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European Journal of English Studies

ISSN: 1382-5577 (Print) 1744-4233 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/neje20

GENDER RESISTANCE

Evgenia Sifaki & Angeliki Spiropoulou

To cite this article: Evgenia Sifaki & Angeliki Spiropoulou (2012) GENDER RESISTANCE, European Journal of English Studies, 16:3, 187-198, DOI: 10.1080/13825577.2012.735142

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.735142

Published online: 28 Nov 2012.

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Evgenia Sifaki and Angeliki Spiropoulou

GENDER RESISTANCE

Contemporary practices and approaches 1

This issue seeks to interrogate experiences and conceptualisations of gender and sexualities at the turn of the twentieth-first century. Phenomena such as globalisation, migration and transnationalism, the dominance of new technologies and what has been identified as the culture of postmodernism have ushered in new conditions for approaching and experiencing gender. These conditions have been accompanied by new ways of understanding subjectivity and even the ‘human’ itself, against the certainties (and tacit prejudices) of the liberal humanist tradition. Notwithstanding the incorporation of feminist demands for equal rights and opportunities in some official cultural discourses and practices, the following questions arise: What new forms of resistance to conventional gender discourses, categories and practices have emerged; and inversely, what manifestations of resilient gender asymmetries can be found in this allegedly ‘postfeminist’ era? The contributions to this issue tackle these multi-faceted questions with reference to examples that range from contemporary theory to fiction, photography and popular music performance. Despite their different foci, all share an encounter with wider political and historical issues that cannot be easily assimilated into traditional feminist paradigms. Thus all of these explorations into gender complicate and broaden the notion of gender resistance/the resistance of gender.

By potentially referring to both a struggle for and against a state of things, ‘resistance’ in some way evokes the terms that Derrida called ‘undecidable’, their value being ‘double and contradictory’, always deriving ‘from their syntax’ (1981: 221). The phrasing ‘gender resistance’ encompasses multiple and contradictory meanings that perforce generate different approaches. On the one hand, conventional binary constructions of gender and attendant power asymmetries often prove ‘resistant’ to change. On the other hand, feminist politics and more liberal attitudes towards sexuality and gender clash with the realities of women’s oppression under enduring patriarchal structures. Yet such realities can sometimes be viewed as containing a potential for resisting gender. Furthermore, critiques informed by post- structuralist and queer theory have rendered the concept of ‘gender’ problematic by demonstrating its unstable and provisional nature.

In this context, the ‘failure’ to occupy a conventional gender position is read as a form of resistance, even where this seems to be the effect of chance or passivity. Politically engaged queer struggles target normative matrices that discursively constitute and exile onto a terrain of the abject those who do not fit into monolithic gender nominations and binaries. In addition, an emphasis on the historicity of gender and sexual identities broadens the meaning of ‘gender resistance’ to include resistance to the naturalising operations of discursive practices. In this sense, this issue aims to

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 16, No. 3, December 2012, pp. 187–198

ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.735142

carry on the project to de-naturalise language and conceptual categories, which has been a central task of feminist politics since at least the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic Second Sex in 1949. Related to this deconstruction or, to evoke Judith Butler’s (2004) term, this ‘undoing’ of oppressive discursive formations is the parallel operation of performativity. Another form of gender resistance, performa- tivity, allows for the subject’s self-reflexive dis-identification from essentialist conceptions and for creative experimentation with new positions.

