The Dead Hand of Constitutionalism: Lessons from Early English and British Radical Struggles

Venus rising, Furies raging: bodies redressed in contemporary visual art

Populist orientations refer to a set of political beliefs and values that emphasize the interests of «ordinary people» with a corresponding need to challenge the political establishment. In Ukraine, long social transformations in the post-communist period led to total mistrust and a negative attitude toward state institutions. The post-communist irremovability of the political establishment led to persistent anti-elitist attitudes. As a result of the inconsistency and contradictions of Ukraine's path to democracy, a basic «transitional type» of personality has emerged. It is characterized by psychological ambivalence, that is a double contradictory attitude to the prospects of society's development. The connection of ambivalent consciousness with populist orientations often arises because both phenomena are based on the absence of a stable ideological orientation or a clear political identity. The ambivalent consciousness and unbelief in the pluralist mechanisms of an imperfect democracy have fuelled the population's attachment authoritarian methods in politics, which is a reflection of the hopes for effective governance. However, the existence of polarization in Ukrainian society based on geopolitical orientations and social identities for a long time conditioned citizens to rely on traditional political forces in their electoral behavior. Only after the disappearance of this polarization did populist orientations materialize into the electoral phenomenon of 2019. In the course of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war, a radical reassessment of the state and state institutions by the population took place, and therefore the antagonism between the population and the elite became temporarily irrelevant. However, post-war reconstruction carries with it the risks of a revival and growth of populist orientations, as economic difficulties will exacerbate intolerant of social injustice.

The snowboarding body is a multidimensional and dynamic social, historical, economic, material, mediated, cultural, gendered, moving, and sensual phenomenon. While the preceding chapters each explored different dimensions of the snowboarding body, some key themes and sociological concepts weave through these discussions, including structure, agency, culture, power, subjectivity, reflexivity, gender, media, time, and social change. In this chapter I draw some of these strands together with a discussion of alternative body politics in contemporary youth- dominated physical cultures. For Parkins (2000), ‘we cannot think of political agency in abstraction from embodiment’ (p. 60). Similarly, any critical discussion of the body in contemporary sport and physical culture would be incomplete without considering its potential for initiating social change. This final chapter consists of two main parts. In the first part, I draw upon two theoretical approaches – nonrepresentational theory and third- wave feminism – to reveal some of the creative and embodied approaches employed by contemporary youth to produce new forms of passionate and affective politics in local and global contexts. Second, I offer some concluding comments about the opportunities and challenges for theorizing the body and researching physical cultures, and particularly youth-dominated action sport cultures, into the twenty- first century, and possibilities for the ‘strategic dissemination of potentially empowering forms of knowledge and understanding’ (Andrews, 2008, p. 54).

Simon Dalby highlights the metageography —i.e., the spatial structure through which people order the world— underlying the current debate on the place of national state in the current order and in our political imaginaries. Taking the example of the Cape Breton Mi'kmaq and their struggle against the exploitation of Klooscap Mountain, Dalby argues for a rethinking of the spatial concepts guiding contemporary struggle. The increasingly dense and rapid flows of capital and peoples that are a hallmark of modernity and capitalism and yet the importance of place-linked identities speak for the need for a multi-scalar—local, national and global —strategic horizon.

This chapter examines two neo-Victorian representations of feminist history, suggesting that they incorporate elements of humour in knowing and self-conscious ways. In Jessica Swale’s play Blue Stockings (which ran at the Globe Theatre in London in 2013) and the first season of Jessica Hynes’s television suffragette comedy Up the Women (bbc, 2013) humour serves a metafictional purpose, embedded as it is in narratives that highlight tensions between feminist activism and public concession. In Swale’s play, Girton College lecturers debate about whether they should align themselves with the radical suffragette movement, and Hynes’s comedy centres on a group of hapless suffragettes who have named themselves the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Politely Requests Women’s Suffrage. The play and show raise questions about the importance of political compromise and mainstream acceptance for feminism, and in particular, the role that comedy might play in introducing a wider public to feminist history. In this way, they extend the debates about feminism, comedy, and politics raised by both New Women writers and suffragettes at the turn-of-the-century.

