scholarly journals Reproductive Racism in Danielle Evans’s “Harvest:” Black, Chicana, and White Motherhoods in the Context of Reproductive Rights Discourses

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

Abstract The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.

Author(s):  
Rebecca Kluchin

This chapter brings together the histories of American beauty culture and disability to identify overlaps between the fields and encourage women’s and gender historians to engage disability studies in their scholarship. “Unruly bodies,” bodies that fall outside the norm because of race, ethnicity, or disability, became the object of social and cultural derision and labeled ugly, abnormal and disabled. The techniques women, surgeons, fashion designers, and beauty culturists used to manage, fix and discipline these “unruly bodies” through cosmetics, diet, exercise, surgery, and rehabilitation contain striking similarities, which this chapter explores in historical context. Although experts projected beauty ideals and medical standards onto women’s bodies, American women embraced body modifications on their own terms and imbued them with their own meanings.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rose Anna O'Rorke Plumridge

<p>This thesis is a scholarly edition of Katherine Mansfield’s Urewera Notebook. The General Introduction summarises the purpose to which the notebook has been put by previous editors and biographers, as evidence for Mansfield’s happiness or unhappiness in New Zealand throughout 1906-8. It then offers an overview of the historical context in which the notebook was written, in order to demonstrate the social complexity and geographical diversity of the terrain that Mansfield covered during her 1907 camping holiday. This is followed by an analysis of Mansfield’s attitudes towards colonials, Maori and the New Zealand landscape. Mansfield’s notebook is permeated by a sense of disdain for colonials, especially when encountered as tourists, but also a fascination with ‘back-block ’settlers and a sense of camaraderie with her travelling companions. Mansfield repeatedly romanticised Maori as a noble ‘dying race’ with a mythic past, but was also insightfully observant of the predicament of Maori incontemporary colonial society. Her persistent references to European flora, fauna and ‘high culture’, and her delight in conventionally picturesque English gardens, reveal a certain disconnect from the New Zealand landscape, yet occasional vivid depictionsof the country hint at a developing facility for evokingNew Zealand through literature.In the Textual Introduction I discuss the approaches of the three prior editors of the notebook: John Middleton Murry polished, and selectively reproduced, the Urewera Notebook, to depict Mansfield as an eloquent diarist; Ian A. Gordon rearranged his transcription and couched it within an historical commentary which was interspersed with subjective observation, to argue that Mansfield was an innate short story writer invigorated by her homeland. Margaret Scott was a technically faithful transcriber who providedaccuracy at the level of sentence structure but whoseminimal scholarly apparatus has madeher edition of the notebook difficult to navigate,and has obscured what Mansfield wrote. I have re-transcribed the notebook, deciphering many words and phrases differently from prior editors. The Editorial Procedures are intended as an improvement on the editorial methods of prior editors.The transcription itself is supported by a collation of all significant variant readings of prior editions. Arunning commentary describesthe notebook’s physical composition, identifies colonial and Maori people mentioned in the text, and explains ambiguous historical and literary allusions, native flora and fauna,and expressions in Te Reo Maori. The Itinerary uses historical documents to provide a factually accurate description of the route that Mansfield followed, and revises the itinerary suggested by Gordon in 1978. A biographical register explains the social background of the camping party. This thesis is based on fresh archival research of primary history material in the Alexander Turnbull Library, legal land ownership documents at Archives New Zealand, historical newspapersand information from discussions with Warbrick and Bird family descendants.A map sourced from the Turnbull Cartography Collection shows contemporary features and settlements, with the route of the camping party superimposed. Facsimiles of pages from the notebook are included to illustrate Mansfield’s handwriting and idiosyncratic entries. Photographs have been selected from Beauchamp family photograph albums at the Turnbull, from the Ebbett Papers at the Hawke’s Bay MuseumTheatre Gallery, and from private records.</p>


Author(s):  
Joe Rollins

This chapter outlines the theoretical and methodological framework for the book. The theoretical foundation is developed from a survey of the long history of scholarship on feminism and queer theory in order to examine heterosexuality, reproduction, abortion rights, and childhood in greater detail. Drawing on law and culture scholarship, the chapter proposes a methodology that utilizes thick description to explore the legal and cultural changes in marriage, particularly insofar as the sexuality of the institution has changed in recent decades. The common theme running through the chapter is the elusiveness of heterosexuality as a concept and its resistance to sustained investigation and critique. Working backward across the timeline of life—from adult marriage, to childhood, to fetuses—the chapter foreshadows the end of the book and the ways that the marriage debate is part of the same set of social and political conflicts as childhood sexuality, fetuses, women’s bodies, and reproductive rights.


