Cross-Cultural Delivery: The American Influence on Representations of Birth in Polish Popular Culture

Sept. 1, 2013

[1] Scripting the birth, that is emplotting the story of pregnancy and labor using specific narrative and visual conventions, is a way of coping with the unrepresentability of the birthing body. These coping strategies are not meant to represent the actual experience of the birthing woman but rather to decrease...

Moving Bodies: Sympathetic Migrations in Transgender Narrativity

June 1, 2013

Affect is not an expression of transsexuality but is, rather, the definitive condition of it. --Lucas Cassidy Crawford, “Transgender Without Organs?” Transsexuality offers a dramatic instance of the temporal instability of the flesh. It sets embodiment in motion. --Susan Stryker, “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology.” [1] No body seems...

The Nun, The Priest, and the Pornographer: Scripting Rape in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures

May 1, 2013

[1] In the early nineteenth century, lurid tales of imprisoned and sexually violated nuns entertained and outraged Protestant Americans. The most famous and popular of these tales was Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery ostensibly written by Maria Monk about her experiences in the Montreal convent. Awful Disclosures tells...

Human Rights and the “African Village”: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé

April 1, 2013

[1] Talal Asad begins his essay “What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry” with the following question: “In the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this...

I Can Be Whoever I Want to Be: Alias and The Post-Feminist Rhetoric of Choice

March 1, 2013

[1] Writing an enthusiastic mid-series review of the cult action-adventure series Alias (2001-2006), Charles Taylor made an unusual comparison between the show’s heroine, good-girl spy Sydney Bristow (played by Jennifer Garner), and the protagonist of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The earnest, fresh-scrubbed Sydney “suggests what Mary Richards might have...

Technodrama of the Designer Baby in My Sister’s Keeper and Pride

Feb. 2, 2013

[1] Engineering a cure for the heteronormative family has become one of the signature missions of certain forms of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in the twenty-first century. Processes like artificial insemination and surrogacy are increasingly depicted in popular culture representations as commercial options for women (particularly career women) to fulfill...

Who’s in Prison in the U.S.? Who’s Not? A Special Call for Papers

Jan. 2, 2010

Recent gender studies about criminality have tended to focus on the decriminalization of same sex relationships or on controversies about a woman's right to choose an abortion. While these issues are important, their implicit legal and political contexts have been considered narrowly. How are these issues reframed when we include...