Reading
Journal 2014
DEADLINE
FOR READING JOURNAL: Wednesday Jan 14th
A
contextual reading on Marxist and Feminist developments
Expansion of
Feminism
1st
Wave
First-wave
feminism refers to a period of feminist activity during the 19th and early 20th
century throughout the world, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United
States which focused on legal issues, primarily on gaining women's suffrage
(the right to vote).
Particular Works to note:
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792):
“Strengthen
the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”
which
was a foundation stone for the modern feminism we still have today. In this she
expressed passionate views for the fight to equal rights of women and against
their 'domestic tyranny' that had left them impotent to fight against
patriarchy. By this she
meant that women were 'forced' to stay at home and be domestic as they were
uneducated, had no political rights and were socially and materially dependant
on men for everything. Wollstonecraft had very liberal thoughts which was very
shocking in the Victorian era, as a woman was brought up to be patriarchal, so
saying things such as “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like
rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing
them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”
Lois Waisbrooker’s: A Sex Revolution (1893)
Marie
Stopes: Married Love (1918)
The US Customs
Service banned the book as obscene until April 6, 1931, when Judge John M.
Woolsey overturned that decision. Woolsey is the same judge who in 1933 would
lift the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses, allowing for its publication and
circulation in the United States of America. It was the first book to note that
women's sexual desire coincides with ovulation and the period right before
menstruation. The book argued that marriage should be an equal relationship
between partners. Although officially scorned in the UK, the book went through
19 editions and sales of almost 750,000 copies by 1931.
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s
Own (1929)
- “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
- “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
Woolf has
touched off one of the most important assertions of feminist literary
criticisms. The oft-held argument that women produce inferior works of literature
must necessarily be qualified by the fact of the circumstances of women. Unlike
their male counterparts, they are routinely denied the time and the space to
produce creative works. Instead, they are saddled with household duties and are
financially and legally bound to their husbands. By being deprived of rooms of
their own, there is little possibility for women to rectify the situation. Even
though this is clearly a historical truth, Woolf’s assertion was revolutionary
at its time. It recast the accomplishments of women in a new and far more
favorable light, and it also forced people to realize the harsh truths about
their society.
History
In 1928, the
franchise of voting
after 1918 was extended to all women over 21 by the
Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928, on an equal basis to men.
What British
Victorian feminists did accomplish in their work as writers, journalists, and
public speakers was to create a culture where change and creative thinking were
possible. Certainly, this is where the disconnect lies in media portrayals of
feminists as glamorous figures whose public accomplishment resides in material
wealth or as mysterious academics emotionally detached from the kinds of workplace
and family issues which women from all socio-economic classes face. Incomplete
images of feminist membership cloud the substance of feminist ideas. (2)
- Politically the first feminist movement had its roots in the abolitionist movement of the 1830's. The issues of the abolitionists were the freedom of slaves and that issue was directly linked to the freedom of women.[1]
- The first wave of feminism took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics.
- The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage.
- Discussions about the vote and women's participation in politics led to an examination of the differences between men and women as they were then viewed. Some claimed that women were morally superior to men, and so their presence in the civic sphere would improve public behaviour and the political process.
Timeline of UK first-wave
feminism
- The Married Women’s Property Act was passed in 1870 expanded in 1874 and 1882, giving women control over their own earnings and property.
- The United Kingdom extended the right to vote in local elections to married women.
- The Women's Social and Political Union was founded.
- On January 17, suffragettes chained themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street. Emmeline Pankhurst was imprisoned for the first time.
- In July, Marion Wallace Dunlop became the first imprisoned suffragette to go on a hunger strike. As a result, force-feeding was introduced.
- November 18 was "Black Friday", when the suffragettes and police clashed violently outside Parliament after the failure of the first Conciliation Bill. Ellen Pitfield, one of the suffragettes, later died from her injuries.
- The suffragette Emily Davison was killed by the King's horse at the Epsom Derby.