The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives, by Elayne Rapping (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 256 pp., $24.00, cloth only. The 12-step has permeated 1990s American culture. This is both a reflection of and a contradictory, confusing development in the enduring struggle for gender justice that originated with second wave feminism. That is the conclusion reached by media critic and columnist Elayne Rapping (Communications/Adelphi University) in The Culture of Recovery, a feminist analysis of the flourishing selfhelp that originated with the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Intending lay bare the deeply reactionary agenda the [recovery] supports (p. 8), Rapping critically examines the proliferation of 12-step groups and thought in contemporary society. In a tone that is simultaneously respectful and severely cautionary, Rapping illuminates the strengths, contradictions, twists and transformations of feminist ideology within the idiom manifest today in the media, in literature, and even in politics. Rather than being disillusioned by this burgeoning and often repressive presence, Rapping regards the as an interruption, not an end point, in the ongoing feminist-driven revolution in gender politics. The Culture of Recovery is as much a cultural and social history as an analysis of the movement. In a brief introduction and six chapters, Rapping reviews much that is familiar about the social, economic and political climate of the last three decades vis-a-vis feminism and the movement. Beginning with a focus on the television and film media, she describes the changing representations of women and in the context of the social transformations and economic interests of an evolving postindustrial society. Chapter two examines, in a and cursory (though well referenced) fashion, the evolution of second wave feminism. Beginning with the utopian vision of revolutionary leaders of the sixties, Rapping traces the disillusionment, backlash and ultimate reformulation of feminist thought into the nineties. By examining the internal structures of the movement, including operation within educational, medical and criminal justice systems, Rapping establishes, in chapter three, the linkage between feminist history and the history of the as it has evolved since the eighties. Each of the remaining three chapters-focused upon the movement's social workings, master narratives, and political uses, respectively-incorporates that historical perspective into this analysis. Rapping states from the outset her intention to conduct this analysis of the with an eye toward its roots in feminist history, culture and theory (p. 8). She delimits feminist history to that period since the sixties when second wave feminism propelled the personal into political discourse and activism. Feminism provoked dramatic and transformative changes in the way women thought about and acted in their lives and relationships. It focused attention on the public and political causes of suffering. It acted, with mixed success, to find public and political solutions to that suffering. As defined by Rapping, the recovery movement excludes AA and Narcotics Anonymous. It consists, instead, of the Anonymous/12-Step groups founded in the 1980s and 1990s that deal with emotional/relational issues (p. 190, n. 4). This movement, she asserts, incorporates selective features of feminist ideology and strategy in providing a response to the tensions and demands of a postmodern, postfeminist world. However, in using the language of addiction and recovery, the focuses on the effects rather than the causes of suffering. This blending of feminist thought and apolitical context is at once the movement's strength and potential danger to gender justice. …

Transnationalizing Aztlan: Rudolfo Anaya’s Heart of Aztlan and US Proletarian Literature Get access Jami Khader Jami Khader Stetson University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 27, Issue 1, March 2002, Pages 83–106, https://doi.org/10.2307/3250638 Published: 01 March 2002

The argument that philanthropy was the taproot of female emancipation in nineteenth- century Britain was not much admired when it was first put forward over twenty years ago. Most feminists sought to find their origins in radical movements such as Chartism or in trade unionism. The idea that women's charitable work might have played a major part in feminist history was unwelcome, if not anathema. Not uncommonly, scholars assumed that philanthropy was little more than a justification of patriarchal rule, a form of "social control" that kept the poor in their place. Today, however, historians and literary critics are more sensitive to the ironies and complexities in women's history and are more susceptible to the idea that Victorian women domesticated the public sphere through charitable work, and thereby opened up possibilities for themselves.

