Women-A Cultural Review最新文献

{"title":"Salad Days","authors":"Dominic Symonds","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072625","url":null,"abstract":"For many, British musical theatre of the 1950s is epitomized by two classics: Julian Slade’s quirky Salad Days (1954), and Sandy Wilson’s breezy The Boy Friend (1953). Not only have these shows become enduring small-scale favourites, but so too have their writers become, to a certain generation, familiar names, thanks to their irreverent treatment as the characters Julian and Sandy in the radio comedy Round The Horne. Projected as camp caricatures by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams trading in the euphemistic slang Polari, Julian and Sandy featured in weekly sketches throughout the late sixties, bringing a fondly grotesque parody of gay lifestyles into British households. In her new book, And This is My Friend Sandy, the title of which riffs off one of the stock phrases from that radio show, Deborah Philips explores one of these writers, Sandy Wilson, in the context of The Boy Friend, London Theatre, and gay culture. The early part of the book charts his Oxford University experiences in revue, alongside the likes of contemporaries Donald Swann and Kenneth Tynan. Seen through the lens of Wilson’s own autobiography, this reveals an ardent theatre lover who would migrate to London’s Soho as successful student revues transferred. Soho itself is explored in chapter two, very much as a vibrant home to London’s gay community, and it is here, at the intimate music-hall venue the Players’ Theatre Club, in 1953, that The Boy Friend first opened, before transferring in an extended version to the West End the following year. Situating Wilson’s early theatrical success in the context of London’s gay culture of the 1950s enables Philips’ account to emphasize the strong influences he had from British musical theatre’s iconic gay establishment. This was a time during which the restrictive laws against homosexuality were being both publicly exercised (with the great classical actor John Gielgud’s notorious arrest for cottaging in 1953), and tested (with the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957). It was also a time during which personalities like Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, and Binkie Beaumont enjoyed huge status and acclaim, their sexuality masked yet resonant on Deborah Philips, And This is My Friend Sandy: Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend, London Theatre and Gay Culture, London, Methuen, 2021, 256 pp, 5 Illustrations, ISBN 9781350174238","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"148 5-6","pages":"244 - 246"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72470287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laura Marcus 7 March 1956–22 September 2021","authors":"Isobel Armstrong","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2084248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2084248","url":null,"abstract":"Laura Marcus, our loved colleague and friend, tragically died in September 2021, after a brief illness, so brief that we were all shocked and unprepared for this early death. She was at the height of her powers. Laura had a thirty-year connection with Women: a cultural review. She became our Reviews Editor in 1990 and subsequently became one of the Editors. During this period she moved from Birkbeck, University of London, to the University of Sussex (1999), from there to the Regius Professorship at the University of Edinburgh (2007), and from Edinburgh to the Goldsmiths’ Professorship at Oxford (2010). She published some of her most renowned books during her time with Women: Autobiographical Discourses, Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), a study of Virginia Woolf (1997), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Literature (2004), The","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"0403 1","pages":"155 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82944071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Defeat of Scientific Racism","authors":"H. Carr","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072616","url":null,"abstract":"Charles King is a distinguished American commentator on the recent history of the Balkans and the Near East, but in this striking intervention in political debate the time and place of his concerns are very different. He has turned his attention to the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the interwar years, concentrating on the development of the discipline of anthropology and centring on the figure of Franz Boas, a humane, courageous and farsighted German Jew, and on the group of women anthropologists he taught and fostered. By the time of Boas’ death in 1942, his arguments for racial equality were widely accepted, as the US entered a war against the horrors of Aryan supremacy. Charles King wrote his book in the last days of the Trump presidency when racism had become once more accepted, powerful and corrosive. It hadn’t of course ever gone away, but it was once more the norm for a terrifyingly large and influential number of Americans. King only mentions Trump once, but his message is clear. Boas had a number of distinguished male students, many of them Jewish immigrants like himself, and their own ground-breaking work helped to spread his insights and values throughout the States. But King concentrates on his female students who had a much harder battle. They needed Boas’ ongoing help to find enough financial support to practice anthropology at all. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been women anthropologists before—it had been a wonderful escape from drawing-room life for some well-to-do women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, somewhere they could be in charge for once and where no-one contradicted them. But gaining an academic position was a very different matter. King concentrates on four women. There is Margaret Mead, with her genius for attracting attention and book sales. Then Ruth Benedict, for years ignored and marginalized, but who eventually, after the war and Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture, Bodley Head, 2019, £25, 9781847924490","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"11 1","pages":"247 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80772523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Studio with Paula Rego: An Interview with Anthony Rudolf, Poet, Translator and Artist's Model","authors":"D. Rees-Jones","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2083815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2083815","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During the more than half a century since his earliest appearances in print, Anthony Rudolf has