- The Representation of the People Act was passed which allowed women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification to vote. Although 8.5 million women met this criteria, it only represented 40 per cent of the total population of women in the UK. The same act extended the vote to all men over the age of 21.
- The Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 was passed allowing women to stand as Members of Parliament.
- The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 became law. In a broad opening statement it specified that, “[a] person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation”. The Act in practice fell far short of the expectations of the women’s movement. Senior positions in the civil service were still closed to women and they could be excluded from juries if evidence was likely to be too “sensitive”.
- 1920: Nancy Astor became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons.
- 1920: Oxford University opened its degrees to women.
- The Law of Property Act 1922 was passed, giving wives the right to inherit property equally with their husbands.
- The Matrimonial Causes Act gave women the right to petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery.
- 1925: The Guardianship of Infants Act gave parents equal claims over their children
- 1928: The right to vote was granted to all UK women equally with men in 1928.[2]
2nd
Wave
(Carter’s work took place in this
stage, both The Bloody Chamber (1979) and The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of
Pornography (1979).
The second
wave began in the 1960s and continued into the 1990s. This wave unfolded in the
context of the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements and the growing
self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world. The New
Left was on the rise, and the voice of the second wave was increasingly
radical. In this phase, sexuality and
reproductive rights were dominant issues, and much of the movement's energy was
focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment to the American constitution
guaranteeing social equality regardless of sex.
This phase
began with protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968
and 1969. Feminists parodied what they held to be a degrading "cattle
parade" that reduced women to objects of beauty dominated by a patriarchy
that sought to keep them in the home or in dull, low-paying jobs. The radical
New York group called the Red stockings staged a counter pageant, in which they
crowned a sheep as Miss America and threw "oppressive" feminine artefacts
such as bras, girdles, high-heels, makeup and false eyelashes into the
trashcan.
Because the
second wave of feminism found voice amid so many other social movements, it was
easily marginalized and viewed as
less pressing than, for example, Black Power or the effort to end the war in
Vietnam. Feminists reacted by forming women-only organizations (such as NOW- an
interest group National Organisation of Women) and "consciousness
raising" groups. In publications like "The BITCH Manifesto" and
"Sisterhood is Powerful," feminists advocated for their place in the
sun. The second wave was increasingly theoretical, based on a fusion of neo-Marxism and psycho-analytic
theory and began to associate the subjugation of women with broader
critiques of patriarchy, capitalism,
normative heterosexuality, and the woman's role as wife and mother. Sex and
gender were differentiated — the former being biological, and the later a
social construct that varies culture-to-culture and over time.
Whereas the
first wave of feminism was generally propelled by middle class white women, the
second phase drew in women of colour and
developing nations, seeking sisterhood and solidarity and claiming,
"Women's struggle is class struggle." Feminists spoke of women as a
social class and coined phrases such as "the personal is political"
and "identity politics" in an effort to demonstrate that race, class
and gender oppression are all related. They initiated a concentrated effort to rid society top-to-bottom of sexism, from
children's cartoons to the highest levels of government.
One of the
strains of this complex and diverse "wave" was the development of women-only
spaces and the notion that women working together create a special dynamic that
is not possible in mixed-groups and that would ultimately work for the
betterment of the entire planet. Women, whether due to their long
"subjugation" or to their biology, were thought by some to be more
humane, collaborative, inclusive, peaceful, nurturing, democratic and holistic
in their approach to problem-solving than men. The term eco-feminism was coined
to capture the senses that, because of their biological connection to earth and
lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism.[3]
3rd
Wave
The third
phase of feminism began in the mid-1990s and is informed by post-colonial and
post-modern thinking. In this phase many
constructs have been destabilized, including the notions of "universal
womanhood," body, gender, sexuality and hetreronormativity. An aspect
of third wave feminism that mystifies the mothers of the earlier feminist
movement is the re-adoption by young feminists of the very lipstick, high heels
and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of
the movement identified with male oppression. Pinkfloor expressed this new
position when she said; "It's
possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time."
