Journal of Gender Studies

Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2008, 75–91

BOOK REVIEWS

Philosophy and love: from Plato to popular culture, by Linnell Secomb, Edinburgh,
Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 184 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 0-7486-2368-6

Asked whether you’re in love, two possible answers are: ‘Of course’ or ‘Yes, whatever
that may mean’. Philosophers, like Linnell Secomb, as well as princes, may be expected to
return the second reply. But philosophy itself, she claims, ‘like love, arises through the
work of the passions. In this account philosophy is more than logical analysis and reasoned
arguments’ (p. 10). And so her book does not aim to define love, for that would be trying
‘to resolve love’s troubles and paradoxes’ (p. 9), which are inherent in it. Rather it aims
at understanding these complexities, in particular by examining narratives of love in
films and other cultural texts, and revealing that love is not just trouble but that it
‘founds human sociality through the connection and recognition, the caring and giving,
it offers’ (p. 4).
Secomb starts with Plato’s Symposium in which Socrates reports how the priestess
Diotima instructs him in the ascent from individual physical love to philosophy, the love of
wisdom. Yet this, Secomb suggests, should not lead us to ignore a Sapphic influence on
Socrates which postulates not ‘a rejection of erotic love or a choice between erotics and
wisdom’, but rather ‘a complex intertwining of desires’ (p. 22). This leads her, despite
the fact that philosophy too ‘is not closure or completion’ (p. 157), to one of the theses
of the book: that ‘love as mediation between lack and fulfilment would be extinguished by
the attainment of the desired object’ (p. 22).
Secomb skips forward, via Frankenstein to a Nietzsche, less misogynistic than
commonly supposed, who finds in love not only a lack but also a consequent need which
leads to the ‘search for a beyond, for a creative transforming difference’ (p. 35). While
Nietzsche reveals this ‘productive paradox’ (p. 35) in love, Simone de Beauvoir, Secomb’s
next author, exposes its ambiguities: ‘the indeterminate, uncertain and uncontrollable
effects and affects of love’ (p. 41). Secomb illustrates these with a commentary on the TV
series Desperate Housewives as unsettling our romantic conception of love and revealing
it as ‘a story we are given, but a story that, through reiteration, we can transform’ (p. 57).
Turning then to Emmanuel Levinas, Secomb rejects his prioritisation of the selfless love
represented by Agape over the particularised carnal love that is Eros. ‘The concernful love
involved in the ethical relation is’, she writes, ‘not only inextricably associated with
femininity but is interwoven with erotic love, with maternal love, and with carnality and
embodiment more generally’ (p. 74).
A chapter on intercultural love (and Fanon’s strictures thereon) is followed by one on
Luce Irigaray in which her celebration of difference and indirection once again points up
‘the movement between lack and fulfilment that is the ceaseless trajectory of love’ (p. 108)
– a theme illustrated from the film of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Next Roland Barthes is
held to refuse ‘both the valorisation and the vilification of love’ (p. 124), the latter by many
feminists, who, one may feel, get surprisingly short shrift here. For if we accept the
76 Book reviews

Barthesian view of love as culturally constructed, as Secomb seems to do, then we can
surely ask whose interests it serves, which is a question she avoids.
‘Butler and Foucault: Que(e)rying Marriage’ is a chapter title that speaks for itself,
though one may doubt its presupposition that ‘a book on love must surely include a
reflection on marriage’ (p. 9). But its point is to illustrate that ‘to queer marriage while also
querying marriage . . . troubles the normal’ (p. 141). Derrida and Nancy follow this, the
former like Levinas prioritising friendship over erotic love, the latter seeing love as what
first forms us in relation to others. And, in conclusion, Secomb writes that she has wished
to ‘unravel finality, stasis, closure and totality, exposing the sharing and the openness or
exposure that creates the connection between self and the other in sociality’ (p. 162).
There is a great deal of suggestive material in this book, though sometimes its subject,
love, does threaten to get submerged in a discussion of the ‘reasoned arguments’ between
the philosophers she cites. However, while one should not expect ‘closure’, the elaboration
of provisional theses along the way can be satisfying, and Secomb often frustrates one
here – no doubt in a practical illustration of her account of philosophy which, like love, is
denied ultimate gratification. It is, in fact, a view of love remarkably similar to Deleuze’s
conception of masochism. But masochism is a subject that Secomb avoids, surprisingly,
perhaps, in view of Sartre’s comparison of love to masochism, which is, for him, a possible
consequence of love’s impossibility. Secomb, however, skips over Sartre in two sentences,
emphasising only another possible result, ‘hatred and cruelty’ (p. 124). But I would not
end on a negative note; should students of love and other philosophers read this book?
Of course.

Paul Gilbert
University of Hull, UK
p.h.gilbert@hull.ac.uk
q 2008, Paul Gilbert

Sexual inequalities and social justice, edited by Niels Teunis and Gilbert Herdt,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007, 264 pp., US$21.95/£13.95 (paperback),
ISBN 978-0-520-24615-7

Sexual inequalities and social justice is a collection of 10 essays that expertly articulates
the lived experiences of sexual inequality and addresses specific concerns for promoting
social justice. Contributors present a range of ethnographic studies that give insight into
the social phenomenon of sexual inequality within specific communities along hierarchies
of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and disability. Its focus on sexual inequality as an
issue of sexual health serves as a valuable contribution to the field of sexuality studies, but
simultaneously limits the work. Sexual inequalities pushes the definition of sexual health
and sexual health policy to include sexual pleasure. This move contributes to the success
of the collection in contesting existing sexual health policy, particularly around
HIV/AIDS, and promoting sexual agency. Its engagement with sexual health policy,
however, hinders its ability to discuss sexual inequalities beyond a structural policy
framework that centres itself on promoting safe sex. The text becomes bound by the very
structural mechanisms it seeks to critique. There is also a notable lack of attention towards
lesbian and queer women’s experiences. A central goal of the collection is also to
interrogate how researcher positionality shapes social science research on sexual
inequality in order to move away from insider/outsider debates that dominate the field.
 Journal of Gender Studies 77

