Hilary Hinds

Imaging Feminism, Imaging Femininity: The Bra-Burner, Diana and the Woman Who Kills

The ® gure of the feminist has been widely represented in the British media for so long as to have become one of the most familiar symbols in the contemporary political landscape and cultural imagination. Whilst the mainstream press continues to circulate the stock-in-trade cliche s of bra-burners and ruthless career-driven superwomen, these stereotypes increasingly operate in tension with a broader media discourse about a potential compatibility between the previously polarised categories of feminism and femininity. The compatibility between these two categories is exempli® ed in a (presumably ironic) article on the a 1990s Feminist Bunny Girlo (see Fig. 1) in the Times on 30 January 1999. The headline, a Enter the 1990s feminist Bunny Girlo , precedes an article which begins: a The world’s ® rst Playboy casino in nearly two decades is to be staffed by British bunny girls valued for their feminism and independence as well as beauty in a bobtail corseto (p. 1). Referring back to a arch-feministo Gloria Steinem’s undercover expose of the Playboy regime 36 years ago, in which she argued that bunny girls were like a less honest and less well-paido prostitutes, the article places the antagonism between feminism and femininity ® rmly in the past: a Stuart Zakim, Playboy’s vice-president, is so con® dent of Playboy’s feminist credentials, that he was not ruf ̄ ed by the prospect of hordes of latter-day Ms Steinems coming to tomorrow’s auditiono (p. 6). According to Helen Rumbelow, the Times reporter, the 1990s feminist bunny girl offers the a girl power generation the chance to storm a citadel of 1960s sexismo (p. 1). This new-found reconciliation between feminism and femininity is evident in the extensive press coverage of a new feminismo and a girl powero since the early 1990s. In 1993, for example, coinciding with the publication of her book Fire with FireÐ The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, Naomi Wolf was accorded the front page and a lengthy article in the Times weekend magazine. Two close-up photographs of her face are accompanied by the headlines, a Feminists Didn’t Used to Look Like Thiso and a Reclaiming the F-Wordo . The article is introduced with explicit reference to her physical appearance: a Time was when you couldn’t describe a feminist as gorgeous. Naomi Wolf is this and much more: successful, clever and articulateÐ and fed up with the sisterhood’s dead-end political correctness and victim-speako (6 November 1993: 19). So-called a new feminismo is thus billed as the glamorous make-over of the old-fashioned, drab and over-serious a women’s liberationistso of the past. Similarly, the Spice Girls are hailed in the press as embodying the new

And The Lord's Power Was Over All: Calvinist Anxiety, Sacred Confidence, and George Fox's Journal

This essay investigates the starkly contrasting affective states of seventeenth-century spiritual subjects. Whilst the self-inscriptions of Calvinists such as John Bunyan are characterised by an unassuagable anxiety, the Journal of the founder of the Quaker movement, George Fox, charts his transition from a position of anxiety to an equally overwhelming and unshakeable spiritual, social and subjective confidence. Locating its argument in relation to the critical debates about early modern masculinity and the specificities of Quaker doctrine, it concludes that Fox’s confidence is rooted in a heteronomous subjectivity predicated on the Quaker theological cornerstone of the indwelling Christ.