Este artículo analiza los cambios que se produjeron en el estatus legal de las esclavas (yawari) con la introducción y expansión del islam entre los árabes. El autor analiza tanto las causas religiosas como las debidas a factores históricos y sociales: cambio en los criterios del reparto del botín de guerra, en el trato y uso de las prisioneras de guerra, introducción del concepto de umm al-walad, etc. Igualmente, se estudia la repercusión social que tuvieron estos cambios para las esclavas (...) y para las familias a las que pertenecían. (shrink)

There is an imbalance of gender roles in everyone's favorite space saga, with the vast majority of characters played by males while the female parts are minimized at nearly every turn. But the underlying problem of womanhood in Star Wars might be even more insidious than Darth Sidious himself. This chapter explains why it is difficult to embrace a strong female identity anywhere, let alone in the midst of intergalactic war. It analyzes whether the women in Star Wars (...) have what it takes to bring feminism to the Force. While Princess Leia and Queen Amidala are instantly recognizable figures in popular culture, the question arises whether they represent women positively. While Leia and Padmé are typically recognized as the feminist icons of Star Wars, they are not all the films have to offer. The women of Star Wars offer just as much as any of the individual male characters. (shrink)

Sex determination offers an opportunity to address many classic questions of developmental biology. In addition, because sex determination evolves rapidly, it offers an opportunity to investigate the evolution of genetic hierarchies. Sex determination in Drosophila melanogaster is controlled by the master regulatory gene, Sex lethal (Sxl). DmSxl controls the alternative splicing of a downstream gene, transformer (tra), which acts with tra2 to control alternative splicing of doublesex (dsx). DmSxl also controls its own splicing, creating an autoregulatory feedback loop that ensures (...) expression of Sxl in females, but not males. A recent paper1 has shown that in the dipteran Ceratitis capitata later (downstream) steps in the regulatory hierarchy are conserved, while earlier (upstream) steps are not. Cctra is regulated by alternative splicing and apparently controls the alternative splicing of Ccdsx. However, Cctra is not regulated by CcSxl. Instead it appears to autoregulate in a manner similar to the autoregulation seen with DmSxl. BioEssays 25:1–4, 2003. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June (...) Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

This essay examines Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in light of new archival findings on the medical practices of Dr. James Norcom (Dr. Flint in the narrative). While critics have sharply defined the feminist politics of Jacobs’s sexual victimization and resistance, they have overlooked her medical experience in slavery and her participation in reform after escape. I argue that Jacobs uses the rhetoric of a woman-led health reform movement underway during the 1850s to persuade (...) her readers to end slavery. This essay reconstructs both contexts, revealing that Jacobs links enslaved women’s physical and sexual vulnerability with her female readers’ fears of male doctors’ threats to modesty and of their standard bleed-and-purge treatments. Jacobs illustrates that slavery damages women’s health as much as heroic medicine, and thus merits the political activism of her readers. Specifically, Jacobs dramatizes her conflicts with the rapacious physician-master at moments that are crucial to women’s health: marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Ultimately, this essay advances a new understanding of the role of health reform in social change: it galvanized other movements such as women’s rights and abolition, particularly around issues of bodily autonomy for women and African Americans. (shrink)

In her extant poetry, Sappho uses fourteen female personal names, four of which are not attested elsewhere. The essay is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of all of them. The results challenge the opinion, still prevailing in scholarship today, that Sappho’s companions were adolescent girls forming an educational or initiatory group, led by the poetess, that prepared them for respectable marriages. As a matter of fact, the female proper names in Sappho belong to four categories: (...) ethnics, abstract nouns, nicknames and mythological names. According to the onomastic conventions of ancient Greece, names of all these categories typically denote females as slaves and courtesans, at least until the Hellenistic period. Thus it is argued that Sappho’s nomenclature creates a ‘reality effect’, implying furthermore that her use of the term hetairai - and likewise of kalai and philai - could also point to the status of courtesans in the technical sense. This best fits the emphasis put on female beauty, seductiveness and musical skills, but also on invective and rivalry. Under the auspices of Aphrodite and from a female perspective, Sappho’s poems feature erotic experiences with lovers of both sexes as well as the reflection of those loves’ vicissitudes. The world imagined and displayed in her songs would therefore be mainly related to the symposion as the dominating realm of archaic poetry. This is how Sappho’s work was actually received in antiquity. (shrink)

Vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF) was a common ailment among American women in the 19th century. Prior to that time, no successful surgery had been developed for the cure of this condition until Dr J Marion Sims perfected a successful surgical technique in 1849. Dr Sims used female slaves as research subjects over a four-year period of experimentation (1845-1849). This paper discusses the controversy surrounding his use of powerless women and whether his actions were acceptable during that historical period.

The article offers a fundamental comparison between a passage in the dialogue of Methodius of Olympus calles De libero arbitrio, and one in the Hexaemeron of George of Pisidia. The starting point is represented by a description of the stormy sea, contained in the De libero arbitrio. After a poetical scene full of epical elements , Methodius gives us an original representation of the sea: as the servant can't refuse to obey his master and mumbles by himself, so the sea (...) has to restrain its anger and remain in its limits, even if it wants to be free. According to Job 38.11, it is forced to sacrifice its will, because there is a divine power that governs the universe. This passage may have influenced the composition of George of Pisidia. In fact, in his Hexaemeron the poet has come to personify the sea, first of all, with the image of a fugitive slave, then with a Bacchante who, taken by an impulse, wishes to go beyond the limits, and finally, with a female slave who is dragged away; this is created to support the conception that nature, in spite of natural impulse, is not independent and free, but is governed by God. Even if George of Pisidia inserts in his scene more details, the comparison of the sea with human subjects and the impossibility for it to be free refer to Methodius' passage. That the poet knew Methodius' writings is confirmed by one of his epigrams, in which he praises the bearing of the style of Methodius' works, based on evident lines of reasoning and divine inspiration. (shrink)