The "grrls"
of the third wave have stepped onto the stage as strong and empowered,
eschewing victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a sexist
patriarchy. They have developed rhetoric of mimicry, which reappropriates
derogatory terms like "slut" and "bitch" in order to
subvert sexist culture and deprive it of verbal weapons. The web is an
important aspect of the new "girlie feminism." E-zines have provided
"cybergrrls" and "netgrrls" another kind of women-only
space. At the same time — rife with the irony of third-wave feminism because
cyberspace is disembodied — it permits all users the opportunity to cross
gender boundaries and so the very notion of gender has been challenged.
This is in
keeping with the third wave's celebration of ambiguity and refusal to think in
terms of "us-them" or in some cases their refusal to identify
themselves as "feminists" at all. Grrl-feminism tends to be global and multi-cultural, and it shuns
simple answers or artificial categories of identity, gender and sexuality.
Its transversal politics means that differences such as those of ethnicity,
class, sexual orientation, etc., are celebrated but recognized as dynamic,
situational and provisional. Reality is conceived not so much in terms of fixed
structures and power relations, but in terms of performance within
contingencies. Third wave feminism
breaks boundaries.
Expansion of Marxism
Marxism
20th century
•Marxism is
the movement founded by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels which fights for the
self-emancipation of the working class, subjecting all forms of domination by
the bourgeoisie.
•The political
curriculum of Marxism in the 20th century began, after the “sheet lightning” of
the Russian revolution in 1905
•The problem
is rooted in the very centre of the Marxist cause, which concerns the position
of working individuals within the relations of production. In Marx's terms: the
State-socialist way to run the mode of production formed a structure of
alienation, depriving the workers of their societal accomplishment.
•The task was
to break the boundaries between ‘civil’ and ‘bourgeois’ society. Civil meant
inclusive-participatory, bourgeois meant exclusive-private. (The difference in
class was highly defined)
•A competitive
struggle for jobs was created
•The Women’s
Liberation Movement (1960’s) conducted its critique both of existing
patriarchal society and the legacy of orthodox Marxism, and a number of
significant leaders in the women's movement either abandoned Marxism or
introduced Marxism into the concepts of women's liberation.
The 20th
century was largely defined by the struggle between capitalism and communism.
Communism is so influential because even capitalist countries like America were
defined in the 20th century by their anti-Communist policies, and because
communism was a critical factor in the development of the climate that led to
World War II, as fascism itself developed in opposition to communism.[4]
Despite
sharing similar premises, different schools of Marxism might reach
contradictory conclusions from each other. For instance, different Marxian
economists have contradictory explanations of economic crisis and different
predictions for the outcome of such crises. Furthermore, different variants of
Marxism apply Marxist analysis to study different aspects of society (e.g. mass
culture, economic crises, or feminism).
These
theoretical differences have led various socialist and communist parties and
political movements to embrace different political strategies for attaining
socialism and advocate different programs and policies from each other. One
example of this is the division between revolutionary socialists and reformists
that emerged in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the early 20th
century.
History
In 1959, the
Cuban Revolution led to the victory of anti-imperialist Fidel Castro (1926–)
and his July 26 Movement. Although the revolution had not been explicitly
socialist, upon victory Castro ascended to the position of Prime Minister and
eventually adopted the Leninist model of socialist development, forging an alliance
with the Soviet Union. One of the leaders of the revolution, the Argentine
Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara (1928–1967), subsequently went on to aid
revolutionary socialist movements in Congo-Kinshasa and Bolivia, eventually
being killed by the Bolivian government, possibly on the orders of the CIA,
though the CIA agent sent to search for Guevara, Felix Rodriguez expressed a
desire to keep him alive as a possible bargaining tool with the Cuban
government; he would posthumously go on to become an internationally recognised
icon.
