Courtney Love Research Articles

“Feminism, Punk Rock, and Subcultural Living”: The Forming of Courtney Love and Hole

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the sources of the anger in the early work of Courtney Love and rock band Hole, which—in contrast to much of today’s mainstream rock, pop, and indie music, which more often draws from singer-songwriter, country, and electronic forms—was inspired by confrontational punk, underground, and post-punk influences. I argue that Hole’s early work, especially debut album Pretty on the Inside, constitutes a coherent protest against the broken promises of the 1960s counterculture and the second wave of feminism. I consider the price paid by Love for playing the “angry woman” and lessons for today’s artists.

Direwood by Catherine Yu

Reviewed by: Direwood by Catherine Yu Natalie Berglind Yu, Catherine Direwood. Page Street, 2022 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781645676126 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781645676133 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 Glen Hills, Michigan, is the perfect suburban town to raise a cookie cutter nuclear family—if you're white, that is. Aja, her role model sister Fiona, and her father make up the only Chinese family in the area, and the neighbors don't let them forget it. Subtle microaggressions increase when Fiona vanishes on the night of her seventeenth birthday, followed by several of her friends. The disappearances are accompanied by strange occurrences: storms have been bringing rust-colored rain and glittering, black bugs are spreading everywhere, and a menacing gloom lays heavy on the town. Aja's not totally surprised, then, when an alluring vampire shows up at the door, finally revealing where her sister has gone—but is she following him to get Fiona back, or will she succumb to the same temptations that stole Fiona away? An intriguing combination of horror and coming of age, the novel follows Aja as she plots to defeat the vampires that keep the neighborhood teens in thrall while simultaneously coping with the feeling of being overshadowed by her sister. Horror elements are gothic and truly grotesque, and Yu pulls on classic vampiric imagery, tying the seductive monsters to death and decay as they hide in an abandoned church crawling with cannibalistic, blood-sucking caterpillars and butterflies. The nuance of the narrative comes from Aja and her emotional hurdles, perhaps accurately perceiving the help of her former best friend as a white savior complex (Aja is Chinese American) but believably unsure of how to deal with it, especially since Aja could use the backup. Background elements such as slap bracelets, Courtney Love references, and dial-up Internet firmly place this in the 1990s, before the characters could use a cell phone for help. The combination of the setting, Aja's emotional journey, the eerie vampires, and the metaphors for change through metamorphosis culminate in a truly effective horror story that will have readers haunted for weeks after it's finished. [End Page 70] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Professional Widows: Contesting History with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Female musicians account for almost 8 percent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s inductees. The Rock Hall, however, often invites rock widows to accept their late husbands’ awards. As a result, rock widows’ sustained presence at Rock Hall induction ceremonies illustrates the hall’s bias against women’s contributions to rock history. This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine how HBO generated programming out of rock widow Courtney Love’s fraught history with Nirvana following the band’s 2014 induction into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame. The channel broadcast the Rock Hall’s 2014 ceremony, which included Nirvana’s induction and reunited Love with her late husband’s family and band, including drummer Dave Grohl. Within a year, HBO programmed Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, two documentary projects that foregrounded Grohl’s and Love’s contributions to Nirvana’s legacy and were particularly instructive in their illumination of Love’s significance to the band’s legacy. Love used HBO’s interest in Cobain as an opportunity to reframe her career through their marriage. Thus, in this article, I recognize Love’s rock widow status as a guiding force behind Nirvana’s mid-2010s renaissance on HBO and a challenge to HBO and the Rock Hall’s hegemonic masculinity.

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

In Search of Nirvana: Why Nirvana: The True Story Could Never Be “True”

In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject—the rock band Nirvana—via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with “insider” information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.