Such examination clearly emerges within some of the essays, but the text overall falls
slightly short in explicitly meeting this objective.
Sexual inequalities highlights the tension and relationship between sexual coercion
and sexual pleasure. The collection is divided into three parts under the headings ‘sexual
coercion’, ‘sexual pleasure’ and ‘sociality’. Part One focuses on sexual coercion and
begins with two qualitative studies around issues of HIV/AIDS. The first of four chapters
is an essay by Sonya Grant Arreola that examines the link between histories of childhood
sexual abuse and adult practices of risky sexual behaviour among Latino gay men in the
United States. Her study reveals a sexual silence among her participants that hinders their
ability to negotiate safe sex options with their partners and to feel worthy of protecting
themselves from HIV infection. The second essay, by Rafael M. Dı́az, similarly focuses on
members of the Latino gay community in the United States and argues that their practice
of stigmatizing HIV positive individuals should be recognized by policy makers as a
complicated strategy to negotiate safe sex. Part One has two main strengths: first its
willingness to consider notions of sexual coercion as simultaneously embedded within
discursive and embodied practices of sexual desire; second its suggestions about how the
link between sexual harm and certain forms of sexual pleasure can be broken.
Part Two focuses on sexual desire. Policy implications are not as well developed in this
section, which reveals the difficulty of incorporating notions of sexual pleasure into actual
policy recommendations. In his study of sexual practices by gay men in Guadalajara,
Mexico, Héctor Carrillo suggests that HIV prevention strategies must distinguish between
inequalities that increase risk of infection and those that contribute to sexual pleasure.
Carrillo acknowledges that such a distinction may be difficult to discern, but nonetheless
HIV prevention policies should recognize that empowering individuals to protect
themselves from HIV/AIDS does not require eliminating all forms of sex and gender
inequality. This chapter and the essay by Christopher Carrington on the gay male party
circuit in the United States both work to reconceptualize sexual health to include the desire
for sexual pleasure. One of the most informative chapters is Russell P. Shuttleworth’s
study of disabled men living independently in the East San Francisco Bay Area and their
strategies for fulfilling sexual desire. Shuttleworth critiques constructivist theories of
disability and the sexual rights movement for failing to address questions of sexual
pleasure. He also complicates the sexual agency of disabled men to show how it
simultaneously embraces and challenges notions of hegemonic masculinity.
The ethnographic essays in Part Two provide valuable insight into the embodied
practices of seeking sexual pleasure, which greatly informs theories and policies around
sexual inequality and social justice. Part Three develops these themes further through the
examination of organizational structures supporting practices such as friendship networks
among older gays and lesbians in the baby-boom generation, and gay – straight alliances
among adolescents in schools.
Discussions of researcher positionality – in Part Three – are best articulated through
the chapters by Fields, Carrington, and Shuttleworth. Fields, using feminist research
methodologies, produces a genuine and rigorous examination of how her own
subjectivities and political commitments influenced her fieldwork and analysis of
school-based sexuality education. Carrington offers a valuable discussion of his position
as an insider within the gay party circuit and the important struggle to maintain a critical
examination. Shuttleworth also contributes a thought-provoking discussion of researcher
positionality that calls for a reflexive participatory approach to ethnographic research.
Sexual inequalities succeeds in its objectives of providing a valuable ethnographic
study of the embodied practices of sexual inequalities and of offering suggestions for
78 Book reviews

policy reforms. It also challenges academics and policy makers by acknowledging the
complexities within different forms of sexual inequality and the importance of recognizing
sexual pleasure as critical to notions of sexual health and social justice.

Laura Foster
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
lafoster@ucla.edu
q 2008, Laura Foster

Quaker women: personal life, memory and radicalism in the lives of women friends,
1780 –1930, by Sandra Stanley Holton, London and New York, Routledge, 2007, 288 pp.,
£80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-415-28143-0, £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-
28144-7

Sandra Holton is one of the most talented writers of British women’s history now at work
and her latest book is well up to standard. Two main features of the book are of particular
interest. The first is that it deals with Quaker women in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries; the second that it examines in detail a handful of women who belonged to the
circle of the Quaker manufacturer and politician John Bright (1811 –1889) and his first
wife Elizabeth Priestman. It is thus a study in what Holton terms microhistory, full of
insights but with obvious pitfalls – principally in that the few individuals studied in depth
may have been less than typical.
Holton was given access to the voluminous papers of the Clark family, well known as
the originators and proprietors of the family firm of C. & J. Clark, boot and shoe
manufacturers of Street, Somerset. Bright’s daughter Helen married into this family in a
typical Quaker union. The letters and other papers in the Clark archive are pure gold for a
researcher, and Holton has supplemented them by the use of other archives and libraries.
The result is original and absorbing.
Paradoxically, a book which sheds a good deal of light on the history of women,
especially Quaker women, is one which deals largely with the life of a man, John Bright,
the best known of Victorian Friends (Quakers), and a man who was never an enthusiast for
women’s rights. Holton might have stated explicitly what I believe to be the case, that all
the Bright men, with the exception of the one Bright whose enthusiastic and energetic
support might actually have had some productive effect, were in favour of women’s
parliamentary suffrage. Readers may ponder whether this was coincidence.
Holton describes well the position of Quaker women. Although they were emancipated
for the nineteenth century, they saw their roles as very limited – and to us shockingly so.
John Bright’s view was typical of the attitude of both sexes: ‘He did not think women’s
proper place was entirely in domestic retirement; but he did believe their role in public life
should be restricted to a supportive, auxiliary, if well-informed and educated, role as the
helpmeets of men’ (p. 70). This attitude can be described as the liberal orthodoxy of the
period and long afterwards.
Quakerism acted as both a spur and a drag to women’s emancipation; a spur because in
theory Quakers made no distinction between Friends on grounds of age, class or gender; a
drag because Quakers remained during the nineteenth century a ‘peculiar people’, mostly
wearing identifiable dress and using a specialised vocabulary, often separated in their
social lives from the community at large. Seebohm Rowntree, the celebrated social
investigator of York in the late nineteenth century, said in 1909 that many Quakers had
 Journal of Gender Studies 79