On 1 July, 1926, Express Wieczorny Ilustrowany [The Illustrated Evening Express] began printing the episodic novel Białe niewolnice [White Female Slaves] by Jan Teodor Grzechota. Twelve days later, the newspaper published an article in which it informed that the printing of the novel was suspended, because the work turned out to be a plagiarism of a novel with the same title by the Scandinavian writer Elizabeth Schoyen. The Jan Teodor Grzechota pseudonym stood for a well-known Łódź-based poet – (...) Mieczysław Braun. The subject of the plagiarism was an extremely popular novel, whose numerous trans- lations appeared in Polish in separate book editions several times in the 1920s and 1930s. The popularity of the motif of human trafficking might have proved itself, as the motif was also used at that time by Polish and European cinematography and theatre. A careful analysis of both works shows that Brown copied the content of Shonyen’s novel almost exactly, i.e. the plot, the characters, and the details. The Polish writer added several initial episodes of the novel in order to set the plot in the reality of Lodz, which was one of the determinants of the poetics of the seg- mental novel. It is probable that the only punishment Braun suffered was public critique of his shameful act, since copyright regulations were not yet in place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pyrrhus Perplex: A Superficial View of Mimesis Andrew J. McKenna Loyola University Chicago In the interest of knowledge conveyed as experience, a teacher of literature likes to begin with a story: A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone; he turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious (...) for him to give up. So he begins to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it. This exquisite little parable from René Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel (176) awaits correlation with Kafka ("Before the Law"), but it can also remind us ofthe passionate imbroglio we find in Racine's Andromaque. I will dwell on the stage play on the assumption that we are even more confused about love than about legal affairs. The play embodies an essential paradox by dramatizing relations in a way that is contrary to our normal expectations of order and conduct: Mais parmi ces périls où je cours pour vous plaire, Me refuseriez-vous un regard moins sévère? (I.iv) (But among the perils I risk to please you, Would you refuse me a gaze less severe?) This is not a vassal or a servant appealing to his master, but a sovereign, Pyrrhus, appealing to his captive female slave, Andromache. Our routine categories are turned upside down. 32Andrew J. McKenna Pyrrhus has everything going for him: he is the son ofAchilles, known to his world (and ours) as the world's greatest warrior, and after his conquest of Troy he is betrothed to Hermione, daughter of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman. There is no matter for tragedy in this, a happy conclusion to the Trojan war. But Pyrrhus spurns Hermione in amorous pursuit of Andromache, whom he counts among plunder of the city he has destroyed. She is the widow of Hector whom his father has slain, which makes her the last person in the world disposed to favor his suit. Andromache is very like the stone which is too heavy to lift, for all the leverage Pyrrhus exercises by threatening to deliver her son Astyanax for slaughter by the still vengeful Greeks. And Racine makes us understand that it is not in spite of Andromache 's resistance to his appeals butjust because ofthem that Pyrrhus wastes his life trying to move her. The treasure that Pyrrhus pursues, which as the son of Achilles he has no choice but to pursue, is "la gloire," the recognized and incommensurate superiority over other mortals. Yet he describes himself plaintively to Andromache as "Vaincu, chargé de fers, de regrets consumé" (vanquished, in chains, tormented by regret). For four acts of the play Pyrrhus mostly cultivates "enslavement, failure, and shame," which is how Girard describes the masochist in the parable he invented to depict him, and in the fifth act he is slain by his Greek allies at the jealous instigation of Hermione, who then stabs herself over his body. Orestes, who lead the Greeks to the assault in amorous obedience to Hermione, goes insane. The quest for glory is a recipe for disaster. A masochist is someone whom we may describe as preferring pain to pleasure, failure to success, and when I review Pyrrhus's conduct with students, they never fail to arrive at this diagnosis. Then the task is to unpack this reductive term, which since Freud has served to label a clinical perversion. In my experience, this task is more successfully accomplished with undergraduate students, who are likely to seek an explanation in terms of the information at hand, if only because they are too distracted, too harried to do otherwise. Graduate students, on the other hand, are committed to advanced professional research, which in literature departments typically sends them in quest of the mythological roots of such a story, and no less often favors the kinds of explanations we find in Freudian psychoanalysis. I take it as a measure of the intellectual confusion of our times that we encourage... (shrink)

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters—the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16—are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, (...) classical texts, and images of enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature. (shrink)

Slavery is as old as human history and is a product of established cultures. To gain profit from captives resulted in slave trade and exploit them as labor force. Although ancient Turks took advantage of slaves, the conditions of Turkish nomadic steppe culture did not allow slavery become institutionalised. During Islamization of Turks, Turkistan witnessed one of the most successful periods of the slave trade because of raids against non-Muslim Turks by Samanids and Muslim Turks. Muslim travellers of X (...) and XI th century emphasize frequently the importance of the Turkish slave trade and its network. Turkish jawari (singular: jariya, an Arabic word, means concubine, female slave and housemaid) were the most demanded in Muslim countries in Turkestan and Near East due to their beauty, which the Muslim travelers mention quite frequently. Their beauty was reflected in epics like the stories of Dede Korkut and Shahnama as well. Turks used a few Turkish and Chinese origin words to mean jariya. Mahmud al-Kaşgari recorded the terms related to jariya in his book, Divan al-Lugat al-Turk. The meaning of some of these words have changed over time but the women referred to by these terms were generally housemaids in family life. All kind of jariya had opportunities such as marriage, being treated like a member of the family and being emancipated. My aim in this study is to address perception and interpretation of jariya and certain practices related to them in Turkish folk culture in the period of Islamization. (shrink)