published many works in prose and verse, and also translated (and co-translated) books, mainly poetry, from the French and other languages. As a literary essayist, he has written on authors as diverse as Balzac, Byron, Borges and George Oppen, as well as several essays on Primo Levi and Yves Bonnefoy. He has also written on the work of visual artists, including Paula Rego, R. B. Kitaj, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Charlotte Salomon and Fermin Rocker, and younger artists including Haidee Becker, Jane Joseph, Jane Bustin, Arturo di Stephano, Paul Coldwell and Charlotte Hodes. In addition, he is a reviewer and obituarist and has contributed to Radio Three, Radio Four and—in English, French and Russian—the BBC World Service. Born in London in 1942, he still lives in the north-west of the city. His books include Jerzyk (2017), a study of the diary of his second cousin, the youngest known suicide of the Holocaust; Silent Conversations (2013) (a book on his reading); and European Hours (collected poems, 2017), whose eponymous prologue is a prose poem about places visited with Paula over the years.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"10 1","pages":"225 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76393061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Archiving Donna Stein","authors":"S. G. Scheiwiller","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072624","url":null,"abstract":"Donna Stein’s memoir The Empress and I is a tale of two women who crossed paths and became united in a vision to make the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA, est. 1977) one of the most prominent collections of Modern Art in the world. The former queen and empress, Farah Diba Pahlavi (b. 1938), had a dream of establishing a global institution that fostered dialogue between modernist artists in Iran (then Persia) and in the Global North, as well as a new space of literacy and learning for the population en masse. The empress sought to enliven the local modern art scene while simultaneously engaging Iran in an international, intercultural exchange with some of the world’s most famous modern artists. Stein was asked to help with this vision because of her training and expertise in the art world in New York City; she would later take this professional skillset to Tehran to assist directly with the collections and protocols, alongside other important figures of TMoCA’s establishment, such as the architect and artist Kamran Diba (b. 1937). Stein’s book is filled with meticulous details and primary documents from the 1970s about her involvement in facilitating, advising, and building the collections of TMoCA, primarily the works on paper. More than 40 years later, letter excerpts, contracts, ledgers, and communiqués detail the many negotiations, processes, and persons involved in various transactions in New York City and Tehran that were all a part of TMoCA’s success as a major world institution. Stein keeps the reader’s attention by dividing the book into ten concise chapters and then by ending her own narrative with an in-depth interview with Farah Pahlavi that Stein conducted in 1990. In the memoir, Stein details how she was able to be part of this historic project. She had been part of the curatorial staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and was awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Museum Professionals to study world fairs and their global impact on cultures. In 1973, this research eventually took Stein to Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, and these magnificent cities of the world awed her—the thrilling urban setting and many museums of Tehran, the Donna Stein, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art, Skira 2021, £21.45 paperback, 9788857244341","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"256 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80952969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comrade Muriel","authors":"L. Roberts","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072618","url":null,"abstract":"Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s new book,Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Reading across genres and forms, Kennedy-Epstein focuses on four thwarted projects: Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War-era novel Savage Coast, unpublished in her lifetime; a clutch of lectures, radio talks, and essays that illuminate Rukeyser’s sexual politics; collaborative work with her lover, the photographer Berenice Abbott; and a biography of the anthropologist Franz Boas. In each case, Kennedy-Epstein traces Rukeyser’s resourceful struggle against ‘the sexism of editors, the withdrawal of publishing contracts, political censure [and] derision’ (7). The result of ten years of archival work, almost every page bristles with evidence drawn from letters, unpublished interviews, and marginalia. This material isn’t brandished as a trophy but woven into the argument of the book, which shows us that what doesn’t come to fruition isn’t simply waste, and that ‘waste’ is itself a highly ideological concept. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The first part of the book – three taut chapters – is organized around Rukeyser’s experiences in Spain, where she travelled in 1936 for the opening of the antifascist People’s Olympiad. Dedicated readers of Rukeyser will be aware of some of this terrain already, thanks in part to KennedyEpstein’s own editorial work. Her edition of Savage Coast appeared in 2013 with the Feminist Press, and helped to introduce Rukeyser’s writing to a new generation of activists and poets. This recovery work originated in the activities of the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Lost & Found, which has been an inspiration for anyone working on experimental poetry in the long aftermath of the financial crisis. Kennedy-Epstein’s contribution to the series, Barcelona, 1936: Selections from Muriel Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War Archive (2011), joined work by other scholars on Diane Di Prima, Margaret Randall, John Wieners, Jean Sénac, June Rowena KennedyEpstein, Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, 2022, 224 pp., 13 illustrations, 9781501762338","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"70 1","pages":"240 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89537420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Daring to Hope and Daring to Disrupt: Rowbotham Revisits the 1970s","authors":"Sarah Crook","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072617","url":null,"abstract":"When several hundred women gathered at Ruskin College, Oxford, on a chilly February day in 1970, they did so in clothes familiar to the era: ‘scraggy fur coats’, ‘maxi-length coats... acquired