‘hardly any personal friends outside the society’ (The Friend, 28 May 1909). These words
did not apply to Rowntree himself, at least in later life, but he was in a good position to
know about Quakers at large. Yet as Holton points out, Quaker women were of far greater
importance in the growing women’s movement of the later nineteenth century than their
small numbers suggest. They owed their prominence both to the tenets of their religious
faith and to their intelligence and education. They also owed much to the Quaker network
of friends and relations and to the middle-class comfort which surrounded most of those
who left archival evidence.
For me the most interesting character in the book is Helen Clark (1840 –1927), John
Bright’s daughter by his first wife, Elizabeth Priestman, who died shortly after Helen’s
birth. Three of the Bright-Clark daughters, Esther, Margaret and Hilda, were allowed to
experience higher education, and Hilda Clark became a well-known doctor, particularly
noted for relief work during the First World War. The fourth daughter, Alice, was like her
mother an officer of the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.
(Both mother and daughter, like many others, were attracted by the militant Women’s
Social and Political Union.) Interestingly their father, William Clark, seems to have been
at least as keen on higher education and careers for women as their mother, whom Holton
describes as ambivalent on the issue. Both Helen and William Clark championed the
young men, often Quakers, who resisted conscription in the later years of the war. Helen
sent a message to German friends in August 1914: ‘what ever happens I shall never feel a
German to be an enemy’ (p. 215). This was a courageous attitude at a time when even
the Religious Society of Friends, nominally pacifist, was deeply riven over the merits of
the war.
Wherever there was a women’s cause to support Helen Clark was there, whether the
issue was married women’s property, the contagious diseases acts (which threatened all
working-class women in garrison towns with compulsory treatment as potential
prostitutes), or the suffrage. She was also central to the maintenance of regular contact
within the Clark – Bright – Priestman clan.
Anyone interested in the effect of Quakerism on the development of women’s
emancipation in the nineteenth century will surely find the book, as this reviewer has done,
both fascinating and important.

David Rubinstein
York, UK
d.rubinstein@tiscali.co.uk
q 2008, David Rubinstein

Calixthe Beyala: performances of migration, by Nicki Hitchcott, Liverpool, Liverpool

University Press, 2006, 190 pp., £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1846-3102-87

After publishing three novels between 1987 and 1990, all focusing on Africa, the
Cameroonian writer Calixthe Beyala shifted her gaze to the African community in Paris,
producing seven novels and two essays between 1992 and 2000. Calixthe Beyala:
performances of migration stands as a beautiful demonstration of Beyala’s performance
both as a writer and a person. Building on existing scholarship on migration such as
Mireille Rosello’s Declining the stereotype (1998) and Postcolonial hospitality (2001),
Nicki Hitchcott unfolds the many layers of textual strategies Beyala has constructed
around the context of migration, exploring their ambivalence and inner contradictions.
80 Book reviews

In the opening chapter, ‘Beyala Incorporated?’ Hitchcott explores the reception of

Beyala’s writing and the reasons why her work is better received in the West than on the
African continent. In particular, she examines the ways Beyala’s writing has been playing
on the ambiguities of the exotic –erotic Other and how these ambiguities both challenge and
reinforce representations of Blacks and minorities. Showing how the writer’s self-
promotion as erotic –exotic in France is actually double-edged, Hitchcott explains why
critics have usually failed to see her writing as political statement. The late Cameroonian
writer Mongo Beti was one of these critics, objecting to what he saw as Beyala’s
manipulation of her readers through a facile exoticism. Although Hitchcott lists him as one
of Beyala’s toughest critics, I would argue that in his book-length interview with Ambroise
Kom, Mongo Beti parle, Beti did actually reassess and nuance some of his earlier
judgments on Beyala, particularly with regards to the alleged accusations of plagiarism.
Some of Hitchcott’s lines of argument in this chapter show inner contradictions. For
instance, she finds that the political impact of Beyala’s writing is limited because her texts
offer no viable solution. Yet, one could contend that Hitchcott’s interpretation is a more
traditional reading of protest literature. Indeed, Beyala arguably renews and subverts the
forms and aesthetics of commitment precisely through her ‘performances’ of migration, as
Hitchcott demonstrates herself in another chapter. Along the same lines, the ‘mediocrity’
Hitchcott sees in Beyala’s most recent novel, La plantation (2005), may actually be another
twist or trick in Beyala’s writing practice and not necessarily a sign of the limits of her self-
promotion. Considered from this perspective, the book is worth exploring in more depth.
In Chapter II, ‘Invented Authenticities’, Hitchcott makes a compelling use of the
concept of authenticity both to defend and attack Beyala. For instance, she remarks that
‘Beyala’s Africa seems then to be frozen in a state of pessimism and inertia’ (p. 48). On the
other hand, Hitchcott’s reading of Les arbres en parlent encore (2002) as a way to
‘challenge the reification of the oral tradition by critics in both Africa and the West’ (p. 62)
is most compelling in this respect. Likewise, Hitchcott’s analysis of Comment cuisiner son
mari à l’Africaine (2000) is most interesting, especially the discussion on the inclusion of
written recipes and how this functions to reinforce both the erotic and exotic elements in
her writing while feeding on the expectations of her readership. This chapter demonstrates
very convincingly Beyala’s ‘ability to position herself inside and outside the authenticity
invented by (post)colonial France’ (p. 65).
Chapter III, ‘Migrating Subjectivities’, explores the ways Beyala ‘declines’ the
possibilities for her migrant characters to perform their identity differently once in Paris
(in connection with this, see Rosello’s work on stereotypical representations of migrants in
France). The narrative demonstrates that physical migration has little resemblance to the
initial dream of becoming somebody new. In order to succeed and to fit into French society,
Beyala’s characters construct themselves, acting out a persona, trying to emulate a model
along their idea of a successful integration process. Most interesting, in that respect, is the
parallel drawn in this book between cultural code switching and gender switching. A number
of Beyala’s characters, Hitchcott shows, undergo body transformations (through a change of
cooking and diet) and gender switching. I would argue that this is not specific to migrant
novels, but that it can also be found in novels on the African continent both in the 1980s and
1990s (for instance, in narratives by Angèle Rawiri, Tanella Boni, and Mariama Ndoye).
The last chapter examines Beyala’s construction of migrants’ identities as parodic
performativity. Several of the writer’s characters, Hitchcott shows, challenge gender
norms through external appearances. In changing their appearance, imitating but also
parodying the western modes of behavior and appearance, they also put to the test cultural
norms and codes, thus redefining their own identities and the ways they are perceived.
 Journal of Gender Studies 81

Taking Dean MacCannell’s notion of ‘staged authenticity’ as a departing point, Hitchcott

reads Beyala’s use of stereotypical characters, her uses of the erotic – exotic Other, as a
staging of the marginality of African migrants in France.
As pointed out in Hitchcott’s conclusion, ambivalence is central to Beyala’s writing
and to her performance both as a writer and a person. In that regard, Hitchcott’s reading of
Fouad Laroui’s novel, La fin tragique de Philomène Tralala (2003), as a direct reference
to Beyala’s alleged plagiarism and to her writing, is utterly fascinating and convincing.
With such engaging analysis of Beyala’s ‘Parisian novels’, the reader might wish further
comparative analysis with other writers, such as Bessora and Fatou Diome, to examine
how the erotic –exotic Other and performances of migration intersect in their narratives.
All in all, as my various comments indicate, this is a very stimulating book.

