Conference Abstracts

PANEL 1 - FEMINISMS 1950-1980 

  

'Betty Miller's Feminist Essay' - Lydia Fellgett (UEA) 

In 1958 The Twentieth Century magazine dedicated its August issue to the subject of WOMEN. The cover is a shade of dusky pink and the infamous image of Mona Lisa sits squarely in the middle of the page.

The 1950s have been felt to be a nadir of British feminism. Agitators such as Dr. Edith Summerskill and the sociologist Viola Klein, both prolific writers of the female condition in the 1950s, were not included in the journal. The majority of the articles are by liberal, middle-aged women noting the indifference of ‘the young woman today’ to their revolutionary fore-mothers. Betty Miller’s ‘Amazon’s and Afterwards’ is one such essay.It is the most accomplished she ever published: her allusive dexterity is fully persuasive. Of course, she points out, women prefer domestic life to one in the workplace; at home they are in complete control of their routine, their space and of anyone who enters into it. She depicts the 1950s for women as a combination of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)and Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’ (1847).

 This paper seeks to understand the ways in which Miller’s essay evidences her feminist politics. It asks how useful the contemplative cultural essay can be as a way of illuminating an author’s fictional politics.

‘Between Anger and Liberation’ Abortion: The Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Dilemma - Sue Kennedy (Hull)

Raymond Williams argues that there is a tangible ‘structure of feeling’ in a particular set of works which is ‘especially evident of those specific and definable moments when new work produces a shock of recognition’(Williams, 1979). Such a shock was created by a number of English women writers in the late 1950s and 1960s in their representation of female experiences in relation to sex, pregnancy, abortion, childbirth, and motherhood which had hitherto largely been considered unsuitable for artistic treatment. 

Following close on the heels of the work of the ‘Angry Young Men’in the 1950s,and before the explosion of Women’s Liberation in the 1970s these debut works by young women caused a popular sensation in text, on stage and on screen. Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey(1958) and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction(1963) made working-class women’s lives their central theme, while Lynne Reid-Banks’ The L-shaped Room(1960) and Margaret Drabble’sThe Millstone(1965) offered fictional representations of the conflicts facing middle-class independent women in the common areas of female experiencedescribed by Elaine Showalter as ‘tabooed areas of sexuality’ (Showalter 1978). These works must have reached what Rita Felski calls ‘a projected community of female readers who will understand, sympathize and identify with the authors emotions and experiences’ (Felski, 1989).

The paper will focus on the single issue of abortion; the subject of a powerful campaign leading to legislation in 1967. The texts illuminate the conflicts presented, in these cases to single women, who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant, further complicated by social class. These influential texts display the socio-historical context of a transformational period in feminist consciousness in the mid-twentieth century and as such offer a view of some of the main concerns of historic feminist debates. The inheritance of the right of women to reproductive choice continues to be contestedin the twenty-first century. 

'Naked Women/ The Female Nude. Feminist Inheritance and Figurative Representations of Women Unclothed’ - Amanda Roberts (Swansea Metropolitan) 

This paper argues that figurative representations of the female nude produced by female artists,necessarily conflict with identified strands of feminist theory originating in the 1970s, collated and formalised as the Negative Feminist Critique of Figurative Representation (NFC). The paper outlines the characteristics of the NFC andshows it to have formedantagonistically to traditional expectations of the female nude. As a strategy for negotiating the restrictive legacy of the NFC in relationto her own practice the author proposes that the NFC has resulted in an alternative cannon of the female nude, distinguishable from and oppositionally positioned to the pre-existing traditional cannon. Both models are shown to continually influence representations and interpretations of the female nude. The identification and acknowledgement of the feminist cannon allows oppositional, traditional and feminist legacies to be deconstructed and explored. This is shown to facilitatenew and negotiatedpositionings for both the production of artworks and the formulation of critical theory relating to figurative representations of the female nude. The paper is illustrated with drawings and paintings from the author’s practice based research andworks by other artists.

PANEL 2 - ANTI-FEMINISMS?

‘Roger Scruton’s Daughters’ - Niall Gildea (Queen Mary)

In the second of two polemical articles he wrote called ‘The Idea of a University’, the philosopher Roger Scruton conjures two daughters, one of whom is also a son, in order to articulate a complaint against what he understands as the ‘polluting’ influence of a perceived valuative departure from androcentrism, heteronormativity and ‘Christian faith’ in university Humanities departments.