In the
People's Republic of China, the Maoist government undertook the Cultural
Revolution from 1966 through to 1976 in order to purge capitalist elements from
Chinese society and entrench socialism. However, upon Mao's death, his rivals
seized political power and under the Premiership of Deng Xiaoping (1978–1992),
many of Mao's Cultural Revolution era policies were revised or abandoned and
much of the state sector privatised.
The late 1980s
and early 1990s saw the collapse of most of those socialist states that had
professed a Marxist–Leninist ideology. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the
emergence of the New Right and neoliberal capitalism as the dominant
ideological trends in western politics – championed by U.S. President Ronald
Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – led the west to take a more
aggressive stand against the Soviet Union and its Leninist allies. Meanwhile,
in the Soviet Union, the reformist Mikhael Gorbachev (1931–) became Premier in
March 1985, and began to move away from Leninist-based models of development
towards social democracy. Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms, coupled with rising
levels of popular ethnic nationalism in the Soviet Union, led to the state's
dissolution in late 1991 into a series of constituent nations, all of which
abandoned Marxist–Leninist models for socialism, with most converting to
capitalist economies.[5]
The success of
Thatcher in attacking the working class movement in Britain encouraged middle
class aspiring politicians in the East like Klaus and presaged a situation in
which Hayekian economic doctrines would become the orthodoxy. Thatcher’s doctrine
TINA, There Is No Alternative, (to capitalism) was generally accepted.[6]
Marxism
21st century
So today we
are faced with a whole new set of questions. The general
intellectual/ideological environment is much less favourable to socialism than
it was in the 20th century. This is not merely a consequence of the
counter-revolutions that occurred at the end of the 20th century, but stems
from a new and more vigorous assertion of the classic tenets of bourgeois
political economy. This re-assertion of bourgeois political economy not only
transformed economic policy in the West, but also prepared the ideological
ground for counter revolutions in the East
History
At the turn of
the 21st century, China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam remained the only officially
Marxist–Leninist states remaining, although a Maoist government led by
Prachanda (1954–) was elected into power in Nepal in 2008 following a long
guerrilla struggle. The early 21st century also saw the election of socialist
and anti-imperialist governments in several Latin American nations, in what has
come to be known as the "Pink tide". Dominated by the Venezuelan
government of Hugo Chávez, this trend also saw the election of Evo Morales in
Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; forging
political and economic alliances through international organisations like the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, these socialist governments allied themselves
with Marxist–Leninist Cuba, and although none of them espoused a Leninist path
directly, most admitted to being significantly influenced by Marxist theory.
For Italian Marxist Gianni Vattimo in his 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism
"this new weak communism differs substantially from its previous Soviet
(and current Chinese) realization, because the South American countries follow
democratic electoral procedures and also manage to decentralize the state
bureaucratic system through the misiones (social missions for community
projects). In sum, if weakened communism is felt as a specter in the West, it
is not only because of media distortions but also for the alternative it
represents through the same democratic procedures that the West constantly
professes to cherish but is hesitant to apply"
Carter pre
‘Bloody Chamber’ (The Sadeian Woman)
The Sadeian Woman Chapter One
“Polemical Preface: Pornography in the service of women:
The Sadeian
Woman, appeared alongside The Bloody Chamber in 1979. "I really can't see
what's wrong with finding out about what the great male fantasies about women
are," she declared, reasonably enough, when The Sadeian Woman came under
attack. It is a difficult, provocative book whose Polemical Preface is
subtitled "pornography in the service of women" - and a continuing
bone of contention for contemporary readers.
One shining
aperçu that emerges from its pages to spread light through the stories of The
Bloody Chamber is that passivity is never a virtue, in fact, even - especially
not - in women. "Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding
female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of
whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity," wrote Carter, tracing
the descendants of De Sade's heroine Justine down to Marilyn Monroe. Another
passage might have been written specifically as an epigraph for The Bloody
Chamber: To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist
in the passive case is to die in the passive case - that is, to be killed. This
is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.
