Feminist Challenges Research Articles

Vacant Wombs: Feminist Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theories of Childless Women

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.

Towards a feminist political geography?

The next challenge for the subdiscipline (of political geography) is to incorporate new politicizations of human geography through… feminist geography (the politics of ‘public’ and ‘private’) (1994: p. 450). (T)he subdiscipline has still yet to meet the challenge of feminist geography whose concerns for power in place and space from a gender perspective have only appeared intermittently in contemporary political geography. The study of place/space tensions may be one way of integrating feminist geographical concerns into political geography (2000: p. 597). These quotes are the closing words in the ‘political geography’ entry in the third and fourth editions of The Dictionary of Human Geography . The 1994 entry basically represents feminist geography as the politics of the ‘public–private’ divide; while the 2000 entry broadens the scope (and possibly the geographic scale?) of the feminist challenge, framing it in terms of power and space—a central concern of political geography. (Notably, feminist geography is not even mentioned in the ‘political geography’ entry in the first two editions.) I want to think about a feminist political geography that takes formulations of the politics of ‘public’ and ‘private’, power, space, and scale seriously as one way of engaging part of Kevin Cox and Murray Low’s charge: “attempt to situate issues about what counts as ‘political’ subject matter in political geography in a broader field of geographic and social science concern, and in relation to ‘current affairs.’ Panelists will explore these questions of subdisciplinary approach, identity, and focus in relation to an array of topical areas in political geography which form actual or potential sites for exchange between subdisciplines and with other disciplines.”

Counting for something! Recognising women's contribution to the global economy through alternative accounting systems

As a political economist, the focus of my research and activism has always been how economic data can be used to influence public policy. I am very familiar with the technical, logistical and measurement arguments traditionally raised by statisticians or economists in the debates on the collection, presentation and imputations related to gender disaggregated statistics. I also have very little patience with them. This article explains why, in the context of a critique of the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA). It also surveys some alternative methods of accounting, which better capture the realities of women's contribution to the global economy. The new feminist challenge is to identify and use these models in public policy making and in advocacy for change.

Screening Networks: Shared agendas in feminist and disability movement challenges to antenatal screening and abortion

This paper identifies common ground in feminist and disability movement concerns with the social and ethical implications of antenatal screening and abortion. By examining the frameworks used by particular authors within each area, I argue that they both can and do have a shared agenda, which is focused on the social values that are embedded in antenatal screening and promote abortion as the obvious choice to the diagnosis of a congenital condition. It is important to develop some kind of shared agenda in order to construct theoretical and methodological approaches, which pay equal attention to pregnant women (disabled and non-disabled) and disabled people. To aid the development of such an agenda I draw on Actor Network Theory (ANT), which focuses on analysing the role of sociotechnical networks in securing particular social values and moral worlds. The issue for both disability studies and feminism is what kind of screening networks produce moral worlds that promote abortion, shape women's choices and express discrimination against disabled people?

