Duke University Press Log

Veiled Constellations

Almost exactly a year after France’s controversial ban of the niquab, and weeks after the attacks committed by French-born Muslim, Mohammed Merah, Muslim women who wear veils in France are in the news again for the public scorn they are receiving, and are afraid they will continue to receive, as a backlash to the attacks. 

 A special section in the most recent issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, called “Veiled Constellations: The Veil, Critical Theory, Politics and Contemporary Society,” dedicates attention to the complex and very public politics of the veil.  Contributors look at veiling and feminism in both Europe and the Middle East, through lenses of politics, art, literature, and philosophy.  Read the introduction to the section for free, here. 

Making a Splash at Figure Skating's Adult Nationals

This week US Figure Skating's Adult National Championships take place outside Chicago. In her new book Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice, Erica Rand describes how she came to be a competitive figure skater in her mid-forties. As Rand writes, "adult" in the world of figure skating does not refer to sexual content, but rather "to people skating after an age when they might reasonbly expect to become the next Brian Boitano or Peggy Fleming." Rand attended several Adult Nationals both as a competitor and as an observer of the rules, gender conventions, fashions, and behind-the-scenes friendships. Here's an excerpt from her chapter on how she challenged some of those conventions at the 2009 competition:

"I made a little splash at the 2009 Adult Nationals. It wasn’t for skilled skating. Besides competing in the lowest freestyle level at an, I botched most of my spins and jumps. Instead, I stood out for violating the unwritten rules of music, dress, and gender presentation for women. My music, harder edged than most, came from the Pink Floyd song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” as well as an instrumental version of Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer,” which is better known by its primary lyric 'I want to fuck you like an animal,' although people familiar with the song might not have placed my excerpt. Unlike my competitors’ costumes, which involved skating dresses and skin- colored tights, my costume featured black leggings under a short, pleated black skirt from Hot Topic that had silver- colored studs and chains. Besides accenting the music with a bit of mainstreamed bondage fashion, the metallic elements provided the requisite skating- costume sparkle ordinarily met by jewel- like stones. My hair, instead of the common bun or ponytail in natural, or natural looking, hair color, had red chunks dyed into a relatively short bluish black.
  I hadn’t considered the costume or music to be so outrageous; neither had my coach. So I was surprised when people sought me out later to praise my refreshing deviation from the norm. 'We don’t think the judges liked it,' someone tracked me down in the parking lot to say, 'but we did.'"(page 117)

For a chance to win an advance review copy of Rand's book, leave a comment here or on our Facebook page about why you love or hate (or love to hate) figure skating. We'll notify the two winners later this week.

 

 

 

New Books in Women's Studies for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day and March is Women's History Month. We have some great new titles in women's studies and feminist theory to celebrate.

In her latest book, The Fantasy of Feminist History, pioneering historian Joan Wallach Scott argues that feminist perspectives on history are enriched by psychoanalytic concepts, particularly fantasy.

 

A passionate advocate of identity studies and a keen reader of U.S. institutional politics, feminist theorist Robyn Wiegman turns her attention to the critical practices and political ambitions of identity-based fields. 

 

While all philosophers have mothers and the idea of ‘birth’ makes frequent appearances in philosophy (theorists are said to give birth to schools of thought), mothers themselves are strangely absent in the work of major theorists like Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. In The Theorist's Mother, Andrew Parker examines this apparent absence and finds motherhood and maternity lurking beneath the surface of much of their work. 

Turning from theory to social science, South Asian Feminisms, edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, intervenes in key areas of feminist scholarship and activism in contemporary South Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, while asking how this investigation might enrich feminist theorizing and practice globally.

And for a closer look at the lives of South Asian women, check out Smita Tewari Jassal's, Unearthing Gender, an ethnography of lower-caste women in North India and how ideas of caste, gender, sexuality, labor, and power may be strengthened, questioned, and fine-tuned through folk music.

Happy International Women's Day and happy reading!