Book Review: The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society, by Narain D. Batra

The First Freedoms and America's Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of Aspirational Society. Narain D. Batra. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 255 pp. $75 hardback.Discovering truth, voting wisely, and realizing one's identity; is trio of wellestablished justifications for protecting speech under First Amendment to U.S. Constitution, corresponding, respectively, to free-expression theories known as marketplace of ideas, democratic self-governance, and autonomy/human dignity.To this list, Narain D. Batra now adds another important free-speech value-innovation-in his timely and example-packed tome, The First Freedoms and America's Culture of Innovation. A professor of communications at Norwich University in Vermont who also writes for media outlets in India, Batra's thesis in his latest book is clear:The First Amendment provides Americans with essential cultural environment, primordial soup or embryonic conditions, for innovations to develop regardless of process, whether is recombinant, serendipitous, or simply someone fiddling and tinkering in garage or with iPad.Citing and channeling Justice Louis Brandeis' 1927 contention from Whitney v. California that it is function of speech to free men from bondage of irrational fears, Batra asserts that First Amendment creates spaces for innovative behavior by freeing us from irrational fears (whether is stem cell research for life enhancement or redefining idea of marriage by applying Fourteenth Amendment to gay marriage rights).But First Amendment and culture of innovation facilitates are only two of necessary conditions for making United States an aspirational society. The other variables, Batra believes, are steady influx of immigrants that produces brain flow and an open economic marketplace (not simply metaphorical marketplace of ideas). Simply put, takes free speech, free markets and freed-not free-brains.One strength of this book is author's ability to surf pop-cultural realm to illustrate larger points about free speech, communication technologies, innovation and aspirational society. On page 22, we find erstwhile California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger landing in hot political and cultural waters for Saturday Night Liveinfused crack about special interests, unions, and trial lawyers being girlie men. Exactly sixty pages later, we catch singer-actress Courtney Love diving into very different cauldron of hot water for tweeting allegedly defamatory remarks about clothing designer. And then there is Donald Trump's The Apprentice, characterized as a most spectacular materialization of myth of aspirational society.But these references are not to say that book fails to approach its topics with gravitas. Batra's chapter on China is excellent and, from an American perspective, almost exceedingly optimistic. He ends by pondering whether China has unique cultural power to challenge United States and West. Batra concludes does not. Authoritarian China cannot handle political freedom because does not have American cultural capabilities to do so, Batra writes, adding that the source of unique American cultural capabilities is First Amendment freedoms, which China cannot import without transforming itself into different society, one that will closely resemble United States. …

Love as a Young Girl

Love as a Young Girl Marianne Kunkel (bio) Following Courtney Love's parents' divorce, her mother accused her father, Hank, of giving four-year-old Courtney LSD. At age 31, Courtney claimed not to remember if this actually happened. Hank fumbles inside of my mouth,lets me sprawl naked beside him on cool linoleum.At school kids are twitchy, use toothbrushes,shout Pee Girl at me in my stained dress;I was born grown-up. I can lie still here for hoursas Hank tells me to, hear in his chestbuffalo galloping steadily faster.On his arm draped around me, hairs shoot up. He said trip, but how? His truck is stuckon cinder blocks. My eyes drag the floor for miceand suddenly I see a quivering staircaseof linoleum tiles. Its corners blaze fluorescent pink—bright as bubble gum in girls' mouths,as the stilettos they wear climbing to the top.I'm told as an infant I never wailed,but this is different. My lips fuse. I want to. [End Page 12] Marianne Kunkel Marianne Kunkel is Managing Editor at Prairie Schooner and a third-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with a specialization in women's and gender studies. Her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, River Styx, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Laughing Game, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Copyright © 2013 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Still Angry after All These Years, or Valerie Solanas under Your Skin