Veiling Gender in French Literary History

THE COMPARATIST SONYA STEPHENS, ed. A History ofWomen 's Writing in France. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 2000. ix + 314 pp. + MADELEINE DOBIE, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. xiv + 234 pp. VEILING GENDER IN FRENCH LTTERARY HISTORY These two very different literary histories, one a general set ofessays, the other a focused thematic study, nonetheless both suggest a certain resistance to AngloAmerican feminism in French studies. Sonya Stephens's History of Women 's Writing in France, a volume in the Cambridge series ofnational histories, follows a straightforward chronological track and sets aside feminist challenges to periodization , movements, or the canonization ofmale authors. Instead it makes its mark by including all kinds ofwriting—devotional, epistolary, fairy tales, journalism, and even scientific tracts—that allow a broad sweep ofwomen to find a place. Yet the pigeonholes into which they are placed are familiar ones, and the absent men such as Rousseau and Richardson cast a long shadow overthe womenwho remain. The volume is hexagonal, excluding most women writing in French outside France. Isabelle de Charrière does appear in Martin Hall's chapter on eighteenth-century fiction as "arguably the greatest" woman writer of the century (113). Yet Hall's thematic description of"everyday provincial life" in her novels belies the importance ofher psychological portraits and ofher radical experiments with ironic fragmentation ofplot, which mark her as a cosmopolitan writer who breaks out ofher century. The accounts by the different contributors vary in their scope but they are all helpful in the mode ofa descriptive bibliography, and the final bibliography of texts and secondary sources will undoubtedly be useful to many readers who start their exploration ofwomen's writings here. By contrast, Madeleine Dobie's Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism is a sophisticated theoretical study ofcontradictory impulses in the gendered representation ofthe Other, whether colonial or Oriental, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The Orient, she argues, is feminized , while Western women are orientalized, as they are assimilated to the dangers ofdecadent desire on the "sopha," passive luxury in their private space, and despotism in the public sphere. In the central contradictory metaphor of the book, the veiled woman represents fidelity or truth, yet she also represents appearance and falsehood. Thus Roxane's veil in Montesquieu's Lettrespersanes protects her from the profane gaze ofthose other than her husband, yet it also enables her to disguise her infidelity to her husband. 7Ae Persian Letters also lay the groundwork for Dobie's theme of the alterity of Woman, of the Oriental, and of language. The instability oflanguage, or more specifically ofthe written, derives in part from texts being subject to interpretation, to reading, and often to speculative translation. When Usbek's letters remain unread, they lose their meaning and power. In an analogous destabilization ofmeaning, Roxane's suicide, which like all suicide has long been the subject ofdebate, here is read as a kind ofwriting, in which blood, poison, and ink spell out her death. In her chapters on the nineteenth century, Dobie's most striking contextual evidence concerns the support ofwriters on the left such as Gérard de Nerval for colonial intervention, and their failure to address the political consequences ofOriental expansion until the decades following the defeat by Germany in 1871. Already inthe eighteenth century she notes a repressive tendency (perhaps due to VcH. 27 (2003): 169 REVIEW ESSAYS censorship) to condemn Spanish colonies and slavery, but to remain silent on French analogues. Writers such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Crébillon fils offer a "metaleptic reversal between colonial history and Orientalist discourse" (17). The "displacement of the whole problem of slavery" from Western colonies to the Eastern world translates enslavement into political or domestic "servitude." Here may be the place to raise the question why, in a work devoted to gender, colonialism , and eroticism, Dobie focuses almost exclusively on male writers. Had she looked at George Sand's representation of colonialism and slavery in Indiana, the explicit parallelism between forms ofthe Other could have led her to very different arguments about nineteenth-century literary politics. Dobie writes boldly, laying out her claims in an emphatic first person, even where her...

Free markets and state control: a feminist challenge to Davos Man and Big Brother

In this article, a sociologist and a criminologist argue that recent analysis from feminist men's studies points to ways to challenge the masculine institutions involved in global economic restructuring and the global war on terrorism. The expansion of state control - in the name of security and fighting terrorism - represents a new aspect of globalisation, which, in the US, carries significant consequences in terms of less freedom, more incarceration and tremendous costs. As with economic restructuring, women will bear much of this burden. However, the forms of masculinity dominant in global social institutions are subject to challenge. This gives feminists opportunities to transform existing relations of social inequality in states and markets.

Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (review)

