While ethics has become accepted as an important field of inquiry within Anglo-American critical and feminist theory, the same thing cannot be said about ‘love’. I argue that ‘love’ needs to be taken as a serious, valid and crucial subject for academic study, and that feminist theory should have a special investment in the topic. Phenomenological theories of pain and psychoanalytic theories of melancholy can provide a negative definition of love by describing situations where love has lost its objects. These (...) theories help to map connections amongst pain, love, and language, and demonstrate how language — and for Julia Kristeva, how especially literary language — can play an important role in mediating these states. I propose that ‘love’ names not only a particular qualitative relation between a self and an Other, but also a process of altering oneself that involves the creation of an unusual and seemingly contradictory spacing or distance. Luce Irigaray’s work helps us conceive of this concept as an embodied one through her concept of proximate distance. I suggest a ‘poethics of love’ as a theory/methodology that could allow us to continue to think through these complex issues in a way that ties ethical, political and aesthetic concerns together. (shrink)

This research illuminates struggles over cultural definitions of femininity by examining how cultural gatekeepers respond to girls' vocal critique of inauthentic media images. Interviews with 10 editors at two national girls' magazine organizations provide a rare glimpse into their contradictory responses to requests for depicting “real girls.” Editors legitimate and share in the critique, claiming they should change images but cannot. In these accounts, they reveal struggles over altering narrow images of femininity at the organizational and institutional levels. Editors also (...) delegitimate girls' critique as misguided by calling on the media organizations' norms and schemas about how the reader is supposed to understand the images. Paradoxically, here, editors claim that they can change images but should not. Ultimately, the power of girls' resistance is tempered, as both sets of responses lead to the girls' critique being inefficacious in redefining femininity. The study contributes to an understanding of how femininity-defining cultural institutions operate to create and sustain gender stratification. (shrink)

This paper examines the cultural phenomenon of `new burlesque', a subculture in which young women take part in striptease performances which invoke the iconic styles and routines associated with mid-20th century cabaret. By reading burlesque websites alongside the celebrity culture and advertising, the article examines how the retro styles of dress and make-up associated with this subculture have circulated through a range of media sites as an alternative mode of femininity. By focusing on the intersections between online fan communities, popular (...) images of burlesque, fashion, and beauty, I argue that burlesque styles involve a reclaiming of traditionally normative sites of identity production and that computer technologies are an extension of the technologies of dress, cosmetics and movements through which femininity is produced. I go on to suggest a re-framing of burlesque as a site of parody and resistance which `troubles' critiques of femininity within both feminist theory and queer theory. (shrink)

The modern Pentecostal movement at its inception in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century was blessed with the ministry of women in key leadership roles. This article gives a brief account of the history of some of the women involved at the beginning. It explores the declining trend through the twentieth century and the reasons behind it. The author then compares the current attitudes towards women in leadership held within different parts of the Pentecostal movement in the United Kingdom. (...) Is there a brighter future where women are once again recognized as worthy leaders of Pentecostal churches? (shrink)

Women’s right to exercise choice has been one of feminism’s central political claims. Where second wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices, choice feminism more recently reorients feminist politics with a call for recognition of the choices women are actually making. From this perspective the role of feminism is to validate women’s choices without passing judgement. This article analyses this shift in orientation by locating women’s choices within a late modern gender order in which the (...) ideal of choice has increasingly been associated with a new form of femininity characterized as self-determining, individuated and ‘empowered’. Instead of offering an effective analysis of the changing social conditions within which the relationship between feminism, femininity and individual choice has become increasingly complicated, choice feminism directs criticism at feminist perspectives characterized as overly prescriptive. This critique fails to appreciate how feminist ideals have been recuperated in the service of late capitalism and neoliberal forms of governance. By failing to engage critically with processes currently impacting on the social organization of gender choice feminism aids in the constitution of an individuated neoliberal feminist subject which performs cultural work vital to the reproduction of neoliberal governmentality. (shrink)