The ‘subject’ of resistance

The essays in this issue respond to recent developments in gender theory, the most prevalent of which is the postmodernist conflation of formations and dislocations of gender with discursivity. More particularly, in the wake of second-wave feminism diverse approaches have emerged that reveal the fundamental instability of gender categorisations. Such approaches engage with issues of representation, difference and sexual politics in the context of postmodernism, post-structuralism and, increasingly, postcolonialism. For instance, Linda Nicholson’s seminal 1990 collection Feminism/ Postmodernism includes contesting points of view, which nevertheless reflect on the growing convergence of feminist theory with anti-foundational work that followed out of a generalised critique of Enlightenment. For the study of gender the decline of the self-evident, sovereign, autonomous subject has been the most pertinent development; somewhat misleadingly this has been referred to as ‘the death of the subject’. By destabilising the Cartesian notion of the subject and emphasising the material effects of discourse, Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Foucauldian analysis of power have all influenced late twentieth-century feminist thought. As Michèle Barrett (1992: 215) summarises: ‘Feminists have appropriated these theories rather than others’, because they ‘address the issue of sexuality, subjectivity and textuality that feminisms have put at the top of the agenda’. Post-structuralist approaches to gender 7 most prominently among them queer theory 7 have called ‘women’ as the privileged subject of feminism into question and critiqued feminism’s former allegiance to a white, heterosexual and bourgeois mode of ‘female’ subjectivity.2

The question about what happens to gender politics or indeed to the feminist subject after ‘the death of the subject’ is still a pressing one in gender studies today, and it is aptly tackled in this issue by Athena Athanasiou. However, the so-called ‘death of the subject’ does not equal the effacement of agency or the belief that human beings are at the mercy of discursive powers entirely beyond their control. Rather, it entails decentring the subject from its epistemological primacy and acknowledging its historical situatedness. Therefore ‘to appreciate that the conditions of subjection and subjugation are also those of agency and improvisation, invites – indeed demands – us to envision the work of freedom as an undertaking in history’ (Colapietro, 2011: 24). In this sense, the turn to history in recent critical thought,3 to which the present issue bears witness, should not be understood as a return to a search for origins and read as a symptom of the failure of anti-essentialist discourse. Instead, it is an indication of the diverse conditions for possible manifestations of subjectivity.

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Athanasiou interrogates self-grounding and sovereign subjectivity in order to open up space for re-thinking and reclaiming the subject in the wake of its disappearance. The title of her essay, ‘‘‘Who’’ is that Name? Subjects of Gender and Queer Resistance, or the Desire to Contest’, plays on Denise Riley’s (1988) ground-breaking historical overview of the category of ‘woman’, Am I That Name? Athanasiou looks at different ways of performing ‘gender in resistance’ that move beyond the binary gender system by exposing the very preconditions of normativity. These conditions are shown to be complicit with a bourgeois, neoliberal epistemology of individual(ist) freedom and governmentality. Following Butler’s (2004) suggestion, she argues that perhaps the way to resist gender is to ‘undo’ it as a normative category but also to resist gender by understanding it to be provisional, temporary and a site of contestation. The essays by Jana Funke and Eduardo Cadava in this issue similarly engage in critiques of the subject. Their discussions of gender resistance practices in relation to transgendered and colonial, subaltern subjects, respectively, are integral to their wider critiques of the notion of the sovereign and self-legislating subject.

Firmly positioned within the provenance of queer theory, Funke’s ‘Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry’ challenges the notion of an autonomous subject who freely chooses to live in opposition to socio-cultural gender norms. In her reading of Duncker’s novel on an ambiguously transgendered character, Funke makes a claim for the political potential of resistant acts that are not univocally legible as activist and liberating. Following Butler, Judith Halberstam and postcolonial feminist scholars, she calls for a feminist form of resistance that ‘does not speak in the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing’ (Halberstam, 2011: 178). Duncker’s work is viewed as exemplifying such a politics.

While the articles in this issue engage with several thinkers associated with post- structuralism, references to Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are the most prevalent ones, because of their emphasis on discourse rather than textuality. Butler directly links discursive power to social practices in both institutional and private frameworks, while emphasising the material effects of language. Foucault’s elaborations have provided useful reading tools for feminists who struggled to provide ‘an analysis of power that can simultaneously theorise both the domination relations that create and sustain certain groups as subordinant and the possibilities for resistance to and subversion of those relations’ (Allen, 1998: 456. Emphasis in original). As a result, feminist appropriations and critiques of Foucault’s conception of productive power that was initially elaborated in the first volume of History of Sexuality (1978) as producing the gender and sexual identities it simultaneously oppresses have a forceful hold in gender theory today. As theorised by Foucault, discourse both enables and obstructs the work of power; an instrument of power and, simultaneously, a vehicle of resistance, discourse effectively provides the means to oppose power.

