ABSTRACT

A unique combination of the activist and the academic, Feminist Review has an acclaimed place within women's studies courses and the women's movement.
Feminist Review is produced by a London based editorial collective and publishes and reviews work by women; featuring articles on feminist theory, race, class and sexuality, women's history, cultural studies, black and third world feminism, poetry, photography, letters and much more.

Feminist Review is available both on subscription and from bookstores.

For a Free Sample Copy or further subscription details please contact Terry Sleight, Routledge Subscriptions, ITPS Ltd., Cheriton House, North Way, Andover SP10 5BE, UK.

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WOMEN ON THE MARCH: Right-wing Mobilization in Contemporary India

Sucheta Mazumdar

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Notes

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References

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References

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A SOCIAL THEORY OF GENDER Connell’s Gender and Power

Zarina Maharaj

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Notes

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POEMS

Laura Donohue Car Sick in Oklahoma

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the sudden flickerings of hand to mouth and expulsions of breath that fill the car with smoke as his mind fights what will happen when we get there. Worry Dolls I laugh at your funny hairband with its crude, bright thread-dolls tacked to a coarse, purple ribbon. ‘You tell each doll one worry at night and it helps—a little,’ you explain, laughing back. It seems to me a talisman that must come from your Costa Rican life, invested with some jungle peoples’ folklore for healing, but dates, you say, from a day of ‘retail therapy’ at a shopping mall near Rancocas Valley Hospital. Trust you to transcend the banal with the potent and magical. We wore each other out with sleep deprivation this visit, playing worry dolls until that dead time when it is quiet even on West Holly Avenue, - and it helped. And now you are back in Shy Town asking why visits have to mean a week of tired, and I am still here in limbo between worlds smiling at the bit of magic you take with you, and leave behind; and I remember us laughing, with some unease in our amazement, at my story of the old woman in her Sunday coat who spoke my thoughts out loud that day under the ‘L’ when I too inhabited the strange world you live in now: ‘I don’t like State Street.’ ‘I just don’t like State Street.’ Too much voodoo on State Street.’ I think of you there, a bird of paradise in a high-rise cage, cycling on your mountain bike after dark among demons of the city, and I send you some magic in return—some good voodoo vibes to balance the odds, to make you smile,

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to strengthen your power against the voodoo on State Street. The Healing Poem So many letters to write, so many chapters to write, so much clutter: newspaper scraps of other lives, mugs half-full and stagnant cold, a life’s work in splinters on scattered index cards, computer disks and opened books and pens everywhere; all this to put in order and all she can think of is something that happened when she was seven, so long ago and far away that nothing is clear except fragments of choking, hurting, outrage, in a haystack. They come out of nowhere like passing traffic, a ringing phone, a heart attack. Sometimes they flicker, then subside; sometimes they take hold like a new brutality and shake and shake until something detaches as in a death. Little girl, are you there? She sits calmly trying to expunge ghosts with carefully chosen, well-ordered words, but knows with a sinking sickness that this is another violation and feels herself cringing inwards to escape the made-for-television-movie triteness. Everyone is doing it these days. Everyone is a victim, and confessions sell.

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MIES AND SHIVA’S ECOFEMINISM: a new testament?

Maxine Molyneux and Deborah Lynn Steinberg

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Notes

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REVIEWS

White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

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Women, the Environment and

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LETTER

Dear Feminist Review I am writing to express my concern over an article in your recent Special Issue on ‘Sexualities: Challenge and Change’ (FR 46). This issue did not include any editorial introduction, so there is no ‘editorial voice’ to whom I can address my comments apart from the FR Collective as a whole. I imagine that only some of

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founded on total unquestioning obedience and love for the master qua master, and her nascent political awareness which takes the form of hatred for the Sultan as the embodiment of the patriarchy, and of a singular outburst of generalized hatred for men: “nothing left but the portal that the man might enjoy. The filthy, selfish beast, the animal” (Roquelaure, 1985:99)’ (Ziv: 70). The last quote by Roquelaure is from the Beauty trilogy itself, and Ziv does not make it clear whether all men are referred to as ‘animals’ here, or only the Sultan. My concern is that there is no mention of the racialized dimensions of this portion of the text. It is surely no coincidence that a non-Western ‘Arab’ society is taken by Beauty to exemplify the horrors of patriarchal power, drawing on a powerful discourse of sexual slavery which constructs the East as the exotic but uncivilized Other. If the reference to the ‘animal’ in the text does refer to the Sultan, then remaining silent about the racialized—and racist—connotations of this association is inexcusable. I am not writing to Amalia Ziv in the first instance, because my concern is over the editorial practices of FR. To operate an editorial procedure which allows authors to remain so totally silent over ‘race’ and racism when discussing SM (as both Ziv and Lewis do in this issue) sits very uneasily alongside recent FR issues on ‘Thinking through Ethnicities’ and ‘Nationalities and National Identities’. Understanding the operation of power relations around ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, class and age means that we must notice where and how those relations of domination and subordination occur. Remaining silent lets them past us to continue their work. Feminism is about breaking these many silences, turning a spotlight on to oppressive discourses, practices and ideologies. I would hope that FR can develop an editorial policy which aims not to tell contributors what to write, but to encourage them (us) to address such questions of power where they are relevant in all issues of the journal. Christine Griffin University of Birmingham

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NOTICEBOARD

Conferences Women/Time/Space

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Announcements Tibet Support Group

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