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‘drone assemblage’ is also of course inseparable from its current use in counterinsurgency and pacification operations. Such operations are often predicated upon ‘fixing’ certain kinds of sexual and gender relations. These operations in counterinsurgency practices are just as technological and ‘artificial’ as any other bodily formation. However, this kind analysis of gender politics does not necessarily take into consideration how both gender and ‘the drone’ are bound up in the politics of race and racialisation, which I turn to now. Building on the insights of
Examining Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca in terms of the Gothic convention of non-realist doubled and split characters, this essay argues that the slippage of desire between characters, male as well as female, complicates the containment of the dead Rebecca and whatever she represents. Although the splitting of the female protagonist into the unnamed heroine, the ghostly Rebecca and her surrogate Mrs Danvers has been extensively discussed, the use of this strategy as it concerns the male characters has been less often noticed. The replication of the male protagonist, Maxim, by two other male characters at once deepens him psychologically and contaminates him with ghostliness. These two conflicting manoeuvres strengthen his connection with both his wives, the dead as much as the living. But even while the treatment of Maxim empowers Rebecca and her successor, the movie‘s depiction of male bonding invites a questioning of the extent of female agency.
regeneration of collective life in a society where such communal experience in its traditional forms has been under sustained attack. This chapter seeks to appraise the conflictual politics of Ecstasy and the rave scene and to trace the symbolic import of romance as a cultural form, specifically in terms of how Welsh utilises its class and gender politics – an appropriation which allows Welsh certain utopian fulfilments but which also sets particular limitations on the radical potential of Ecstasy. Nonetheless, in terms of the development of Welsh’s work, his engagement with
hermeneutical considerations. I have emphasised the need to engage with all these things, before attempting a fine-grained reading. Conclusion This has made the opening sections of some chapters into rather long preambles before the excitement of sexual difference and gender politics emerges, but I hope that I have shown that the philosophical and hermeneutic discussions were worthwhile, and that I did not linger unduly. My focus has been on selected texts, rather than with building up a picture of an author and his views, from what remains of an oeuvre. As most
manhandled, V.I. is told by Furey that his pals were right all along, that she is ‘not interested in the things a normal girl is’, that she is just waiting for a chance to ‘jump on a guy’s balls’.41 Such violence underwrites patriarchal power, becoming socially visible during the Reagan years in the violence of the anti-abortion vigilantes. The gender politics of the novel are complicated further by the feminist cautionary tale contained in the plotline dealing with a community organiser’s attempts to move beyond community politics. Roz has traded her support within the
as 68 Jesus ‘son of God’ and party to the godhead trinity, rather than on a binary with women, and with men whose masculinities are significantly different from his. What follows is therefore a dual project: who is Jesus in gender terms? and on that basis, what kind of political theory can we make of his words and deeds as they are narrated to us in the gospels? A politics of gender Jesus’ gender politics is not just transgressive within himself, as a performer of a reinterpreted masculinity. He also transgresses boundaries and whole institutions that are
This book looks at Paretsky's work within the context of the current debate over the political possibilities and subversive potential of detective fiction. It commences with a proposal of two new frameworks for assessing the subversive possibilities of detective fiction: trauma literature and historiographical discourse. A discussion of detective fiction as a literature of trauma enables a perspective on the politics of agency within detective fiction. The book examines the gender politics of Paretsky's fiction in relation to Paretsky's own background and political activism and within the context of the political agendas and debates over identity politics within second and third wave feminism. It looks at the way Paretsky constructs her social landscape, one of changing neighbourhoods, and of the tensions and power struggles that threaten to fracture those neighbourhoods along lines of class, race, and ethnicity. The book also looks at the unexplored references to particular incidents of corporate malfeasance and political corruption in Paretsky's fiction, incidents that received considerable press coverage at the time Paretsky was working on her novels. An awareness of these references and resonances brings Paretsky's political agenda into clearer focus. It looks at Paretsky's detective novels in relation to historiography and identity politics. Paretsky's achievements are not limited to the area of gender politics, and her work clearly warrants more than the passing references and general treatment it has received. Paretsky's work invites a reconceptualisation of detective fiction as both a literature of trauma and as historiographical narrative.
This article provides a reading of gender politics in cyberpunk, drawing upon the Gothic, the cyborg and the (post)feminist subject. This reading is effected through an account of the ass-kicking techno-babe, a crucial component of the masculine strand of cyberpunk which valorises a masculinity and technology dialectic and draws upon film noir, with its hardboiled detectives and monstrous femmes fatales. From Molly Million‘s in Neuromancer to Y.T. in Neal Stephenson‘s Snow Crash (1992) and Trinity in Andy and Larry Wachowski‘s Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), this figure of the femme fatale demonstrates that the (post)feminist project of the ass-kicking techno-babe has found a home in the Gothic aesthetics of the noir-inf(l)ected genre of cyberpunk. The account of how hyper-sexualised cyborgic female bodies are positioned in contrast with the repressed bodies of male hackers reveals the destabilising conundrum of supposed agency contained by the determinacy of the (post)feminist body.
Male servants in Ann Radcliffe‘s early Gothic novels are frequently underexplored in critical examinations of gender identity in Radcliffe‘s literary politics due to a long tradition of social and literary marginalisation. However, class-specific masculine identities built on a socio-moral and political ideologies and domestic anxieties are not only particularly evident in Radcliffe‘s The Romance of the Forest (1791), but also effectively problematise an already unstable masculine ideal therein. Servant masculine identity in Radcliffe‘s work is developed through the contrast between servant characters and their employers, through examples of potentially revolutionary active and narrative agency by male servants, and through the instance of the heroine and male servants joint flight from the Gothic space. This article will establish that the male servant character in the early Gothic novel is essential to understanding socio-gendered identity in Radcliffe‘s work, and that thisfi gure s incorporation in Gothic class and gender politics merits further examination.
The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.