Starting from this premise among others, e.g., speech act theory, Butler’s elaboration of the notion of ‘performativity’ is defined as ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects [i.e., the gendered subjects] that it names’ (1993: 3). At the same time, however, performativity also entails ‘the possibility of a repetition which does not consolidate that dissociated unity, the subject, but which proliferates effects which undermine the force of normalisation’ (Butler, 1997: 93). This dynamic notion proves crucial in accounting for the

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construction of new forms of (gendered) subject positions that concurrently subvert and reproduce old ones. In the first place, subjects are produced within given cultural discourses and practices, which they embody, enact and reiterate. This repeated activity may nevertheless involve and engender instances of potentially subversive variation and change. In her more recent work, which informs Athanasiou’s essay, Butler has explored the implications and productive potential of performativity in the terrains of political activism and collective action. In this issue, performative constructions of gender and their emancipatory potential are also identified by Christine Harrison in her analysis of contemporary novelist Rose Tremain and by Ana Sobral’s work on the hip hop duo ‘Poetic Pilgrimage’.

Gender politics in contemporary theory and culture

Although a critique of gender identity politics is not possible within the scope of this introduction, it is nonetheless important to underline the continuing political repercussions of the theoretical assault on gender categories such as ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘lesbians’ and ‘Third World women’ on account of their universalising and essentialist nature. This undercutting of categories was in turn criticised for its potential to undermine political movements like feminism. The questioning of the universalising premises of gender subjectivity in postmodern feminism has been cause for heated debate at it has been seen as antithetical to the project of feminist politics involving any kind of agency. To the extent that all forms of activism and political intervention require and rely on some form of collective consciousness, it has been argued that subjectivities are deconstructed at the peril of effective political action. This thesis has been forcefully put forward by Seyla Benhabib (1995: 17–30), for example, from the perspective of Marxist critical theory and feminist utopianism. A counter-argument to such objections is that such a notion of feminist politics in fact signifies the ‘foreclosure’ of politics itself, for in Butler’s words, ‘[t]o claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political opposition to that claim’ (1995: 36. Emphasis in original).

Harrison’s essay ‘In Dialogue with the Early Modern Past: Gender Resistance in Rose Tremain’s Restoration and Music and Silence’ presents this dispute as informing the emergence of ‘new British historical fiction’. Harrison argues that this genre allows for the reconciliation of what has conventionally been seen as mutually exclusive, namely the ‘she-stories’ of realist feminist history and the interrogative emphasis of postmodern feminism. In fact, Harrison contends that the genre is derived from an entwinement of feminism and queer studies with the historical novel. This explains why it has proven to be particularly appealing to contemporary writers interested in gender, sexuality and the body such as Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt. Like Tremain, these women authors seek to undermine dominant discourses and practices of gender and sexuality by tracing their historical roots. Maintaining a traditional feminist agenda, these writers develop effective models of agency that work to balance their deconstructive practices. Significantly, Harrison distinguishes instances of ‘new historical fiction’ such as Tremain’s novels from the influential model of ‘historiographical metafiction’ that Linda Hutcheon (1988) adjudged to be characteristic of the postmodern historical novel. The former encompasses the

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assumption that there is a meaningful past that remains partly accessible despite textual mediation. Thus a continuity is maintained between the genre and an expanded conception of the realist tradition and its emancipatory aims.