 

25th Anniversary Edition of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Available

Editors Susan Bee and Mira Schor have just announced that the 25th anniversary issue of the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G is now available online. Blogger Sharon Butler says it is "chockablock with interesting ideas about art, politics and culture." The issue is organized around two themes: the role of public trauma such as war in art and art criticism, and the role of artistic intuition, creativity, community, production, and distribution in the new digital world.  M/E/A/N/I/N/G was a print journal from 1986-1996 and we were pleased to publish an anthology of some its liveliest and most provocative pieces in 2000. In 2002, Bee and Schor began to publish the journal online. Check out the new issue and any back issues you may have missed!

Swanee Hunt to Speak on Security Lessons from Bosnia

This month PBS is airing the acclaimed new series Women, War, and Peace, spotlighting the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan and Colombia to Liberia. The first episode, "I Came to Testify," featured women in Bosnia. Swanee Hunt, former Ambassador to Austria, has written extensively on women's role in war and peace in the Balkans. Her first book This Was Not Our War, featured many stories of women rebuilding the troubled region. Her new book Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security, brings the concerns of ordinary people, especially women, into global policymaking. On Tuesday, October 25, Hunt will appear in a panel discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace, along with Abigail Disney and Pamela Hogan, who produced "I Came to Testify." Hunt and Disney have traveled to war-torn regions together in the past, and Hunt helped fund the development of the PBS series. The film will be screened at the event and a discussion will follow. After the panel, join the conversation on Twitter with #SecurityLessons. 

40th Anniversary of Our Bodies, Ourselves

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the landmark book Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Collective. In celebration, they are hosting a symposium on Saturday, October 1 and launching the ninth edition of the iconic text. USA Today's Anita Manning says the book "not only challenged the medical establishment and its assumptions about women, it also encouraged women to explore their own bodies and provided, in unexpurgated terms, information about sexuality and reproduction that went far beyond the birds and bees." Kathy Davis, senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, calls attention to the global reach of Our Bodies, Ourselves in her book The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders. Our Bodies, Ourselves has a global reach, with more than 30 foreign language editions in circulation. But the American edition was not simply translated, Davis explains. Rather, careful consideration by local groups was given to adapting the book to each culture while retaining the empowering feminist message. Davis will be attending the symposium and moderating a panel about Our Bodies, Ourselves's global partners. Check out the symposium if you're in Boston, and read the book to learn more about this important global feminist project.

Christine Yano on the Premiere of "Pan Am"

ABC-TV’s new series Pan Am is generating a high level of buzz.  Entertainment shows preceding the premiere featured not only clips of the show, but also interviews with former stewardesses, infamous author Donald Bain (Coffee, Tea, or Me), and others from the generation characterized as the “swinging 60s.”  What these previews suggest is an amalgamated, nostalgized view of an era when – as they say – people knew how to dress, knew how to travel, knew how to treat the service providers.  Many Americans of a certain age can sympathize with the source of the nostalgia, given the demeaning experience that commercial air travel has become these days.  However, this is nostalgia for specific class and race experiences that many could not share. The nostalgia of Pan Am positions the 1950s and 1960s as an era of domestic “innocence” – when women could still be women and men could still be men.  This is painted as an era when lines and lives were more clearly drawn, etching in gender roles as clearly as racial roles.

The innocence does not extend to the international scene.  Pan Am situates itself within the Cold War era of espionage, political intrigue, and the airline’s (and some of its personnel’s) role within these.  What the show does not depict are the incipient seeds of domestic social change.  With black-white race relations simmering not far from the surface, with ethnic revitalization movements waiting in the wings, with feminist movements just underway, the “swinging 60s” of Pan Am skirts the deep national contradictions of the era.  Here were working women in that very modern of industries that relied upon them playing traditional hostess roles, even while traveling the world.  This included women of Asian ancestry who I wrote about in my book Airborne Dreams.  While stewardesses were getting their hair coiffed and girdles checked, other women were beginning to reject those very bodily accoutrements as symbols of patriarchal control.  Indeed, the so-called swinging era was riddled with numerous contradictions and ironies if we take off the spectacles of nostalgia.