Reviewed by: German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lara Kriegel German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. By Lora Wildenthal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Scholars have faced two challenges in writing the histories of Germany’s modern empire. First, students of other empires have dismissed the German story as “too late and too brief” to provide effective points of comparison. Second, the ascent of the Nazi racial state has overshadowed earlier developments. By adopting insights and approaches from the “new imperial history” that have proven so fruitful for the British case, and more recently for the French, Dutch, and Belgian stories, Lora Wildenthal invigorates the German experience and places it firmly on the map of imperial scholarship. Her groundbreaking and engaging monograph rejects the two constricting options of limited relevance or seeming overdetermination in favor of “political ambiguity” (8). Wildenthal addresses colonialism’s ambiguity by focusing on the role of women as both “symbols and agents” of Germany’s imperial project (1). A feminist historian and an archival pioneer, she examines texts produced by German colonialist women, including travel journals, fiction, records of voluntary organizations, and personal correspondence. Wildenthal mobilizes these texts to address the rise, development, and persistence of imperialism’s gendered politics between 1885 and 1945. The five chapters of her monograph deftly and provokingly traverse the imperial domains of the intimate, the civic, and the governmental. Wildenthal locates the first successful strategy for German women’s imperial activity in a secular nationalist version of nursing; she examines the life and the writings of Frieda von Bülow, who looked, albeit in frustration, to empire as a way out of a conventional middle-class femininity; she analyzes the foreclosure of interracial marriage and the resulting ascent of white German women to the status of “necessary partners” in colonialism (130); she traces women’s own adoption and adaptation of this role, exemplified by the figure of the farmersfrau; and she tracks the persistence of a gendered imperial sentiment in the face of Germany’s unique history of forced decolonization and Nazism. This persistence is exemplified by the Colonial School for Women, which inculcated a sense of rational domesticity in its students until 1945. Wildenthal casts the Colonial School as the “final setting” for German women’s “dreams of freedom as independent colonizers” (200). Her characterization of the Colonial School points to one of the central themes and intellectual contributions of the text. Wildenthal echoes scholars of modern British imperialism, including Antoinette Burton, Philippa Levine, and Angela Woollacott, who have demonstrated the fraught nature of empire as a generator of political possibilities for women. Wildenthal pushes this discussion in a fruitful direction through her conception of “colonial space.” Material and imaginary realms located “far from Germany’s social strife,” the colonies appeared as utopias offering economic opportunity, sexual freedom, or political agency (3). However, as the case of Frieda von Bülow demonstrates so well, women of all classes frequently found the “fantasyland” of colonial space foreclosed by ideological and intimate contests with German men (201). A provocative contribution to colonial history, Wildenthal’s analysis of colonial space as a geographical and imaginary realm bears similarities to Mrinalini Sinha’s notion of “imperial social formation.” Her text might benefit by directly addressing Sinha’s rubric. Such an engagement would intensify a dialogue with other colonial histories, press the significance of Wildenthal’s own conception, and foreground gender—rather than women—as one of the text’s analytical categories. It was not only “imperial patriarchy” that transformed the utopian possibilities of colonial space, but also the “continuous intensification of racism” as a governing colonial logic (201). In another crucial interpretive line, Wildenthal charts the development of a twentieth-century racism based on “blood percentages” that usurped the nineteenth-century constellation of “morality, rights, upbringing, and appearance” (93). Colonial policy did not instantiate a “sharp boundary line” of race until the early twentieth century, when legislation prohibiting race mixing proliferated (47). While it protected male sexual privilege, such legislation restricted the radical possibilities of colonialism. This partnership between race and gender privilege did not exclude white German women from colonial space. Instead, it simultaneously increased and regimented their roles. As the “helpmeets...

The "Sex and the City Voter" construct as it was deployed in political journalism and popular culture during the 2004 campaign is problematic. Although it seemingly promoted young women's political agency, the potency of the image came from its characterization of young women voters as a homogenous group of white, middle- to upper-class professionals, as consumers rather than citizens, and as sexually appealing and available. The construct's assimilation into popular culture and political journalism mirrored earlier attempts by the media to characterize feminism in the late 1990s, where emphasis was placed on young women as so-called "third wave" feminists. The 2004 campaign offers an important case study of third-wave feminist logic as it was appropriated and infused in campaign discourse and political journalism.

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This paper examines some of the changes that have taken place in Western feminist theory during its recent past. It begins by questioning whether previous practices of labelling feminism as liberal, Marxist or radical are still useful. It then considers those influences that have especially effected feminist thinking, particularly Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. The paper argues that the nature of feminist theory has been profoundly transformed since the early days of second wave feminism. While some of these changes have been positive, others have had unfortunate and negative consequences. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the usefulness and political potential of feminist theorising might be harnessed for the future.

The issue of involving young people in political movement in the process of purposeful activities of political parties remains one of the understudied problems in the history of Russian liberalism and its political and legal thought up to the present. The article analyzes domestic liberal theorists’ search for an answer to the question concerning reasons for the politicization of the youth, primarily the student movement in Russia, which was partially reflected in the publications of the journal Osvobozhdenie [Liberation]. It is noted that two groups of factors are distinguished, those of general nature associated with the shortcomings of the social system as a whole and more specific factors related to the concrete youth policy of the state. The authors pay attention to how the liberals who wrote to the journal determined the place of the youth movement in the process of social transformation. Identification of their positions appears important and necessary in order to answer the question, which the liberal parties and party leaders faced in full growth during the period of the revolution, whether it was possible and reasonable to involve young people in revolutionary processes and in socio-political activities of party organizations. For the liberals, this issue was important due to the significant reflection of the Russian intelligentsia in relation to young people, their youthful radicalism. The article is based on the materials of the pre-parliamentary period in the history of Russian liberalism and covers the years from 1902 to 1905.