A common feature of the essays in this issue is that they uphold the political dimension of literary and cultural studies. Hence they have to grapple with the tension between radical discourse about the ‘end’ of gender and the persistence of the latter’s effects; and the conflict between the reputed obsolescence of a feminist/gender politics and the continuing need for it. This dilemma is reflected in the disagreement that surrounds the controversial term ‘postfeminism’. In Postfeminisms, Ann Brooks (1997: 4) employs the term to denote ‘not a depoliticisation of feminism but a political shift in feminism’s conceptual and theoretical agenda’ to an alignment with post-structuralist and postcolonial theories of difference. Thus postfeminism is taken to encompass both a post-structuralist critique of identity politics and a critique of anti-feminist, conservative politics. However, the term is more commonly used to mean the ‘backlash’ against feminism (Faludi, 1992: 15). Sarah Gamble (2006: 37), for example, argues that postfeminism represents ‘a devastating reaction against the ground gained by second wave feminism’. She claims that postfeminism in the last analysis coheres and colludes with the heteronormative, neoliberal white ideology, whose undoing post-structuralist theories were supposed to perform. Postfeminism has, for instance, proven to be irrelevant for the problems of working-class black women, or women in colonial contexts whose conditions of oppression are foregrounded by the essays of Cadava and Sobral in this issue.

This tension between post-structuralist theory and radical politics is addressed in this issue by Athanasiou in the context of queer theory. Athanasiou emphasises the political potential of the spectral quality of ‘subjects of gendered resistance’ in our ‘post-subject’ moment. She thus concurs with what Ewa Ziarek (2001) has called an ‘ethics of dissensus’ as a possible alternative to critical agency and political subjectivity, which might move beyond a liberal notion of individualised, disembodied selves or a normalising, conservative communitarianism. Indeed, by putting ‘gender’ in quotation marks, contemporary feminist and queer theory not only demonstrates the category’s historical variability and hence its ontological instability but also its radical re-articulation as a site of contestation. This political gesture is made in order to reactivate the revolutionary imaginary. Athanasiou identifies an example of contemporary feminist politics of ‘undoing’ national, gendered and sexed borders in the performances of the transnational feminist and anti-militarist movement Women in Black. The latter’s anti-war practice of mourning 7 a practice traditionally performed by women 7 beyond and across set borders provides a site for reconfiguring notions of human rights, of citizenship and the political in Europe and elsewhere. Thus Athanasiou effectively responds to objections made to queer theory such as Jeffrey Weeks’s (1995: 115) concern that queerness may be ‘elevating confrontation over the content of alternatives’, or Donald Morton’s (1995: 370) suggestion that queerness is, like the wider postmodern framework it belongs to, inescapably linked with neoliberal individualism.

The political commitment of theory that also informs postcolonial studies is revealed in Cadava’s essay on Indian widows ‘At the Threshold of Life and Death’. Cadava focuses on Fazal Sheikh’s sophisticated photographic mediations of those Indian women who, following a long-standing native tradition, are deprived of their possessions after their husbands’ deaths and travel to Vrindavan, Krishna’s birthplace and the ‘city of widows’ in order to seek ‘Moksha’, or ‘salvation’. Sheikh’s and

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Cadava’s thematisations of the widows’ plight comprise conscious attempts to counter what Walter Benjamin (2003: 392) termed ‘the tradition of the oppressed’ in his call for an apocatastasis of those who have been excluded from history and official culture. In this respect, the widows are ‘restituted’ to history by Sheikh’s and Cadava’s testimonies to their subaltern condition. Their work constitutes an act of resistance against these women’s physical and symbolic oppression under persistent patriarchal structures. Yet the question arises of how to speak for the Other, or on behalf of the subaltern, without partaking in the process of ‘Othering’ her further. This question is a central concern in postcolonial studies and human rights activism. In their work Cadava as well as Sheikh take on the challenge of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988: 295) dual charge to continue the activist work of ‘reporting on, or better still, participating in anti-sexist work among women of colour or women in class oppression in the First or the Third World’; and to be aware of the fact that such work is inevitably performed in the tradition of European narratives that have constituted the observing subject of modernity. Thus this work is always in danger of cohering ‘with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advancement of learning and civilization’ (295).