Odile Cazenave
Boston University, USA
cazenave@bu.edu
q 2008, Odile Cazenave

The emergence of feminism in India, 1850 –1920, by Padma Anagol, Aldershot,

Ashgate, 2005, 264 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 0-7546-3411-6

In this book, which adds to the rich and growing historiography relating to gender and
women in India, Padma Anagol argues convincingly for the need to move beyond
ethnographic historiographies. By their exclusive focus on the ‘constitution and
reconstitution of patriarchy’ (p. 5) such studies tend to cast Indian women as passive rather
than active respondents to colonial interventions. Anagol attempts to recover the active
voice of women. She examines the growth of feminism between 1850 and 1920 in the
Indian western state of Maharashtra. She uses this material to challenge both the
dominance which studies of colonial Bengal have had in shaping historiography on
women in India, and the fixed perceptions about gender roles in India that have emerged
from them. Her central thesis is that, in the context of Maharashtra, women in the mid-
nineteenth century were both assertive and resistant to patriarchy, and that they
demonstrated an early form of Indian feminist consciousness that has so far been ignored,
and was in some ways more radical than the women’s movement which aligned itself to
the Indian national movement in the 1930s and 1940s.
The book explores the emergence of feminism during the period under study in a
variety of settings: women converts to Christianity; the growth of Hindu women
reformers, their networks and institutions; the concept of bhaginivarg (sisterhood); and
men’s resistance and assertion in the legal arena, including the right to property and
conjugal rights. She also addresses the issue of criminalised women, and questions
whether their acts of crime were indeed a form of resistance. Looking through a gendered
prism, Anagol examines the issue of conversion arguing that contrary to some
contemporary representations, conversion to Christianity was not a form of collaboration
with British imperialism. Nor were women converts merely passive and helpless followers
of their husbands’ choices, but conversion was freely chosen, as a form of resistance
against gendered restrictions within Hinduism. This analysis is based on the articulations
of a range of Christian women who critiqued Hinduism. Some of the issues addressed were
early marriage, female infanticide, women’s seclusion, dowry and prostitution attached to
the temples – all of which were seen as reflecting the negative projection of women within
82 Book reviews

Hindu scriptures. In sharp contrast, Christianity was projected as a potentially liberatory

space, within which gender relations were seen as more egalitarian.
Anagol then moves on to interrogate Hindu women’s critiques of Hinduism, thereby
shifting the focus to an internal debate within the community, where some Hindu
patriarchal norms were debated and rejected, but not the religion itself. There is a
suggestion that the degree of assimilation and accommodation that this stance implied
might have been a reason why these feminists – rather than female converts to
Christianity – were able to adapt to nationalist concerns, and participate in the national
movement in the 1930s and 1940s. The issues taken up by these women included support
for widow remarriage and for women’s education. And, as Anagol goes to some lengths to
demonstrate, Hindu feminists based their support for widow remarriage not on
reinterpretation of scriptures – as male reformers did – but on ideas of humanity and
women’s rights. Readers might have appreciated a further analysis of the ways in which
‘traditional’ upper caste Hindu concepts and rituals such as ‘halad kunku’ (a ceremony
where married Hindu applied vermilion and turmeric to each other as markers of their
married status) were used by these feminists to attract women to feminist ideas.
Following this, Anagol proceeds to analyse the different forms of feminist resistance,
including the use of law and ‘petitioning’ (p. 107) in getting access to rights, such as the
right to property. While this material is of interest, no attempt is made to engage with recent
feminist critiques of the relevance and limitations of legal intervention for feminist activism
and politics (Agnes 1995, Menon 2004), a discussion of which would have enriched the
book. Rather, there is an assumption that legal intervention in this context was potentially
subversive of patriarchal norms, even though Anagol herself presents evidence that the use
of law could work against women’s interests, for instance in cases of women committing
infanticide or spousal murder. There is a tendency to an undifferentiated celebration of all
forms of women’s agency. Quite diverse expressions of assertion are interpreted as feminist
actions; examples of this include: lower middle class women’s home budgeting in response
to price rises in the 1850s, infanticide, murder of abusive husbands, and upholding caste
restrictions and norms in prison. I see this as romanticising women’s agency; in my view
some of these actions are better interpreted as assertion rather than as feminist resistance.
For instance, the role of women in maintaining their household budget in difficult financial
times can also be seen as maintaining their feminine roles as housewives.
However, the book makes a valuable contribution to the field, and is especially useful
in shedding light on the history of gender relations and feminism in western India, thereby
demonstrating the heterogeneity of women’s experiences of, and responses to, patriarchies
in colonial India.

References
Agnes, F., 1995. State, gender and the rhetoric of state reform. Gender and law: book 2. Bombay:
RCWS, SNDT.
Menon, N., 2004. Recovering subversion: feminist politics beyond the law. New Delhi: Permanent
Black.