Scruton’s first daughter – his unnamed, sacrificial ‘first-born’ – embarks on a course of ‘Women’s Studies’. A faddish, misandrist discipline, ‘Women’s Studies’ inculcates in Scruton’s first daughter a dynamic of man-hating and promiscuity, fuelled by drink, drugs and heavy metal music. She emasculates her father by rejecting the attitudes to ‘career, marriage, childbearing, and all the other things he had hoped for her’.

These two poles of misandry and nymphomania – the crudest caricature of ‘the feminist’ – result from a mode of learning characterized by ressentiment: it is an entirely reactive pedagogy which militates against the moral and organic self-formation of a Coleridgean ‘Genius’ by recourse to its instrumental, calculated and prosthetic other, ‘Cleverness’. For Scruton, the timeless, self-evident formative capacity of ‘the classics’ is disastrously overwritten in the contemporary university by this quality of ressentiment in post-’68 thought, embodied most ‘satanically’ by Michel Foucault.

Scruton’s second daughter, and/or son (‘young James or Clarissa’) fares rather better. Eschewing the Humanities in favour of ‘math or sciences’, s/he ‘makes the right friends; plays viola in a string quartet; joins a theatre group; avoids drink, drugs, and promiscuous sex and holds on, against the odds, to the religion of the family home’.

Scruton wrote this article in 2010, the year he was welcomed as Visiting Professor at Oxford University’s Faculty of Philosophy. I would like to consider the anxieties encoded in Scruton’s atavism, as a means of thinking what the futurity of a ‘satanic’ Humanities could offer to a contemporary student.

‘Identifying Misogyny in the Postmodern Fiction of Thomas Pynchon’ - Dr Joanna Freer (Sussex) 

In 1984 the American postmodernist Thomas Pynchon admitted that one of his early short stories, “Low-lands” (1960), contained sexist talk that reflected his own way of thinking about women at the time. Pynchon apologised for this, and his work has increasingly displayed a sympathy for certain overt forms of female oppression such as forced prostitution and domestic abuse, as well as an awareness of key works of feminist criticism. Yet the 1984 apology was partial and conflicted, including an attempt to excuse “Low-lands”’s sexism as authentic for its era and a simple result of men’s eternal “puerility.” Combined with Pynchon’s ongoing tendency to represent the female body pornographically, this casts doubt upon the degree of maturation in his work with respect to the female since 1960.

 This paper addresses the problematics of pursuing a feminist analysis of the work of an author such as Thomas Pynchon in the context of the extremely varied legacy of feminist social criticism. Focussing on Pynchon’s later fiction, Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), and Inherent Vice (2009), the paper asks whether Pynchon may in fact have found intellectual support for some of the seemingly misogynistic elements in his narrative treatment of women in the sex-positive feminism of the 1980s, or in contemporary post-feminist discourse. Or, does this Left-wing author retain a blind spot when it comes to certain forms of female liberation? Furthermore, how does one negotiate such questions in a postmodern fiction heavy with irony and parody?

'"all that rubbish": Beryl Bainbridge, Feminism and Feminist Rewriting' - Dr Huw Marsh (Queen Mary) 

Beryl Bainbridge was adamant that she was not a feminist. She claimed variously that she had no need to be a feminist, that she was ‘against’ feminism, and that she believed men to be superior to women. These views influenced her approach to writing fiction, and in 2000 she suggested that at the outset of her career ‘women were beginning to write about girls having abortions and single mothers living in Hampstead and having a dreadful time’. She decided not to concern herself with ‘all that rubbish’ and took her own idiosyncratic route. Notwithstanding her dismissiveness, Bainbridge’s thumbnail sketch of women’s fiction of the sixties and seventies comes close to describing the plot of her own novel, Sweet William (1975), which features an illegal abortion and a woman living in Hampstead who is abandoned by the father of her child.

What distinguishes Sweet William from the novels of many of Bainbridge’s peers is that the travails of its protagonist, Ann, are played for laughs; indeed, Lorna Sage has described Bainbridge’s ‘hard humour’ as a distinguishing feature of her writing, which constitutes a tacit ‘satire on the traditional women’s novel’. This is a typically astute observation, but in Sweet William Bainbridge’s satire is directed less against the ‘traditional women’s novel’ and more against a particular sub-genre of male-centred comic fiction. As unpublished manuscript material helps to reveal, Sweet William responds to the ‘lad-lit’ of writers such Kingsley Amis and Bill Naughton, rewriting it from the ‘other side’.

