vol 26 - 2000
   
Preface
   

In this issue of Feminist Studies we are proud to publish the winners of the Feminist Studies Award for the best graduate student essay submissions received in the last year: Victoria Rosner, Gillian M. Goslinga-Roy, and Ednie Kaeh Garrison. Together with the other essays in this volume, these emerging scholars weave together revisionings of popular culture, acts of individual and historical recovery, and moments in which women's opportunities are simultaneously foreclosed and enhanced. Each essay in its own way addresses the vexed and contradictory possibilities for feminist agency.

More than two decades of feminist scholarship have taught us that the act of recovery of women's voices is a troubled one. Yet once we are prepared to relinquish the easy answers, the task becomes immensely rewarding. Thus, the first three essays in this issue encourage us to explore the complex and compelling relationships between agency and social control across centuries and national boundaries. Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson's essay, "French Women Opera Composers and the Aesthetics of Rousseau," is both a work of recovery and an analysis of the complex effects of political and social revolution on women as culture producers. Women opera composers and librettists flourished in France between 1770 and 1820, some with spectacular success. Despite a strongly conservative gender ideology, the democratization of the public sphere enabled women to feel that for the first time they could compete on more equal terms with men. Although the immensely influential Rousseau strenuously objected to women in the public sphere, the authors argue, his promotion of sentimental values, melodies, and simple harmony encouraged women to participate as the creators of opera. Through this essay we see once again that in moments of upheaval women often emerge as both the unexpected agents and beneficiaries of change.

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Contents
   

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Victoria Rosner
Have You Seen This Child? Carolyn K. Steedman and the Writing of Fantasy Motherhood (Feminist Studies Award Winner)

Page Dougherty Delano
Making Up for War: Sexuality and Citizenship in Wartime Culture

Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson
French Women Opera Composers and the Aesthetics of Rousseau

Sharon P. Holland
On Waiting to Exhale: Or What to Do When You're Feeling Black and Blue, A Review of Recent Black Feminist Criticism
(Review Essay)

Gillian M. Goslinga-Roy
Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An Ethnographic Perspective on Power, Feminism, and the Reproductive Technologies (Feminist Studies Award Winner)

Ednie Kaeh Garrison
U.S. Feminism—Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave (Feminist Studies Award Winner)

Eva Cherniavsky
Visionary Politics? Feminist Interventions in the Culture of Images (Review Essay)

Edna Zapanta Manlapaz
Literature in English by Filipino Women

Creative Writing by Angela Manalang-Gloria; Estrella Alfon; Rosa Maria Magno; Marra PL. Lanot; Mila Aguilar; Tita Lacambra-Ayala; Marjorie Evasco; Noelle Quintos de Jesus; Myrna Peña-Reyes; and Fatima V. Lim Wilson

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
"To Widen the Reach of Our Love": Autobiography, History,
and Desire

     
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