Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Dvir Abramovich: Abortion and the single woman as literary tropes in the works of Amos Oz
- Abstract: This paper provides a gender-based reading of texts by Israeli Author Amos Oz, in particular Fima, My Michael, A Perfect Peace as well as several short stories. The constructions of unmarried women and of abortion are focused on as tropes betraying the reactionary gender politics in these texts. The analysis reveals that the representation of abortion is rhetorically biased, representing the decision as selfish, the operation as inhumane and the foetus as a child, while exaggerating the psychic risks for women undergoing abortion. The unmarried female characters in Oz' texts are shown to be presented according to sexist stereotypes, which is further supported by the asymmetry in comparison to their male counterparts.
- Author's Bio: Dr. Dvir Abramovich, the Jan Randa Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies, is Director of The University of Melbourne Centre for Jewish History and Culture. Dr. Abramovich is President of the Australian Association of Jewish Studies and is editor of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies — Australia's only peer-reviewed journal devoted to the field of Jewish studies. He contributes regularly to the national publication and has been interviewed on Australian radio. The author of more than 45 peer-reviewed essays and book chapters, he is currently writing a book on Israeli author Amos Oz. Dr. Dr. Abramovich has lectured in local and international conferences and sits on the editorial board of several international academic journals. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book Testifying to the Holocaust.
- Magda Romanska: Performing the Covenant: Akedah and the Origins of Masculinity
- Abstract: Following Derrida's open-ended question why woman is excluded from the biblical covenant, I suggest that the feminine ethics of self-sacrifice evolved from the Judeo-Christian discourse of the sacred: the contract between man and God is grounded in the economy of sacrifice. In fact, woman's self-sacrifice, though irrelevant for the sacrificial economy, is the satellite around which the performative language of ethics and theology could revolve.
- Author's Bio: Magda Romanska received her B.A. from Stanford University (1998) and her Ph.D. from Cornell University (2006). She also studied at the Yale University as an exchange scholar. Former member of the editorial board of Theater Magazine, Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, she also served on the board of Diacritics. Romanska's recent articles have appeared/are forthcoming in The Drama Review, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, and Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her two book chapters were recently published by the Cambridge Scholars Publishers. She is a recipient of Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2006). Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at Emerson College in Boston and a research associate at Harvard University's Davis Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
- Interview: Of Cultural Deference. A Conversation with Rabbi Tanya Segal, Poland's First Female Rabbi — Warsaw, 12 July 2008
- Abstract: Rohee Dasgupta's interview with Tanya Segal touches upon a host of questions due to Segal's involvement in both cultural and religious affairs. Segal understands her progress in constructing a Jewish identity of her own as a key element uniting her previous involvements in the Moscow Yiddish theatre as well as her theatrical and rabbinical studies with her current task of laying the groundwork for the development of progressive Judaism in Poland. Her project of Midrash theatre combines performance and the active interpretation of theological texts, which also enables a questioning from a gender perspective.
- Author's Bio: Rohee Dasgupta is Ph.D. candidate in the Research Institute of Law, Politics and Justice, Keele University, United Kingdom. Her thesis is a legal ethnographic research on renewing Polish-Jewish identity in contemporary Poland. She has been a visiting scholar at the Simon Dubnow Institute of Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig University, Germany.
- Review (Review): Nadia Valman. “The Jewess in Nineteenth Century British Literary Culture.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Abstract: Nadia Valman's book is a survey of the image of the Jewess in nineteenth-century British literary culture. Through five case studies, Valman demonstrates that the Jewess was simultaneously cast as an object of idealisation and an object of interventionist strategies which aimed at her conversion or "civil improvement." The issue of gender was always a complicating factor in these strategies: it confused the other "categories of difference" of the discursive formation at stake, and often revealed their instability and contradictions.
- Review (Review): Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher, eds. “Africa After Gender?” Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007.
- Abstract: "Africa After Gender?" combines a range of articles from various displines which illustrate the wealth of recent of African gender scholarship. Counteracting the Western hegemony of gender research, the texts point to the specificity of experiences of racism and colonialism, emphasize the importance of the political and economic context and thereby raise questions in regard to intersectionality and positionality.
- Review (Review): Lynette Goddard. “Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance.” Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- Abstract: "Staging Black Feminisms" critiques texts authored by African-Caribbean women playwrights and dramatic practitioners in British theatre. The author explores the meanings and implications of a progressive Black feminist performance practice.
- Review (Review): Deborah Clarke. “Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America.” Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
- Abstract: Deborah Clarke's monograph examines how cultural portrayals of women and cars have registered and participated in shifting conceptions of female identity and female agency. Clarke's insistence on the importance of women's relationships with cars to our understanding of twentieth-century American culture is affirmed both by her nuanced readings and the sheer number of texts addressed in her study. Driving Women combines breadth and depth to offer a compelling examination of gender and American car culture. It merges and adds to the large number of studies on American mobility narratives and gender and technology that have been published in recent years.