Reviews 263 Parergon 20.1 (2003) been generally regarded as unexceptional, argued by historians such as Patrick Collinson in The Elizabethan Puritan Movement in 1967 (p. 375), well before any feminist challenges. Ancestors is elegantly written, as would be expected from a Harvard professor, and nicely printed. Its intended audience appears to be the educated intelligent general –American? – reader rather than teachers and undergraduates interested in the early modern period. There are no new agendas for historians of ‘the family’here, only another discussion of what many would argue is the blind alley of trying to decide whether families were loving in the past. There are better historical questions we could concern ourselves with. How did families differ at different stages of the individual’s life and at different social levels? How did women’s experiences of families differ from those of men? How can we counter the bias of socially specific sources such as first-person accounts, in order to understand the childhood of the poor? The histories of families in early modern times are far more complex than Ozment’s celebratory present-focused argument suggests. Patricia Crawford History The University of Western Australia Richardson, Glenn, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (Reconstructions in Early Modern History), London, Edward Arnold, 2002; paper; pp. x, 246; RRP US$21.95; ISBN 0340731435. Historians have a dangerous tendency to reify their own mental images of past times even though contemporaries might have difficulty in recognising the artefact so created. Dr Richardson has employed a phrase that has flickered in and out of the borders of reification. While formally rejecting the idea that these three rulers, all of whom claimed imperial rather than mere princely status, differed in any substantial way from their predecessors, he asserts that it is not merely a term of convenience but appropriate because of the times in which they lived, an idea that he does not develop further. They are, of course, the three monarchs who have most attracted widespread historical attention but he offers no reason for selecting them for particular attention. Richardson in this volume is neither concerned with analysis nor with demonstrating why in this reconstruction he chooses one explanation rather than 264 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) another, except in the one case of the fall of Anne Boleyn where he specifically asserts his preference for the Ives/Starkey viewpoint over that of Retha Warnicke. A brief introduction makes reference to anonymous intensive studies that have modified the ‘orthodox’ interpretations of the mid-twentieth century but the implication that a new and correct synthesis has now been created is not defended. The student is simply offered a brief synthesis of those subjects that Richardson finds most relevant to the lives and behaviour of Francis I, Henry VIII, and Charles (V of the name in the Holy Roman empire and I in his Spanish kingdoms). This new, early twenty-first-century, orthodoxy is described without much comment. As a result, the book tends to resemble a series of linked encyclopaedia entries providing a short introduction to individual topics but not an articulated argument. It will be useful for those who want, for example, an introduction to the names of the main families involved in the government of the different countries, or the outline of the social hierarchy, but not to those who would like a clear picture of the comparative resources and independence of those families in the different areas. As a result, teachers seeking to stimulate their students’ ability critically to read, analyse and challenge a particular viewpoint or explanation will not be able to use this volume to provide one side of the argument since it uses the voice of authority not the voice of persuasion. Although it may be a useful compendium from which a student could start, there is no guide to the topics omitted (the role of the queen, strikes me, for example) or assertions that others may find dubious. The selected further reading provided is largely monolingual, suggesting that the perceived audience is English speaking. Richardson does not justify his concentration on these three monarchs whom he rightly terms important, but who...

Liberal Pornographic Rights

The conservative antipornographic premise (defined and connected) should be faulted for its groundlessness. Thus, conservative state censorship should be challenged by liberal individual rights to pornography and further by the value of moral harm. Along with the spirit of J. S. Mill's harm principle, the right to free speech, including of course pornographic right, must prevail. And a number of feminist challenges to free pornographic rights are replied to in a variety of ways by some liberal thinkers who believe in the supremacy of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. The concept of neutralizability may be added among those replies. Liberal pornographic rights prevail these days.

Critical Divides: Judith Butler's Body Theory and the Question of Disability

Until 1999, major works in disability studies tended to ignore the influential body theories of Judith Butler, or to argue that her theories relied upon the disabled body as a constitutive Other. Between 1999 and 2001, however, a number of works have appeared which apply Butler's theories to disability. I consider both the original disregard for Butler and her recent adoption in disability studies to shed light upon possibilities for developing integrated feminist disability theory and praxis in the future. I suggest that applying Butler's theories to disability should take place in a contextualized and critical mode, and that substituting disability for Butler's own terms of sex or gender without fully considering the implications of such a substitution may obscure important differences between identity-categories. Finally, I challenge feminist and gender theorists such as Butler to include and account for the disabled body in their future work.