Concurrently
with writing these fairy tales, Angela Carter was making a translation of
Perrault; she followed both books with her most contrary and uncompromising
essay, The Sadeian Woman (1979), which forms a diptych with The Bloody Chamber.
Carter once remarked, “For me, a narrative is an argument stated in fictional
terms,” and her writing fulfils that unexpected definition. In this
counterblast to the virtuous claims of feminism, Carter identifies the Marquis
de Sade as an honest witness to the conditions of bourgeois marriage, the
economics of sexual relations, and the collusion of women with their own
enslavement and subjugation. While as a writer she clothes herself in sparkling
ornament and sensuous fantasy, she continues to operate surgically, with
Enlightenment fury against hypocrisy and modations. The Sadeian Woman makes a
Swiftian “modest proposal” about pornography, and it provides a valuable gloss
on themes in The Bloody Chamber:
The essay
still has a starkly clarifying ethical force today, but it cost Angela Carter
many friends and supporters, especially among US femnists, and marked her out
as someone for whom nothing is sacred (echoed in the title of her 1982 selected
essays), who never toed the party line, not even the party line of her natural
allies. Like her friend JG Ballard, and her own Red Riding Hood, she was
nobody’s meat.
Cognitive
theorists of language have identified such travelling movements and embodied
presences in narrative as prime conductors of readerly empathy, replicating the
motions of thought itself as it models scenes and experiences in the mind’s
eye. Carter’s mastery of these effects brings about a quality of hallucinatory
reality, dream-like in its close-up intensity that wraps the products of her
unleashed fantasy. She knew what wordpower could do: “No werewolf make-up in
the world can equal the werewolf you see in your mind’s eye,” she wrote.
Quotes:
- “the probe and the fringed hole…the simplest expression of stark and ineradicable sexual differentiation , a universal pictorial language of lust , or rather , a language we accept as universal because , since it has always been so , we conclude that it must always remain so”
- From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences – man aspires; woman has no other function but to exist waiting. The male is positive, an exclamation mark. Woman is negative. Between her legs lies nothing but zero, the sign for nothing that only becomes something when the male principle fills it with meaning.
- My symbolic value is primarily that of a myth of patience and receptivity, a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled.
- I am indeed allowed to speak but only of things that male society does not take seriously. I can’t hint at dreams, I can even personify the imagination; but that is only because I am not rational enough to cope with reality.
- (Women) are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men).
- Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances.
- (The figures) are a “savage denial of the complexity of human relations is also a consolatory nonsense”.
- “Any glimpse of a real man or a real woman is absent from these representations of the archetypal male and female”. (they are) “ a fantasy relation to reality”.
- “These archetypes serve only to confuse the main issue, that relationships between the sexes are determined byy history and the historical fact of the economic independence of women upon men”.
- “the economic dependence of women remains a believed fiction and is assumed to imply an emotional dependence that is taken for granted as a condition inherent in the natural order of things and so used to console working women for their low wages”.
- (a woman) “is most immediately and dramatically a woman when she lies beneath a man , and her submission is the apex of his malehood”.
- “all tributes to the freedom and strength of the roving , fecundating , irresistible male principle and the heavy, downward equally irresistible gravity of the receptive soil”
- “our flesh arrives to us out of history , like everything else does”
- “Flesh is not an irreducible human universal”.
- “the erotic relationship may seem to exist freely , on its own terms , among the distorted social relationships of a bourgeois society , it is , in fact , the most self-consciousness of all human relationships , a direct confrontation of two beings whose actions in the bed are wholly determined by their acts when they are out of it”
- “The marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contrast. Prostitutes are at least decently paid or the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability, but their services are suffering a decline in demand now that other women have invaded their territory in their own search for a newly acknowledged sexual pleasure.
