The Lost Portrait of Gutle Rothschild

The lost portrait of the matriarch of the Rothschild family, Gutle Rothschild (1735-1849), offers a window not only into the lives of the Rothschilds, but into the lives of Jewish women of the late 18th and early 19th century. The artist Oppenheim was affiliated with the Rothschild family for close to fifty years, and during that period executed a large number of commissions for them. It is possible to compare his extant works with this painting, which disappeared during World War II. The article examines what can be gleaned from the painting about its subjects and commissioners, as well as probes the question of the changing roles and views of the Jewish woman at the end of the 19th century

Bathroom Realism and the Women of Cable TV

Taking as case studies three women-centered cable TV shows, this essay aims to renegotiate the terms of realism along feminist lines. In their focus on the ordinary and domestic, on proximate bodies and intimate conversations, Broad City, Insecure, and Girls echo the quotidian concerns of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Beyond this, in their signature use of the bathroom, they echo late Victorian efforts to push past the accepted limits of the “real” to explore matters conventionally hidden and beneath consideration. Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer, Issa Rae, and Lena Dunham turn for reality effects to the “ugly” and typically unseen aspects of women’s daily lives: objects from tampons to toilets, shameful bodily functions, imperfect and vulnerable bodies, confused and embarrassing feelings. While all three shows exemplify a women-centered bathroom realism (in contrast to male-centered works for which violence is the key to a grittier realism), their particular strategies are differentiated by race. Jacobson, Glazer, and Dunham give us white women sprawled on toilets and tubs, trashing the ideal of proper ladyness. Rae’s bathroom fixture of choice is a mirror, a device she uses to explore the neglected terrain of Black female interiority

Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialsim

Explores the problematic gender politics of Edward Said's commentary on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Contra Said, argues that neither Fanny Price nor Austen herself can be assumed to share the values of Mansfield's slaveholding patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram. Said's general critique of culture's role in validating imperialism is invaluable, but his discussion of Austen's relation to this dynamic overlooks the subordinate, non-citizen status of women in Regency England

Shelter Writing: Desperate Housekeeping from Crusoe to Queer Eye

Theorizes the category of "shelter writing": blow-by-blow accounts of efforts to keep house, centered on figures whose domestic endeavors have become urgent and precious in the wake of dislocation--whether as the result of migration, divorce, poverty, or a stigmatized sexuality. Exemplary texts range from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Engages with Gaston Bachelard's "topoanalysis," Bill Brown's "thing theory," and Rita Felski's contributions to feminist everyday life studies

HGTV’s House Hunters and the Right to Coziness

This article explores the complex appeal of home-buying and renovation shows on the cable channel HGTV. While their popularity is clear, their political implications are murkier. Some media studies scholars accuse the genre of fostering consumerism, conformity, and neo-liberal nationhood. Others admire its inclusion and “non-special treatment” of queer and racially diverse participants. My own feminist reading notes the limits as well as merits of the diversity defense and offers to appreciate the shows’ contribution in somewhat different terms. Focusing specifically on House Hunters (1999-present), I credit this home-buying series with asserting the primacy of domestic life in conjunction with a host of related values conventionally coded and subordinated as ‘feminine.’ In the hegemonic scheme of things, qualities coded as ‘masculine’ (the aggressive, historic, large-scale, public-sphere, self-reliant, and individualist) occupy a superior position. House Hunters challenges this gendered hierarchy by reveling in the modest, everyday, small-scale, private-sphere, interdependent, and relational. It does so, moreover, in a gender-neutral way: no longer written off and relegated to women, the little things that happen in houses are made paramount for male and female viewers alike. Adding a further twist, I close with an episode whose homebuyers have histories of social marginality and economic insecurity. In this context, the desire for domestic ‘coziness’ is less about conformity to bourgeois norms and more about feelings of safety and belonging in relation to place

Realism’s Gender Wars: Masculinity Effects in Late Realist Fiction and Contemporary Reality TV

Who gets “The Real” in realism, and what difference does gender make? Countering monolithic (and dismissive) notions of realism, I explore the competition between realisms coded as “feminine” and “masculine”—between what Frank Norris belittled as “the drama of a broken teacup” and the drama of a man struggling to survive in the wilderness. Juxtaposing Jack London’s Klondike fiction with today’s survivalist reality shows, I see these as similar efforts to put a masculine stamp on “the real.” In my reading of the History Channel’s Alone (2015- ), however, a London-esque realism of moose-killing is challenged by a realism of the daily, non-dire, and domestic. Alone’s oscillation between these modes recalls that Ur-text of literary realism in which a violent, shipwrecked man sets about reinventing the household arts

Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies

Pioneering ecofeminist work in animal studies dates back to the 1970s. Yet animal studies remained an idiosyncratic backwater until its 21st-century reinvention as a high-profile area of humanities research. Key to its new cachet is a revamped origin story beginning in 2002 with Jacques Derrida as founding father. In readings of Derrida and leading animal studies theorist Cary Wolfe, I examine the gender politics of animal studies today, especially that affiliated with Wolfe’s formulation of posthumanism. In addition to slighting ecofeminist precedents, this approach distances itself from “liking” animals and from scholarship on gender, sexuality, and race. By contrast, animal studies foremothers Carol Adams and Donna Haraway (despite significant differences) both readily own their debt to feminist thinking as well as their emotional and political commitments to animals

Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222) against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised controlled trials in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK.

