A Site of Subaltern Articulation: The Ecstatic Female Body in the Contemporary Bangladeshi Novels of Taslima Nasrin

Dec. 1, 1999

Introduction [1] The emergence of Taslima Nasrin's feminist writings inaugurates one of the most controversial moments in the scene of Bangladeshi literature. The news of her exile from Bangladesh in August, 1994, drew considerable international attention. The fundamentalists in Bangladesh issued a death threat against her for allegedly blaspheming the...

Truth, Speech, and Ethics: A Feminist Revision of Free Speech Theory

Nov. 1, 1999

[1] Truth seems to be a phoenix in Western civilization. No matter how many particular truths are destroyed by a new vision or discredited by time, the ideal of truth reasserts itself in the human imagination. Indeed, even the periodic attacks upon the idea of truth itself, though they may...

“Going Straight”: Camera Work as Men’s Work in the Gendering of American Photography, 1900-1923

Oct. 1, 1999

"We'd all sit together at a big table and Diane would sit with us. She'd never say a word — she'd just listen and then suddenly you'd look up and she'd be gone. She was the only woman who was ever in our little group." – Walter Silver, documentary photographer...

Rethinking Law and Fatherhood: Male Subjectivity in the Film A Perfect World

Sept. 1, 1999

[1] Fathers and fatherhood have long played an important role in the thinking and theorizing about law. From Abraham and Isaac to Supreme Court cases, like the now famous DeShaney v. Winnebago, 1 it seems that everywhere we turn law is commanding fathers or presenting itself in a fatherly way...

Elizabeth Dole and Conservative Feminist Politics

Aug. 1, 1999

[1] Buried within the political platforms of Elizabeth Dole are two distinct and competing conservative ideologies about gender and the role of women in society. On the one hand, Dole refers to an explicitly Christian paradigm when making claims about gender and society; on the other, she also consistently refers...

Lecter Knows Worst: Justice as Marginal Value and the Law of Series in Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs

July 5, 1999

The Lion looked at Alice wearily. Are you animal – or vegetable – or mineral? he said, yawning at every other word. "It's a fabulous monster!" the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply. – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached where the...

The Real of Edye-Icon: Edye Smith, The Oklahoma City Bombing, and the Mobilization of Ideologies

June 1, 1999

Introduction [1] This essay is a reading of the events that surrounded Edye Smith, the mother of two children who died in the daycare housed in the Murrah federal building that was bombed in Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. The essay has several goals. First, it reads these events through...

Class, Gender, and Public Education: A Material History of the Academy

May 1, 1999

[1] In 1994, the University of Delaware's student newspaper, The Review, printed the first in a month-long series of articles and editorials celebrating the arrival of what Esquire writer Tad Friend recently had dubbed "Do-Me" feminism. Trumpeting Friend's discovery, the lead article opened: "'Do-Me' quickens pulses," and went on to...

Masculinity Without Men: Annamarie Jagose interviews Judith Halberstam About Her Latest Book, Female Masculinity

April 1, 1999

[1] JAGOSE: The critical efficacy of the phrase "female masculinity" obviously derives, in large part, from its flaunting of its oxymoronic effect. Yet–post-Butler and the near-universal critical, political and sub-cultural mobilisation of her understanding that gender is performative–there is another sense in which the assault on the coherence of long-reified...

The Racial Double Standard Behind the Littleton School Shooting: Authorities Couldn’t See the Trench Coats for the Trees

March 1, 1999

[1] Close your eyes and imagine: There is a group of kids at school. They threaten other students, play war games on campus, revel in violent imagery, boast of multiple weapon ownership, respond to special phrases and symbols and all wear clothing of the same type and color. Now take...

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