2019 ◽  
pp. 156-184
Author(s):  
Joan Wallach Scott

This chapter explores the complex uses of feminism and appeals to “sexual democracy” in the new discourse of secularism. The story is anything but straightforward and involves the insistence on sex as a public matter, and on women's sexuality (and by extension, nonnormative sexualities) as a right of individual self-determination. The emphasis on individualism is a part of neoliberalism's “rationality;” it is not the same as its nineteenth-century antecedent. At the same time, the difference of sex and its heteronormative claims has not disappeared, confusing woman's status as a desiring subject with her status as an object of (male) desire. The contemporary discourse of secularism, with its insistence on the importance of “uncovered” women's bodies equates public visibility with emancipation, as if that visibility were the only way to confirm women as sexually autonomous beings (exercising the same rights in this domain as men). The contrast with “covered” Muslim women not only perpetuates the confusion between Western women as subjects and objects of desire, it also distracts attention from (or flatly ignores) persisting racialized gender inequalities in markets, politics, jobs, and law within each side.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luh Putu Sendratari

Literary works are often interpreted as a medium for the distribution of artistic desires alone. In fact, such a worldview is a mirror of superficiality in understanding literature. Kadek Sonia Priscayanti's short story is one of literary works critical of gender issues, especially in women's bodies, through what women's bodies are viewed and how the body is treated socially and culturally. Semiotic method used to dissect this work with interpretation supported by critical theory about Antonio Gramscie dominance / hegemony, Derrida decontruction and Bourdieu Interpretatif Kontrukstif hence can be found there is depiction of marginalization, inferioritas woman and way of woman do resistance to condition of injustice that happened. At least, this work adds to the list of articles that are sensitive to gender issues and can be an inspiration for the development of the Gender Mainstreaming program in the School World through the aspirations of literary works.Keywords: marginalization, inferiority, resistance, Gender Mainstreaming


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1A(115A)) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Carlos Alberto Ávila Araújo

Purpose/Thesis: In this article we discuss the theoretical common ground of archival science, library science and museum studies share with one another and with information science.Approach/Method: The article offers a systematic review of scholarship in each of the disciplines discussed, starting with foundational texts and progressing through different periods, geographical areas, and traditions of thought.Results and conclusions: We present the historical context in which the three disciplines were established and identify the twentieth-century theoretical developments that resulting rejection of the previously dominant paradigm. We conclude that the concept of information as studied recently may favor the advancement of theoretical perspectives in the three areas and points to the possibility of its epistemological dialogue.Research limitations: The literature review focused on the studies that had the most significant impact on Brazilian scholarship. It could be extended to other countries, and other theories.Practical implications: The results of the presented research may provide a conceptual basis for university courses in archival science, library science and museum studies, as they already do in Brazil. They may also inspire a comparison with other countries.Originality/Value: There are only few studies which combine the analysis of archival science, library science and museum studies; even less relate these disciplines to information science. We believe that considering the theoretical frameworks of all these disciplines together will be beneficial for all.


Author(s):  
David Brian Ross ◽  
Richard Louis ◽  
Melissa T. Sasso

This chapter explores the insight of how the mind is negatively impacted by the news media. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce readers to how the human brain processes good and adverse effects of the news. The chapter begins with the overview that delves into the various aspects such as our brain and how it processes emotions, the theoretical frameworks of mass society, Marxism, functionalism, social constructionism, the historical context of the media in various countries, journalists and pundits, how the media divides communities, and how the media reports world events causing individuals to suffer from adverse psychological effects. This chapter then ends with a conclusion that consists of suggested future research.


2018 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Molly W. Metzger ◽  
Henry S. Webber

The introductory chapter to the book situates current housing segregation within a historical context. The chapter begins with a comparison of the current moment in housing to the circumstances preceding the signing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The chapter then presents a snapshot of demographic continuity and change since the 1960s, including a description of patterns of segregation along lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. An argument is presented for why all residents of the United States should care about housing segregation: segregation fundamentally impedes shared economic prosperity, frays the fabric of US democracy, and calls into question the self-defining notion of equality of opportunity. The chapter closes with a preview of subsequent chapters in this volume, which provide frameworks for understanding the problem of segregation as well as proposed policy solutions.


Author(s):  
James M. Bromley

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.


Author(s):  
Wanda Nowicka ◽  
Joanna Regulska

This chapter reviews the history of women’s reproductive rights in Poland, starting with early 20th-century mobilizations, the de facto legalization of abortion during the communist era, and the post-1989 dramatic shift. It points to the cyclical nature of these struggles and mobilizations and also to the fact that they remain unresolved and are contested by both pro-choice and pro-life movements. The chapter examines these confrontations and shows how the alliance between state and church has produced a set of legal and moral controls over women’s bodies and shifted the power to decide away from women. It reviews restrictive legislation that has contributed to women’s and their families physical and emotional suffering and points to doctors’ complacency. It concludes that despite years of relentless pro-life pressure that has resulted in a change of public attitudes, women continue to resist, organize, and mobilize; thus, the struggle over women’s reproductive rights continues.


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