Still Angry after All These Years, or Valerie Solanas under Your Skin Tiina Rosenberg (bio) "Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of shit." —Valerie Solanas1 On 30 April 1988, the body of Valerie Solanas was found at the Bristol Hotel, the single-room occupancy in the Tenderloin District in central San Francisco. According to the terse police report, she was kneeling beside the bed in a tidy room with her manuscripts in proper order on her desk. The report goes on to state that Solanas had died around 25 April and that cadaverous worms had invaded her body. The hotel staff had seen her writing at her desk a few weeks earlier. The image of the neat room with piles of manuscripts and the dead body of Solanas fascinated Sara Stridsberg, a Swedish playwright and novelist who was born in 1972. She decided to find out who Solanas was in the same manner that Isabelle Collin Dufresne, alias Ultra Violet, one of Andy Warhol's superstars, once did. Ultra Violet telephoned people who had known Solanas during the 1960s. Only a few of them were still alive and they warned Ultra Violet about Solanas. "She is dangerous," they said.2 Stridsberg was thrilled by everything she found out. She literally got Solanas under her skin, embarking on a three-year project (2003-06) that started with a translation of Solanas's 1968 S.C.U.M. Manifesto into Swedish and included the novel Dream Faculty: An Addition to the Theory of Sexuality (2006), which is about Solanas, and the play Valerie Jean Solanas for President of America (2006). This forum essay discusses Stridsberg's revisiting of Solanas's anger as a feminist response to the injustice of sexism and homophobia and to envision a future loaded with feminist energy. [End Page 529] Characteristic of Stridsberg's work is the way she portrays her heroines when they are in a most vulnerable and deplorable state, but maintaining dignity against all odds. In Valerie Jean Solanas for President of America, Stridsberg tells the story of Solanas's wounded childhood, how she sold her body to finance her studies in psychology, why she shot Andy Warhol, and her death in the hotel room in San Francisco. Stridsberg also translated Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto into Swedish in 2003 and provided a very long introduction. S.C.U.M. stands for Society for Cutting Up Men, a fictitious organization whose founder and only member was Solanas. The Swedish version of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto was performed by a chorus of angry women reciting it in the form of political agitation. When Stridsberg (fig. 1) planned the public reading of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto in 2003 in Stockholm, she contacted a number of women she thought embodied some of Solanas's qualities. The actress Ingela Olsson, who later performed Solanas (fig. 2), was one of them. Olsson and others who participated in the event had heard of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, but they had never read it. They were, however, fascinated by the text, finding in it a special energy that emerges from the paradox of a person living on the streets and at the same time producing such a work. Stridsberg knew the S.C.U.M. Manifesto by heart. She had laughed and cried over this irresistibly wild and crazy satire of the patriarchy that did not resemble anything by any feminist she had ever read before. Its language is harsh, its ideals completely out of reach. The wild and intense voice of the manifesto does not adhere to any consensus regarding rhetoric, politics, art, philosophy, or the future. It is a fantastically desperate and euphorically mad text. According to Stridsberg, the S.C.U.M. Manifesto is all about poetry, not politics in the traditional sense of the word; she places Solanas in the same tradition as Sylvia Plath, Courtney Love, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Billie Holiday, and Tracey Emin. Writing about Solanas was, for Stridsberg, a way of communicating with the woman who had written the wildest utopia ever. She created a dance macabre of Solanas's childhood...

