ABOUT 2006 ISSUES

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Issue 82. Everyday Struggling (February 2006)

  • A focus on struggle and survival in everyday life;
  • Emphasises the importance of emotion and judgment for feminism;
  • Provides a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

'Everyday struggling' evokes an image of a wriggling body, never still, always engaged with itself and the world. A struggling body might tighten bonds or loosen them, and everyday struggling may be visible or hidden, vocal or silent. In strikingly different ways, each author interrogates the question of resources, critically examining the relationship between what a body needs for life (for example, health, freedom from violence, shelter, human care and of course economic means) and what one has access to. The shortfall between the two produces everyday struggling in a material sense, and necessitates the use or development of more personal resources, in the form of narrative, testimony, action or reflection.

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Issue 83. Sexual Moralities (August 2006)

  • This issue investigates the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual morality;
  • It examines how sexual morality is used to police or problematise boundaries of nation, religion and family;
  • There is a focus on local and global manifestations of sexual morality, for example in relation to health and reproductive rights, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, reproductive rights of a mother versus foetal rights, sex work, sex education, fundamentalism, child sexual abuse;
  • It also charts the role of women's and social movements in challenging the pernicious effects of sexual morality.

A conservative sexual morality appears to be on the increase globally, operating in both new and familiar ways. How are we to make sense of the possibilities, contradictions and exploitations that make up the contemporary realm of sexual moralities? How does power work through questions of sexual morality to position bodies unequally, and to produce subjects answerable to its contradictory logics? This special issue of Feminist Review explores manifestations of anxieties about sexual morality for the following reasons:

  • Declarations of sexual morality are consistently targeted at women and minorities, often as a way of policing national boundaries and preserving the 'integrity' of the heterosexual family;
  • Discourses of sexual morality operate in contradictory ways, frequently serving as a dense site where hierarchies of race, gender, class and religious are affirmed or challenged. As a result new oppositions emerge - we speak of high and low risk groups for sexually transmitted diseases, and sexually-liberated versus sexually-oppressive nation-states;
  • While assertions of sexual morality are increasing, new forms of sexual exploitation and expression reveal themselves - in the global sex trade, in contests between women's rights and foetal rights, in domestic partnership legislation for same-sex couples, and in new relationships made possible by new forms of communication and technology (phone sex, mail order brides).
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Issue 84. Postcolonial Theatres (December 2006)

This issue of Feminist Review brings together articles, reviews, interviews and dialogues on plays and performances by Indian, African-American, African-Canadian, and Black and Asian women in Britain in order to address the ways in which women from such differentiated contexts use theatre as a site for exploring feminist issues and for challenging dominant cultural and social conventions, ideologies, and positions. Most articles address the relationship of the plays and performances to colonial history, memory, and nationalist consciousness and ideologies.