Disciplines
in cross fire: research on women's studies in France
Rose-Marie LAGRAVE
The main purpose of
this article is to show how women's studies - as a new interdisciplinary
field of research has been created and developed in the West in general
an in France in particular. The author explains and documents various tensions
between militantism and research, or between such trends as esentialism,
radicalism, egalitarianism or deconstructivism concluding that in the Western
World the '90s seems to point towards a certain decrease in the interest
for women's studies as a separate field of research. Giving a fresh boost
is necessary not only in France but also here in Romania where the history
of women's studies is just beginning.
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Contemporary
issues in American feminism
Ruxandra MANDOIU
The essay surveys some
of the significant trends in American feminism today. It highlights the
departure from a monolithic type of feminism characterized by a unique
agenda in the nineteen sixties and seventies to an eclectic theory that
takes into account the diversity of experiences of women in the United
States and in the Third World. Many critics have pointed to the coincidence
between the tendency of feminism to diversity, its modes of reflection
upon women's lives and the postmodern critique of global theories. The
essay also addresses the ways in which feminism and postmodernism collaborate
with each other at the methodological level, but also the reasons why they
conflict at the level of ideology.
Finally, the analysis focuses
on the most recent studies of gender and sex as social constructions, pointing
to the critique of fixed gender identities and a necessary heterosexuality,
as well as describing the emergence of new areas of study, such as lesbian
and gay studies or queer theory.
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Romanian
rural women mothering transition
Laura GRUNBERG
Looking at transition through
the eyes of the Romanian rural women from Buteni, I was interested in seeing
how transition messages are perceived/internalized and transition effects
are concretely experienced by these women/ Challenging myself into doing
qualitative, feminist research, I reached a surprising conclusion: transition
empowers women from Buteni. Women are mothering transition in ways that
empower and not victimize them.
Taking care of everybody
and of everything more than before 1989, women are unofficial appointed
managers of the community. The saying: "The man is the head, but the woman
is the neck", the content of the song: "Where the river is not deep/I,
the man will cross it alone/Where it is deeper/My sweetheart will carry
me on her back" are ethnographic evidences of the cultural definitions
of power relationships between men and women.
Doing politics by "baptizing"
cakes with politicians' names or by voting as mothers, complaining about
motherhood as an institution, revealing a profound internalized tolerance
towards "others" - of different ethnicity, confessions, age (less towards
gypsies and "inbroughts" - those from other Romanian regions), women, partners
with men, see gender constraints simply as facts of life, not related to
the causes of their "oppression". Acting traditionally but thinking modernly,
women from Buteni are handling with care the transition tensions between
the traditional values and the tendency toward modernity. Due to them,
Buteni has a latent chance to survive the transition period with less major
"cultural shocks".
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''Children
Crusade'' by Ana Blandiana: a parody to the pro-natalist speech
Daniela SOREA
Spun around a powerful gender
core, Blandiana's poem appears as a word "crusade" against the totalitarian
pronatalist discourse of Ceausescu's regime, which glorified conveyor-belt
child delivery as the means to increase national birth rate. Blandiana's
imagery introduces the reader into the nightmare of coerced pregnancy,
of inflicted assimilation of one body 9that of the child "doomed to be
born") into another (that of the mother "doomed to give birth"). Her poetics
of corporeality focuses on the mother-container as both the birth-boosting
instrument of a rural-patriarchal dehumanizing machinery and as the "unconsenting"
nurture upon whom pregnancy is inflicted as patriotic duty. Sentenced to
extrusion into an oppressive universe, the blind foetus colonizes the mother's
body as a "writhing" intruder.
While countering violence
by its very violence, Blandiana's trenchant language of corporeality creates
a mock eulogy of the official patriotic urge addressed to Romanian mothers
throughout the sixties, the seventies and the eighties to fulfil their
"sacred" patriotic duty of "making their precious contribution to the increase
of the country's population". While voicing the silenced lament of the
speechless in pain, Blandiana discursivizes the barbarian intrusion of
state authority into the individual's life. Her poem concomitently deplores
infantilization and homogenisation of the individual in the name of the
abstract lofty ideals of "socialist humanism".