 PANEL 3 - NEGOTIATING FEMINISMS 

‘The Inheritance of Irony and Development of Flippancy’ - Prudence Chamberlain (Royal Holloway)

This paper will consider Denise Riley’s exploration of irony within her work The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony.Riley suggests that irony is a serious political commitment that allows for personal disengagement, while facilitating identity fluctuations.  In her work, irony’s construction occurs through the speaking party taking on the role of ‘echo’, repeating dominant discourses within a different frame, thus imbuing it with new meaning.

However, Riley’s irony is problematic in regards to contemporary feminism.  She claims that ‘Vulgarity can be worn down by erosion, but can’t flash into irony’, and that as a result, we have very few women who are identifying as ‘fat slags’ or ‘cunts’.  Recently, marches such as the ‘Slut Walk’ and ‘Muff March’, and the furore surrounding ‘Pussy Riot’ imply that feminism has moved quite comfortably into an age of vulgarity.

If as Riley claims, and ‘irony dates as rapidly as style’ then how might a poetics of flippancy be developed in order to reflect contemporary vulgarity? Furthermore, I will discuss the ways in which a poetics of flippancy may work as a linguistic strategy that, while differing from Riley’s irony, uses her seminal work as a catalyst for developing a contemporary political voice.  Considering both the politics of emotional response and then, a language-concerned approach to feminism, I aim to defend a flippant attitude in a time that calls for concerted political commitment.

    

‘Black Feminism’s Influence on Octavia Butler’s Fledgling’ - Myriam Mubikayi Rojo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

It is almost impossible to analyze a text written by black women without considering certain degree of feminist denunciation. As it has been stated before, black women writers, since the slave narratives to our days, have expressed their discontent with the patriarchal, racist system they lived in. Since these texts had been criticized, analyzed and/or denied by the white dominant society (men as well as women), the appearance of a Black Feminist Theory during the 1970s has helped to give them importance within the literary realm.

Presenting the themes and issues raised by black feminists, this paper will intend to demonstrate how Octavia Butler presents those matters in her novel Fledgling (2005). As the protagonist is a young light-skinned female vampire, Butler demystifies the stereotype of the Black women’s bodies as sexual objects men (whites as well as blacks) have access to. Besides, the intimate interactions are woman to man, woman to woman, and man to man relations; with no distinction of race either. In this sense, Butler posits her writings within the Afro-feminist field, giving her protagonists (always women of color) the necessary agency to confront the patriarchal obstacles that often prevent them from acknowledging their womanhood (physically and psychologically). 

In conclusion, this work will try to show how Octavia Butler’s novel encompasses the issues raised by the Black Feminist Movement, which makes her novels belong to the “Black Female literary tradition”.

PANEL 4 – RE-READING AND RECLAMATION

‘The Re-illumination of Evangeline: Longfellow’s Heroine and Orthodox Feminism in Overdue Conversation’ - Timothy E. G. Bartel

Hester Prynne has long topped the list of proto-feminist heroines in nineteenth-century American literature, a model of resourceful subversion in traditional New England society. But no less resourceful (and no less subversive) is Longfellow’s Evangeline, a heroine that tested the religious and gender expectations of Longfellow’s audience, but was nonetheless celebrated and beloved throughout the nineteenth-century world. But in the early twentieth-century Evangeline was largely misunderstood and unduly rejected along with the rest of Longfellow’s corpus. The poem was all but forgotten in the flowering of feminist criticism in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

I offer a new reading of Longfellow’s poem that seeks to return Evangeline to her previous place as a great heroine of American literature. I argue that Evangeline is at its heart concerned with the deification of its protagonist, a meditation on the full humanity and potential godlikeness of Evangeline, and, by extension, all women.

Given the poem’s concern with the godlikeness of woman, I put Evangeline in conversation with the writings of contemporary Orthodox feminists Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Nonna Verna Harrison, and Valerie Karras, all of whom, over the last three decades, have argued for a theological vision that holds the full humanity and potential godlikeness of woman as its central concern. I argue that Orthodox feminism provides Evangeline with a re-entry point into the contemporary feminist conversation, and that Evangeline, in turn, provides an opportunity for Orthodox feminist concerns to gain new prominence in literary critical circles. 