The basic resources of the Islamic Society are generally the Qur'an, the Sunnah, the mind, science and culture. The Islamic society that emerged with the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 was the beginning of a new civilization. This civilization has created a society based on the unity of belief, which goes beyond the principles of language, color, race, geography, blood ties and nationality. According to the French-born Muslim philosopher Roger Garaudy, this society had a very different, (...) universal and transcendent character than the previous ones. Because the principles of the Arab society from which the prophet came, on the contrary, were based on the principles of tribe, cognate and nationality. While this society was based on the rich-poor, male-female, slave-master and black-white distinctions, the Islamic society abolished all these distinctions and was based on the principles of equality, justice, right, law and piety. The purpose of this society, which is the dual aspect of the Islamic society, which is based on the material and spiritual aspects of the Islamic religion, which is based on happiness in both the world and the hereafter, is to order goodness and prevent evil. Thus, the civilization in question both strengthened its own social structure and contributed to world peace. Garaudy opposes those who say that the Islamic civilization is not original but a product of collection and imitation, and says that this civilization is original and noble and its source is based on revelation. It is a region where great civilizations that left their mark on history such as Sassanid, Byzantine, Mesopotamian, African, Indian and Chinese civilizations were influential in the geography where Islamic civilization spread. While Garaudy attributes the reasons for the collapse of this great civilization, which dominated three continents, to the loss of its lively and dynamic character, he also lists some other reasons. He stated that the most important of these are sectarian bigotry and Muslims' distancing from understanding the Qur'an. According to him, the Qur'an is not a book that addresses only the seventh century. He says that the Qur'an addresses every age on its own terms. During the periods when this address of the divine revelation was fully understood, the Islamic society saw peaks in many areas. For example, during the Andalusian Umayyads, Islamic civilization rose to the position of the most developed country in the world. But when it moved away from its main sources, the decline started and the Islamic civilization went into a collapse. (shrink)

The following article analyzes two novels, published recently by a new, powerful voice in Irish fiction, Lisa McInerney: her critically acclaimed debut The Glorious Heresies (2015) and its continuation The Blood Miracles (2017). McInerney’s works can be distinguished by the crucial qualities of the Irish Noir genre. The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles are presented from the perspective of a middle-aged “right-rogue” heroine, Maureen Phelan. Due to her violent and law-breaking revenge activities, such as burning down the institutions signifying (...) Irishwomen’s oppression (i.e. the church and a former brothel) and committing an involuntary murder, Maureen remains a multi-dimensional rogue character, not easily definable or even identifiable. The focal character’s narrative operates around the abuse of unmarried, young Irish mothers of previous generations who were coerced to give up their “illegitimate” children for adoption and led a solitary existence away from them. The article examines other “options” available to “fallen women” (especially unmarried mothers) in Ireland in the mid-twenty century, such as the Magdalene Laundries based on female slave work, and sending children born “out of wedlock” abroad, or to Mother and Baby Homes with high death-rates. Maureen’s rage and her need for retaliation speak for Irish women who, due to the Church-governed moral code, were held in contempt both by their families and religious authorities. As a representative of the Irish noir genre, McInerney’s fiction depicts the narrative of “rogue” Irish motherhood in a non-apologetic, ironic, irreverent and vengeful manner. (shrink)

This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And (...) through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the métier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole. (shrink)

Aux périodes archaïques et classiques, les femmes grecques pourvoyaient des soins aux moments les plus importants de la vie, comme la naissance et la mort : pourtant ce n’est pas ce care qu’a mis en avant l’historiographie de la médecine, mais bien le cure masculin des médecins hippocratiques. À rebours, cet article met en avant ce care féminin. Fondée sur les documents textuels, épigraphiques et iconographiques, l’étude aborde la figure d’Hécamède, femme pourvoyeuse de soins efficaces mais non techniques aux guerriers (...) de l’Iliade d’Homère. La deuxième partie analyse le travail de care invisible et dévalué des femmes libres et esclaves au sein de l’oikos. Le soin des malades, des enfants et des vieilles personnes y échoit aux femmes adultes. Une troisième partie s’intéresse aux soignantes aux fortes compétences techniques parfois rémunérées, à mi-chemin entre care et cure : sages-femmes et femmes médecins de la période classique, jamais très éloignées du care puisque spécialisées dans les soins d’entretien de la vie : accouchement, soin des enfants et des femmes. (shrink)

First published in 1991, this book -- through the examination of ancient Greek literary, philosophical and legal texts -- analyses how the Athenian torture of slaves emerged from and reinforced the concept of truth as something hidden in the human body. It discusses the tradition of understanding truth as something that is generally concealed and the ideas of 'secret space' in both the female body and the Greek temple. This philosophy and practice is related to Greek views of (...) the 'Other' (women and outsiders) and considers the role of torture in distinguishing slave and free in ancient Athens. A wide range of perspectives -- from Plato to Sartre -- are employed to examine the subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Image and SilenceGiorgio AgambenTranslated by Leland de la Durantaye (bio)[End Page 94]In the Roman pantheon there is a goddess named Angerona, represented with her mouth bound and sealed (ore obligato signatoque).1 Her finger is raised to her lips as if to command silence. Scholars claim that she represents, in the context of pagan mystery cults, the power of silence, although there is no consensus among them as to how (...) to understand this power. Etymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, means “to close the mouth, to silence.” At the beginning of the sacred rites in Eleusis a herald “commanded silence” (epittatei tēn siōpen). It is said that that the initiates into these Eleusinian mysteries were required to maintain absolute silence concerning what they had seen and heard during their initiation. Our question is how to understand this silence. Was it a prohibition aimed at keeping a secret doctrine from the uninitiated? Or did it concern, instead, something truly impossible to say?To begin we might ask what sense there might have been in the obligation to remain silent given that it was possible for anyone—including slaves, and thus, potentially, the entire population of Athens—to be initiated into the mysteries. In his early work, “On Philosophy,” Aristotle affirmed that, “the initiates do not need to learn something (mathein ti), but, instead, to be disposed to something, to experience and to undergo something (pathein kai diatethēnai).”2 It would therefore be possible that in the ancient mystery cults the initiate did not learn a doctrine that could be expressed in words (yet had to remain secret), but, instead, experienced something essentially silent, something impossible to say. “A great awe in face of the gods,” we read in the Homeric ode to Demeter, “silences the voice.”3The impossibility of speaking—and the power of silence—has two forms, one joyful and the other disturbing. In myth muteness is often associated with rape. The Romans tell the story of Lara who was punished for her inclination to gossip by being rendered mute and who was then raped in a sacred wood by Mercury (who took advantage of her impossibility of speaking). Before being transformed into a swallow Philomela was raped by Tereus, who cut off her tongue to prevent her from recounting his misdeed. Persephone, raped, kidnapped, and conducted to Hades, remained there silent as the dead. In every one of these cases silence is the painful experience of a privation of speech, of being unable to say what one wishes to say.In Gnostic mythology, the preexisting, eternal, uncreated God contains within himself a female figure which is his silence, Sigē. From his union with Silence Thought is born. “Sigē,” we read in a Valentinian text, “is the mother of all the beings that have emerged from the Abyss. He who has failed to say the unsayable has silenced it; he who was understood the unsayable, has declared it unsayable.”4 Here too silence appears as the experience of an impossibility of saying, as a privation. It is in opposition to this abyssal figure of silence that the church fathers affirmed the primacy of the logos in which God is revealed. Nevertheless, of the power of silence Heidegger would write: “This primordial silence is more powerful than any human potentiality. No one, on his or her own, has ever invented language—that is, has been strong enough to break the power of this silence.”5 [End Page 95]In Kafka’s parable on Ulysses, we are told that the silence of the Sirens is more perilous than their song, and that Ulysses—who realized, as his ship neared them, that the Sirens were silent—put on an act to protect himself from this silence, plugging his ears with wax and having his men tie him to the mast.6 In Kafka’s retelling of the tale, the silence of the Sirens represents a zero degree of song and, following a stubborn tradition that sees in absence the most extreme form of presence, also represents an at once zero and ultimate degree of reality. In this sense Heidegger could write... (shrink)