Engaging Globalization: Critical Theory and Global Political Change

Globalization implies global social and political change. Irrespective of whether one identifies globalization as primarily driven by economics or as a cultural phenomenon occurring in the context of technological change and a transformation of lifestyles, it is now clear that the social sciences face the challenge of somehow 'making sense of it. The study of international relations, it could be argued, has been complicated by this challenge, and as a result it begins to reach out in a more interdisciplinary manner, including an opening to more sociologically informed research agendas. Approaches in international relations associated with various forms of critical theory have especially put forward theoretical work, sometimes accompanied by empirical findings, with which to assess and substantiate the nature, quality, and scope of social change in the era of globalization (whether this is understood as an ideology, masking trends that have essentially always accompanied the expansion of modern capitalism, or whether it is seen as something qualitatively new). In the IR discipline, the term critical theory has become a shorthand reference for a variety of attempts to break with the molds of theorizing presented by the dominant strands of realism/neorealism, or liberalism/neoliberalism. Thus, it has come to represent the commentary from the margins of the discipline in manifestations as diverse as neo-Gramscian readings, reformulations of Marxist theory, the spectrum of feminist challenges, poststructuralist inquiries, and the theoretical work originating with the Frankfurt school. (1) Although the affinities among these strands of theorizing from the margins have frequently been stressed, (2) there remain serious disagreements over core issues of theorising with a critical motive, which typically revolve around the claims that critical theorists make for their projects. From among the plurality of critical interventions, Andrew Linklater's appropriation of the reformulated approach of Frankfurt school critical theory--mainly as developed in the work of Jurgen Habermas--has made the most consistent bid for integrating the widest possible range of critical concerns into a more unified version of critical theory for international relations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this gesture of embrace--still evident in Linklater's Transformation of Political Community (3) -- has invited the embraced themselves to reassert their positions with reference to the theoretical suggestions of the embracer. More often than not, the response to Linklater's inclusiveness has been to question the validity of core elements of his theory. In what follows, I want to engage with some of these criticisms insofar as they continue, as I see it, to misconstrue Habermas's grounding of normative theory and criteriology, which he advances through his conception of the discourse-ethical model of norm validation. These misconstruals, I argue, arise in part from the way in which Linklater himself integrates discourse ethics into his theory with emancipatory intent. Following this reconstruction of the potential of the discourse-ethical conception of norm validation for international-relations theory, I focus on what I perceive to be at the core of Habermas's critical project, the dialectic of lifeworld and systems, with a focus on its applicability in international-relations theory. Here, I take into account recent trends toward developing functionalist accounts of integration for the further study of globalization. (4) In my final section, I consider some issues on which Habermas's theory appears insufficiently refined and suggest them as items for furth er investigation. The purpose of this investigation is to underline the relevance of critical theory for attempts to make sense of the globalization challenge. If political community and social bonds are undergoing significant changes, the self-conscious approach to theorizing social life and political authority from a critical perspective that avoids classification in either classical liberal or republican terms promises a more thorough understanding than approaches that remain couched in a conceptual language that is today challenged by actual change. …

Feminist Hermeneutics and Evangelical Concerns: The Rape of Dinah as a Case Study

The article begins by outlining the challenge feminist hermeneutics poses for traditional notions of biblical authority. Genesis 34 is set out as a case study for displaying feminist interpretations that read with the narrator but against patriarchal interpreters and those which read against the narrator himself. I argue that a ‘high view’ of Scripture can accommodate many of the concerns raised by feminist critics of biblical narrative. It is, however, maintained that an evangelical hermeneutic will not easily be able to endorse an interpretation that stands over against the stance of a biblical narrator.

Can Traditional Ethical Theory Meet the Challenges of Feminism, Multiculturalism, and Environmentalism?

This paper aims to evaluate thechallenges posed to traditional ethical theoryby the ethics of feminism, multiculturalism,and environmentalism. I argue that JamesSterba, in his Three Challenges to Ethics,provides a distorted assessment by trying toassimilate feminism, multiculturalism, andenvironmentalism into traditional utilitarian,virtue, and Kantian/Rawlsian ethics – which hethus seeks to rescue from their alleged``biases.'' In the cases of feminism andmulticulturalism, I provide an alternativeaccount on which these new critical discourseschallenge the whole paradigm or conception ofethical inquiry embodied in the tradition.They embrace different questions, goals, toolsof analysis, and wider audiences, typicallyignored or marginalized by traditionalethicists.I illustrate my argument through briefinterpretations of writers such as Susan Okin,Catharine Mackinnon, Sandra Bartky, JohnStoltenberg, Richard Wasserstrom, AnthonyAppiah, Charles Mills, Will Kymlicka, CharlesTaylor, and Martha Nussbaum. In many of thesecases, I suggest that they provide us with newways of being ethicists.In the case of environmentalism, I defend amore conservative and negative assessment.Sterba embraces authors such as Peter Singer,Tom Regan, and Paul Taylor in order to advancean environmentalist ethic of ``speciesequality/impartiality'' and ``biocentricpluralism.'' Here I argue that the traditionalKantian/Rawlsian ethics – which Sterba hopesto accommodate – actually provides compellingmoral reasons for rejecting his principles of``species impartiality'' and biocentricpluralism. Moreover, Rawlsian ethics canprovide a more coherent, consistent, andplausible account of environmental issues thanSterba's brand of environmental ethics. Iargue that in practice, his ethics concedeswhat it denies in theory – namely, the specialvalue which inheres in human beings.As such, environmental ethics, unlike feminismand multiculturalism, poses very little in theway of a credible challenge or alternative totraditional ethics.

