Postmodernist Trends Research Articles

Gender Construction and Diversity in Icelandic Fishing Communities

Abstract: This article combines an analysis of the social construction of gender inequality with an examination of the construction of other kinds of diversity among women in small fishing villages in Iceland. This combination is necessary in order to avoid the creation of a static categorization of women in the fisheries. The construction of commonalities and diversities among women and between women and men is examined. Gender and diversity are generated locally, and in relation to the larger world. Women have a common identity as inhabitants of small fishing villages, an important identity they share with men to some extent. However, among them there are important dissimilarities based on many factors, including, for example, the different relations to the fisheries experienced by fishermen's wives and fish processors.The Social Construction of Diversities and CommonalitiesMultivocality, multiple identities and diversity within given areas are common themes in anthropology and gender studies at the present. The picturing of as a bounded unit has been seriously put to the test. In studies of gender construction the emphasis is no longer only on the differences between women and men but also on diversity among women. Henrietta Moore has pointed out that this emphasis on the variance among women has occurred simultaneously with and been a part of a movement towards a post-modernist trend along with a focus on multi-culturalism and new questions regarding the concept of culture (Moore 1993:194). In gender studies the focus on diversity is in part a reaction to an earlier essentialism found among those anthropologists who attempted to find universalistic explanations for the inequalities between women and men. Today many who theorize about gender relations assume that there is no single cause for the different positions of men and women in society.Nationality, class, sexual preference, ethnicity, age and residence (rural vs. urban) are often intertwined in the discussion of diversity among women. Multiple identities have been seen as formed by these various factors and as intersecting within individuals. A few questions must be raised with regard to the diversity among women and the differences in the social construction of maleness and femaleness. How important is gender, compared with these other factors, in forming people's identities and in defining their position in society? Does a focus on diversity mean that there is no common ground for political organizing among women? How far can we go in our focus on diversity before becoming such relativists that we begin to justify inequalities and political apathy?There is no simple solution to the question, Where should we draw the line between universalism and relativism when we are dealing with power differences based on gender in particular localities? However, too much of an emphasis on culturally constructed differences can lead to a new reification of these differences which may then be communicated in static terms, such as those based on class, religion or ethnicity. As Pratt and Hanson (1994:6) have pointed out, There is a very real danger that old systems of closure may simply be shifted on to a new set of categories. Thus we find today new, static categories of Islamic women, lesbian women, single mothers, etc. This kind of reification can to a certain extent be seen in studies of women in fishing communities in the North Atlantic. Since the focus has primarily been on the commonalities among them as fishermen's wives and fish processors, and on their potential power, the diversities between the various North Atlantic fishing societies, as well as within fishing communities, have largely been ignored.An attempt has been made in the last decades by those who have studied fishing communities to correct the former stereotypes of women in the fisheries, make such women visible and give a more realistic view of their social and economic contributions as well as examining their position. …

The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton (review)

Reviewed by: The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton Gayle Graham Yates Gloria C. Erlich . The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: University of California P, 1992. xiii + 210 pp. No price given. Calling her work a psychobiography, Gloria C. Erlich admits to drawing some speculative conclusions and identifies hers as a "hermeneutic psychoanalytic method of case study." Erlich's study of Edith Wharton is beautifully written, cogently argued, and nicely jargon-free—the methodology comment is in a footnote, and that's as technical as she gets. Timely both popularly because of the new Martin Scorsese movie made from Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence and academically because of the current postmodernist trend of biographies with a focus on sexuality, Erlich's book is a joy to read as well as a treasure trove of information and insightful interpretation. Erlich skillfully weaves a tight analysis of Wharton's life, specifically her complex and delayed sexual development, with an intertexture of Wharton's fiction-writing. Following the lead of Wharton scholar Cynthia Griffin Wolff and using The Letters of Edith Wharton edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, as well as manuscripts and papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and the Edith Wharton Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, Erlich documents an uncommonly close relationship between Edith Wharton's own sexual situation and the sexual agendas she provides her fictional characters at each stage of her life. In the writing itself, Erlich believes, Wharton works out the complicated tangles [End Page 147] of her sexual history. Once thought the chronicler of New York society manners as a cool and detached observer, Erlich shows that Wharton was far from that, now that letters and other papers have become available. Erlich argues that the central passionate event in Wharton's life came in her mid-life (at age forty-five) in an intense, though brief, affair with Morton Fullerton. Wharton was still married to Teddy Wharton at the time in a marriage that had been essentially celibate, a marriage which she had entered with no knowledge at all of what she called the processes of "generation" and in which there was no sex at all for many weeks after the wedding and then, after very little, none at all. Fullerton was a thoroughgoing scoundrel, a charmer whose own mother was dazzled by him and who was the bisexual lover of a number of eminent women and men, loving them intensely momentarily but giving only enough of himself for them to want more. However, Edith Wharton discovered a passionate depth in herself in her relationship with Fullerton. It was in this "awakening," this coming to sexual maturity in a life that had been almost void of sex, that made this experience pivotal for Wharton's personal integration quite apart from the shabby character of her lover. Erlich suggests that Wharton anticipates the Fullerton affair in a novella called "The Touchstone" written in 1900 when she was thirty-eight and refers back to it in her novel, The Reef , when she was 50. Erlich writes, "In The Reef . . . Anna Leath plays the sexually repressed woman Edith Wharton once feared she might remain. The part of Wharton that dared convention to seize her moment with Morton Fullerton is played by Sophy Viner, who possesses the 'vital secret' of erotic energy." Erlich builds her work itself almost like a suspenseful novel. In the early chapters she writes about the emotional split in Edith Wharton's childhood between a cold, aloof, and socially ambitious mother, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, and a nurturing, loving nanny, Doyley. She explores this with Freudian theory of developmental conflict of a child with two such "mothers" and shows how Wharton was emotionally fragile as an adolescent. Something of this ego weakness is given to the character Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. Erlich writes, "Lacking maternal sponsorship and financial resources, Lily desperately and ineffectually seeks marriage as a refuge for her frail selfhood." Wharton's father, in contrast to her mother, was responsive to his...