“East West, Home’s Best”: Feminist Politics of Sue Townsend in Bazaar and Rummage

This paper discusses the social reasons for agoraphobia as a psychological disorder as observed in the women characters of British playwright Sue Townsend’s issue-based play Bazaar and Rummage (1982). The depiction of three agoraphobic women in a context characterised by patriarchal dominion constitutes the core of Townsend’s play. Although their problematic condition is presented rather comically, from their accounts, it seems apt to argue that societal oppression is the reason for their longlasting seclusion and constant fear of the outside world. The play offers a rummage sale as an opportunity for women to step outside and conquer their fear. Accordingly, in terms of presenting the psychological condition of women characters and associating the possible solution to their problem with a market occasion, Townsend’s play illustrates an example of feminist criticism. In this study, the play’s analysis is based on the 1980s context dominated by Thatcher politics, and Townsend’s portrayal of agoraphobia is discussed as a criticism of her society in which patriarchal hegemony plays a central role in women’s forced confinement.

The Personal Is Archival

Chapter 4 investigates Barbara Hammer’s creation and use of queer archives to tell stories—via particular lesbians—of lesbian cultures past. The chapter’s turn to a lesbian filmmaker is an assertion that the preservationist impulse that accompanied much AIDS activism was genealogically connected to and politically aligned with feminist historiographical practice and body politics. The queer body politics of the AIDS crisis, politics rooted in the care of queer bodies, draws from the feminist politics and cinema originating in second-wave feminism. The chapter argues, then, that the lesbian body politics established in Hammer’s cinema, beginning in the 1970s, informed queer filmmakers’ activist approach to filmmaking during the AIDS crisis. Through readings of Maya Deren’s Sink (2011), Welcome to This House (2015), and Lover/Other (2006), this chapter argues that a distinctly lesbian-feminist aesthetic does not exist independently of a distinctly queer one.

Power Struggles in the Implementation of Gender Equality Policies: The Politics of Resistance and Counter-resistance in Universities

This article develops an analytical framework to study the power struggles between status quo and gender equality actors underpinning the implementation of gender equality policies. While resistance to gender equality policies in different institutions has received considerable scholarly attention, examining this struggle in light of a multifaceted concept of power that encompasses both domination and individual and collective empowerment, we argue, offers a more accurate account of the possibilities of a feminist politics of implementation. Our analytical framework also accounts for the factors that enable resistance by dominant actors and counter-resistance by gender equality actors and the informal rules that are being upheld or challenged, respectively. Applying our framework to the study of Spanish universities, we identify both the forms and types of resistance that hinder gender reform efforts in higher education institutions and the counter-action strategies that seek to drive implementation forward and achieve institutional change.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910

Casting fresh light on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, literature, ecological science and paganism, Decadent Ecology reveals the pervasive influence of decadence and paganism on modern understandings of nature and the environment, queer and feminist politics, national identities, and changing social hierarchies. Combining scholarship in the environmental humanities with aesthetic and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study digs into works by Simeon Solomon, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Arthur Machen and others to address trans-temporal, trans-species intimacy; the vagabondage of place; the erotics of decomposition; occult ecology; decadent feminism; and neo-paganism. Decadent Ecology reveals the mutually influential relationship of art and science during the formulation of modern ecological, environmental, evolutionary and trans-national discourses, while also highlighting the dissident dynamism of new and recuperative pagan spiritualities - primarily Celtic, Nordic-Germanic, Greco-Roman and Egyptian - in the framing of personal, social and national identities.

Introduction

This chapter explains who the Kenneys were, provides biographical detail about the family and the individual sisters, and sets out the political, economic, social, and cultural context in which they grew up. It shows that, despite the rhetoric of sisterhood which often characterizes feminist politics, friendship rather than family has been central to suffrage studies, and argues that the family needs to be given greater consideration. It also explains the place of class in suffrage historiography and the relationship between the women’s and labour movements as a way into understanding the relative lack of work on suffrage militants. The chapter sets out the source material which forms the basis for this study, explains the thematic biographical approach, and summarizes the chapters which follow.