Passing for an author: the strange case of J. T. LeRoy

The photograph depicts a child - perhaps nine or ten years old - with bushy brown hair and bright, dark eyes that reveal a certain strong-willed ambition. In a portrait from the mid-1970s, the child wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words 'I want to be me!'1 (Figure 1). It is a nice sentiment and one that reflects our modern interest in authenticity and the search for self. It would be unremarkable, except to a doting parent, were it not for the fact that the child depicted here grew up to be involved in one of the most convoluted cases of impersonation in recent history. In that light, ? want to be me!' begins to take on a less inspiring, more desperate tone. How startling that a message on a T-shirt - the very de rigueur location for ironic sloganeering - should be not only such a prescient indicator of future events but almost too painfully appropriate in its irony. Jeremiah 'Terminator' LeRoy was the son of a truck-stop prostitute. He was pimped out by his mother, lived rough on the streets of San Francisco, recovered from heroin addiction, contracted AIDS and was in the process of transitioning from male to female. LeRoy was remarkable not only for having lived through so much while so young; more remarkably, he had overcome this adversity to become an enfant terrible, admired by the literary and entertainment industries and a legion of readers. In 1999, his first novel, Sarah, the story of a child prostitute, was published to critical acclaim; within a year, LeRoy was the darling of a hip celebrity crowd. Madonna sent him books on kabbala; Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson, Liv Tyler, Carrie Fisher and Gus Van Sant all counted him as a close friend. By 2003, LeRoy had graced the cover of Vanity Fair and had been compared with some of the twentieth century's most important cultural icons - among them Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Truman Capote. He not only befriended rock stars, he lived like one: LeRoy wrote lyrics for his own band; he travelled with an entourage; he had a standing rider for every gig; and he always appeared in public heavily disguised. That was LeRoy 's life, but his fiction was no less sensational: his stories were a commercially savvy blend of trauma, exploitation, dysfunctional family life, sex, drugs and mysticism - all set before the background of West Virginian truck-stops, flea-pit motels and white-trash dives. Although classified as fiction, the connections between the life of the author and the content of his stories gave his work the feel of memoir. There was little doubt that his own life experiences had a major impact on his writing. Except that LeRoy never existed. The books were written by Laura Albert, the young child wearing the T-shirt in the photograph. Albert, a forty-something woman, had spent several decades drifting around the fringes of San Francisco's counterculture, writing stories and articles and performing music under a number of different names. The product of Albert's imagination, 'J. T. LeRoy' was a literary device that, she later explained, gave her the freedom to be the real her.2 Writing as LeRoy, Albert drew on her experiences with sexual abuse, the punk underground, sex work and Ufe on the streets. When, during the civil fraud trial relating to the hoax in 2007, Albert was asked to explain her actions, she testified: 'he [LeRoy] was my channel for air. To me, if you take my JT, my Jeremy, my other, I die.'3 How do we account for the identity known as J. T. LeRoy? Was it simply a case, as the civil courts found, of fraud? Is this another chapter in the long history of literary hoaxes? And what of his creator: how do we match the girl in the picture who wanted 'to be me' with the woman who explained LeRoy as her life source, a 'channel for air'? This essay will argue that the J. T. LeRoy hoax demonstrates the author as a collective identity, formed by writers, readers and the publishing industry acting in concert towards a common aim. …

Hamlet Between the Lines

Hamlet Presented by The Public Theater at Delacorte Theater, Central Park, New York, New York. May 27-June 29, 2008. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Scenic design by David Korins. Costume design by Ann Hould-Ward. Puppetry by Basil Twist. With Michael Stuhlbarg (Hamlet), Sam Waterson (Polonius), Andre Braugher (Claudius), Margaret Colin (Gertrude), Lauren Ambrose (Ophelia), David Harbour (Laertes), Kevin Carroll (Horatio), Hoon Lee (Rosencrantz), Greg McFadden (Guildenstern),Jay O. Sanders (Player King), Miriam Silverman (Player Queen), and others. The most, and almost only, moving scene in The Public Theatre's Hamlet in Central Park this year was the play-within-the-play. Performed by highly skilled puppeteers, it featured three life-sized marionettes designed by Basil Twist with what one might call rough magic; each puppet was made to look as though it were only colorful sheet (of satiny burgundy, white, or blue and green) wrapped over simple marionette frame with stuffed headpiece and coiled fabric for arms. The movements were equally simple, but also remarkably subtle and expressive, and brought the puppets alive in hauntingly poignant way that made the mic'd voice-overs resonate with genuine emotion. For the first time I can remember, the Player King and Queen did indeed come across as couple that shared thirty years of love in the sacred bands of marriage. Thus it felt real that the Player Queen would protest so much; and the Player King's blunt predictions about how her vows will fare after his death felt as though he spoke, not out of cynical distrust, but selfless care for his wife's happiness in the future. Unfortunately, this moment stood virtually alone, and did not become an emblem for the magic of theatre when make-believe takes on living quality and actors become personages we care about. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I should note that I was not alone in feeling that the production, directed by the Public's Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis, was uninspired. First, I happened to see the show with my mother, who had last read Hamlet well over sixty years ago in Korean translation of Japanese translation (as was the practice in colonial times). Her knowledge of the play came more from bits and pieces picked up over the years (melancholy brooding, To be or not to be) and assembled around the image of Hamlet holding skull. On top of this, because her English is still far from perfect, her impressions were necessarily broad. Nonetheless, her reactions to the production generally matched the most common complaints of the reviewers. She found Gertrude to be characterless and bland (NY Post, June 18, 2008), if not so lifeless as a well-maintained mannequin (Daily News, June 22, 2008). Nothing illuminated my mother's most pressing question about Gertrude: is it frailty or guts, or something else, that drives woman to marry her brother-in-law so soon after her husband's death? My mother also couldn't see how Andre Braugher's Claudius could murder, seduce and engineer coup, since there was little in the way of specific characterization (NY Times, June 18, 2008); had she been familiar with Braugher's other work, she would no doubt have added that he uncharacteristically left little impression (New York Magazine, June 19, 2008) at all. Ophelia was at least pitiable as the pained, dutiful daughter in an elegant pink frock, but her transformation into disheveled punk-chick (New York Sun, June 18, 2008), or Courtney Love look-alike (NY Post) in the mad scene left my mother thinking that Ophelia had suddenly walked in from another play. But most of all, Michael Stuhlbarg's Hamlet left her feeling emotionally disengaged, and as the show teetered into its fourth hour, numbness [became] the overriding response (Variety, June 17, 2008). By that time, the character that both the New York Times reviewer and my mother found most interesting--Sam Waterston's eager and bluster-filled but vulnerable and gently comic Polonius--was long dead and offstage. …