Sheikh’s and Cadava’s sensitivity to the barbarism that underlies the production of civilisation and its transmission across different times and cultures allows room for an awareness of the risks that Spivak identifies. Cadava’s essay first pays heed to the widows’ perspective by investigating the ritualistic repetition and performative adoption of the ancient religious script found in the Bhagavata-Purana. He focuses on Sheikh’s photographic treatment of these women while meditating on the nature of the medium of photography itself. He furthermore explores Sheikh’s efforts to resist the fictions of directness and transparency peculiar to ethnographic and documentary photography. Sheikh’s work suggests that the precondition for approaching these women without objectifying them is to produce representations that systematically obscure and mystify their images rather than explain and elucidate them.

One may object that such mystification aestheticises the Indian widows and their predicament, but this is not the case here. Rather, the use of suggestive obscurity deliberately frustrates intellectual understanding, invokes a sense of strangeness and works to create an affective connection with the viewer. At the same time, obscurity functions as a form of resistance which is employed by the photographer against his and his audience’s gender, cultural and ideological presumptions. Somewhat analogously to the argument that Funke makes about historical obscurity as a form of resistance as well as a means of enabling an ‘affective connection’ with the queer body, Cadava reads the impenetrable quality of Sheikh’s pictures as a form of resisting the colonialist, sexist and objectifying gaze. And at the same time, he construes obscurity to indicate the multiple mediations that are at play between the artist, the viewer and the subject of the image, which the ideology of photographic transparency tends to gloss over.

Sobral’s essay in the issue ‘Unlikely MCS’: Hip Hop and the Performance of Islamic Feminism’ likewise evokes the complex issue of transcultural politics in relation to gender practices and identity. It follows the attempt of the British hip hop duo ‘Poetic Pilgrimage’ to construct an identity as feminist Muslims by employing popular Western music forms. The two British-born artists who form Poetic Pilgrimage are from immigrant families of Jamaican and African origin; both

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converted to Islam in 2005 and advocate Islamic feminism. Poetic Pilgrimage have emerged out of what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘The Black Atlantic’ – a dynamic field of cultural and political contact and hybridisation created by ‘the movements of black people’ and ‘black diasporas’ from Africa to Europe and America (1993: 16). Initially generated by the commodification of individuals by colonial and postcolonial Europe, these movements simultaneously produced and involved ‘various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy and citizenship’ (16).

A primary platform for the duo’s artistic performances is the Internet, which allows them to engage and interact with global feminist, Muslim and music networks. Indeed, the development and expansion of Islamic feminism has been facilitated by new forms of communication technologies such as web-based networks. As Sobral argues, ‘virtual space’ opens up possibilities for the exchange of information and the formation of alliances between women who are stifled by social conditions defined by patriarchal ideology. Poetic Pilgrimage concur with other proponents of Islamic feminism who are open to Western forms of feminism. The duo argue against the belief in there being a divine foundation for gender discrimination by stressing gender’s derivation from prevailing social hierarchies. Simultaneously, they claim women’s right to reinterpret Islamic law in an act of resistance.4 Such revisionist approaches are based on ‘a radical decentering of the clergy from the domain of interpretation, and the placing of woman as interpreter and her needs as grounds for interpretation’ (Moghadam, 2002: 1144). However, Islamic feminism still presumes the monotheistic religion’s essentialist understanding of gender. Sobral’s essay addresses this contradiction by investigating the question of whether a means of providing minority women with agency may in the last analysis function to reproduce the very patriarchal structures it seeks to overthrow.

The work of Poetic Pilgrimage involves the performative construction of the artists’ various subjectivities. They repeatedly perform their gendered identities and continuously reinvent themselves on stage by eclectically rearranging their sources, which come from various parts of the globe. They draw on contesting discourses and artistic traditions such as the Qur’an and US American rap music. Their artistic productions involve the simultaneous adoption and modification of various traditions by means of combination, improvisation and ‘resignification’. They also involve interesting antinomies which relate to the artists’ moving between different cultures. More specifically, these practices relate to the artists’ project to claim women’s rights in resistance to patriarchal Muslim institutions, on the one hand, and to defend Muslim culture, on the other. Moreover, since the two artists try to define their identities as politically active feminist Muslims, their work raises issues of agency in ways that tend to be associated with second-wave feminist politics and the question of ‘women’s choice’.5 Independently of their expressed intentions, Sobral reads the duo’s poetry and performances as productive sites of composite and often conflictual meanings with regard to gender identity and politics.