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets (...) in India.Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective. (shrink)

The fourth-century B.C. was a period during which a large number of Greek cities were affected by civil wars, military conquests, and destruction, with the displacement of large numbers of men, women and children as a result. This has implications for the modern debate on Athenian attitudes to immigration, which normally focuses on just two groups of free non-citizens: adult, able-bodied men who moved to Athens voluntarily to take advantage of the city’s economic opportunities and on the free non-citizen population (...) who had come to Athens as slaves and who stayed on after their manumission. This article argues that refugees were likely to have constituted a considerable component of the migration to Athens during certain troubled periods in the course of the fourth century. This means that the size of Athens’s immigrant population was likely to have fluctuated considerably, that many of the refugees would have been destitute, that women and children may have made up an even greater proportion of the non-citizen population than normally assumed, and, thus, that a considerable number of these immigrants would not have been able to contribute substantially to Athens’s grain trade or military. The implications of this for our assessment of the Athenian motives for admitting groups of refugees are discussed, and it is argued that the requirement that all male and all unaccompanied female immigrants had to find an Athenian sponsor and pay a special metic tax may have constituted a certain level of control over immigrant numbers. (shrink)

Questions about the use of “inclusive language” in Christian discourse are trivial but the discussion which surrounds them raises an exceedingly important question, namely that of whether gender is theologically salient-whether Christian doctrine either reveals theologically significant differences between men and women or prescribes different roles for them. Arguably both conservative support for sex roles and allegedly progressive doctrines about the theological significance of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are contrary to the radical teaching of the Gospel that in (...) Christ there is no male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free man. (shrink)

Questions about the use of “inclusive language” in Christian discourse are trivial but the discussion which surrounds them raises an exceedingly important question, namely that of whether gender is theologically salient-whether Christian doctrine either reveals theologically significant differences between men and women or prescribes different roles for them. Arguably both conservative support for sex roles and allegedly progressive doctrines about the theological significance of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are contrary to the radical teaching of the Gospel that in (...) Christ there is no male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free man. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to examine Aristotle's puzzling and contentious claim inPolitics1.13 that the deliberative faculty in women is ‘without authority’ :The freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different ways. For the slave lacks the deliberative faculty altogether; the woman has it, but it (...) is without authority, and the child has it, but it is immature. (shrink)

This article resurfaces an enslaved female whom we encounter, drowning, in the archive of the Middelburgse Commercie Compagnie (MCC). To unfold a reading beyond the transcription of her commodified death, I investigate the five localities that conditioned her bodily inscription into history: the archive, the law, the ship, the ocean, and the womb. Traveling through these localities, I disclose, at once, the historical violence against black females through the transatlantic slave trade system and the excess black females proved to (...) be to this very system. Excessive thus, black female lineage provides an alternative to white, patriarchic systems of relation. (shrink)

Carol P. Christ discusses her new multi-pronged definition of patriarchy as an integral system: male dominance is enforced by violence which is a product of war; the control of female sexuality ensures the transfer private property and slaves which are the spoils of war in the male line; and the system as a whole is legitimated by religion. She argues, based on the new research on matriarchies that patriarchy is not eternal or universal, but that it arose in (...) history, and is inseparable from the rise of warfare and other forms of domination. (shrink)

WORK, GENDER AND POWER IN ANCIENT GREECE - EXAMPLES FORM ATHENS IN THE CLASSICAL PERIODThis article asks how different forms of work were associated with varying forms of status, class and gender in Classical Athens. Moreover, the author seeks to clarify how the male citizen collective in particular controlled society by enforcement of general ideas about what types of work were suitable for citizens, metics and slaves alike. Also, the article challenges the ideal work discourse allocating farming, politics and (...) warfare to male citizens, whereas female citizens confined to oversee the household and perform work to do with processing of food and wool. (shrink)

This chapter explains how a single scene in the Star Wars saga serves to reflect a popular and problematic contemporary view about people. The scene in question occurs in Return of the Jedi when Jabba the Hutt holds Princess Leia captive in his court on Tatooine. Using the philosophy of Susan Bordo, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, the chapter examines how Leia's captivity scene reflects modern society's hatred of fat and its preoccupation with the control of bodies, particularly the (...) class='Hi'>female body. In contrast with Jabba and his uncontrolled appetite, Leia operates as a model of control. She becomes flesh's master rather than its slave. She finds her freedom by fighting fat. Fear of the flesh and a desire to control bodies are expressive of a deeper anxiety regarding embodiment that has been culturally conferred upon women more than men due to the cultural association of women with the body. (shrink)

