[1] In 1979 Barnard College sponsored “The Scholar and the Feminist VI: The Future of Difference,” a conference whose proceedings were anthologized into a volume called simply The Future of Difference, which, its post-preface proclaims, “has become something of an underground classic” (Eisenstein and Jardine, xiii). What is striking to...

[1] The continual recurrence of liberal visual and textual representations of Afghan women sensationalize their plight and conflate third world women “over there” with third world women “over here.” Such presentations compel me to reiterate critiques put forward by Chandra Mohanty (1991), Gayatri Spivak (1999), Umma Narayan (1997), and Lata...

[1] JAGOSE: Your book on gay male spectatorships notes the cultural persistence, both homophobic and anti-homophobic, in reading the movie fan and the male homosexual in terms of each other. (figure 1) Indeed, a couple of times you offer incidents from your childhood – your grandmother’s gift to you, aged...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] In the past eight years, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved through a range of roles: she took up a highly controversial and ultimately doomed position as her husband’s “two for the price of one” partner in...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] In the course of exhaustively documenting the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Interregnum Protectorate, historians have taken virtually no interest in his wife, Elizabeth. They report that Elizabeth married Oliver...

(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England) [1] Until Diana Spencer’s death on August 31, 1997, the conjunction of England’s queen consorts and populism was far from obvious. Yet this was exactly the ideological intersection her death foregrounded for those who watched and...

From the trial of Socrates to the dozens of proceedings reported daily in the press, the popular trial has been active as a rhetorical form, a social practice and a symptom of historical change – Robert Hariman Every man I meet wants to protect me. Can’t figure out what from...

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. – Donna Haraway Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard. – Deckard in Blade Runner. [1] Arguably the most influential Science Fiction (SF) film of all time, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) is one...

[1] JAGOSE: Given the Motion Picture Production Code’s determination to corral “sex perversion” outside the cinematic field of vision, classical Hollywood cinema might not seem a promising archive for the consideration of lesbian representability. Can you talk me through what your book takes as its founding paradox, the Production Code’s...

[1] Contemporary discussions of globalization and the transnational circulation of cultural products are often marked by celebratory exhortations of the imminent global village or by less optimistic perspectives that present the Third World as beleaguered and besieged. Countering these perspectives, through an examination of media commentary on the Canadian-Indian film...