Uses of history

The articles in the issue emphasise the link between a politics of gender resistance and an engagement with the questions of history that preoccupy contemporary

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critical thought. Funke’s contribution investigates Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry, a fictionalised biography of the Victorian military surgeon, James Miranda Barry, who became legendary after his death in 1865, when it was reported that he had been a woman passing as a man. In contrast to standard accounts of Barry’s life that assume his identity to be that of a cross-dressing woman or an intersexed individual, Funke emphasises Duncker’s refusal to reveal any ‘truth’ about Barry’s sex. The obscurity preserved around Barry’s ‘real’ sex in Dunker’s account is thus construed as an act of resistance that frustrates the desire to define identity in terms of anachronistic gender binaries and naturalised categories of subjectivity. Ironically for a biographical/historiographical novel, it also hinders our access to the past, thus critiquing the usual understanding of the past as the site of origins and hence the supposed truth of the subject. Significantly, this unknowability allows for alternative, queer temporalities to emerge that unleash ‘the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing’ (Halberstam, 2005: 2).

According to Funke, Dunker’s James Miranda Barry ‘queers’ narrative time as the attempts of the protagonist to locate selfhood in patriarchal time, that is, to discover a father (‘origin’) and to find happiness in an (otherwise successful) masculine professional career, all fail. Funke draws attention to the fact that Barry resists various gender positions at different points of life in ways that are not chosen. ‘Choice’ is thus shown to be a delusion enjoyed by the putatively sovereign individual. This delusion reveals itself most clearly in the process of reinventing the past; a process that is required for transgendered characters to successfully ‘pass’ but is resisted by Dunker’s novel.

In fact, the emphasis on the historicity of gender as a means of resistance against persisting gender fixities appears to be a central feature of contemporary fiction, especially of the ‘new British historical novel’ discussed by Harrison in this issue. Virginia Woolf’s pioneering call in A Room of One’s Own (1929) for women to be included in the historical and literary scene and thus to overcome their having been silenced in a historiography that focuses on the life and works of ‘great men’ has motivated more than the wealth of women’s histories and feminist novels that was witnessed within the framework of second-wave feminism. It has also inspired many examples of contemporary historical fiction that focus on women and other marginalised figures and groups, who have been excluded from mainstream historical accounts. Instead of referring to all people, official historiography reveals ‘a relegation to invisibility of all but white, Western, economically privileged men’, thus ‘subsuming differences under ‘‘norms’’’ (Bowen Raddeker, 2007: 42).

The subversion of resilient gender frameworks that is effected by Tremain’s historical novels evokes Foucault’s (1991) ‘genealogical’ method. According to Foucault, value-sets, institutions, disciplinary constructs and concepts emerge historically by collision of different forces. The task of genealogical analysis is to ‘counter the view of the emergent as inevitable by recording its lowly beginnings’ (Prado, 2000: 37–8). Harrison reads Tremain’s texts as encompassing this task. The latter’s novels are argued to historicise the operational significations of various forms of sexuality and gender by exploring their emergence within the early modern settings of the novels. Tremain’s narrative techniques, including the use of multiple settings

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and unreliable narrators and the enlisting of a plethora of seventeenth-century gender and sexual identities, contribute to highlighting the historically and culturally specific and at the same time random nature of gender and sexuality construction. These novels contest the Enlightenment’s assumption of a universal, rational human subject as emphasis is placed on femininities and masculinities, transgendered positions and on accounting for the processes by which sexual and gender subjectivities are constructed. By problematising standard gender frames, these diverse historical identities open up new possibilities for thinking about and experiencing gender in the future.