- “considerations of social class censored the possibility of sexual attraction between the Countess and Figaro before it could have begun to exist”
- “class dictates our choice of partners and our choice of positions”
- “control of fertility is a by-product of sexual education and of official legislation concerning the availability of cheap or free conception”
- “social administrators have decided that poverty is synonymous with stupidity and a poor woman cannot know her own mind”.
- “lack of privacy limits sexual sophistication”
- “it is a wonder anyone in this culture ever learns to fuck at all”
- “Flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo that governs our experience of flesh”
- “Our knowledge is determined by the social boundaries upon it”
- “Through the archaic sequence of human life – we are born m we fuck, we reproduce, we die – might seem to be universal experience, its universality is not its greatest significance. Since human beings have inverted history , we have also invented those aspects of our lives that seem most immutable , or rather , have invented the circumstances that determine their nature”
- “Birth and death , the only absolute inescapable , are both absolutely determined by the social context in which they occur”
- “The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the nation of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick”
- “Pornography like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalizing.
Societal Study
Media/News
Stories: 1976-1982 Create
a short report (400 words) per story
10
December 1976 – Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mairead
Maguire (born 27 January 1944) co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran
McKeown, the Women for Peace, which later became the Community for Peace
People, an organisation dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the
Troubles in Northern Ireland. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel
Peace Prize.
Maguire
became active with the Northern Ireland peace movement after three children of
her sister, Anne Maguire, were run over and killed by a car driven by Danny
Lennon, a Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) fugitive who had been
fatally shot by British troops while trying to make a getaway. Danny Lennon had
been released from prison in April 1976 after serving three years for suspected
involvement in the PIRA. On 10 August, Lennon and comrade John Chillingworth
were transporting an Armalite rifle through Andersonstown, Belfast, when
British troops, claiming to have seen a rifle pointed at them, opened fire on
the vehicle, instantly killing Lennon and critically wounding Chillingworth.
The car Lennon drove went out of control and mounted a pavement on Finaghy Road
North, colliding with Anne Maguire and three of her children who were out
shopping. Joanne (8) and Andrew (6
weeks) died at the scene; John Maguire (2) succumbed to his injuries at a
hospital the following day.
Betty
Williams, a resident of Andersonstown who happened to be driving by, witnessed
the tragedy and accused the IRA of firing at the British patrol and provoking
the incident. In the days that followed she began gathering signatures for a
peace petition from Protestants and Catholics and was able to assemble some 200
women to march for peace in Belfast. The march passed near the home of Mairead
Maguire (then Mairead Corrigan) who joined it. She and Williams thus became "the
joint leaders of a virtually spontaneous mass movement."
The
next march, to the burial sites of the three Maguire children, brought 10,000
Protestant and Catholic women together. The marchers, including Maguire and
Williams, were physically attacked by PIRA members. By the end of the month
Maguire and Williams had brought 35,000 people onto the streets of Belfast
petitioning for peace between the republican and loyalist factions. Initially
adopting the name "Women for Peace," the movement changed its name to
the gender-neutral "Community of Peace People," or simply "Peace
People," when Irish Press correspondent Ciaran McKeown joined. In contrast
with the prevailing climate at the time, Maguire was convinced that the most
effective way to end the violence was not through violence but through
re-education. The organization published a biweekly paper, Peace by Peace, and
provided for families of prisoners a bus service to and from Belfast's jails.
In 1977, she and Betsy Williams received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Betty
Williams in 1977.
1982 Varying Events:
25 February -
The European Court of Justice rules that schools in Britain cannot allow
corporal punishment against the wishes of parents.
26 March - The
first test tube twins are born in Cambridge.
2 April -
Falklands War begins as Argentina invades the Falkland Islands.
7 September -
Margaret Thatcher expresses her concern at the growing number of children
living in single parent families, but says that she is not opposed to divorce.
