Feminist Studies

Preface

According to Blackwood's research, tombois dress and act like men, physically and socially embodying masculinity and, to some extent, a version of femininity based on the social spaces they are navigating. [...] Marija Gimbutas, the influential feminist archaeologist who claimed to have uncovered a prehistoric matrifocal culture that predated ancient Greece, lived and worked there; second, the Woman's Building, founded in 1973, provided space for feminist art exhibitions and housed the Femin...

Trans Identities and Contingent Masculinities: Being Tombois in Everyday Practice

Despite articulating a sense of self that they consider to be nearly the same as other men's, tombois take up different subject positions in different spaces, engaging with and reproducing a version of femininity when they move within family and community spaces. [...] I ask in what moments and by what processes do tombois take up particular subject positions.

Game Roles Sestina

The dog, the hat, the iron, the car? The board cracked open, you reached for the familiar object.

The Circuit

Lum rubbed the tiny red cheek, then opened her carpetbag, and took out two black cotton dresses and one brown wool skirt. White underclothes and black wool stockings went in another drawer, then she laid a straight-edge razor and some soap powder on the dresser top. [...] Lum unpacked a gingham apron. "Little girl, little girl, riding into town, take care, little girl, don't you fall down!" Lum spread her legs and Mae fell into the black corduroy hammock, giggling and whimpering at the sam...

On Abstractness: First Wave Liberal Feminism and the Construction of the Abstract Woman

Ideologies of domesticity were deployed to buttress the claim to equality;3 and women's political entitlement was expressed as a function not only of their potential equality with men but also, paradoxically, of their difference from men, which was itself intertwined with another bodily facet: it was considered to be an attribute of the white race alone, a symbol and aspect of progress that then made equality possible.4 Furthermore, as Joan Scott argues, the very foundations of a liberal stru...

'Stabane,' Intersexuality, and Same-Sex Relationships in South Africa

"Shoot the Drag Queen! . . . and Daisy Died," Queer Life Web site Most importantly, these theoretical contestations play out on the bodies of those who are caught at the fractures of the heterosexual matrix. Since the end of apartheid, the promise of the new constitution for creating a framework for gender and sex equality and protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has not been actualized for those commonly labeled as stabane.

What We Want: The Art of Marie Luplau and Emilie Mundt

Once esteemed as a landscape painter, Kyhn hasn't been considered a particularly important Danish artist for decades, although that's not quite enough to remove his paintings from the museum walls, nor to replace them with the work of the many women artists he instructed. In the enormous painting, From the Early Days of the Women's Suffrage Movement, which now hangs in the Women's Museum in Aarhus, Marie Luplau painted her mother in the center of a group of women and men who fought fierce ba...

August Afternoons at the Love/Art Laboratory

Hot August afternoons at the Love/ Art Laboratory with Beth and Annie in Boulder Creek, the height of blackberry season, and Albert, the snow-white peacock, is molting his white tail feathers for Annie, his devotee, who carries them home to her kitchen, where they dangle down from a piece of string, evidence of their collaboration as post-porn-modernists.

Goddess: Feminist Art and Spirituality in the 1970s

Edelson's unwavering commitment to making ritualistic art informed by her feminist spirituality, her commitment to leftist political causes and organizations, and her gender can all be used to explain why she didn't get the grants and tenure-track positions that were awarded to her male peers in the 1970s. In "Art in the Dark," McEvilley did not find Edelson's use of primitivism problematic; in fact, he praised the invocation of the Paleolithic sensibility of "shamanic magic and ordeal" and ...

Instructions From the Inner Room

In premodern Korea, self-educated, upper-class women wrote instructional poem-songs kyubang hsaj that were mainly passed down from woman to woman, mother to daughter. These poems, usually recorded in vernacular Korean, hangA, spoke of family genealogy; proper conduct; duty and obethence to husbands, inlaws, and parents. Place a kitchen knife deep inside the washer. Drain water and soap. [...] a son of a nation is a son of a butcher.

Networked Bodies and Extended Corporealities: Theorizing the Relationship Between the Body, Embodiment, and Contemporary New Media

There is a feminist literature in film and media studies, medical imaging, and prosthetics that, engages with the ways the body, embodiment, and technologies interconnect; but these texts have not been central to theoretical developments in Internet and new media studies.1 Studies of the kinds of gender, race, and sexuality representations that are produced in Internet and computer-facilitated settings are rarely linked to critical examinations of corporeal experiences.2 Despite these limitat...

From Noon-to All Surviving Butterflies

Craters are formed and war correspondents travel in moonlight. An old peasant stays behind to save his house, his son's legacy- his written Chinese in ink and brush. An aerial view reveals that he's a gook in white pajamas, normal for the daytime. 2 I belong to none except the gone. Father's documents have been rolled, tied together in string I made from hemp in winter under lit pine nut oil.

'Good' and 'Bad' Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms

2 The U.S.-led War on Terror is based on these assumptions and embedded in a binary framework: a state that does not promote terror fighting a network of non-state actors who inflict terror. Because terrorists do not resemble a "conventional enemy" and can presumably blend into the citizenry, they must be contained by cultural as well as military tactics of repression. [...] the disciplining practices of the War on Terror extend well before the events of 9/11 and the Patriot Act: the profil...

South African Intersex Activism: Caster Semenya's Impact and Import

On the positive side, both organizations have documented increased interest in intersexuality.\n Placing it firmly on people's conceptual maps and making it part of everyday awareness is of crucial importance because, in the context of South Africa's liberation struggle and canon of human rights law and legal culture . . . the liberation struggle creates significant openings for active protection of the rights of the intersexed. Issues particular to South African intersexuality- including th...

Guidelines for Contributors

Feminist Studies is committed to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge that sees intersections of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for our politics and our intellectual analysis. Whether work is drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies address social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women and men...