I was fortunate enough to watch the premiere of ABC-TV’s Pan Am with a group of people (147 strong) whose ties to the era and this television show are extra special – the Pan Am Association - Aloha Chapter in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Gathered at the Hawaii Yacht Club for the occasion (some in uniform!), they relished those spectacles of nostalgia affording them yet one more occasion to shout out, “Pan Am lives!” “Gone but not forgotten!”  They scrutinized ABC-TV’s show for inaccuracies (color of uniform, length of stewardess’s hair, use of a Jetway during that period).  They cheered at depictions of bygone icons – the Pan Am building in New York with its rooftop helipad, even the pilfering of fancy food and drink in First Class by stewardesses (one overheard comment: “Now it’s getting real!”).  Pan Am reassures them all that at least for one television season on Sunday nights, their display of loyalty to the airline of a past era – “the best years of their lives!” – may be shared by viewers nationwide.

Barbara Gordon Discusses Recurrent and Late-Stage Breast Cancer

Check out our latest author interview video! Barbara L. Gordon, one of the authors of Breast Cancer Recurrence and Advanced Disease: Comprehensive Expert Guidance (2010), discusses why she was inspired to write a book on late-stage cancer and offers helpful advice to others facing this situation.

 

This comprehensive guide gathers in one place authoritative medical information about recurrent and late-stage breast cancer, and it addresses the practical, emotional, and interpersonal aspects of death and dying.

Alexander Edmonds Wins SAW Book Award

Congratulations to Alexander Edmonds, author of Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil, for winning the 2011 Diana Forsythe prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW). Celebrating the best book or series of publications in the spirit of Diana Forsythe's feminist anthropological research on work, science, and/or technology, including biomedicine, the prize will be awarded at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November.

Remembering Dicle Koğacioğlu

"The Other Effect,” the most recent issue of differences, is a tribute to the late scholar, Dicle Koğacioğlu, and her work.  The issue includes articles by Timothy Bewes, Lila Abu-Lughod, Ayse Parla, Leti Volpp, Z. Umut Turem, Elizabeth Polvinelli, and Koğacioğlu herself, with important new article on honor crimes, focused upon what she called the making of “the custom.”

Leti Volpp, Professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, reflects on Koğacioğlu’s life and work:

The legal sociologist Dicle Koğacioğlu was a brilliant scholar and feminist activist whose work on power, modernity, and bureaucratic forms of authority influenced many during her brief life.   Her work was deeply original, passionate, and critical, and spoke simultaneously to particular questions within Turkey and to broad theoretical debates.  A primary thread of Koğacioğlu’s writing, examined in complex contexts ranging from honor crimes, constitutional courts, to access to justice, was how public discourse on tradition always creates an “other.”  Her much cited article, “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey,” differences (2004), responded to a perceived increase in documentation of honor killings in Turkey by international organizations and nongovernmental organizations to show how these crimes are produced in relation to institutional practices and discourses of modern government.  Koğacioğlu argued that these institutions -- the Turkish state, Islamic parties, European Union, and the international media -- imagined as modern and standing outside of or in opposition to tradition, see tradition as an object of technical intervention, delimiting the universe of meaning through which these crimes can be understood, and removing attention from the way in which these very institutions participate in perpetuating these crimes.  Her article “Progress, Unity, and Democracy: Dissolving Political Parties in Turkey” in Law and Society (2004) examined the dissolution of Islamic and pro-Kurdish political parties by the Turkish Constitutional Court, assigned the task of dissolving anti-constitutional political parties.  Here Koğacioğlu showed that an arbitrary boundary between political and cultural domains was drawn by the Court, a boundary then used by the Court in the service of justifying its decision, as what may be harmless when an issue is cultural (use of the headscarf, the Kurdish language) may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state.   Koğacioğlu also published several works about access to justice in Turkey, looking in particular at interactions between citizens and legal authorities in the courthouse, the axes of power (class, gender) that operate in the legal system, as well as the negotiations by the disempowered who strategize within it.  At the time of her death, she was conducting research on Turkey’s justice system which promised to redefine the parameters of law and society scholarship in Turkey.   Her death is a stunning loss to feminist theory, to sociolegal scholarship, and to her many friends.