8 October -
With the economy now climbing out of recession after more than two years,
Margaret Thatcher vows to stick to her economic policies, and blames previous
governments for the decline that she inherited when taking power more than
three years ago.
30 November -
A letter bomb sent by Animal rights activists explodes in 10 Downing Street,
with packages sent to the leaders of the other political parties. One member of
Downing Street staff is burnt.
Polemical
Attempts
Posistive/Negative Reviews
- Helen Simpson – The Guardian 2006
she had conjured up an exotic new
hybrid that would carry her voice to a wider audience than it had reached
before.
Her work caused shock waves when
it appeared, and it continues to shock.
whether she minded or not, by
using the time sanctioned form of fairy tales she acquired readers who would
not otherwise have read her. And she was using the forms of fantasy and fairy
tales with conscious radical intent
There is an astonishing extra
vivid materiality to this alternative world she invented, down to the last
sensuous detail
Dialogue came less naturally to
her and she avoided it for years, joking that the advantage of including animal
protagonists in her work was that she did not have to make them talk.
Naturalism or realism, the low mimetic as she called it, was not her mode. Not
that she wasn't observant - nothing could have been sharper than her journalism
with its gimlet anthropological eye - but in the end her genius did not
actually lend itself to the "low mimetic"
Carter was an abstract thinker
with an intensely visual imagination
- Marina Warner on why Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber still bites (Excerpt) The Scotsman 2012
Fairy tales were reviled in the
first stirrings of post-war feminist liberation movements as part and parcel of
the propaganda that kept women down.
In the context, Angela Carter made
an inspired, marvelous move, for which so many other writers as well as readers
will always be indebted to her: she refused to join in rejecting or denouncing
fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatised genre, its stock
characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention,
perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought
them leaping back to life.
The Bloody Chamber, which has now
become a classic of English literature, far beyond the moment and historical
circumstances of its origins.
Yet these stories provided a powerful
catalyst. Irreverence and anarchy, skepticism and non-conformity were qualities
Carter shared with fellow Londoners in the reverberating force field around the
Beatles, the Stones, satirists like Lenny Bruce and the founders of Oz
magazine. Curiosity about possible sexualities was a central theme, reflected
in the cult status of Jean-Luc Godard’s films of that time.
Carter’s fairy-tale heroines
reclaim the night. She rewrites the conventional script formed over centuries
of acclimatising girls – and their lovers – to a status quo of captivity and
repression, and issues a manifesto for alternative ways of loving, thinking and
feeling.
Yet the same readers who are
shocked by her acclaim of Sade’s “moral pornography” are enthralled by the way
her stories explore similar themes, for The Bloody Chamber also quests for
emancipatory erotic’s, beyond subjugation, beyond prejudice.
The collection’s ten stories, none of them
very long, and some of them micro-fictions, haiku-like in their compression,
were assembled from disparate writings, and the perfection of the sequence as
they follow one from the other happened by chance, chance created by the logic
of Angela Carter’s quest for a new, contemporary romance literature fired by
erotic imagination.
Her highly wrought prose,
especially in these fairy tales, gorgeously elaborates on states of desire and
discovery, but it skirts the perils of overblown romance through its poise,
always on the edge of a delicious humour.
The scale of her extraordinary
achievement has been recognized by the thousands of readers who find in her
writing something they know inside themselves but have never encountered
expressed in that way before. Often these readers are counterparts of the
writer herself at the age she was when she was writing these stories – my
students, for example, have to be restricted to writing one essay on her a
year, otherwise they would spend their entire English literature degree working
on early Carter. For a while after her death, she became the subject of more
PhD theses than any other English author.
But not all of her readers are
young women – her work bridges frontiers, gender and, above all, eras. She
seemed to be writing for her generation out of concerns that dominated children
brought up in post-war Britain, but her influence has grown, and grown stronger
year on year, with a wide-ranging following among singers, artists,
film-makers, dramatists, producers, graphic novelists, all drawing inspiration
from her work, especially the fairy tales. She would be astonished at her
success and her fame now, since such acclaim eluded her during her lifetime
(scandalously, no Booker Prize nomination, for example).