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss (...) the film as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts. (shrink)

Published to coincide with the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus's ‘discovery’ of the New World, the Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko's apocalyptic 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, is a harsh indictment of five hundred years of colonialism, racism and genocide in the New World. Silko clearly links this inhuman(e) history to the contemporary social policies of a range of nation states within the Americas, to present a variety of political issues that are of crucial significance to contemporary tribal communities (...) and other multi-national disenfranchised groups. Among others, this includes the significance of gender to constructions of American settlement and Federal-Indian relations, and to Silko's own status, and choice of literary topics, as a female (and Native) writer. This essay analyses Silko's disruption of authorized and sanitized state narratives, and of accepted (and acceptable) narratives of settlement; and considers Silko's use of the almanac form – the codex – of the pre-contact Aztec and Mayan libraries as a means to assert indigenous literacy, and to challenge the Euro-American claims to ‘civilization’ that are the basis for New World settlement. Most significantly, as its title suggests, Almanac of the Dead emphasizes the presence of the dead, both indigenous peoples and African slaves, to expose the real costs of settlement, and to actively un-settle the Euro- American reader. Consequently, Almanac of the Dead presents the powerful alternative histories of a range of dispossessed social and ethnic groups throughout the Americas, while relocating and reconsidering the US within the context of the Americas as a continental and historical whole, and emphasizing the positive potential of political activism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexism and Misogyny in the Christian Tradition:Liberating AlternativesRosemary Radford RuetherThe oppressive patterns in Christianity toward women and other subjugated people do not come from specific doctrines, but from a patriarchal and hierarchical reading of the system of Christian symbols as a whole. These same symbols can be read from a prophetic and liberating perspective. So what I will do in this essay is to show how Christian symbols have (...) been read as a system of domination, on the one hand, and then how they can be read as a system of liberation, on the other hand.1 The framework for reading Christian symbols as a system of domination derives from patriarchal slaveocracies, the social system in which Christianity was born. Yet Christianity also began as critique of this system that proposed prophetic-liberating alternatives to it that were then partially repressed.The New Testament is shaped in the context of this struggle. It contains testimonies to a subversive vision which has been partly repressed by reimposed patriarchal patterns. Thus the New Testament itself is the main source both for canonizing a sexist and slave social system and also for reconstructing an alternative egalitarian vision. In this essay I will first summarize the patriarchal reading of Christianity as it became the dominant interpretation between the second and sixth centuries, with further elaboration in medieval scholasticism. I will address this reading of Christianity under the five symbols of anthropology, sin and grace, God, Christ, and the Church. This will show that the patriarchal reading of these symbols is not a problem of the prejudices of particular theologians, but a comprehensive worldview. I will then analyze these same symbols and show how they can (and, in my view, should) be read from a prophetic-liberating perspective.I begin with the issue of anthropology. How is gender, male and female, related to humanness? Early Christianity saw a close relation between the human soul, understood as mind or reason, and the divine logos, which was seen as the divine nature of Jesus as the Christ. They interpreted the text of Genesis 1:27, “God created the human in the image of God,” to refer to the mind or soul in each human person. The human soul as mind or reason mirrors on a created level the divine logos or reason manifest in Christ. The human soul thus partakes in a created fashion in God’s nature and so is immortal and capable of eternal life. [End Page 83]But do women possess reason? Are they made in the image of God, or only male humans? The Greek philosophical tradition, particularly in Aristotle, which shaped early Christian views on this, believed that women lacked autonomous reason and were therefore inherently inferior and dependent on the male. For Aristotle, slaves and Asians (i.e., barbarians) were also dependent on ruling-class Greek males, who alone were fully rational.2 Thus Greek philosophy gave Christianity both a strongly gendered and also a classist and racist reading of anthropology.The Jewish tradition was ambivalent about whether women were equally made in the image of God. Some rabbinic teachers defended the belief that women were equally made in God’s image, while others argued that Adam alone was God’s image.3 This ambivalence is reflected in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11. Here Paul says, “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife and God is the head of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:3, NRS). Paul lays out a cosmic hierarchical order of headship of God over Christ, Christ over the male human, and the male human over the female human as the basis for his argument that the woman should cover her head, but the male should not cover his head. “For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but the woman is the reflection of man” (1 Cor. 11:7).Paul goes on to insist that “man was not made from woman but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but... (shrink)

This article examines the antebellum popular culture that was created by pro-slavery intellectuals and that contributed to the subordination of female African slaves. It argues that southern ideologues produced a dominant ideology that facilitated the exploitation of enslaved Black women and contributed to the social construction of their gender. This article contributes to Black feminist theory that, since the early 1970s, has been developing as a counter-hegemonic advocate for the subaltern African American woman.

The author gives a model by which it is possible to interpret ethics from the standpoint of gender. Above all, it emphasizes the importance of recognizing the level of particularity and its integration between the universal and individual level. This methodological instruction enables us to recognize social differences that result from various types of repression, and affect the possibility of ethical behaviour of large groups of people. It results in the impossibility of individuals’ to act ethically and, subsequently, in their (...) being denoted as non-subjects:slaves, victims of mobbing, prostitutes, exiles, exploited workers, the hungry, the unemployed, women…Gender issues in ethics can be approached through the mentioned aspects of: subject, body values and relevant topics. The ethical subject’s aspect shows the neutrality and lack of definition of the subject’s gender throughout history. However, this refers only to the male gender, while the female gender’s possibility of being subject has been either reduced or excluded throughout history. The entry into ethics through the body or nature issue presents a connection between male violence towards women and human violence towards nature. A gender analysis of ethics through the aspect of values shows an actual redefinition of values through the affirmation of women’s values: care, life and cooperation.Finally, many issues from the gender studies’ domain are eminently ethical issues : rape, marital rape, wartime rape, violence against women, domestic violence, abortions, mutilation, prostitution, pornography…. (shrink)