Reviewed by: Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre by Dorothy Chansky Kim Solga Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; pp. 304. The October 2008 issue of Theatre Journal was bookended by articles from Jill Dolan and Dorothy Chansky that separately reevaluated two stalwarts of the second-wave feminist movement: Wendy Wasserstein (Dolan) and Betty Friedan (Chansky). Together, they marked one unofficial beginning of what has since become a vibrant contemporary movement (including my work with Roberta Barker in Canada, as well as work by Elaine Aston in the United Kingdom, and Varun Begley and Cary Mazer in the United States) to rethink, reframe, and reclaim stage realism in all of its fraught complexity. While it is impossible to recuperate stage realism naively, thanks to the robust critique leveled against it by feminist and critical race scholars over the past four decades, it is—as the above writers contend—nevertheless necessary to parse that critique with care, to distinguish among the multiple practices and strategies (dramaturgical, technical, and performative) that constitute the thing(s) we mean when we talk about “realism,” and to take the measure of the different kinds of cultural work that multiple “realisms” can do—sometimes separately, sometimes in tandem, and sometimes at tantalizing cross-purposes with one another. Now, nearly a decade after her essay on Friedan was published, Chansky offers us a thickly historicized, informative, lively, and intelligent addition to the burgeoning critical literature we might call “Realism 2.0.” Kitchen Sink Realisms is a provocative, unabashedly “feminist history” (3; emphasis in original) of American theatre that spotlights the role that domestic labor has played, as both dramaturgical device and sustained performance action, in a wide range of popular (and a few avant-garde) works written and performed between 1918 and 2005. At the center of Chansky’s history is a careful revaluing of the often-derided genre in her title, and while the book does not offer a thoroughgoing engagement with genre per se, it structures all of its readings around the questions that ghost the label “realist”: How does the American theatre stage our [End Page 489] assumptions about what experiences, what human beings, and what kinds of human labor count as “real”? How can we, as scholars of theatre and performance, account for those assumptions effectively and interrogate the ways in which our performance cultures both uphold and challenge them? Chansky’s rich introduction will appeal to historians, as well as to readers interested more broadly in the recent critical turn back to realism. After introducing the term kitchen sink realism within its historical context, the author spends time thinking through the different ways in which we might value realism today, and the different generic structures within which we might uncover its operations. Although she begins by noting that her book will investigate the routine ways in which some of the most “real” labor in American life—domestic work for pay, or more often for none—is simultaneously implied and forgotten by major realist texts in the American canon (3), Chansky quickly moves on to complicate what might otherwise seem a familiar critical move: damning the realist stage for failing to account for multiple forms of human experience. Brecht, she helpfully reminds us, was a self-identified realist, one who believed realism to be the preeminent genre for “unmasking” a culture’s most malignant operations (5). Following his lead and quoting Pam Morris, Chansky defines realisms—plural—as a cluster of related genres invested in “a complex, ambivalent responsiveness towards, rather than repulsion from, the tangible stuff of reality” (Morris, qtd. on 5). The social and political potentials of these genres, Chansky goes on to argue, are always implicit, but not always available to artists or producers; especially when we examine works for a wide popular audience, the marketplace often gets in the way (6). Thus the task of the realist historian becomes to think theatre carefully through its cultural histories, exploring what knowledge audiences might have brought with them to the theatre at any given...

This Article highlights key contributions of second wave feminism, arguing that these are of relevance today, as we struggle to deal with questions of social justice within a context of increasing poverty and inequality. I look at feminist understandings of expanded social justice which highlighted crucial links between the economic, political and the cultural, and which stressed that the personal was political. I look at feminist strategies which stressed women's agency and the need for separate women's movements even as feminist women challenged men alongside whom they worked in trade unions, liberation movements and radical social movements. I look at how feminist struggles have fragmented over the decades alongside an increasing hegemony of economic and political neoliberalism, and the demobilisation of emancipatory movements. While women made gains within state institutions and the United Nations (UN) system in the 1990s, alongside these gains was the co-option and depoliticisation of feminist concepts forged in the throes of struggle of the earlier decades. Women's agency too came under threat and was challenged as men's movements came to be promoted as vehicles for gender equality. I argue that while men can play a vital role in struggles for gender equality it is women's movements that need to be advanced and supported as key actors in repoliticising feminism today.