BACKGROUND: A safe and efficacious vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), if deployed with high coverage, could contribute to the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in a pooled interim analysis of four trials. METHODS: This analysis includes data from four ongoing blinded, randomised, controlled trials done across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa. Participants aged 18 years and older were randomly assigned (1:1) to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or control (meningococcal group A, C, W, and Y conjugate vaccine or saline). Participants in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group received two doses containing 5 × 1010 viral particles (standard dose; SD/SD cohort); a subset in the UK trial received a half dose as their first dose (low dose) and a standard dose as their second dose (LD/SD cohort). The primary efficacy analysis included symptomatic COVID-19 in seronegative participants with a nucleic acid amplification test-positive swab more than 14 days after a second dose of vaccine. Participants were analysed according to treatment received, with data cutoff on Nov 4, 2020. Vaccine efficacy was calculated as 1 - relative risk derived from a robust Poisson regression model adjusted for age. Studies are registered at ISRCTN89951424 and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04324606, NCT04400838, and NCT04444674. FINDINGS: Between April 23 and Nov 4, 2020, 23 848 participants were enrolled and 11 636 participants (7548 in the UK, 4088 in Brazil) were included in the interim primary efficacy analysis. In participants who received two standard doses, vaccine efficacy was 62·1% (95% CI 41·0-75·7; 27 [0·6%] of 4440 in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group vs71 [1·6%] of 4455 in the control group) and in participants who received a low dose followed by a standard dose, efficacy was 90·0% (67·4-97·0; three [0·2%] of 1367 vs 30 [2·2%] of 1374; pinteraction=0·010). Overall vaccine efficacy across both groups was 70·4% (95·8% CI 54·8-80·6; 30 [0·5%] of 5807 vs 101 [1·7%] of 5829). From 21 days after the first dose, there were ten cases hospitalised for COVID-19, all in the control arm; two were classified as severe COVID-19, including one death. There were 74 341 person-months of safety follow-up (median 3·4 months, IQR 1·3-4·8): 175 severe adverse events occurred in 168 participants, 84 events in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group and 91 in the control group. Three events were classified as possibly related to a vaccine: one in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group, one in the control group, and one in a participant who remains masked to group allocation. INTERPRETATION: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 has an acceptable safety profile and has been found to be efficacious against symptomatic COVID-19 in this interim analysis of ongoing clinical trials. FUNDING: UK Research and Innovation, National Institutes for Health Research (NIHR), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemann Foundation, Rede D'Or, Brava and Telles Foundation, NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, Thames Valley and South Midland's NIHR Clinical Research Network, and AstraZeneca

Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222) against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised controlled trials in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK

Background A safe and efficacious vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), if deployed with high coverage, could contribute to the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in a pooled interim analysis of four trials. Methods This analysis includes data from four ongoing blinded, randomised, controlled trials done across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa. Participants aged 18 years and older were randomly assigned (1:1) to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or control (meningococcal group A, C, W, and Y conjugate vaccine or saline). Participants in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group received two doses containing 5 × 1010 viral particles (standard dose; SD/SD cohort); a subset in the UK trial received a half dose as their first dose (low dose) and a standard dose as their second dose (LD/SD cohort). The primary efficacy analysis included symptomatic COVID-19 in seronegative participants with a nucleic acid amplification test-positive swab more than 14 days after a second dose of vaccine. Participants were analysed according to treatment received, with data cutoff on Nov 4, 2020. Vaccine efficacy was calculated as 1 - relative risk derived from a robust Poisson regression model adjusted for age. Studies are registered at ISRCTN89951424 and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04324606, NCT04400838, and NCT04444674. Findings Between April 23 and Nov 4, 2020, 23 848 participants were enrolled and 11 636 participants (7548 in the UK, 4088 in Brazil) were included in the interim primary efficacy analysis. In participants who received two standard doses, vaccine efficacy was 62·1% (95% CI 41·0–75·7; 27 [0·6%] of 4440 in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group vs71 [1·6%] of 4455 in the control group) and in participants who received a low dose followed by a standard dose, efficacy was 90·0% (67·4–97·0; three [0·2%] of 1367 vs 30 [2·2%] of 1374; pinteraction=0·010). Overall vaccine efficacy across both groups was 70·4% (95·8% CI 54·8–80·6; 30 [0·5%] of 5807 vs 101 [1·7%] of 5829). From 21 days after the first dose, there were ten cases hospitalised for COVID-19, all in the control arm; two were classified as severe COVID-19, including one death. There were 74 341 person-months of safety follow-up (median 3·4 months, IQR 1·3–4·8): 175 severe adverse events occurred in 168 participants, 84 events in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group and 91 in the control group. Three events were classified as possibly related to a vaccine: one in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group, one in the control group, and one in a participant who remains masked to group allocation. Interpretation ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 has an acceptable safety profile and has been found to be efficacious against symptomatic COVID-19 in this interim analysis of ongoing clinical trials