Rethinking Women's Politics in the 1970s: The League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women Confront Poverty

Women's politics in the 1970s reached beyond self-defined feminists, as "traditional" women's organizations tackled problems of import to women's everyday lives. A comparison of the positions and actions on welfare reform taken by the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s challenges the assumption that all middle-class white women ignored the problems of poor women and highlights a critical turning point in American liberalism. The League's activism reveals the depth and breadth of liberal commitment to eradicating poverty in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but economic changes and feminist challenges undermined the family wage assumptions upon which that commitment was built. NOW's poverty activism increased during the decade, and the League eventually joined the feminist call for a welfare state geared toward overcoming women's economic disadvantage through employment.

Comparative religious ethics: a narrative approach

Preface.Acknowledgments.Part I: Post/Modern Stories of War and Peace.Introduction: Storytelling and Comparative Religious Ethics.1. Religion, Ethics and Storytelling.Religion: The Sacred and the Holy.The Awakening of Ethical Consciousness: The Power of Religious Stories, East and West.The Great Religious Stories of the World - An Overview.A Postscript on Religious Language - A Word of Caution.2. Stories of War and Peace - Ancient and Post/Modern.Tales of Demonic Madness - From Auschwitz to Hiroshima.Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Formative Religious Events of the Post/Modern World.Tchno-bureaucratic Rationality and the Demise of Ethical Consciousness.Doubling and the Myth of Life through Death: The Spiritual Logic of Mass Death in the 20th Century.Apocalypse - A Story of War as Ritual Purification.The Way of All the Earth: Global Ethics and Tales of Divine Madness.Part II: War and Peace: Ancient Stories and Post/Modern Life Stories. Introduction to Part II: Ethics After Auschwitz and Hiroshima.3. The Religious Quest and the birth of Ethics.The Story of Gilgamesh: The Crises of Morality, Mortality and Meaning.Urbanization, Doubling and Death.The Story of the Trial of Socrates.The Socratic Invention of Ethics and the Way of Doubt.4. Hindu Stories - Ancient and Post/Modern.Cosmic Story: The Myth of Liberation.Formative Story: Arjuna and Krishna.Life Story: Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Way of Brahmacharya.Comparative Reflections: The Paradoxes of War and Peace.5. Buddhist Stories - Ancient and Post/Modern.Formative Story: Siddhartha.The Cosmic Story Revised: The Myth of Liberation.Life Story: Thich Nhat Hanh and the Way of Mindfulness.Comparative Reflections: Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh.6. Jewish Stories - Ancient and Post/Modern.Cosmic Story: The Myth of History.Formative Story: The Audacity of Job.Life Story: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Way of Audacity.Comparative Reflections: Heschel, Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh.7. Christian Stories - Ancient and Post/ModernFormative Story: Jesus of Nazareth.The Cosmic Story Revised: The Incarnation of the World.Life Story: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Way of the Cross.Comparative Reflections: King, Heschel, Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh.8. Islamic Stories - Ancient and Post/Modern.Formative Story: Muhammad.Cosmic Story: Further Revisions of the Myth of History.Life Story: Malcolm X and the Way of Pilgrimage.Comparative Reflections: Just War or Non-Violence? - Malcolm's Argument with the Gandhian Tradition.Part III: The Way of All the Earth.Introduction.9. Feminist Audacity and the Ethics of Interdependence.The Feminist Challenge to the Myths of Life through Death.The Feminist Alternative: Interdependence and the Ethics of Care.Life Story: Joanna Macy and Buddhist Ecofeminism.Life Story: Rosemary Ruether and Christian Ecofeminism.10. The Way of All the Earth.The Story of Babel: From Ethnocentrism to Interdependence.Ecofeminism and the Ecology of Conscience.The Way of All the Earth.Questions for Discussion.Reference.Index.

From human wrongs to universal rights: communication and feminist challenges for the promotion of women's health in the Third World.

