Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Curtis Fogel: Presenting the Naked Self: The Accumulation of Performative Capital in the Female Strip Trade
- Abstract: This paper explores the female strip trade in Canada and the United States from a dramaturgical approach by looking at how female strippers construct, present and manage their gender, bodies and emotions in their everyday work. The basic theoretical framework of the study is built on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach to sociology, including three specific theories that can be related to it: Judith Butler's performative theory of gender, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, and Arlie Hochschild's theory of emotion work.
- Author's Bio: Curtis Fogel is a PhD student at the University of Calgary. He is currently writing his dissertation on the topic of consensual crime in Canadian sport. His research interests are in deviance, sport, law, gender and emotion.
- Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec: Discrimination Against Women Lawyers in England and Wales: An Overview
- Abstract: Traditionally, the legal profession has been a white male profession; women's and ethnic minorities' entry is quite recent. Despite the opening up of the profession, white males still account for the vast majority of senior positions, even though women have been present long enough to be part of the selection pools when vacancies for senior positions arise. One may infer from this observation that discrimination does take place in the legal profession in spite of the anti-discrimination legislation which has been implemented since the 1970s. What is at stake is a cultural legacy that disregards women and creates a glass ceiling preventing them from reaching the upper rungs of the ladder. In order to give an overview of discrimination against women lawyers in England and Wales, the author first presents the legislative and historical background, then focuses on various manifestations of sex discrimination in the legal profession (the pay gap, the glass ceiling and maternity leave), and lastly illustrates these issues with a case study.
- Author's Bio: Alexandrine Guyard-Nedelec holds a BA and an MA in English studies from University Paris Diderot and passed the agrégation (France's highest teaching diploma) in 2005. Her Doctorate in History and Area Studies, started in 2006, deals with "Intersectional Discriminations against Women in the Legal Profession in England and Wales, 1975-2005." She is currently teaching translation and British history at the University Paris Diderot. She is also a member of the Research Group on Eugenics and Racism (GRER), and participates in a large translation project of British and American texts on "The Fundamentals of British and American feminism."
- Christina Marín: Staging Femicide/Confronting Reality: Negotiating Gender and Representation in Las Mujeres de Juárez
- Abstract: Focusing on the maquiladora system and the cases of femicide that continue to take place on the U.S.-Mexican border, this paper asks how theatre, in performance and as dramatic literature, can be employed in the form of "staged narrative" to explore human rights violations around the world. I will use Anzaldúa's transfronterista feminist lens, Saldańa's qualitative research framework for ethnodrama, and a feminist view of Brechtian performance theories, in an attempt to unpack some of the gender-based violence issues that seem to be causing the city of Ciudad Juárez to implode on itself. Using Las Mujeres de Juárez by Rubén Amavizca, I hope to reinforce Arriola's conclusion that "[i]n general, what can be said about the maquiladora system is that it is hardly a humane system of employment and hardly something the knowing United States citizen would want to support" (809).
- Author's Bio: Christina Marín is Assistant Professor of Educational Theatre at New York University. Her research focuses on the examination of theatre as a tool to educate people regarding human rights violations and social justice. Forthcoming publications include "A Methodology Rooted in Praxis: Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) Techniques Employed as Arts-based Educational Research Methods" in the Youth Theatre Journal, and "The Pink Elephant is Going to Ruin My Sofa: Theatre as Pedagogy addressing Racism and Social Change" (co-authored with Jodi VanDerHorn-Gibson) in the edited volume Teaching Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (The Higher Education Academy Network, University of Birmingham, UK). She is currently collaborating with students from New York University on a staged reading of Maricela Trevińo Orta's play "Braided Sorrow" about the femicide taking place in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
- Mark Schreiber: Re-negotiating Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary British Film
- Abstract: Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000) reflect and problematise the consequences of economic change and political misfortune in post-industrial Britain. Moreover, they critically, albeit entertainingly comment on the changing social structures and the changing gender relations that were brought about by this economic decline. All three films problematise this loss of traditional masculinity but, at the same time, they also suggest potential solutions. Despite the fact that all three films make only tentative steps towards re-evaluating "stereotypical" concepts of masculinity, I would like to read them as examples of a successful deconstruction of gender stereotypes and as triggers for a cultural healing process of the trauma of social and cultural destabilisation caused by economic decline and a gradual realisation of what one might call "post-industrial masculinity."
- Author's Bio: Mark Schreiber is currently completing his PhD thesis on dramatic and cinematic representations and evaluations of Celtic Tiger-Ireland. He has held positions as Research Assistant and Lecturer in American Cultural Studies and co-editor of the Mitteilungsblatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer Amerikastudien. Since 2005 he holds a lectureship in English Literature at Chemnitz University of Technology. His research interests include Contemporary British and Irish Theatre and Drama, British and Irish Film, Cultural Studies and Theory.
- Markus Tünte: A Man's Work in a Female World? Gender Paradoxes of Male Childcare Workers
- Abstract: The analytical focus of this article is on everyday occupational life of male teachers in German pre-schools and male care workers in childcare centers. In light of the minority status of men in this occupation, attention is paid particularly to tensions experienced by male care workers and how these tensions are dealt with in relation to identity formation. Are male childcare workers the prototypical "new men," with implications for de-gendering and professionalising care work? Or are male childcare workers faced with the same structural disadvantages of female occupations, in addition experiencing contradictions in relation to their masculinity? In order to address these questions, the actions and experiences of male childcare workers are examined in relation to work colleagues, parents and the children with whom they interact on a daily basis as part of their work practice.
- Author's Bio: Markus Tünte has a degree in Social Sciences from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, where he now teaches courses in sociology. Since 2004 he is engaged in the research project Virtuelles Arbeiten und Lernen in projektartigen Netzwerken (VIP-Net) as a graduate research assistant. His main fields of interest are gender studies, the sociology of work, and qualitative methods.
- Review: Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, eds. “Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth.” Wayne State UP, 2005.
- Abstract: In Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005), Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward have collected articles that make an important contribution to inquiries into cinematic depictions of boys in the twentieth century. Maintaining that masculine power and its exercise often go unobserved and hence uninterrogated, the book's editors describe the need for critical examination of "screen images of boyhood for clues about the wider social world, its gendered social structure, and the process of building masculinity in the modern world" (2).
- Review: Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds. “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.” Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004.
- Abstract: All of the chapters of Curiouser work neatly together to provide a well-written critique of the functions served by a range of constructions of childhood within Western nations, both historically and in the present. The chapters explore in various ways how the queerness of childhood and the experiences of queer childhoods are variously disavowed within contemporary cultures. In their introductory chapter, Bruhm and Hurley elaborate what they see as an excusatory stance on children in queer families.
- Review: Jean Wyatt. “Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community.” Albany, NY: State U of New York Press, 2004.
- Abstract: As I will elaborate within this review, I began reading the book, and became quickly enamored of Wyatt's eloquent writing style, her accessible reading of psychoanalytic concepts, and her thoughtful elaborations of issues of envy, identification and ethical engagement. I was somewhat troubled, however, by later portions of the text, which seem in part to perpetuate the very problems the author seeks to challenge. Whilst, as I will reiterate later, I thoroughly enjoyed the text overall, and would recommend it to academics working in a wide range of fields, I feel it is nonetheless important to raise the points of contention I have with the text, and to connect these to the productive and exciting aspects of the text.