Geetanjali Gangoli
University of Bristol, UK
G.Gangoli@bristol.ac.uk
q 2008, Geetanjali Gangoli
 Journal of Gender Studies 83

Women in the Indian national movement: unseen faces and unheard voices, 1930– 42,
by Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London, Sage Publications,
2006, 304 pp., £35.00 (hardback), ISBN 0-7619-3406-5, £14.24 (paperback), ISBN 0-
7619-3407-3

This study is an admirable addition to the burgeoning fields of Women Studies and Gender
Studies in modern India. Indian women’s nationalist activities in the public domain have
been much written about over the last 40 years. However, the subject of this monograph is
a topic previously almost completely neglected: it is the contribution of middle-class
women, from the domestic sphere, to the nationalist movement in the relatively neglected
region of Uttar Pradesh (UP). The careful use of source materials, conventional and
unconventional, especially first-person narratives of eyewitnesses and participants, and
women’s periodical literature in the Hindi language, has resulted in a work of erudition.
The book becomes a unique contribution to our knowledge of nationalist politics during
this period largely through two core chapters, three and five. The first focuses on the
‘domestication of the public sphere’, explained as one in which entry into the public
domain is made possible by the importation of domestic values such as modesty, self-
suffering, non-violent behaviour and silent bearing of hardship in picketing,
demonstrations, and political activity in segregated groups. The second refers to the
‘politicisation of the domestic sphere’ and focuses on women who could not enter the
public sphere due to social constraints yet who wished to participate in the nationalist
movement. It examines how they managed economic hardships whilst fathers, husbands or
sons went to prison, how they imbued patriotic zeal in their children, and how they looked
after the children of others who had faced long term imprisonment. Some of this material
is not novel, nevertheless by theorising the content of these processes the author makes an
important contribution to discussion in this area.
The book is securely anchored by an initial discussion of new approaches and recent
methodological advances in understanding the women’s movement in early twentieth-
century India. She discusses the Cambridge School, Nationalist School and Subaltern
historiography which have together made immense advances in delineating the elite and
mass involvement of Indians both in the emergence of nationalism and the subsequent birth
of the nation called ‘India’; yet they fail to give much consideration to gender or to women.
This discussion includes negotiation with the older works on the women’s movement such
as Kaur (1968), Agnew (1979), Minault (1981), Jayawardena (1986) and Forbes (1998)
amongst others. Possibly, this is the first work that engages with the longer historiography
on the ‘women question’ with rigour and detail and hence will provide a good teaching tool
for those teachers of Indian gender history hoping to convey to their students the century’s
long-drawn-out, complex and uneasy alignment between feminism and nationalism.
There remain, however, some contentious areas. The author argues that the middle
class she is discussing were ‘ordinary’, ‘simple’ and ‘unsophisticated’ women (pp. 49 –50)
but this is not how everyone understands the highly problematic class configuration called
the ‘middle class’, especially in a colonial setting. At one stage she defines ‘family wealth,
ownership of property and a high standard of living’ (p. 33) as characterising middle-class
women and setting them apart from lower-class women. But these criteria could also
refer to ‘elite’ women who would not then qualify as the ‘simple’, ‘ordinary’ or
‘unsophisticated’ women said to be the focus of Thapar-Bjorkert’s study. The author
would have fared better with a definition drawn from inter-disciplinary approaches to
defining middle-class women. A further puzzle was the lack of historical context regarding
84 Book reviews

UP women’s activism: if women in UP rose in a dramatic fashion in the crucial period of

the 1930s (when the author locates her study) should we not be told how this was made
possible? It is especially necessary because the author insists that UP was a socially
backward and inherently conservative place. Visalakshi Menon (2003, pp. 29 – 56) has
attributed the rise of these political developments in the region to the Municipalities Act of
1920 which allowed Indians more representation thus vastly expanding the building of
girls’ schools and colleges. The contours of both the political history of the region and
women’s eventual participation in the nationalist movement of UP are thus firmly
anchored in the development of women’s education.
Finally, Thapar-Bjorkert argues convincingly that the nature of women’s participation
in the political movement was characterised by two features: segregation and
respectability. Both were ‘borrowed’ from the domestic sphere in order to make the
streets safer for women; the result was that men’s hostility to women’s presence in the
public sphere was replaced by acceptance. But, one wonders whether the exhilaration of
being in the public sphere did not tempt some women to flout customs and traditions.
Thapar-Bjorkert does not explore this possibility; rather she assumes that since the public
space was made accessible women were simply glad and relieved to accept this without
further ado. Similarly it seems curious that the women respondents constructed their
identities only in the form of ‘anti-colonial’ feelings and refrained from commenting on
the really volatile rise of right-wing sentiments during the 1930s and 1940s, especially
when the region under study was a hotbed of religious intolerance.
These criticisms do not, however, detract from the worth of this book. Its best feature is
that it allows gender historians of the nationalist period to overcome the impasse built by
poststructuralist adherents who have argued that the ‘women question’ was either resolved
by male nationalists (Chatterjee 1989) or that women were merely ‘domesticated’ subjects
(Viswesvaran 1996) whose speech had been suppressed by both colonialists and
nationalists from the 1920s onwards. Instead, Thapar-Bjorkert brilliantly demonstrates
how the domestic sphere was being rapidly transformed by women themselves and how
the resulting politicisation of the domestic sphere effectively challenges the findings of
subaltern historians proving that even within the interstices of a highly constrained space
such as an Indian home, women could not be silenced nor their activities contained.

References
Agnew, V., 1979. Elite women in Indian politics. Delhi: Vikas.
Chatterjee, P., 1989. The nationalist resolution of the women’s question. In: K. Sangari and S. Vaid,
eds. Recasting women: essays in colonial history. Delhi: Kali for Women.
Forbes, G., 1998. Women in modern India. Cambridge University Press.
Jayawardena, K., 1986. Feminism and nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed.
Kaur, M., 1968. Role of women in the freedom movement, 1857– 1947. New Delhi: Sterling.
Menon, V., 2003. Indian women and nationalism: the UP story. Delhi: Har Anand Publications.
Minault, G., ed., 1981. The extended family: women and political participation in India and
Pakistan. Delhi: Chanakya Publications.
Viswesvaran, K., 1996. Small speeches, subaltern gender: nationalist ideology and its
historiography. In: S. Amin and D. Chakravarty, eds. Subaltern studies IX: writings on South
Asian history and society. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Padma Anagol
University of Cardiff, UK
anagol@cardiff.ac.uk
q 2008, Padma Anagol
 Journal of Gender Studies 85

Postfeminist gothic: critical interventions in contemporary culture, edited by

Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 200 pp.,
£45.00 (hardback), ISBN 9-78-023000-5426

