Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Shortly after the financial crisis hit the USA and Europe in 2008, commentators started to debate the gendering of this recession. Initial response from North America suggested that a ‘man-cession’...

Women and austerity: the economic crisis and the future for gender equality

Black Venus is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus.\n\nThe book opens with an exploration of scientific discourse on black females, using Sarah Bartmann, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and natural scientist Georges Cuvier as points of departure. To further show how the image of a savage was projected onto the bodies of black women, Sharpley-Whiting moves into popular culture with an analysis of an 1814 vaudeville caricature of Bartmann, then shifts onto the terrain of canonical French literature and colonial cinema, exploring the representation of black women by Baudelaire, Balzac, Zola, Maupassant, and Loti. After venturing into twentieth-century film with an analysis of Josephine Baker’s popular Princesse Tam Tam , the study concludes with a discussion of how black Francophone women writers and activists countered stereotypical representations of black female bodies during this period. A first-time translation of the vaudeville show The Hottentot Venus, or Hatred of Frenchwomen supplements this critique of the French male gaze of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\n\nBoth intellectually rigorous and culturally intriguing, this study will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, feminist and gender studies, black studies, and cultural studies.

Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French

Precarious work is increasingly considered the new ‘norm’ to which employment and social protection systems must adjust. This article explores the contradictions and tensions that arise from differ...

Challenges and contradictions in the ‘normalising’ of precarious work

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets

In Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show, Helen Davies explores the politics of representation in neoVictorian re-imaginings of freak show performers. The book draws upon work from both freak studies and disability studies to address the issue of bodily difference in a series of nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian texts, an area that has drawn little critical attention in the field of neo-Victorian criticism to date. Her book returns again and again to the ethical quandaries of the neo-Victorian genre – what is at stake in representing the lives of others? Particularly those others who – like the freak performer – were marginalised during their lifetimes? Neo-Victorian texts are in danger of re-enacting the historical oppression of these performers but, crucially, they also have the potential to offer a more empathetic engagement with the figure of the freak. For Davies, it is this “learning about different ways of being and living which can lead us to question our presumptions about ‘freakish’ Victorians as well as about bodily diversity in our cultural moment” (15). The key to moving beyond such exploitative relations, Davies suggests, is through metatextual strategies that encourage both author and reader to interrogate their desire for knowledge of the freak body.

Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show

Since the onset of widespread economic crisis in 2008, varied policy-makers, critics, lobbyists and charities have vocalised concern about the impact of austerity measures on women's lives across t...

Helen Davies

Papers

Women and austerity: the economic crisis and the future for gender equality

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction

Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets

Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show

All in this together? Feminisms, academia, austerity