in Army and Navy surplus stores’, and ‘long flowing sixties scarves and hair too’ (17-18). What the women came to discuss and challenge was less familiar, however. Talks were given on women’s relationship to work, class, capitalism, and the home and family. Both the factory floor and the kitchen sink were discussed as sites where politics was enacted: at this first Women’s Liberation Conference, a ‘new politics was being expressed through women’s daily experiences’ (20). Sheila Rowbotham was one of those who spoke at the conference, drawing upon the research she had been doing for her book Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) to talk on ‘The Myth of Inactivity’. No one could accuse Rowbotham of being inactive. A key member of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Rowbotham is an important scholar of women’s history as well as a crucial voice on the movement itself. This, her most recent book, builds upon her earlier memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2000). Progressing chronologically, Daring to Hope maps a personal journey through the 1970s. Daring to Hope starts in January 1970, picking up not with an analysis of the state of feminism but with a new and romantic connection with David Widgery, a member of the International Socialism group. It threads the intimate and personal – the loves, the betrayals, the friendships, motherhood – with the labour of working for social change across the 1970s. This work took a variety of forms: conferences, meetings (lots of meetings), Sheila Rowbotham, Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s, London and New York, Verso, 2021, ISBN 978-1-83976-389-2","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"8 1","pages":"253 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74052112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"All Body? Transformation, Generic Codes and Embodied Memory in Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018)","authors":"S. Thornham","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072615","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer (2018) was reviewed as a neo-noir re-working and a star vehicle for Nicole Kidman. This article argues that it in fact offers a complex re-visioning of both the noir narrative to which reviewers compared it, and the ‘woman’s film’ and its successor, the maternal revenge film. It examines the ways in which Kusama’s film plays on cinematic genre codes and structures to suggest that they constitute a ‘compulsion to repeat’, in which femininity as performance is scripted, defined and positioned, and, where it threatens transgression, rendered abject as bodily excess. The film’s flashback structure, it argues, first exposes the various scripts through which its protagonist Erin’s younger self performs the roles she is given, and then stages the recovery of embodied memory, as generic codes and structures give way to the phenomenology of the process of remembering. Through its construction of a memory text in which time is fractured and/or slowed in moments of intensity, the film works against conventional accounts of subjectivity to suggest that Erin’s recovery of memory is also a recovery of a specifically maternal body. It thus stages an attempt to retrieve, or construct, a subjectivity that is embodied, relational, and maternal.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"34 1","pages":"205 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77056311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘What a Hellish Business’: Exploring the Theme of Infant Feeding in the Works of Virginia Woolf","authors":"Charlotte Taylor Suppé","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2072614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2072614","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although Virginia Woolf’s interest in the social and political participation of women has garnered decades of critical consideration, there has been limited attention to the historical relevance of maternal themes in her works. This article begins to address this gap by offering an analysis of Woolf’s writing on infant feeding, a trope which emerges in her very earliest fiction and continues throughout her canon. During Woolf’s lifetime maternal discourses were rooted in changes in employment, social structure, politics, philanthropy and science. Her writing on maternity is especially valuable not only because of her response to these contemporary events—the trope of infant feeding, for example, offers another critical approach to her thoughts on class—but also due to the deeply personal aspect of the subject. Exploring a variety of ways Woolf engaged with infant feeding, the author here considers how such a theme offers a fresh perspective on Woolf’s feminism, social engagement and feelings about creating art.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"183 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86072152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Elders: The Long Journey Home","authors":"M. Jacobus","doi":"10.1080/09574042.2022.2101750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2022.2101750","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The term ‘elders’ has been used to refer to those who might once have been called ‘seniors’, ‘retirees’ or ‘OAPs’ (Old Age Pensioners). The Middle English eldre—connoting wisdom and experience—signals a discomfort-zone. ‘Elders’ are us, embarked on an unknowable end-of-life journey. Similarly, ‘elder-speak’ designates an artificial manner of speaking (reduced speed, simplified vocabulary, exaggerated diction), implying that those of advanced years have limited cognition and linguistic competence. The memory- and language-losses of later years challenge literary and visual representation. We risk becoming ventriloquists, eavesdroppers, or voyeurs in our efforts to accompany the old on their last journey. Listening with ‘the third ear’ (Theodor Reik’s term, borrowed from Nietzsche)—or seeing with the third eye—potentially allows for a non-intrusive mode of understanding the old, and also ourselves. Women are often care-partners. But sometimes they are the ones cared for—part of an aging couple. My three examples will be Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant (2015); later life seen through the lens of contemporary British Object Relations psychoanalysis; and Paddy Summerfield’s photographic essay about his elderly parents, Mother and Father (2014). Read together, they underline the role of aesthetics in understanding the meanings and losses of old age.","PeriodicalId":54053,"journal":{"name":"Women-A Cultural Review","volume":"32 1","pages":"159 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87430174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}