The front cover of this book promises much. The title encourages us to consider the heated
debates and controversies surrounding ‘postfeminist’ and its yoking together with that
equally unpredictable creature, the gothic. This seems to invite a genuinely exciting set
of ‘interventions’. The cover photograph of a woman’s back – from shoulder blades to
buttocks, hands crossed behind her, either handcuffed or wearing a bracelet – is
ambiguous, subtle and provocative. Does she, and will the book, present a challenge to
conventional ways of articulating feminist ideas about the gothic? Will postfeminism be
lauded or lambasted? Can there be a new kind of gothic heroine?
It is a shame, however, that the language in which the discussions are conducted in
many of the contributions often seems subject to the kinds of bonds, limitations and
restrictions that impeded the traditional gothic heroine. The interesting topics and
arguments of many of the essays seem overwhelmed by the decision to adopt the
conventionalized lexis and rules of theory-speak. In many essays, the texts under
discussion are described as ‘destabilising’ categories, they question ‘binaries’ or are ‘sites’
that ‘contest’; categories are inverted and transformed; we have simulacra and spectacle.
Not only the scholarship, but also the language, is often so closely related from one
essay to the next that there is a sense of reading a single author. And this, surely, is a
problem. The essays in this collection often expressly disagree with each other, they offer
different and important approaches to feminism, postfeminism, the gothic and
postfeminist gothic. Their linguistic and stylistic uniformity, however, is such that
many of these differences are rubbed out.
The distinctiveness of individual essays and arguments, however, is often vital and
illuminating. Stéphanie Genz’s ‘(Re)Making the Body Beautiful: Postfeminist Cinderellas
and Gothic Tales of Transformation’ offers the very interesting notion of the ‘Girlies’, and
her assertion of ‘femmeinism’ is a genuine contribution to the debates surrounding
postfeminist cultural production. These two terms are inter-related and insist upon a notion
of the feminine that is not immediately and superficially regarded as passive and
repressive. This ‘pink power’ position obscures, for Genz, the differences between the
victimization and agency (p. 73).
Donna Heiland’s essay ‘George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy: Sublimity, Pain,
Possibility’ re-engages with the sublime as an important aspect of postfeminist gothic.
The comparatively little known verse drama by Clarke provides, in Heiland’s reading, the
gothic ability to make oppression sublime (magnificent in its horror), but to then translate
this into a version of beauty via the ‘concrete, articulate [ . . . ] catalyst for change’ (p. 136)
that is the main character Beatrice. It is an impassioned and deeply engaging piece of
criticism. In addition to this, the essay demonstrates the sublime’s importance in terms of
its ability to work within different kinds of historical and generic formulae.
Benjamin Brabon’s essay ‘The Spectral Phallus: Re-Membering the Postfeminist
Man’ is a timely reflection on masculinity and also gives us a very interesting reading
of Falling Down (dir. Joel Schumacher, 1992) and Fight Club (dir. David Fincher,
1999). The main point of the argument is that a traditional version of gothic violence
where masculine identity is predicated on men’s sadism aimed at women has been
transformed into a masculine identity which is predicated on masochism aimed at men.
While the over-reliance on Deleuze distracts from the argument at times, this is a
fascinating essay.
86 Book reviews

However, the stand-out essay is Rhonda Wilcox’s ‘Bite-Size Pieces: Disassembling the
Gothic Villain in Witchblade’. In part this is because she eschews, mostly, the otherwise
ubiquitous lexicon of theory and, instead, presents an exceedingly well-informed and
well-written account of the US series Witchblade. This show, which ran for two seasons on
TNT in the USA, sees homicide detective Sara Pezzini become the custodian of the
‘witchblade’, an ancient and powerful gauntlet that has been a supernatural weapon worn
by women through history, a history that, as Wilcox identifies, is visually represented in
the pilot as quintessentially gothic. The essay has a relatively simple focus, indicating how
the male gothic hero and villain are re-imagined in early twenty-first-century televisual
fiction. In so doing, the essay is more able to demonstrate the complications and
contestations of the phrase ‘postfeminist gothic’ than any of the other pieces. It does this by
characterizing the main character, Pezzini, as both ‘second-wave feminist hero’ and
‘postfeminist’. By operating across the boundaries of two seemingly culturally separated
positions, Pezzini offers, according to Wilcox’s tremendous reading, a truly careful
presentation of certain engagements with current gender debates. The relationship between
Pezzini’s culturally antagonistic positions, the gothic-indebted role and function of the
male heroes and villains and, crucially, the ways in which the narrative operates in terms of
mutable temporality leads Wilcox to assert that although not great art, Witchblade is ‘fertile
fantasy’ and ‘is one example of the postfeminist Gothic territory we might claim’ (p. 53).
This is a collection that needed the courage of its convictions. Its claim, to be
challenging, new and de-stabilizing, clashes with its language, which is predictable,
institutional and settled. The danger is that this can only lead to a certain cynicism in the
reader. Brabon and Genz have put together a formidable array of subjects but it is not as
clear that they have managed to provide an equally formidable array of essays.

Matthew Pateman
University of Hull, UK
M.Pateman@hull.ac.uk
q 2008, Matthew Pateman

Gender and consumption: domestic cultures and the commercialisation of everyday

life, edited by Emma Casey and Lydia Martens, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 246 pp., £55.00
(hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-4386-9

This edited collection of new writing on gender and consumption in the context of the
domestic sphere offers empirical and theoretical insights into the understanding of the
interaction between class, gender and domestic life. The volume is divided into three
parts; an editorial introduction is followed by 11 substantive chapters and an editorial
conclusion. The first part considers the commercialisation of domestic life in historical
perspective; the middle section explores public/private dynamics in gender and consump-
tion; and the final part studies gender and the material culture of the domestic sphere.
Given the constraints of space, I decided not to focus, in the foreground at least, on the
contributions of writers whose well-known books on domestic life I have reviewed
previously (Cieraad 1999, Giles 2004, Hollows and Moseley 2006, Pink 2004). This is not,
of course, to say that their contributions are less original or imaginative. Indeed, each
author takes forward strides in their analytical work. I will concentrate instead on those
chapters which work across relatively fuzzy and contested boundaries between the public
and private spheres.
 Journal of Gender Studies 87

