Archive - Year - 2011

[1] The history of black feminist theory relates black women’s sexuality as silence or dissemblance (Hammonds, Hine, Spillers). With continued sexual exploitation of black women and girls, increasing attention to male rape in prisons, misogyny in popular culture, and homophobia in black communities, the discourse of silence reigns supreme, but...

[1] Images of ideal masculinity in Singapore are, as in any society, unstable and subject to ongoing modification. Local imperatives have brought about adaptations to normative masculinities, but interaction with global dynamics and market forces has also introduced new possibilities for the reinscription of masculinity. The rise of the “New...

[1] By the late nineteenth century, Spiritualism, a religious movement that promised communication with the dead through spirit mediums, had attracted a broad range of prominent followers like the American suffragist Victoria Woodhull, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the beloved creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Although...

[1] The notion of genre has long proved useful as an organising category for scholars approaching popular British television drama. For example, relatively early academic work on the soap opera (Dyer, Ang, Geraghty), the detective or police series (Clarke, Sparks) and the costume drama (Brandt), placed these popular genres firmly...

[1] Release of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine on the market sparked controversy: Teen girls, sex, politics, religion, and cancer intersected in the push to inject the vaccine into arms. The focus of this paper is the mythology of the vaccine, and the means in which various standpoints have created a...

[1] From the moment of its release, David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club has provoked a great deal of theorizing about gender both inside and outside of academia. Such a cultural event, interesting wide swaths of the movie-going public, media pundits, and academics is rare enough, but when the topic...

[1] Soon after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, the abject figure of the burqa-clad woman awaiting freedom was publicized by the State Department as a major justification for the war. This recycling of a familiar nineteenth-century colonial narrative of saving brown women was accompanied by the renewed popularity...

“As no doubt we all know, no single instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to the world and to being) is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by that [atomic] speed race.” – Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Diacritics The history of (the) Bikini [1] An...

I think I hear at least every other day: “You’re not normal!” You only like women because you’re in prison!” –Karen Batton, personal correspondence [1] Prisons in the United States regulate the ways in which people in them can build a home and construct intimate, sexual, and family lives. These...

Introduction [1] Contemporary celebrity culture allows for the configuration of certain discourses about male violence against women. By paying attention to this form of culture, changes in the cultural landscape, particularly in relation to the emergence of new forms of social media (such as celebrity gossip blogs and websites), are...