Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2013

In 1998 and 2002, U.K. citizen Diane Blood conceived sons from a sample of her late husband Stephen’s sperm in a private Belgian fertility clinic. Although Stephen’s sperm was illegally harvested from his comatose body in 1995, the British Court of Appeal decided in 1997 that Diane was not to be prevented from consuming commercial infertility service in a European member state pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Rom Read More

Choosing to have a baby after the age of 40 has become something of a cultural touchstone in the developed world. At best, women face grim warnings of risks to child and mother. At worst, they are accused of being ‘selfish’ by doctors and pundits alike. All this takes place at a time when the numbers of over-40 mothers are thought to be increasing explosively. However, a historical overview shows that women aged 40 to Read More

In this essay I address the popular notion that reading literature is a way to gain empathy through identification. Using the relatively new phenomenon of the lesbian mother as an example, I ask through which cultural repertoires lesbian mothers are made visible, which subject positions are available for them, and which identificatory positions are made available to readers. I explore a number of representations Read More

In this article Maaike Meijer argues that not only the film One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (1975), but also its literary pretext and the history of its interpretation serve as valuable objects of analysis. Four distinct interpretations of the film offer diverse readings of its narrative in general, and of nurse Ratched in particular. Depending on the interpretative point of view, nurse Ratched has been read as a figure of repressive, sadist Read More

In the first half the 1990s, Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie appeared in twelve television skits as Carla and Frank van Putten, mother and son. Each instalment follows a fixed narrative development, in which Carla’s domineering behaviour causes deep frustration with Frank. I investigate how these skits relate to Momism: a psychiatric and sociological discourse that ascribes a large number of ‘disorders’ with men – including as Read More

In her contribution Mineke Bosch tries to explain the success of the major box office movie Mary Poppins that came out in 1964. Feminist critique of the movie seems by and large rather predictable in its presupposition that popular success means ideological weakness. Especially the comic representation of the suffragette mother of the children is seen as meaningful in this respect, and the movie’s main message is read as Read More

In this pictorial essay, Buikema investigates the image that won the World Press Photo award in 2012. This photograph of a veiled woman cradling the body of a fallen revolutionary in a mosque in Yemen evokes in western audiences the image of the pieta. Buikema argues that the image pictorially stages a confrontation between east and west, and owes its affective power to the similarities with and difference from christi Read More

No other researcher of religion revolutionized the way we look at Greek antiquity like the Hellenist, archaeologist and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), who taught at Newnham womens College, Cambridge (UK). Harrison’s avant la lettre performative and material turn challenged the text-based approach to Greek culture. The article reconstructs parallels between Harrison’s Becoming Goddess and the early work of Lu Read More

In this short analysis of Catholic representations of St. Mary throughout the centuries as a breastfeeding mother, we see that this very popular image in early Christianity and the Middle Ages is banned after 1593 and replaced by a childlike virgin. Thereby the power attributed to Mary’s milk, as the embodied transmission of the Holy Word in early Christianity, slowly dissipates. What once was holy is now abject, and this is linke Read More

This column argues that the slogan ‘the personal is political’ – when slightly rephrased – is now even more to the point than ever before. The personal has become ‘geopolitical’ due to the emergence of the socalled ‘global care chain’. Nowadays, families at both the higher and lower strata of society are organizing themselves on a transnational scale in a multitude of ways: as migrant care workers in the first world re Read More