Although this issue can by no means provide a comprehensive account of the field of gender studies today, it does reflect on topical themes and approaches. Its scope ranges from the British and European to the transnational and the global. It addresses questions of the diasporic and the subaltern, the transgendered, the obscure and the undecided. It also inquires into gender formations and dislocations in relation to historical conditions and socio-cultural parameters. Thus the essays on ‘gender resistance’ included in the issue exhibit the recent emphasis on exploring the inter-relations between gender and issues of human rights, ethnicity, history and class. They also bear witness to the continuing trend to de-naturalise normative gender identities and, more generally, to deconstruct bipolar approaches to gender and the subject. Therefore, this issue demonstrates the broadening of the feminist horizon that has occurred since the Sixties, when issues of representation and identity were addressed by second-wave feminists but to some extent remained fixated on the concerns of white, middle-class Western women. Earlier forms of feminist politics involved the search for new models of identity, the quest for the legal vindication of rights, and attempts to valorise the ‘feminine’ against the long tradition of its symbolic devaluation. In addition to such demands, gender resistance today is also evinced in obscurity and contestation, diversity and contradiction and in an acute sense of historicity. These impede the mechanical assumption of a natural subject of gender and create an opening for a reflection on gender and its effects in all of their historical situatedness, provisionality and variability. The resultant critique of the essentialist conception of a sovereign, sexed subject is not only politically informed but also highlights the question of the ‘political’ itself.

Notes

1 We would like to thank the EJES general editors, and especially Greta Olson, for their valuable help and support throughout the preparation of this issue.

2 For a review of the effect of queer theory on contemporary gender and feminist studies, see, for example, Halley and Parker (2011).

3 In this context, see Butler and Scott (1992), who explicitly address the question of the political within post-structuralist theory and the latter’s relevance for feminist politics.

4 This trend is expressed by contributions to the women’s magazine Zanan, founded in Tehran in 1992 and discussed by Moghadam (2002) in the context of the complex feminist debates that have recently developed in Iran.

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5 For a critical revisiting of feminist notions such as agency, autonomy and desire recently witnessed in studies of Islamic feminism, see Jacobsen (2011) and Jouili (2011).

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Oxford: Westview. Riley, Denise (1988). Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of Women in History.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture. Eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P. 271–313.

Weeks, Jeffrey (1995). Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity.

Woolf, Virginia (1929). A Room of One’s Own. London: The Hogarth Press. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska (2001). An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the

Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Evgenia Sifaki (MA, PhD King’s College London) teaches Literary Theory and

Criticism at the University of Thessaly. As an associate of the gender studies

programme of the University of Athens, she taught courses on gender and literature

and introduced the essay collection Feminist Interventions to the Academic Disciplines

(2008). She is the editor of the electronic encyclopedia for gender issues FyloPedia

(http://www.thefylis.uoa.gr/fylopedia), which was inaugurated in 2009. She has

contributed several essays to collective volumes and academic journals such as

Gramma (Thessaloniki), Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge) and Études

Irlandaises (Paris). Her research interests include English nineteenth-century

literature and culture, travel writing and the Irish national tale.

Angeliki Spiropoulou (MA, PhD Sussex University) is Associate Professor in

European Literature and Theory at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. She is

the author of Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and co-author of History of European Literature 18th–20th C.

GENDER RESISTANCE 1 9 7

(Patras, 2008). She has edited Representations of Femininity: Feminist Perspectives

(Athens, 1994); and Walter Benjamin: Images and Myths of Modernity (Athens, 2007). She

has co-edited Culture Agonistes: Debating Culture, Re-reading Texts (Peter Lang, 2002);

and Contemporary Greek Fiction: International Crossings and Orientations (Athens, 2002).

She has published on literary/cultural theory; modern European literature; and history,

modernity and modernism. She has a chapter forthcoming in the volume, 1922: History,

Culture, Politics, eds Jean-Michel Rabaté and Rivky Mondal (Cambridge UP).

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