‘Reclaiming the Female Experience of the Great War’ – Dr Jane Mattison Ekstam

History has gendered the Great War as male. In the context of the approaching centenary of the outbreak of the war, my paper reclaims the events of 1914-1918 as an arena of female experience as it explores the writings of women as diverse as Sylvia Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf and Vesta Tilley. In what ways did women’s lives change during the Great War? How did women respond to these changes, and how are they represented in their writings? In answering these questions, I consider the role of the Women’s Movement, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Women’s Social and Political Union, which, by giving voice to as well as helping to shape feminist aspirations during the war years, made it possible for women to record their greatest hopes and darkest fears. The works produced by feminist writers during the Great War are an important but hitherto neglected part of our feminist inheritance. Their patriotic rhetoric and gritty realism of the Front Line offer an invaluable insight into the way in which the universal experience of war began to shape women’s lives in the twentieth century.

PANEL 5 – LANGUAGE AND VOICE

‘the outsider and the independent, mobile republic: Dissent in Arundhati Roy and Virginia Woolf’ - Urvashi Vashist (UCL)

Author of the hugely successful The God of Small Things and activist Arundhati Roy can perhaps be described most accurately as a professional dissident. Since she won the Booker in 1997, Roy’s writing has focused almost exclusively on the failures of democracy in India and abroad, on the intentional and incidental violence of majority views, and the oppressive nature of established social structures, paradigms of thought, and ‘knowledge’. Her uncompromising polemic, commitment to political dissent, and ‘accurate description of [that] slice of reality’ which is rarely presented as any version of the ‘truth’ by politically correct or moderate littérateurs and journalists, have made her as thoroughly unpopular at home as she is lauded overseas. 

This paper reads Roy’s consistently counter engagement with India’s ‘new modernism’, her articulation of the citizen exile through singularly interdisciplinary and stylistically controversial manifestos of resistance from The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002) to Broken Republic (2011) as analogous with—as an enactment of—the ‘outsider’ position Virginia Woolf advocated in Three Guineas (1938).

Mindful of the ways in which latent neocolonialism may problematise my rendering of influence/inheritance in this regard, my paper takes advantage of the parallels, differences, and correspondences between Roy and Woolf’s contexts and non-fiction to arrive at a theory of anger and strategic dissent in formulating modern feminisms and postfeminist modernisms. I use the reading and reception of Roy’s ‘shrill’, ‘Manichean’, and ‘seditious’ voice to conceptualise its role as affect, as liminal space, as the impetus for and indeed an expression of geographically and historically diverse (but not ideologically divergent) cultural modernism(s).

‘Feminism in Poetic Language: A Comparison of Two Texts by Helene Cixous and Gayatri Spivak' – Alexander Fyfe (Warwick)

This paper will argue for the importance of attending to the literary qualities of feminist texts. Although a large number of works of feminist theory exhibit idiosyncratic and often poetic writing styles, it is rare that sufficient attention is paid to the ways they affect our reading. “Poetic” is used here in the Kristevean sense of extra meaning created by the unusual deployment of language (hence the play on Revolution in Poetic Language in the essay’s title). I will briefly compare the salient features of two well known essays, Hélène Cixous’s “Laugh of the Medusa” and Gayatri Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and A Critique of Imperialism”. These may be considered to be respectively “second wave” and “third wave” texts. My aim is to problematise the poetics of the two texts and to show what a reading of them as literary events can reveal. I will show how Cixous’s text, when read in this way, does not enact the biological essentialism with which she is frequently charged. I will also demonstrate how Spivak’s text, though often maligned for its style, is an enactment of her ongoing political project. My findings will suggest a way in which we may be able to reassess key texts and thinkers and how different “waves” may be characterised in writing style. It is also an attempt to move away from the persistent labelling of certain feminist texts as “inaccessible” or “obscurantist”.