Before I do so, I need to set aside some grumbles so that I can get on with reviewing in
the right spirit. The first and most predictable complaint I have is that the book is mainly
about women and not gender per se. Most women academics who are undertaking
empirical work in this area tend to concentrate mainly or solely on women, so leaving men
as off-stage characters. Few men academics are working in this field, which is
disappointing, but I make no claim that men academics should redress the balance by
concentrating solely on men’s domestic lives. The editors argue unapologetically that ‘it
was inevitable that female consumers would stand central’ (p. 4) in most of the chapters.
I’m uncomfortable with inevitability, and argue that it would have been beneficial if more
of the studies reported upon here observed men and/or listened to their voices first hand.
A strength of the volume, by contrast, is the determined effort by many of the authors
not to toe the line with established but outdated feminist orthodoxies on gendered
power in the domestic sphere. In all cases, women are credited with their own agency
and much of the debate on men’s roles in heterosexual relationships has a strong focus
on negotiation of priorities – or more particularly in exchange relationships. Better
still, women are shown to seek and achieve enjoyment from the everyday and not so
everyday-life domestic practices which are mediated through or generated by consump-
tion practices.
When I read the book first time round immediately after its publication I found it hard
to overcome my disappointment that some of the issues surrounding consumption under
scrutiny were actually beyond the domestic threshold. I missed my copy deadline, a
summer passed and so I needed to read the book again. Then I came to a different view.
Those chapters which deal with not-so-strictly domestic issues actually enhanced
understanding of consumption in the home because they provided a backdrop on gendered
expectations and behaviours which appeared to originate neither in the public nor the
private sphere, but instead, were a product of interaction across the boundaries.
Davidson’s study on social introduction services, Boden’s chapter on the wedding day,
and Casey’s contribution on gambling all fall into this category and the book is, I think, the
better for them. All three chapters focus on the gendered dreamscapes of heterosexual
women as they map out aspects of their imagined future lives through consumption, men
and money, while their real-life journeys are shown all too often to be very different.
A number of chapters of the book deal with taboo subjects very effectively and make
inroads into new territory. Clarke’s excoriating critique of capitalism’s invasion into the
innocent world of the children’s birthday party shows how mothers are to some extent
manipulated into expensive, competitive and wasteful exchange relationships with other
families they hardly know. Wilson-Kovacs successfully explores the relationship between
consumption and sexual intimacy. Women interviewed show how they plan their
‘lovemaps’, but tabloid steaminess is stubbornly avoided here by seriousness of style. As
the chapter concludes: ‘These practices show women as pertinent bricoleurs and agents
involved in intersubjective practice, who improvise passion in a taken for granted
mobilisation of material resources’ (p. 193). This chapter is hard work, and I wondered at
its end whether some of the theoretical ideas which had been melded together might
exhibit too much strain. But it made me think and that’s the point I want to convey.
Silva’s ethnography of a heterosexual couple’s new fitted kitchen is, I think, the best
contribution to the volume. With a relatively light touch, Silva injects energy into her
theoretical exploration of the interaction between class, gender and consumption practices
through detailed personal observation, video evidence, together with effective analytical
work on in-depth interview data from wife and husband. Power imbalances, engendered
by pay and time differentials and culturally embedded attitudes about gender roles are
88 Book reviews

shown to shape the attitudes and behaviours of the couple under scrutiny. But much more
importantly Silva clearly explains, drawing on Morgan’s (1996) conceptualisation of
family practices, how negotiation and trading over priorities between husband and wife
evolve into agreements (or rather agreements to disagree). The terrain upon which
compromise is reached is cluttered. As Silva shows, the kitchen represents and mirrors
imagined images on how others may see them. The complex process of designing and
building it reveals much about gendered approaches to showing respect, care and trust.
And how living with the new kitchen reveals the disjuncture between wanted and accepted
domestic realities.
In sum, this is a thoughtful, well selected and useful set of contributions to a growing
literature on gender, consumption and domestic life. Its range of quirky subject material
will appeal to students. And its challenging messages should spur on young researchers –
hopefully men as well as women – to reassess gendered practices in the domestic sphere.

References
Cieraad, I., 1999. At home: an anthropology of domestic space – space, place & society. Syracuse
University Press.
Giles, J., 2004. The parlour and the suburb: domestic identities, class, femininity and modernity.
Oxford: Berg.
Hollows, J. and Moseley, R., 2006. Feminism in popular culture. London: Berg.
Morgan, D., 1996. Family connections: an introduction to family studies. Cambridge: Polity.
Pink, S., 2004. Home truths: gender, domestic objects and everyday life. London: Berg.

Tony Chapman
University of Teesside, UK
t.chapman@tees.ac.uk
q 2008, Tony Chapman

Gender history in practice: historical perspectives on bodies, class and citizenship,

by Kathleen Canning, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2006, 285 pp.,
US$56.50/£32.50 (hardback), ISBN 0-8014-4357-1, US$21.95/£12.50 (paperback), ISBN
0-8014-8971-7

Kathleen Canning is surely one of the most influential and important historians of gender
and of gender theorists working today and this collection of her essays deserves to be read
by all those working in this field. She has a remarkable facility for articulating the
conversation between history, gender and theory, more especially the encounter between
the practice of gender history and theory.
Canning’s early research was centred on gender in the nineteenth-century German
textile industry, published as Languages of labor and gender: female factory work in
Germany, 1850 – 1914 (Canning 2002), a bold and innovative study which presented the
field of German labour history with a radical new way of conceptualising the struggles and
experiences of the industrial process. Many of the themes examined in that study – from
the linguistic turn (the problematisation of the use of language) to the place of the body –
have subsequently been taken up and expanded, deepened and re-thought, and the results
can be read in this collection. Since then she has become a leading practitioner and thinker
in the diverse fields of gender, labour, the body and citizenship thereby addressing some of
the key questions occupying gender historians in the last two decades. This book brings
 Journal of Gender Studies 89

