Preface

Abstract

preface Feminist scholarship has been long concerned with the terms in which the past is presented and, more specifically, with how women's agency is suppressed or misconstrued. Authors in this issue take up what we call the politics of history and recovery across a range of genres: from historical fiction and literary, film, and art sources to ever-changing electronic archives. The issue opens with the late Diane Middlebrook's experimental exploration of the life and work of the first-century BCE poet Ovid. Middlebrook's provoc ative narrative begins with a fictional account of Ovid's birth from the perspectives of the midwife and mother, and it proceeds to surmise familial details about influences in the young poet's life and how they might have influenced his work. Middlebrook combines a close analysis of the recollection and metaphor that characterized Ovid's writings with extant secondary literature on ancient Rome to paint a vibrant picture of Ovid's early life and the particulars of the ancient Roman household and culture that surrounded him. In the process, Middlebrook persuasively demonstrates that communities of women were central to Ovid's life trajectory and his transforma tion from privileged child to epic poet. These communities of women included his mother, the various female intermediaries that intro duced him to and integrated him into the broader Roman house hold, and the goddesses that were always present to guide, oversee, protect, and inspire. Middlebrook details the myriad ways that Ovid references the "social world" that women created forthemselves within 287 288 Preface the household, a world that was "largely concealed from the atten tion of men." In doing so, Middlebrook's work engages the long standing question of how scholars might find sources for those who did not leave written records. Looking to literature for one answer to this question, Middlebrook finds that through his poetry Ovid illuminates the intimacies and complexities of the worlds of women that were rarely noted or documented in and for ancient Rome. In "Trafficking in Truth: Media, Sexuality, and Human Rights Evidence," Jamie L. Small shows how contemporary international human rights campaigns frequently blur the lines between fact and fiction. Analyzing the production and reception histories of two explicitly fictional movies and one documentary film about girls forced into prostitution, often far from their homes, Small reveals that the narratives constructed in these films are frequently reduc tive and do not allow for the exploration of the complex structural and personal forces that push young women into prostitution. Insist ing on the need to recognize the violence that can be part of sex work, Small is nonetheless critical of how fictional stories become evidence in human rights campaigns that in turn bolster conservative politi cal agendas. She is especially worried about the claims that the Acad emy Award-winning documentary Born Into Brothels makes to realistically represent the rescue of Indian children by a Western woman, the filmmaker/photographer. Voices that question the authenticity of such accounts are unable to enter mainstream debates, Small notes. Rather than recovering the voices and bodies of the oppressed, such filmic narratives and their use in human rights discourses enhance the divides between the First, Second, or Third World while often eliding the power dynamics central to these divides. Diana Barnes takes up questions that scholars have raised over the last two decades about the significance of Lady Mary Wort ley Montagu to the history of inoculations and the history of medi cine. Barnes uses these questions as a starting point for reexamin ing the terms on which an aristocratic woman of the eighteenth century led a public life, gained an education, and influenced medi cal practice in London. Even though British papers did not mention Montagu's move to have her own daughter inoculated for smallpox for several years, oral reports of Montagu's action and her witnessing Preface 289 of inoculations in Constantinople circulated in elite circles. These reports directly influenced both scientific experiments and prac tices at the royal court. Through personal visits and the circulation of knowledge of her activities in influential social circles, Montagu, who had been disfigured by smallpox herself, played a significant role in...