Illuminating Gender II

Detailed Table of Contents

Editorial

Elizabeth J. Clark: Policing, Politicizing, Poeticizing the Virgin/Whore Split: Contemporary American Women's Poetry about AIDS

Abstract: This article looks at four women poets: Lesléa Newman, Marie Howe, Tory Dent and River Huston and the impact their work has had on the literary, poetic construction of HIV/AIDS. Implicit in their poetry and their activism is a constant wrestling with their own subject position in relationship to HIV/AIDS.

Author's Bio: J. Elizabeth Clark is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College — City University of New York. Her work has appeared in journals such as: A & U: America's AIDS Magazine, The Journal of Medical Humanities, and The Minnesota Review, among others. She writes on post-protease HIV/AIDS poetry of the United States. She is also a published poet with poetry appearing in journals such as The Comstock Review, The New Writer, The Santa Clara Review, and Ars Medica.

Amber Dean: At the Limits of Materiality / At the Limits of Discourse: Feminist Struggles to Make Sense of Depression in Women

Abstract: Depression presents feminist theorists with a significant problem: it makes sense to many of us to point out the ways that depression, as a concept, is constituted discursively. In particular, depression seems indelibly tied to powerful biomedical discourses, and also, for women, to the equally powerful discourses that dictate what a "good woman" should be. Yet to highlight these discursive dimensions of the phenomenon seems to preclude both an acknowledgement of depression as a source of pain and an acceptance of any form of treatment for this condition other than dramatic social change. This article explores the limitations of strictly material and strictly discursive explanations for women's depression, and suggests that a feminist model existing in-between these two dualities is essential to a more comprehensive understanding of women's depression experiences. The narratives of women who experience depression provide a rich source of knowledge by which to deconstruct materialist and discursive approaches to women's depression. A narrative approach also allows us to escape the confines of scientific/positivist research, which has proven inadequate to fully encapsulate the phenomenon of depression in women. The article concludes with an evaluation of the material-discursive models for understanding women's depression recently posed by feminist psychologists Janet M. Stoppard and Jane Ussher.

Author's Bio: Amber Dean is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She also teaches in women's studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Amber recently co-edited a special issue of West Coast Line on representations of murdered and missing women, with Vancouver writer Anne Stone.

Heike Hartung: "Doleful ditties" and Stories of Survival -  Narrative Approaches to Breast Cancer in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Sontag

Abstract: The article looks at two early nineteenth-century narratives concerned with breast cancer and reads them in the context of Susan Sontag's twentieth-century analysis of the cultural and linguistic over-determination of illness. Frances Burney's "mastectomy letter" (1812) is an early example of a patient's narrative which uses the discursive conventions of sentimental fiction to achieve female empowerment. By contrast, Maria Edgeworth moralizes illness in her novel Belinda (1801) and uses it as a cultural metaphor. While Edgeworth's and Burney's narratives share the historical moment of a shift in illness attitudes and in the technologies of medical diagnosis in the early nineteenth century, Susan Sontag, in her essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), analyses the articulation of an idea of individual illness as a hostile burdening of the individual person with guilt and responsibility. From a transhistorical perspective, all three texts provide further insights into the generic and gendered differences of illness experience and meanings.

Author's Bio: Heike Hartung studied English and German at the University of Münster, the University of Sheffield and the Free University Berlin, where she took her MA in 1992. From 1995 to 2004 she was a lecturer at the Free University Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin (2000), the title of her dissertation is Die dezentrale Geschichte. Historisches Erzählen und literarische Geschichte(n) bei Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift und Salman Rushdie (Decentring History. Historical Narration and Literary Story-Telling in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift, and Salman Rushdie). From 2001 to 2004 she worked on the postdoctoral research project "Transverbal Dimensions of Literature". From August to December 2004 she was a Fellow at the Postdoctoral Research Centre "Illness and Gender" at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, University of Greifswald. This was followed by the Postdoctoral Research Project "Aging-Gender-Society" at the University of Greifswald, where she was employed as a Research Fellow from 2005 to 2006. Currently, she is working on her habilitation, a book project tentatively entitled "Narrating Age in the English Novel: Age, Gender, and Genre."

Gabriele Kaczmarczyk: Concept and Organisation of the Master's Degree Program "Health and Society: International Gender Studies Berlin" at the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a joint facility of the Humboldt University and the Free University Berlin in co-operation with the Berlin School of Public Health

Abstract: The "Health and Society" master's program offers continuing education along with an academic degree to women and men aiming to become professional leaders in their home countries or in international organisations, businesses, projects or universities. The program is designed to address globally relevant health and social problems and will be offered in co-operation with scholars from the medical, health, social and cultural sciences. The program will be guided by transnational, intercultural, interdisciplinary principles and a gender-aware perspective.

Author's Bio: Prof. Dr. med. Gabriele Kaczmarczyk is the director of the master's program "Health and Society: International Gender Studies Berlin." From 1996 to 2004, she supervised the work-group for “Experimental Anaesthesiology” at the Charité Berlin. She was the equal opportunities commissioner (Frauenbeauftragte) at the Charité for more than ten years, and for many years served as a member of the faculty council, where she co-founded the Rahel-Hirsch-Scholarship for female scientists. She is currently one of the spokespersons for the "Kommission Klinika der Bundeskonferenz der Frauen- und Gleichstellungsbeauftragten an deutschen Hochschulen" as well as the recently founded "Netzwerk Frauengesundheit Berlin."

Review: Frances Heidensohn, ed. “Gender and Justice: New Concepts and Approaches.” Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2006.

Abstract: Since the 1970s, feminists have engaged in criminological discussions, working to increase the visibility of women's issues within academic discourse. In the years following, feminist criminology has developed a voice of its own.Gender and Justice: New Concepts and Approaches, explores the ways in which feminist criminology has grown and is transforming in the face of cultural, political, and societal changes of the twenty-first century.

Review: Cara Carmichael Aitchison, ed. “Sport and Gender Identities: Masculinities, Femininities and Sexualities.” London: Routledge, 2007.

Abstract: Sport and Gender Identities: Masculinities, Femininities and Sexualities is an edited collection exploring and describing the complex interplay among sport, gender and sexual identity. The interdisciplinarity in this new sub-discipline in which the editor places the work, the sociology of sport, are evidenced by the selections chosen, and parallel the myriad connections in the formation of gender and sexual identities the book succeeds in making visible to readers. Researchers working in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States present a range of disciplinary perspectives that inform this work, including anthropology, geography, philosophy, psychology, sociology and sport sciences.

Review: Kath Woodward. “Boxing, Masculinity and Identity: The 'I' of the Tiger.” New York: Routledge, 2007.

Abstract: Woodward's project is to explore how male boxers establish and reestablish their masculinity and identity, both within and outside the boxing ring, with one foot in a world dominated by notions of heroic masculinity and the other in a society with ever-changing gender norms and expectations. More specifically, Woodward focuses on the role of the body, narratives, and film in forming masculine boxing identities. In her own words, the central task of the project is to investigate: "How do boxing masculinities work?" (37).