This article argues that in the quest for global bioethics in its relation to the promotion of women's health and women's rights, the main challenge is to, first, rise above the relativist trap and second, to solve the false dilemma between individualism and collectivism. Particularly in order to improve women's position and advance their well-being in many developing countries with patriarchal cultural practices, there is an urgent need to introduce modern medicine and to share more evenly and efficiently the health care resources of the industrialized societies. This presumes that we can find a normative bioethical approach that promotes the rights of individuals without striving for cultural assimilation and disrespect. From the philosophical point of view this means that we have to overcome the debate between the rival views of justice, and rather find the shared features of the various approaches, thus diminishing the exaggerated polarizations between them. The author claims that despite its importance in women's rights protection, feminist bioethics cannot remain as a normative alternative that can replace either liberal or communitarian approaches. Instead feminism needs to be part of both liberal and communitarian ethical thinking. Communitarianism, for its part, cannot offer an alternative to either liberalism or feminism, but it can function as an essential critical balancing force within these approaches. Individualist liberalism, on the other hand, has to find its way into collective social structures and accept their maintenance, instead of exhausting itself in its attempts to lift individuals above or beyond their social contexts. All in all, the article shows that in finding the global bioethical norms the incompatibility between universalist and relativist reasoning or between individualist and collective ethical positions per se is not the main problem. Rather the problem is in our persistent tendency to believe that such an incompatibility exists. However, if we overcome the debate on whether one cultural background is superior to another, we can find a way to agree on some common norms that are based on shared values of very different traditions. Finding globally acceptable values, however, is not enough unless we pay more attention to their promotion in practice, in very different economic, social and political circumstances.

Narratives about Young Men and Masculinities in Organised Sport in Norway

Sport has been likened to a holy sanctuary for boys and men where their physical superiority and difference can be celebrated. In recent years, however, strains in the sport/masculinity relation have been documented which suggest that participation in sport may be far from a positive masculinising experience for men. The 'crisis of masculinity', which has resulted from feminist challenges to the patriarchal order raising fundamental questions concerning how we understand men and gender, is being acknowledged within sport. This paper explores the way in which young men in Norway are experiencing the so-called 'crisis', in a country where the traditional gender order is certainly being challenged with the help of a broad legislative policy of gender equality. Drawing upon data from focus groups and in-depth qualitative interviews, it asks whether narratives about male bodies in sport challenge or confirm traditional stereotypes about what it means to be male. Paradigmatic analysis reveals, in fact, the persistence of traditional male stereotypes, which appear to provide the young men with a script in a society where gender is increasingly without roles.

Reflections on the Reproduction and Transformation of Gender Differences Among Women in the Shelter Movement in Germany

The origins of autonomous women's support projects in Germany lie in feminist challenges to notions of women's inferiority and the desire to protest male violence and abuse. The early visions and ways of working involved an idealization of women and their abilities to create nonhierarchical and egalitarian structures. This article explores the contradictions inherent in this model and the tensions it has produced in conjunction with the challenges of funding by the state and moves toward professionalization.

A feminist critique on the use of the Internet in nursing research.

With the increasing use of the Internet, the importance of incorporating this new technology in nursing research increases. Yet nursing has been slow in adopting this new technology as a research method, and the use of the Internet in nursing research rarely has been discussed and critiqued. In this article, use of the Internet in nursing research is analyzed and critiqued from a feminist perspective. The analysis indicates that use of the Internet in research frequently brings about selection biases because of a limited pool of potential participants, it usually does not provide contextual data on research encounters, it might not uncover women's subjective experiences under marginalized situations, and it tends to raise power issues related to the relationships between researchers and participants. Despite the limitations, use of the Internet in research provides better communication channels for research participants, more flexibility in time and place of data collection, and less expense for data collection. Based on the critique, feminist challenges for future use of the Internet in nursing research are proposed.

The Web and the Quilt: Alternatives to the Heroic Journey Toward Spiritual Development

This paper poses a feminist challenge to stage models of spiritual development and suggests alternative metaphors to the common image of a heroic journey. Women’s spirituality is typically more intuitive and relational than rational and individualistic and to express this, we employ metaphors of “the web” and “the quilt.” Support for the relevance of these metaphors comes from the spiritual autobiography of Jane Goodall, an anthology of African American women’s writings about spirituality, and two qualitative research investigations of older women’s spirituality. We conclude with an autobiographical account of our own spiritual development and engage in a dialogue-on-the-page in which we respond to each other’s narratives.

Challenging boundaries: gender and periodization

What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly fit female writers into the white male scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, including Mary Rowlandson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Frances Harper, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich, discussing how the present classification of these writers by periods affects our reading of their work.Beyond the focus of feminist challenges to American literary periodization, this volume also studies issues of a need for literary reforms considering differences in race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. The essays are valuable and informative as individual critical studies of specific writers and their works. Challenging Boundaries presents intelligent, original, well-written, and practical arguments in support of long-awaited changes in American literary scholarship and is a milestone of feminist literary study.