PANEL 6 – ‘LOCATING FEMINISM’

Postfeminism or ‘Ghost feminism’?: Feminism, Postfeminism, and the Politics of Spectrality- Dr Melanie Waters

This paper sets out the central contention of my forthcoming book, Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (I. B Tauris, 2013; co-authored with Dr. Becky Munford); namely, that postfeminism is a peculiarly Gothic phenomenon, insistently haunted by the ghosts of feminisms (and femininities) past. Whether ironic or otherwise, the tendency to Gothicise feminism is an increasingly prevalent strategy within popular and academic scholarship: Angela McRobbie traces the ‘hideous spectre of what feminism once was’ as it stalks popular culture (1); Jane Gerhard acknowledges the ‘ghost of the scary lesbian/feminist’ as a defining feature of postfeminism (37); and Lori A. Brown even speculates that feminism – already, in her opinion, ‘a spooky word’ – might itself be ‘a kind of ghost’ (216). To some extent feminism’s new rhetorical (after)life as a monstrous spectre follows logically from the mainstream media’s repeated pronouncements of its demise. From the ‘Is Feminism Dead?’ cover of Time magazine in 1998 to the 2005 publication of Phyllis Chesler’sThe Death of Feminism and beyond, the last gasps of women’s liberation have been the object of continuous coverage for the past two decades. In this paper, I draw on Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) in order to investigate the extent to which contemporary culture is haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of an undead feminism that is routinely – if erroneously – consigned to the past. Through close reference to spectral formulations of feminism and femininity in popular literary fictions and theoretical discourses alike, I develop a speculative ‘hauntology’ of feminism. This hauntology – which pivots on a ‘politics of memory […] inheritance, and of generations’ (Derrida xviii) – provides a framework through which to consider the ways that postfeminist identities might ‘ghost’ the styles and politics of previous eras, and offers a context for considering whether the present moment is best understood as one of ‘postfeminism’ or ‘ghost feminism’.

‘Femi-normativism, the Maidservant of Modernity’ -  Anna Kuslits

With my project, I wish to speak to the topic of problematic feminist legacies. I will look at feminism as a discipline – as a disciplinary mechanism, as Foucault would have it – in a trans-national framework. 

During my years as a graduate student of literature at a Hungarian university, I have become accustomed to the way feminism in Hungary was talked about by those few who spoke from a feminist stance: a lack. According to the prevailing view amongst Hungarian feminists, the cultural climate of the (post-1989) post-socialist Hungary to date has been resistant and hostile to a gender-sensitive perspective in contrast to more modernised western societies, where feminism has acquired a mainstream status, has a wide institutional support, and has already become part of the `norm`. The legitimacy of feminism in the local context, as I will point out, is commonly derived from a perceived moral superiority of the “West” (interestingly, the very same argument the feminists of late-18^th century Britain put forward as a source of self-legitimation).

I will argue that in this particular case, feminism (or the lack thereof) is being deployed as a discursive strategy that I call here femi-normativism to create hierarchies between historical and geo-political locations, cultures and nations, national arts and literatures, and as such, it reproduces an ideological mapping of the world with the “West” being the centre and the standard for development. As long as feminism (the gender-conscious critique of, or counter-discourse to modernity) is caught up within this ideological representation of space and time, it becomes – ironically – an extension to the discourse of modernity.

‘Western Feminisms from Egyptian Perspectives’ – Dr Magda Hasabelnaby

This paper attempts to highlight how Egyptian intellectuals and scholars engaged with the substantial feminist inheritance. It will seek to consider how scholarly research, literary products and even popular culture in Egypt repeatedly related to the rich and complex history of Western feminism. Egyptian responses to such complex body of research ranged from adaptation and appropriation to utter rejection, passing through eclecticism and negotiation. 

Among the works examined in this paper is Dr. Abdelwahab Elmessiri’s Feminism Versus Women’s Liberation Movements, a work which offers a critique of Western feminism and provides alternative concepts for the liberation of both men and women. 

Similar, yet less sophisticated dialogues continue to take place in Egypt. An example is a recent popular TV show by the Islamic scholar Moez Masoud in which he relates the old and the new thoughts of Germain Greer to Islamic feminist paradigms. The show will be analyzed as a sign of acknowledgement and negotiation of Western feminisms.

Included in the analysis also are some earlier adaptations of Western feminism manifested in the works of the famous, yet controversial, Arab feminist Nawal Al-Saadawi. Saadawi's "Women and Sex" and other books by Saadawi will be examined for direct and indirect references to Western feminism. The paper will also tackle literary works by Egyptian "feminists", such as Latifa Elzayyat, Salwa Bakr, and Sahar Elmougy, attempting to compare their feminisms to the complex history of feminist research and to explore the new routes they are taking that might be informed by works of the past.