This article examines the manner and method of resistance against patriarchal power and privilege. Two types of power are contrasted. One is the violent, war-like and hierarchical power of an empire, and the other is the faithful resistance of Israel's prophets. A further distinction is made between violent male power and non-violent female power. It is argued that Miriam was a prophet of the people and her prophetic witness is an example of the power and outcome of non-violent resistance. (...) Her theology explicitly and specifically praises God not as a warrior. Hers is not a muscular, masculine God whose power seeks to match the power of empire. Her God has a power that through radical love for a slave people and taking sides with the enslaved overcomes the power of the slaveholder. In her theology, Miriam recalls the God of the exodus, who begins the acts of liberation with the women, to whose faithfulness, courage and defiant obedience, the freedom of the people is entrusted. From a feminist perspective it is argued that this style of non-violent, faithful prophetic witness has a greater impact than violent resistance associated with an empire-like power. It is suggested that black liberation theology should adopt this paradigm in its witness of and resistance against oppression. (shrink)

The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road. We observe (...) female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film. (shrink)

ABSTRACT If phenomenology is a research methodology uniquely positioned to enable us to learn from others, I aim to demonstrate the idea that cinema is a privileged site from which to investigate the notion of virtuality (sight and reality), even in an age where vision’s predominance is waning. In order to do so, I consider the painfully disruptive mother-daughter relationship found cross-culturally and discourse-analytically in contemporary patriarchal societies. This bond is arguably of central concern to feminists (and women in general) (...) since previous research has found that the fractious nature of this dynamic points to a very specific psychological deformation of the female psyche under conditions of sexist oppression. The views of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva and other feminist contributors to the debate on this psychological construct are considered. The possibility of a cultural remedy inspired by a secularised trend of Chinese Buddhism in post-Maoist China, a society very different from that of the West, is investigated. This will involve the analysis of the film Curse of the Golden Flower (Chinese Mandarin soundtrack and English subtitles). I subsequently explore whether or not a valuable model for the compromised mother/daughter relationship is available within the context of the notion of a “slave economy” in the comparatively healthier mother/son relationship of (contemporary) Han Chinese culture. By means of cross-cultural analysis as research tool, this article finds confirmation for the proposition of a positive mother/daughter dynamic in the French novelist Colette’s relationship with her mother, Sido. In conclusion, I find that cinema (as an art form serving the eye, i.e. virtuality) is particularly well suited as a site to investigate psychological phenomena by way of interpretative phenomenology as a research methodology, even as vision – as the human sense of choice – has begun to wane amid a global crisis in masculinity. (shrink)

Roman Law is an important legal systematic that contains important codings of world law history. This legal system not only affected Continental Europe, but also the Near East, which was a period under its domination. Especially in the Justinian period, the law collection that emerged as a result of the legal studies starting from the East Roman capital is considered as a monumental work by many historians and jurists. Researchers who praise Corpus Juris Civilis are right. However, this selection, which (...) is one of the most effective law coding, is far from being practical. For this Leo III prepared his law book called Ecloga. Referred to as the first Christian law book, this work was later expanded with some additions. Ecloga was given its final shape during the period of Empress Irene. Irene is one of the strongest female figures in Roman history. Emperor Constantine V married his son Leo (who is from his first wife Çiçek Hatun, the Caspian Princess) to Irene. Irene was the daughter of an ordinary family. She was Athenian as origin. However, Athens was not a city as flashy as it was in ancient times. At the same time, the Athenians were against icon-breaking, which was the official ideology of the empire. It was really interesting that Irene was chosen by Constantine V as wife for his son Leo. After the death of Constantine V, Leo IV acceded to the throne without any problems. The fact that Leo IV had chronic tuberculosis prevented him from state administrations. Actually, it was Irene who filled in this gap. After the early death of Leo IV, due to the aforementioned disease, his 10-year-old son Constantine VI became officially regent. After killing her son by abacina-tion Irene became the sole owner of the throne. In the ongoing process, she abused law and religion to maintain her power. Irene’s first law supplement was on oaths. There were many references to the Holy Book in the annex of this law. It was mentioned that it is not a sin to swear in the Old Testament, but it is now forbidden to swear with the New Testament. In addi-tion, the law stipulates that the oath is the way to deny God precisely after lying. However, it was claimed that the oath tradition to the Roman society passed through the Hebrews. Un-doubtedly, Irene used the text of this law to prove that the oath of devotion of the majority of the eastern Roman army, allegedly to her son Constantine VI, was invalid. Because in the Ro-man army, fulfilling the necessary oath and loyalty to the emperor were in front of everything. It was possible for the empress to take over the throne with this proclaimed law article that the vows of the soldiers who swore in order to remain committed to Constantine VI within the army were void. It is obvious that Irene was trying to prevent a possible coup attempt within the army. The empress’ second annex to the law concerns those who married for the third time. The law was titled “About those who illegally contract to third or later marriages and about those who marry their own slaves”. In Christianity, it was allowed to marry for the sec-ond time after the death of one of the spouses. There were certain phrases that marriages to be held for the third time in the Holy Book were forbidden. It is clear that Irene had a political benefit in reminding this ban. Because her power was based on her marriage with Leo, who was the son of Constantine V from his first wife. Their rivals were the sons of Constantine V from his third marriage. Therefore, with this law, she eliminated her political rivals. (shrink)

Viewed through the prism of gender, race and generational change, memories of the Holocaust acquire a dynamic and a salience that differ substantially from one group to the next. This article examines the role of gender in sustaining and reconfiguring such memories in Germany; it argues that female victims and perpetrators are moving towards common ground in processing Second World War experiences as they anticipate their own deaths. Ranging from active collaborators to bold resistance fighters, some women proved both (...) deeply reflective, others almost oblivious to the horrors occurring around them, as revealed by (auto)biographical texts. ‘Women under the Nazis’ were not a subordinate, uninformed mass, easily exploited by a megalomaniacal patriarchal establishment; still, their many roles were rated as ‘insignificant’ in configuring the master narrative. The unequal treatment accorded women in the 1940s still shapes the unequal slave-labor compensation accorded women half a century later. This raises new questions about the need to re-establish communication between the generations for the purpose of transmitting lessons of world-historical magnitude linked to the Holocaust. (shrink)