Virtual Hillbilly: Musings on JT LeRoy by a Flesh-and-Blood West Virginian

ARTICLE Virtual Hillbilly: Musings on JT LeRoy by a Flesh-and-Blood West Virginian Ann Pancake So it turns out that the most famous West Virginia writer in history (well, at least in recent history) is not only not West Virginian. He doesn't exist at all. As you know if you've run across any of the million and a half items Google coughs up for "JT LeRoy," many if not most written in just the past few months, the story goes like this: our author was born in 1980 in an unspecified West Virginia town. After a wildly abusive childhood in the state, distinguished by his mother prostituting him at truck stops, young JT escaped to San Francisco. There he lived on the streets, still hooking and at some point developing a heroin addiction, until he was rescued by a social worker named Emily Frasier in 1993. While in therapy with psychologist Dr. Terence Owens, JT began to write. Owens immediately recognized JT's latent genius and put him in touch with the first of many well-established writers and editors. By the time JT was sixteen, his work was appearing in popular magazines and journals—not bad for a formerly homeless hillbilly who was sexually abused as a child—and at the tender age of twenty, LeRoy published, to considerable acclaim, an autobiographical novel set in West Virginia entitled Sarah. Sarah was followed a year later, in 2001, by a collection of short stories, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, also set partly in West Virginia, and it too received an enthusiastic reception and has just been made into a film. A novella, Harold's End, this time with a San Francisco backdrop, came out in 2005. Not surprisingly, JT didn't achieve this spectacular literary ascent single-handedly. Drawing on self-promotion skills unprecedented in any Appalachian adolescent I've ever known, at fourteen JT was already in touch with edgy writer Dennis Cooper. From there, he cultivated intimate friendships/ mentorshipswith scadsofotherliterary celebrities, agents and editors. Sarah's blurbs and acknowledgements page read like a Who's Who in Contemporary Hip Writers and include Mary Karr, Sharon Olds, Mary Gaitskill, Tom Spanbauer, Art Spiegelman, Lewis Nordan, Tobias Woolf, Chuck Palakniuk, Joel Rose, 35 and Suzanne Vega. Vega prefigures JT's more recent batch of friends, because even the hippest of hip writers is less hip than a movie or music star. Eventually, JT's networking prowess had him hanging out with Winona Ryder and Gus Van Sant, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal and Courtney Love. Few could resist this vulnerable damaged genius boy, his need for support and nurturing, and his considerable charm in phone conversations and e-mail exchanges. Because—and here our tale takes a darker twist—phone conversations, faxes, and e-mails were almost exclusively how these relationships were conducted. Only a couple of his rich and /or famous friends ever met JT face to face, and those who did were presented with a mysterious figure in a wig and sunglasses accompanied by a woman named Laura Albert who did JT's talking for him. JT, friends and then fans were told, could not make public appearances because he was "pathologically shy;" because he was confused about his gender; because as a transgendered person, he might be attacked; because he had contracted HIV. After a while, some people got suspicious. Rumors about JT LeRoy's real identity were circulating pretty early on, but many of his closest supporters—those who spent hours with him on the phone—insisted that JT had to be exactly who he claimed he was. In October 2005, however, journalist Stephen Beachy published in New York magazine a meticulously researched piece making an awfully good case that JT was an imaginary construct most likely created by none other than Laura Albert, a forty-year-old middle-class white woman originally from Brooklyn. (During his research, Beachy examined all available public records and found no evidence of LeRoy's being born in West Virginia—or anyplace, for that matter—in 1980.) Then, in January 2006, a Warren St. John piece for The New York Times revealed that the...