together previously published pieces representing distinct phases in the author’s thinking
but, unlike most essay collections, this one contains two new essays, several revised
versions as well as an English translation of a German language original. For historians –
particularly those specialising in Europe – the opening essay, which surveys the state
of European gender history, is a tour de force, engaging with and drawing upon the vast
range and diversity of research across geographies, temporalities and theoretical positions.
A reader who reads only this essay would be rewarded with a survey demonstrating the
exuberance and vitality of the discipline of women’s and gender history, its ability to
challenge existing frameworks, its creation of new categories of analysis and the revision
of key concepts in fields ranging from class and citizenship, consumption and welfare,
empire and war, race, sexuality and the body. It is a survey that would make any gender
historian feel privileged to be part of such a dynamic field and yet, lest we become too
complacent, Canning notes that the impact of gender history has been unevenly spread
across geographies and themes.
The final essay, the other new piece here, analyses Germany’s failed inter-war
democracy through the lenses of gender and citizenship. The story of the Weimar Republic
has been somewhat resistant to gendered approaches yet here Canning argues that an
understanding of citizenship in the sense of ‘new subjectivities within a new language of
democratic participation’ helps to frame the tensions of Weimar through the lens of gender
(p. 216). The granting of political rights to women and the consequences of the gender
upheavals of the war years opened up new possibilities for women and, Canning suggests,
meant that gender was a continuous site of contest throughout the Republic’s history.
Canning’s use of the concepts of gender and citizenship to analyse the Republic thus
presents us with a new interpretation of that contested time, one which places gender at the
heart of explanations of the republic’s troubles.
The special value of this collection lies in Canning’s ability to combine theory with
historical practice, in her ability to bring together the archives and the concepts to produce
fresh understandings of historical moments and processes, rather in the style of Joan Scott.
However, her most lasting contribution may be her most theoretical pieces. The essay
which discusses the relationship between feminist history and poststructural theory
rewards a second reading and likewise the analysis of the concept of experience, for so
long the subject of debate amongst gender historians. Certainly some of these essays are
challenging and would benefit somewhat from a more jargon-free narrative style. On the
other hand the book is completed by an extensive bibliography which old and new scholars
will find of huge value. Gender history in practice should stand as a classic collection
of innovative articles, all of which challenge us to continue to push the boundaries of
historical practice.

References
Canning, K., 2002. Languages of labor and gender: female factory work in Germany, 1850– 1914.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Lynn Abrams
University of Glasgow, UK
l.abrams@history.arts.gla.ac.uk
q 2008, Lynn Abrams
90 Book reviews

The hearts of men: tales of happiness and despair, by Chris Barker, Sydney, University
of New South Wales Press, 2007, 217 pp., £18.50 (paperback), ISBN 0-780868-409498

The hearts of men starts from a banal premise: not only do men have emotions, but they
even sometimes talk about them. (‘What a surprise!’ – p. 3.) Barker knows this because he
has conducted interviews with 107 of these strange creatures, the majority of them Anglo-
Australians. Only three of his interviewees were gay and only four non-white. So his actual
topic is not men, but white men; and not just white men, but straight white men. Even this
does not quite fit the bill, since Barker shows virtually no sign of any interest in non-
Anglophone cultures, with the rather serious consequence that it does not occur to him that
there are Catholic cultures as well as Protestant ones.
This omission has considerable ramifications when it comes to his arguments about the
nature of the family. It is not until p. 101 that he even mentions a non-Anglophone country,
and then only in passing; and not until p. 171 does he mention an Italian-Australian. Yet
this latter individual, who seems to baffle Barker, is worth remarking on at greater length,
since he proves radically different from any of the other interviewees: he takes paternity
leave when his children are born, reduces his working week in order to share the burden of
child-rearing, and allows his career to take second place to his family. Moreover, the
concentration on white men looks especially threadbare when it transpires that Barker’s
solution to men’s ills is a form of faithless meditation filched from Buddhism.
From the outset, Barker’s tone is one of wide-eyed, Candide-like innocence.
Characteristic insights include: ‘apparently “bad” men often turn out to be “sad” men’
(p. 11); ‘fathers who participate in sport often encourage their sons to play games’ (p. 31);
‘The seeds planted at childhood grow differently in varying social and cultural soils’
(p. 97); ‘Human beings seem to like drugs’ (p. 135); ‘Heterosexual men often rely on
women for friendship and emotional support’ (p. 158). It is not clear what purpose, or what
readership, this affected naivety serves, especially given the fact that the book has been
issued by an academic press. When we do get footnotes, they are sometimes inaccurate
(Michel Foucault never wrote a book called Discipline and punishment), as are many of
the researchable details in the main text (Philip Larkin did not say, in one of the most
famous lines of modern verse, ‘Your Mum and Dad they fuck you up’ – p. 67).
When Barker reports that, ‘sadly, divorce statistics suggest that marriage is not always
a happy experience for men or women’ (p. 158), one yearns for an author who, rather than
scurrying to the shelves of the office of statistics, is actually emotionally literate, or even
just literate. Who in the world but he, until he consulted the divorce statistics, could have
imagined that marriage is ‘always a happy experience’? Has he never observed married
people; or has he never read about a marriage? To be fair, he does speak of his own
experience throughout – he is himself thrice married and divorced – so, again, the
question is: why is he writing as if he knows nothing of the world? Occasionally, this mode
leads Barker into a sentence of monumental fatuity: ‘The stable family backgrounds of
corporate executives are in striking contrast to the chaotic and emotionally painful
childhoods of heroin users’ (p. 14). Here we are in the domain of stereotype, which tends
never to allow for any crossover between hermetically distinct types.
But where I most emphatically depart company from Barker is in his unquestioned
assumption that men need to emote more. The truth is that the more moving stories come
from the older, more emotionally controlled interviewees. What is wrong with the
suppression of emotion, anyway? Do we seriously believe that if more fathers had said
‘I love you, mate’ to their sons, they and the world would be in less of a mess? I, for one,
was very fond of my own father’s diffidence and distance. Do we seriously believe that, by
 Journal of Gender Studies 91

contrast, emotionally loquacious relationships between mothers and daughters are,

generally speaking, not a mess?
Besides, there has never been any dearth of male emotion. Given the structures of
patriarchy for several millennia in ‘the West’, it has almost always been men’s emotions that
mattered more than women’s, and, indeed, it has consistently been men who defined the
emotions and mapped out their structures. Male emotion generates the visual arts, music,
poetry and the novel . . . Not to mention wars and methods of torture. For one fleeting
moment, Barker seems to recognise the idiocy of his initial assumption, when he admits:
‘Shakespeare was a man. Wordsworth was a man. Freud was a man!’ (p. 3). Quite. It is
entirely apt that Barker should mention the arts here, but he hardly ever returns to them, except
in a passing reference to listening to ‘beautiful music’ to calm oneself down. I am especially
interested in the exclamation mark he grants his recognition that Freud had a gender and a sex.
What a surprise! Men can suffer. Welcome to the human condition, chum.

Gregory Woods
Nottingham Trent University, UK
gregory.woods@ntu.ac.uk
q 2008, Gregory Woods