Wendy Varney

The briar around the strawberry patch: Toys, women, and food

Abstract Strawberry Shortcake, and other food-imaged dolls that have swarmed onto the toy market since 1980, display features of the backlash against feminism. In particular, they serve to “naturalise” those perceptions that the backlash has promoted: that women need to be confined to specific roles serving male and family interests. Based on a female-food amalgam, these toys provide a window to the problematics surrounding women and food, some of which this article explores. These problems include the depth of gendering even into foodstuffs; the tantalisation process which surrounds womens relation to food; and social expectations that women be like food, namely attractive, appetising, and consumable. The toys are among a number of apparatuses which lay down guidelines for womens expected social behaviour.

Howzat! cricket from empire to globalization

Cricket may be among the most complex of all sports. Equally complex are the ideologies and values tied up with it, which range from colonialist to anti‐colonialist, from early capitalist to globalist. It has been described as the most colonial of all sports on one hand, and on the other hand also been seized by countries such as those in the West Indies as a rallying point against colonial powers. The game is played in a limited number of countries but among those where it has become popularized—mainly Britain itself and former British colonies—it generates a huge number of devotees. Despite being viewed as conservative and steeped in tradition, cricket has been far from stable and has had to adapt to shifting value systems. The shifts in rules, rituals and understandings of cricket mark social changes, none more so than the globalization of culture that can be seen in crickets commercialization, commodification and revamping as spectacle. Yet despite these shifts, cricket remains a strong purveyor of i...

Green Nonviolent Resistance in Australia

Suddenly the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, is talking green. After denying the threat of global warming and refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a groundswell of popular concern about these issues and the proximity of an election have forced a change of his surface color. But, having long shown blatant favoritism to Australia’s large fossil fuel industry, especially coal interests, at the dire expense of renewable energies, there has been little change in actual policy.