The Bloody Chamber resuscitated
fairy tales for today and picked up a dropped thread of English literature of
enchantment, as visible in the work of Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson
(both openly pay homage to Carter) and, since then, in the creations of myriad
others in every medium – Carteresque fabulism has become part of the artistic
and literary weather. Recognition from readers at this pitch of intensity has
the quality of one of the many enchanted mirrors that appear in Angela Carter’s
stories.
Contemporary
News Story Feminism: Jennifer Lawrence/Emma Watson
Emma Watson? Jennifer Lawrence?
These aren't the feminists you're looking for. There’s nothing wrong with
famous women (or men) claiming the cause. But the fame-inist brand ambassadors
are a gateway to feminism, not the movement itself. But it irks me that we more
easily embrace feminism and feminist messages when delivered in the right
package – one that generally includes youth, a particular kind of beauty, fame
and/or self-deprecating humour. It frustrates me that the very idea of women
enjoying the same inalienable rights as men is so unappealing that we require –
even demand – that the person asking for these rights must embody the standards
we’re supposedly trying to challenge. That we require brand ambassadors and
celebrity endorsements to make the world a more equitable place is infuriating.
Celebrities, of course, are often
used as part of all vague “rebranding feminist” efforts, and in the last year
or so, many famous young women – Jennifer Lawrence, Lena Dunham, Miley Cyrus –
have openly claimed feminism. This shouldn’t be news, but it is, because all
too often famous women – Katy Perry, Shailene Woodley, Kelly Clarkson – denounce
feminism because they believe in humanism or they love men or other such
reasons that make little sense.
This is the real problem feminism
faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and
what the movement aims to achieve. But when a pretty young woman has something
to say about feminism (Emma Watson UN speech or Ellen Page Time to Thrive ),
all of a sudden, that broad ignorance disappears or is set aside because, at
last, we have a more tolerable voice proclaiming the very messages feminism has
been trying to impart for so damn long.
Thicke fell flat on his face
Those familiar with Thicke's
previously questionable artistic decisions — singing about the "blurred
lines" of consent being his most infamous — may not have been surprised
when his new album was released and was creepy as hell. More surprising,
however, was that people weren't buying it. Literally. To be perfectly fair to
Thicke, Paula, named for his now ex-wife, did sell like 530 copies in its first
week. But the moral of the story seems to be that the era of the open
misogynist may be coming to an end in the music industry.
New Barbie
Did you know that if Barbie were a
real woman she would be 5 feet, 9 inches with a 39-inch bust, but only a
18-inch waist, a tiny shoe size of 3 and have to crawl on all fours because her
body is so small it couldn't support her head? While there have been many
attempts at a Barbie alternative, perhaps the most realistic was created this
year by Nickolay Lamm, whose "average" Barbie even comes with
imperfections like acne and cellulite.
Aziz Ansari broke down feminism for dudes.
During his appearance on the Late
Show with David Letterman in October, Ansari made crucial points about feminism
to an otherwise pretty mainstream late night audience: "If you look up
feminism in the dictionary, it just means that men and women have equal rights.
And I feel like everyone here believes men and women have equal rights. But I
think the reason people don't clap is that word is so weirdly used in our
culture."
Ansari's message was clear —
feminism is not about pitting men and women against each other. "If you
believe that men and women have equal rights, if someone asks if you're
feminist, you have to say yes because that is how words work," he said.
[1] http://www.citelighter.com/political-science/womens-studies/knowledgecards/1st-wave-feminism
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism
[3] http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/three-waves-feminism
[4] http://www.rationalrevolution.net/war/communism_and_marxism.htm
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism#History
[6] http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/21stCenturyMarxism.pdf
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