Nadine Muller

Feminisms, sex and the body

This is an introduction for the Journal of Gender Studies discussing the feminisms, sex and the body debate.

Feminism's family drama: Female genealogies, feminist historiography, and Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women

This article considers Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that tells the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. Tracing feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert’s historiographic metafiction helps us think through the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have long dominated feminist historiography. Critically engaging with what has arguably become a feminist family drama, the novel makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary feminist theory and feminist historiography, illustrating of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating and yet inescapable and useful.

Introduction: The Male Body in Victorian Literature & Culture

There exists a considerable amount of research focused on the female body in the Victorian period, from texts such as Krugovoy Silver’s exploration of anorexic female bodies to Talairach-Vielmas’s Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007) and Sondra Archimedes’ Gendered Pathologies: The Female Body and Biomedical Discourse in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (2005), to name but a few. However, the representations of and discourses surrounding the physicality of her male counterpart only have begun to be examined recently. Critics such as Andrew Dowling have questioned whether it is anachronistic to discuss masculinity in the nineteenth century because ‘the topic did not exist in the way we conceive it today’ (Dowling 1). He concludes that, while it was not a part of contemporary debate, the idea of what constituted manliness was deeply embedded within Victorian culture, not least through images of male deviance in the literature of the period. But despite the work completed by Dowling and others, the breadth and depth of scholarship on Victorian men and masculinities leaves much to be explored. This special issue is the result of a call for essays which aimed to bring together the work of scholars who seek to contribute to the filling this gap. The essays we have selected for this volume share a central concern for the exploration of the Victorian male body not only as a signifier of a variety of gendered identities, anxieties, and norms but also as a physical canvas on which we can trace masculinity’s inherent and complex intersections with a variety of nineteenth-century discourses. As such, they consider both the metaphorical and literal inscriptions with which writers and artists have endowed the Victorian male body and which reveal new perspectives on the period’s constructions of social class, empire, race, nationhood, war, disability, science, and religion, be it through consumption, appearance, or disembodiment. In doing so, the issue goes beyond representations of male physical deviance and discipline. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 4, 303–306, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2014.954413

Introduction: Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Recent years have witnessed what can only be described as an explosion of scholarly interest in the representation of feminism and femininity at the turn of the millennium and beyond. Critical attention to this subject has been spread discursively across a number of genres, with critics such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Ann Brooks, Hilary Radner, Imelda Whelehan, Yvonne Tasker, Diana Negra, Sarah Projansky, Melanie Waters, Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon, to name only a few, producing monographs and edited collections devoted to the configuration of gender across multiple mediums (literature, film, television and media studies) and within what has come to be termed as postfeminist cultural praxis. In the field of film studies specifically, Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer’s Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Culture (2011) and Melanie Waters’ Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture (2011) are noteworthy recent interventions, and both collections share with this one a sustained focus on gender for both are works of feminist film criticism committed primarily to analysing cinema across the first decade of the twenty-first century. Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema aims to extend current scholarship on postfeminist media culture and postfeminism as a cultural condition by exploring popular culture’s engagement with feminism through a range of cinematic genres.

Sexual f(r)ictions: Pornography in neo-Victorian women’s fiction

Since the first decades of the twentieth century and the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), through to the 1960s and Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victorian England (1964), the nineteenth century has been (re)defined according to its sexual politics, not least in order to contrast perceived Victorian conservativeness with later generations’ sense of their own modernity. At the turn of the new millennium, neo-Victorian fiction, through its compulsive return to matters of sex and gender, continues this sexualization of the past, a phenomenon which Marie-Luise Kohlke has termed the ‘neo-Victorian sexsation’, and which, as in previous decades, still frequently serves to ‘conveniently reassert our own supposedly enlightened stance towards sexuality and social progress’ by sexually ‘liberating’ the past and its fictional heroines.1