Daphne Patai

Women's Words : The Feminist Practice of Oral History

Womens Words is the first collection of writings devoted exclusively to exploring the theoretical, methodological, and practical problems that arise when women utilize oral history as a tool of feminist scholarship. In thirteen multi-disciplin ary esays, the book takes stock of the implicit presuppositions , contradictions, and prospects of oral history at the hands of feminist scholars.

Beyond defensiveness: Feminist research strategies

Abstract In the course of doing research for a book on utopian fiction by women, it became evident that my formulation of the project constituted a trap, for it affirmed the very thing I wanted to challenge: the assumption of the centrality of utopias by men and the ‘otherness’ of works by women. As I reoriented my research, I came to see that this contradiction pervades much feminist scholarship and is present as well in the very notion of ‘Womens Studies’. This essay describes the process by which I came to identify the problem; how the techniques of defamiliarization and reversal pointed toward a solution; and the two research strategies that evolved. These strategies, both of which depend upon reversal of the usual rules of relevance and irrelevance, can be applied to feminist research endeavors in other fields as well.

Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889—1939

Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals reintroduces the work of writers and activists whose texts, and often whose very lives, were passionately engaged in the major political issues of their times but who have been displaced from both the historical and the literary record. Focusing on seventeen writers whose common concern was radically to change the status quo, this collection of thirteen essays challenges not only the neglect of these particular writers but also the marginalization of women from British political life and literary history. This volumes recuperation of them alters our appraisal of their literary period and defines their influence on struggles still very much alive today--including the suffrage movement, feminism, anti-vivisection, reproductive rights, trade unionism, pacifism, and socialism. The radicals of 1889-1939, whether or not widely read in their own day, speak in different ways to the intelligent discontent of many people in our time. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Orwell's despair, Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

Abstract George Orwells 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night , that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwells critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.

Women's Studies on Trial

I hese two books have very different stories to tell about the state of feminism in the American academy. The story told in Professing Feminism is already notorious beyond the academy; Gender and Academe will almost certainly never circulate so widely. Together, though, these books imply more than either does alone about how centrally academic feminism figures in current struggles over the nature of academic work and the policing of the academys borders. Professing Feminism, according to its authors, is an inquiry... concentrated on feminism as it is practiced in Womens Studies at colleges and universities (xvii). Daphne Patai, a literary scholar, and Noretta Koertge, a historian of science, insist that their inquiry is an inside critique, aimed at calling academic feminism back from what they diagnose as its current ills to its liberal origins. We are feminists and.. . friends of feminism, they write in their Postscript, feminists arguing from within feminism about the means for achieving the basic goal of the liberation of women from all that impedes their ability to lead full and productive lives (218). Their methods of inquiry draw on the feminist models of ethnography and

Cultural Competence, Identity Politics, and the Utopian Dilemma

In the name of creating a more just society, demands for multiculturalism, diversity, and cultural competence have proliferated over the past few decades. All these terms fundamentally depend on identity politics, pitting group against group. Far from ushering in a more harmonious future, identity politics seems to lead primarily to greater social fragmentation, combativeness, and conflict. The escalation of these tensions is manifest today in attacks on free speech and efforts to micromanage everyday life. Accompanying these is a persistent denigration of western culture and its tradition of individual (rather than group) rights and freedoms. The dangers of such developments have been well documented in the twentieth-century dictatorial regimes claiming to be acting for the greater good. The costs of abdicating liberal values in the name of goodness have also been extensively explored in utopian and dystopian fictions that demonstrate why ideological policing can never produce a better world.

The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology

Examines all of Orwells major novels, essays, and journalism and argues that his reputation for moral authority is undercut by condescending attitude toward women.