Modernism represented a pervasive adherence to the concept of progress, to the idea of constant movement toward the achievement of ever-changing ideals. As modernism in art was to take us ever closer to the purest expressions of the sublime, modern science was charged with bringing us closer to pure truth, final truth—and if not these, […]
День: 31.10.2015
The Korean War and beyond
At the end of the Second World War, the Korean peninsula was split between the Russian — affiliated North and the US-affiliated South. War broke out from 1950 to 1953. The North — South conflict is still unresolved, with the two sides in an uneasy truce to the present. Some of the Allied soldiers who […]
Militarised sexualities in occupied Japan
One of the first actions of the Japanese government on its defeat in 1945 was the creation of the Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA), for the purpose of providing sexual services to the occupying armies and thereby supposedly ‘protecting’ other women from sexual violence. The logic which had seen the setting up of military brothels […]
Heteronormativity
Contemporary society is based upon a heteronormative gender order: an order based on the idea that there are two opposite sexes that are attracted to each other. The gender order demands that we categorize people as women or men. People usually try to imitate what are perceived as ‘normal’ femininity or masculinity and the complex […]
More Demand Than Supply
If all of this good news isn’t enough to get your empowerment juices flowing, the Womenomics of demographics should do the trick. In the short term the U. S. economy may be experiencing a downturn, but it’s the long term that has most employers wideeyed. We are facing a talent shortage unlike anything in history. […]
Feminist Ideas about Reproductive Rights
. . . that ail the while the Foetus is forming. . . even to the Moment that the Soul is infused, so long it is absolutely not in her Power only, but in her right, to kill or keep alive, save or destroy, the Thing she goes with, she won’t call it Child; and […]
Discourses and practices of efundula in postcolonial Namibia
In the postcolonial society, representations of efundula continue to play a major part in the Owambo, and beyond in the national Namibian, cultural discourse. This final section of the chapter revisits the silences around women’s initiation that I encountered in the mid-1990s. It then engages with the increasingly public presence of efundula over the past […]
The Limitations of «Privacy"
In tension with the racism and patriarchal familialism embedded in American political culture is the deep-rooted belief in "individual choice" and "privacy" in intimate personal matters—a belief that cuts across the political spectrum. Likewise, the sphere of privacy in American constitutional law has come to be associated by liberals and conservatives alike with matters of […]
Contest and Change
As a consequence of negotiation, the law changes incrementally through an incessant process of contestation. Lawyers specialize in introducing new distinctions, new analogies, new arguments, and new doctrines. What is more, courts respond, however slowly, to changes in social life at large. Legislatures also enact new statutes in response to gradual social changes and to […]
THE REMOTENESS OF THE RECENT PAST
The scientific study of sex can trace the earliest of its most significant roots almost to the memory of living humanity. But the growth, one might almost say explosion, of scientific attention to the sexual must really be charted from the end of the Second World War. A period of some forty years, half of […]