of Bosnian Muslim refugee women living in Vermont. These dress practices tend toward elaborate, carefully cultivated styles for hair, makeup, and dress. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary historical sources, the authors seek to explain the meanings and practice of these dress practices. They argue that gendered dress practices reflect agentic processes that are situated within the flow of time and are rooted (...) in relational processes that occur at the macrostructural level of history and nation and at the micro world of social interaction and lived experience. (shrink)

Ruth is one of the first examples of literary decadence in Estonian literature, a manifestation of the discourse of decadence that dominated the fin-de-siècle period. The function of this discourse was on the one hand the expression of the experience of modernity, and on the other, its critique. Just as in the majority of examples of literary decadence, Ruth is a ”studied composition”, relying more on cultural intertexts than on direct observation of the world of experience. Many of the explicit (...) or implicit allusions latent in Ruth can be traced back to the texts of writers who generated syntheses of decadent sensibility: T. Gautier, C. Baudelaire, P. Bourget, F. Nietzsche, and O. Weininger. This article focuses on traces of the idea of affirmative aesthetic decadence in the Gautier-Baudelaire tradition, and Bourget’s ambivalent treatment of decadence as these are made visible in Ruth. Ruth exhibits the idea of affirmative aesthetic decadence of the German variety, though the negative connotations of decadence come to overwhelm the positive at the end of the 19th century. Negative nuances are mediated through Bourget’s ambivalent renderings of decadence, and specifically through his model of the decadentdilettante. While Bourget admired the decadent-dilettante as a symbol of European culture’s high level of refinement, it also signals overripeness and cultural decline. The veiled opposition to the decadent-dilettante attitude to life is carried in Ruth both by the narrator and the protagonist Ruth herself. The function of the opposition is to critique both the negative concept of decadence and more broadly, an overmodernized, therefore declining Europe. (shrink)

A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin America in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one hand, and modernity and capitalism in Europe, on the other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The (...) effects of that history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations. These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating more accurate and progressive northern philosophies and histories of science as well as social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin American feminists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolonial accounts. (shrink)

This paper argues that Darwin's theory of evolution offers two modes of understanding the relation between life and human knowledge. On the one hand, Darwin can be included within a general turn to “life,” in which human self-knowledge is part of a general unfolding of increasing awareness and anthropological reflexivity; life creates an organism, man, capable of discerning the logic of organic existence. On the other hand, Darwin offers the possibility of understanding life beyond the self-maintenance of organism and, therefore, (...) beyond the rational of life's putative striving. (shrink)

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s – India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) – in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji's apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a (...) practice of history – how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period. (shrink)

A self-confessed hypochondriac, Immanuel Kant was prolific on the topic of his own corporeality, diligently recording the details of his ‘Di‰tetik’–a physical regimen intended to ensure long life. The ‘Di‰tetik’ reveals a Kantian body in which the orifices–the ways in and out of the body–are problematized, and exchange with the world of objects via these orifices is strictly regulated. The Kantian body is a ‘classic’ body in Bakhtinian terms; its ‘grotesque’ counterpart–the feminine body–is explored in a range of Enlightenment and (...) Romantic texts–philosophical, medical, sociological. The Enlightenment is a turning point in the history of gender difference, when the naturalness of incommensurable sexual difference is asserted. The Kantian body is part of this project. The motif of bodily fluids, and their transgression of corporeal boundaries, is considered within the context of an emerging consumer economy, and the changes being wrought on the ‘body politic’. (shrink)

Within the social sciences the widespread impact of the social capital concept has prompted strong critique on the part of feminists, for it is a concept which appears to reinstate a version of social worlds which for the past thirty years or more feminist social scientists have sought to problematize and move beyond. Yet do these critiques go beyond the social capital paradigm? It is the contention of this article that they do not and in particular that such critiques fail (...) to problematize the association of women with collective social goods found in the social capital literature. It will be suggested further that this association relates to the use of a dualism of instrumentality versus freedom, whereby women are overwhelmingly associated with the latter. This article therefore delineates a gendered subtext operative within the social capital debates. Recognition of this subtext should lead feminists to disengage with the social capital concept, for this is a concept whose use will always trap women in the social-historical time of industrial society. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

This contribution aims for a “corporeal reconstitution” of Sophie Taeuber’s dance performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada in 1916/17. This means that the movements from the static images informing the history of Dada art need to be re-imagined. It implies a rendering perceptible of Taeuber’s trained dancer’s body, its particular movements, and the quality of these movements. Through testimonies of contemporaries, it becomes clear that Taeuber not only dances in a costume or behind a mask but with (...) the mask, the costume and sound poems. The reconstitution of the moving body with the mask thus points at a foregrounding of the masquerade to which she is convicted as a woman. Her mimetic strategy or playful repetition of the masquerade entails a “radically new mode of relating” between human and non-human materiality. Taeuber is not only moving in between puppet and puppeteer, movement and stasis, abstraction and expressivity, performer and mask, presence and absence, but also in between feminine and masculine. The hybrid movements in her mimetic strategy disrupt the binary nature of the oppositional pairs. In dancing the perpetual movement in between dualities, through a patchwork of genres and materials, Taeuber not only playfully rebels against patriarchal discourse, but also against the dehumanizing effects of World War One violently raging through Europe. (shrink)

In the fi eld of psychology, the topics on human nature and motivation have been quite extensively discussed. These two topics are interrelated and inseparable. Any endeavor to understand man and his potentials makes it necessary for one to venture into the study of human nature. Major topics in psychology like motivation, personality, creativity, psychotherapy, mental health, etc. could be well understood with a proper understanding on human nature. In the light of this reality, what makes this research an appealing (...) and interesting one is the fact that the researchers had comparatively analyzed the ideas on human nature and motivation showcased to the world by Western and Islamic psychologies. The fact that there exist a great number of schools of thought in Western psychology, the researchers had narrowed their scope of investigation to three only. As such, they discussed the ideas on human nature and motivation as conceptualized in Psychoanalysis, Radical Behaviorism and Humanistic psychology. Upon analyzing Western theories, the researchers performed a compare and contrast analysis with ideas provided by Islamic psychology on human nature and motivation. This academic exercise was done in the hope of identifying as to whether there exist any similarity and difference between the two psychologies. Since the nature of this study was a qualitative one, the researchers conducted a library research to collect the relevant data. In analyzing the data related to the study, the researchers used the content and textual analysis methods. (shrink)