Archive - Topic - Gender and Politics

Introduction [1] What happens when a child is born, and the attending physicians look to declare, Its a boy! or Its a girl!, but cannot clearly decide? What happens when a girl at 18 still has not reached menarche, and after a bit of research, it is discovered that she...

Gender and the American Ideology of War [1] At the huge peace demonstration in London on February 15, one of the larger signs appropriately urged, “Stop Mad Cowboy Disease!” Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could...

[1] In this essay, I explore the form of feminist agency we encounter in popular Anglophone women’s literature from post-colonial Singapore (Mingfong Ho’s novel, Sing to the Dawn, 1975; Lee Tzu Pheng’s poem “My Country and My People, 1980; the novel, Serpent’s Tooth [1982], and some short stories [1990’s] by...

[1] The Verdict (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet, is not the kind of film that has received attention from feminists. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s films (a repeated source of inspiration for psychoanalytic feminist film theory), Lumet’s films are usually perceived as liberal rather than conservative in their politics, as strongly grounded...

(part of a series in Issue 35: Masculinity and Labor Under Capitalism – Edited by DONALD MORTON) “The research university is structured like a nuclear family: the scientists are the dads, and they go out and make the money, and the humanists are the moms, and they stay home and...

[1] The speech of women who work in prostitution lacks credibility for many people. This is particularly true when they testify about the violence they face. It is often difficult for others to perceive violence against prostitutes as something real. Many women describe this contradiction in which they are caught...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] In the past eight years, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved through a range of roles: she took up a highly controversial and ultimately doomed position as her husband’s “two for the price of one” partner in...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] In the course of exhaustively documenting the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Interregnum Protectorate, historians have taken virtually no interest in his wife, Elizabeth. They report that Elizabeth married Oliver...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] Until Diana Spencer’s death on August 31, 1997, the conjunction of England’s queen consorts and populism was far from obvious. Yet this was exactly the ideological intersection her death foregrounded for those who watched and...

From the trial of Socrates to the dozens of proceedings reported daily in the press, the popular trial has been active as a rhetorical form, a social practice and a symptom of historical change – Robert Hariman Every man I meet wants to protect me. Can’t figure out what from...