This chapter explores Simone de Beauvoir's relation to Hegel's philosophy beyond her adaptation of the master and slave dialectic to the question of woman's historical relation to man. It focuses on her reading of the Hegelian Absolute, which underlies her rejection of the patriarchal representation of the female alterity as absolute, as manifested in the eternal myth of the feminine. Through a survey of Simone de Beauvoir's early intellectual history, it shows that the idea of the Absolute is more (...) important for Simone de Beauvoir than it is generally acknowledged in the philosophical literature on her. She interprets the Absolute as the idea of freedom, which unfolds itself in historical reality, and from which women cannot be excluded as persons. On personalist grounds, she argues that women's acquisition of political and moral status as persons is a necessary implication of the Absolute, if the Absolute has to overcome the unhappy consciousness the consciousness falls into in patriarchal myths. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:133. HUME ON RESENTMENT In his Enquiry version of the conditions of justice, Hume adds a third modified Hobbesian condition to the two, moderate scarcity and moderate selfishness, which he had listed in the Treatise. The new condition is a certain measure of equality, or limit ±o inequality—justice is owed, he says, only if there is a society of more-or-less equals; and only to those who are members of (...) it. The equality in question concerns the ability of candidate societymembers to make us feel the effects of their resentment (E190). If such ability is lacking, then, Hume says, the relationships between "us" and "them" will be those of absolute command on the one side and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure, by which they hold their possessions : Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will (Ibid. ). This passage is interesting because Hume describes the position of such powerless creatures intermingled with men in terms which appear to be social —command, obedience, possession, tenure, the act of "resigning" coveted goods. But he says that our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality (Ibid. ). True society is, then, restricted to those who are roughly equal, whose interests help to determine the conventions which give rise to duties of justice. But intermingled with the members of such a real society there might be, were or are, a species of creatures, who, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment (Ibid. ). They are "rational", so can obey, can resign possessions, and can resent their inferior status. They have quasi-social relations with their masters, but not fully social ones, since they are neither parties to nor bene- 134. ficiaries of the social conventions which create rights and duties. Hume seems to assume that because they are not parties to the artifice-creating conventions, those conventions will not cover relations with them, so that the conveners' "laws" are limited, and allow them a sphere of "lawless will" in their dealings with the inferior creatures. But children, for example, while not legislators, may be both right holders and beneficiaries of the laws which adults agree on. Hume is most charitably read here to mean that the conventions which serve the interests of the superior creatures might not, cannot be depended on, to regulate in any way the dealings of the superiors with the inferiors. They are left at the mercy of their superiors, resent that fact, and yet may be powerless to alter the situation. It is very clear from what follows that Hume has in mind in this passage the relations of males to females, and that it is his thoughts about male-female relationships which led to his emendation of his Treatise account of the conditions of justice. The Treatise had not mentioned equality of power as a condition for justice, but had devoted a chapter to the extra obligations, of chastity and modesty, which social conventions imposed on the female sex. It was therefore a natural question to arise for Hume whether women really could be parties to conventions which imposed these obligations on them. Were their interests served, or did these obligations arise from "the voluntary conventions of men, " (T510, emphasis added) who asked themselves What restraint, therefore, shall we impose upon women, in order to counter-balance so strong a temptation as they have to infidelity? (T571). Hume had argued that female fidelity was needed for male paternal obligations to be properly assigned, so that it was in the interests of children, of fathers, and of society in general, that fatherhood be determinable, and so that wives be chaste. Now, in the Enquiry, he considers the possibility of a class of slaves whose interests, like those of animals, need not be considered 135, in the conventions which generate duties of justice. The great superiority of civilized Europeans above barbarous Indians, tempted us to imagine ourselves on... (shrink)