Genealogies and generations: the politics and praxis of third wave feminism

This article interrogates the ways in which post-feminism and third wave feminism are used interchangeably, both within the academy and in the media. As it identifies the ways in which third wave feminism seeks to define itself as a non-academic discourse, it points up the tensions implicit in the contemporary feminist project. It outlines such popular components of third wave feminism as girl culture, the grrrl movement and BUST magazine, before addressing the arguments concerning agency in such icons as Courtney Love, Madonna and the Spice Girls. Positing that the metonymic gap between the personal and the political allows post-feminism to be a viable alternative to feminism, it argues that the wave paradigm paralyses feminism, pitting generations against one another.

Genealogies and generations: the politics and praxis of third wave feminism

Abstract This article interrogates the ways in which post-feminism and third wave feminism are used interchangeably, both within the academy and in the media. As it identifies the ways in which third wave feminism seeks to define itself as a non-academic discourse, it points up the tensions implicit in the contemporary feminist project. It outlines such popular components of third wave feminism as girl culture, the grrrl movement and BUST magazine, before addressing the arguments concerning agency in such icons as Courtney Love, Madonna and the Spice Girls. Positing that the metonymic gap between the personal and the political allows post-feminism to be a viable alternative to feminism, it argues that the wave paradigm paralyses feminism, pitting generations against one another.

Fight for Survival

Webcasting is an alternative to terrestrial radio stations. Online radio allows listeners to swap local radio fare for more exotic programming, turning everyday PCs into world receivers, and offers a large variety of special-interest Webcasts catering to very genre-specific tastes. For independent music labels whose content would never be played on mainstream terrestrial radio, Webcasting has become a major source of exposure. Unlike filesharing, however, Webcasts remain largely ephemeral: no permanent copy of radio content can be created on the user’s computer unless authorised by the Webcaster, or unless users specifically seek out software like Streambox VCR which circumvents such restrictions.

Disruptive divas: feminism, identity, and popular music

Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegeocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of acceptable female musicianship.

The Routledge critical dictionary of feminism and postfeminism

Approachable for general readers as well as for students in women's studies-related courses at all levels, this guide follows the critical dictionary format in combining over a dozen in-depth background chapters with more than 400 A-Z dictionary entries. The background chapters are written by major voices in the field of feminist studies, and include thorough coverage of the history of feminism, as well as extensive discussions of topics such as post-feminism, men in feminism, feminism and technologies and feminism and philosophy. The dictionary entries cover the major individuals and issues essential to an understanding both of feminism's roots and of the trends that are shaping its future. Readers will find entries on people such as Aphra Behn, Simone de Beauvoir, Princess Diana, Courtney Love and Robert Bly, and on subjects such as Afro-American feminism, cosmetic surgery, the new man, prostitution, reproductive technologies and slasher films.

"Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America.

In the past quarter century, mothers have moved noticeably toward center stage in American culture. While Susan Smith will eventually fade from the tabloids, the monster mother that she represents has a storied and long history. Mothers have been blamed for a host of problems, from autism in children (due to chilly refrigerator mothers), to homosexuality (attributed to smothering moms), to welfare dependency and crime (caused by black matriarchs and single mothers). Some mothers are not good mothers. No one can deny that. There are women who neglect their children, abuse them, and fail to provide them with proper psychological nurturance. While such mothers have always stimulated the American imagination, the definition of what constitutes a bad mother has expanded significantly in recent years. Indeed, with a distinct minority of American families living the two-parent, one-worker lifestyle once considered the norm, we all face the discomfiting question, Do most mothers now qualify as mothers in one way or another? Drawing together the work of prominent scholars and journalists, Bad Mothers considers such diverse topics as the mother-blaming theories of psychological and medical experts, bad mothers in the popular media, the scapegoating of mothers in politics, and the punitive approach to mothers by social service and legal authorities. The volume also includes the stories of individual mothers, from sterilization survivor Willie Mallory to rock star Courtney Love. Ably edited by two leading scholars, Bad Mothers marks an important contribution to the literature on motherhood.

The Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning (review)

Reviewed by: The Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning Mark Stocker The Educational Imperative: A Defense of Socratic and Aesthetic Learning, by Peter Abbs; x & 250 pp. Bristol, Pennsylvania: Taylor & Francis, 1994, $29.00 paper. O tempora! o mores! Peter Abbs begins by deploring “the cultural catastrophe” of British education in the mid-1990s. He states in his always lucid and accessible prose: “I want to come clean; I want to place the general argument of the book in the current arena of public debate, and to do so without apology and without equivocation.” He bemoans today’s massive denial of spiritual energy, of intellectual enquiry, of aesthetic beauty and public virtue. In a better world, he says, education would serve, “willingly and lovingly . . . the transcendent ends” of culture and society. Abbs decisively rejects the “Cato” model where teachers are unquestioning skill-based technicians who employ [End Page 393] “managerial” language. Instead, he advocates a Socratic view, which is “to reaffirm that education should be primarily concerned with critical reflection, with personal development and with the sustained enquiry into the various forms of meaning.” Subsequent chapters apply this approach to the arts curriculum. Its failure to gain proper recognition and the absurd and continued conflation of Dance and Physical Education are indicted. Abbs convincingly attacks the notion of “self-expression” in art and language long upheld by educationalists. Its application at the expense of reason, abstract thinking, and the study of “the truly significant writers through the centuries” has in his view helped to trivialize and to marginalize the arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in so-called “educational drama.” For three generations it has denied “the aesthetic field of drama, the symbolic field of its own form,” and has elevated one genre, improvisation, and made it the totality. Abbs is committed to reconciling “the creative energies of the individual and the creative energies of the culture.” Who would argue with that? And who could deny the value of critical reflection or indeed public virtue? He declares, rather ponderously: “The vested interests of Coca-Cola manufacturers or political missionaries have to be seen as too ‘recent and relevant’ to be allowed” to shape education. The Abbs academy requires “a formally protected place, an institutional space more like the theatre than Tesco [a supermarket chain], more like the cathedral than the Stock Exchange.” For all this patent seriousness and sincerity, here is an educationalist irrevocably and irreconcilably out of joint with the present. The austere modernism of Herbert Read profoundly influenced Abbs in his teens; he also admires F. R. Leavis, Richard Hoggart, and David Holbrook, whose writing at its most influential spans the 1930s and the 1960s. Abbs’s most recent source of inspiration is the art critic Peter Fuller, whose abiding legacy was a romantic nationalism that eloquently celebrated an “essentially symbolic and figurative” tradition in British art from J. M. W. Turner to Henry Moore. Modern Painters, which Fuller edited, could afford to eschew popular culture and its connections with “higher” arts. Fine for a periodical, but how could such a fastidious approach be applied to the classroom experience? Abbs describes an experiment that he performed on student-teachers at the University of Sussex to understand their aesthetic responses. Among the events and objects that the students were asked to consider were John Constable’s The Haywain, Richard Strauss’s The Four Last Songs, a visit to Claude Monet’s garden and a performance of Coriolanus. Abbs’s list does not, however, contain Pulp Fiction, a Courtney Love concert, or an S. E. Hinton novel. What place, if any, do the latter have in the arts curriculum? Must they be ruled out for being too “recent and relevant”? Can student responses to them be brought to bear on their comprehension of higher culture? Or is there a great and ultimately irreconcilable divide? Abbs never faces these issues and instead, in his fogyish [End Page 394] coda, denounces once more “the consumer society” which has “trivialized on an unprecedented scale” and has “tarnished whatever it has touched.” Mark Stocker University of Canterbury, New Zealand Copyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press