Aristotle notoriously excludes free women and both male and female artisans and slaves from citizenship in the polis on the basis of an identifiable difference in nature: all of these groups, unlike free males, possess and exhibit some delinquency in their capacity for reason. Commentators have typically interpreted Aristotle’s comments on the nature of free women by suggesting that free women by nature have heightened or increased propensities towards incontinent behavior. If this is indeed the only difference between (...) the natures of free men and free women, then it remains difficult to see why the appropriate modes of education in addition to the practice of habit would fail to ameliorate this deficiency in free women. My intention is to argue that Aristotle does think of the difference in the capacity for reason between free men and free women as a difference of kind—namely, women lack the capacity to develop practical reason—and as a result, justifiably, at least within the suppositions of his own position, excludes free women from citizenship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 102-117 [Access article in PDF] Gossip and Literary Narrative Blakey Vermeule Northwestern University Since its murky origins in Grub Street, a specter has haunted the novel—the specter of gossip. In its higher-minded mood, literary narratives have been very snobbish about gossip and the snobbishness is unfair. Even the most casual reader of social fiction will recognize that gossiping is what characters do most passionately. (...) However, they can neither admit nor be aware of it. Only minor or morally compromised characters are allowed to indulge in its pleasures. Matronly middle-aged women, chatty maids, little girls, and effeminate fops are the ones who gossip; their more reflective counterparts—the men and women designated as heroes and heroines—only briefly tolerate such idle chatter. Gossip is derided, decried, condemned, and maligned. It is womanish, low, slavish, servantish, silly, pert, loose, wanton, jiggetty, mean. It is the "tittle-tattle of Highbury" in Austen's Emma, an activity for the old maid Miss Bates and her even older, blind, and senile mother. In Middlemarch, although the world is "apparently a huge whispering-gallery," the greatest gossip of all is Mrs. Cadwallader, a matron with a mind like "phosphorous, biting at everything" (Spacks, p. 194). In Richardson's Clarissa, Lovelace—a man not known for his indifference to social information—airily dismisses gossip as "the female go-round." (In novels, the male equivalents of the "female go-round" tend to be such despised modes of exchange as business letters, gambling, chess, and games of chance.) Gossip has always been a part of charivari with the power to turn the world upside down. It also has the power to destroy lives (Les Liasons Dangereuses) and to derail love (when it becomes the "prejudice" of Pride and Prejudice). If it ever innocent, it is only because it is meaningless.Gossip is all of these things even—especially—when it powers the [End Page 102] whole narrative. This paradox is evident almost anywhere we choose to look. Social novelists view the stuff of direct, unmediated social information as so intense that it requires special handling—even disavowal. I will briefly survey examples from French, English, and Russian fiction. The first is a lurid and overheated speech by Henri de Marsay, the peculiar hero of Balzac's short novel, The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1815). De Marsay is a dissipated aristocrat in love with a mysterious young girl who, he finds out much later, is the sexual slave of de Marsay's long-lost sister. But first, after a night of passion that "had begun with a slow trickle of pleasures and ended in overflowing torrents," de Marsay realizes, when his lover accidentally lets slip the name of his rival, that the person he is competing with is female. The next day he becomes consumed with a bitter plan to kill his faithless lover. He reflects to his friend Paul "Upon my honor, man is a clown dancing on the edge of a cliff. We're told about the immorality of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and some book with the name of a chambermaid. But there is one ghastly, dirty, dreadful, corrupting book that is always open and never closed, the great book of the world—not to mention another book, a thousand times more dangerous, that consists of everything passed on by word of mouth between men or women behind their fans at the ball."1 Even though de Marsay is a corrupt aristocrat, his sentiments are little different from those the narrator expresses in the book's opening chapter, a panoptic survey of Parisian life as a glorious mosaic of infection, rot, and moral disease.In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's new tenant Lockwood breaks his self-imposed exile from social life by pressing the housekeeper Nellie Dean to do what housekeepers do best and launch into an aggrieved saga about her master's family. He wants her to serve up the gossip hot. "I ate..., hoping sincerely she would prove a regular gossip, and either rouse me to animation, or lull me to sleep... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WomanistAlice Walker1. From womanish. (Opp. of "girlish," i.e., frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mothers to female children, "You acting womanish," i.e., like a woman. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered "good" for one. Interested in grown-up doings. Acting grown up. Being grown (...) up. Interchangeable with another black folk expression: "You trying to be grown." Responsible. In charge. Serious.2. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility (values tears as a natural counter-balance of laughter) and women's strength. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically, for health. Traditionally universalist, as in: "Mamma, why are we brown, pink, and yellow, and our cousins are white, beige, and black?" Ans.: "Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented." Traditionally capable, as in: "Mamma, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me." Reply: "It wouldn't be the first time." 3. Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless. 4. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender. [End Page 45]FootnotesFrom Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi; reprinted in Katie Cannon, Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995), 22; reprinted in Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006); reprinted in Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness: Meditations (New York: New Press; Distributed by W. W. Norton, 2006).Copyright © 2012 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 286-290 [Access article in PDF] Letter to Lester Olson Jessica Benjamin Dear Lester Olson,I regret not having responded sooner to your communication. This is a matter of considerable importance to me, but you might imagine that it is difficult to read an analysis of events in which I was so involved that takes so little account of my/our point of view. Let me add, (...) after reading your response, that I do recognize that this is through no fault of your own, and as you indicated to me later, you assiduously strove to get more information. I believe it was Alfred Kazin who (I've heard) said that the movements of today make the dissertations of tomorrow. Since that is always a difficulty, I am sure that my experience is not singular. Unfortunately, in my view, the decontextualization of Audre Lorde's speech at that conference can serve to perpetuate the misunderstanding that underlay the destructive polarization that occurred at that time. To accept her view that the event was organized with no effort to include women of color by oblivious, racist white women is surely not what happened. In fact, the estrangement between white and black women at the time of the "Second Sex Conference" had much deeper causes (the enduring structures of racism in our country) for which I believe no individual could be held responsible.First, let me clarify an important fact. While we organizers of the conference invited numerous black and third world women to participate, we were consistently declined. For instance, Mary Helen Washington said she did not want to speak to an audience of only white women, and it was her experience that only white women came to feminist conferences. Indeed, at the time Michele Wallace, who probably would have been interested had she been available, was vociferously complaining about the lack of interest, indeed the rejection of feminism, among black women. Audre Lorde herself, one of our consultants, had been apprised of the participants for months and never named anyone who could participate. Similarly, Robin [End Page 286] Morgan had been consulted and had offered no suggestions of black participants. Yet ten days before the conference her young black protégé at Ms., Susan McHenry, appeared with a series of demands, including a list of black women she wished to see invited to the conference. Although I had met with Robin Morgan months before, she had never told me of Susan McHenry or proposed her as a participant, rather her interest had been focused on what would become the anti-pornography movement, similar to the interests of Kathy Barry who wrote about female sexual slaves. At the conference, Susan McHenry did speak; she expressed her indignation and outrage, and suggested that the entire conference was a racist gathering that should change direction and consider only the issue of racial exclusion.It is certainly true that the organizers were distressed by the same issue prior to the conference. After nearly a year of organizing, soliciting, and publishing open calls for participation, we were absolutely desperate to find participants who would reflect racial and ethnic groups other than white middle class. But in 1979 the institution of women's studies looked very different than it does now--feminism was a political movement not an academic institution, and only a few women in any university had become interested in it. And that does not even begin to address how few women, let alone black women, were in the universities in 1979!A second important point is that Audre Lorde was not speaking to an audience who disagreed with her; she was speaking to an audience who were already inflamed because they felt that certain identities had been left out of the conference. Despite the fact that it was an open conference, based on an open invitation--we had drawn scores of women to give workshops and papers whom we had never heard of--and despite the fact that we had organized the conference to address differences among women, the audience consisted of many women ready to protest... (shrink)