Masculine femininities/feminine masculinities: power, identities and gender

This paper is basically about terminology. In it I discuss the terms 'masculinity' and 'femininity' and how they relate to being male and being female. My theme arises from an increasing difficulty that I am finding in understanding how individual identities relate to dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity. Christine Skelton and Becky Francis argue that we should not be afraid to name certain behaviours as masculine even when they are performed by girls. After a discussion of the problems of defining both 'masculinity' and 'femininity', and a consideration of the power relations between these terms, I go on to consider the concept of 'female masculinity' (Halberstam). I argue that this formulation is problematic, due to its dependence on a main term whose definition is unclear. Finally, I argue that we need to distinguish 'masculinity' and 'femininity' from 'masculinities' and 'femininities'

The Strange and Spooky Battle over Bats and Black Dresses: The Commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend and the Loss of a Subculture

From counterculture to subculture to the ubiquity of every black-clad wannabe vampire hanging around the centre of Western cities, Goth has transcended a musical style to become a part of everyday leisure and popular culture. The music’s cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first decade of this century. In this article, we examine the phenomenon of the Whitby Goth Weekend, a modern Goth music festival, which has contributed to (and has been altered by) the heritage-tourism marketing of Whitby as the holiday resort of Dracula (the place where Bram Stoker imagined the Vampire Count arriving one dark and stormy night). We examine marketing literature and websites that sell Whitby as a spooky town, and suggest that this strategy has driven the success of the Goth festival. We explore the development of the festival and the politics of its ownership, and its increasing visibility as a mainstream tourist destination for those who want to dress up for the weekend. By interviewing Goths from the north of England, we suggest that the mainstreaming of the festival has led to it becoming less attractive to those more established, older Goths who see the subculture’s authenticity as being rooted in the post-punk era, and who believe that Goth subculture should be something one lives full-time

Tomboys and girly-girls: embodied femininities in primary schools

This paper is about how nine to eleven year old children, particularly girls, co-construct tomboy and girly-girl identities as oppositional positions. The paper sits within a theoretical framework in which I understand individual and collective masculinities and femininities as ways of ‘doing man/woman’ or ‘doing boy/girl’ that are constructed within local communities of masculinity and femininity practice. Empirical data come from a one-year study of tomboy identities within two London primary schools. The paper explores the contrasting identities of tomboy and girly-girl, how they are constructed by the children, and how this changes as they approach puberty. The findings suggest that the oppositional construction of these identities makes it harder for girls to take up more flexible femininities, though it is possible to switch between tomboy and girly-girl identities at different times and places

Rape and respectability: ideas about sexual violence and social class

Women on low incomes are disproportionately represented among sexual violence survivors, yet feminist research on this topic has paid very little attention to social class. This article blends recent research on class, gender and sexuality with what we know about sexual violence. It is argued that there is a need to engage with classed distinctions between women in terms of contexts for and experiences of sexual violence, and to look at interactions between pejorative constructions of working-class sexualities and how complainants and defendants are perceived and treated. The classed division between the sexual and the feminine, drawn via the notion of respectability, is applied to these issues. This piece is intended to catalyse further research and debate, and raises a number of questions for future work on sexual violence and social class

Discourse and identity in a corpus of lesbian erotica

This article uses corpus linguistic methodologies to explore representations of lesbian desires and identities in a corpus of lesbian erotica from the 1980s and 1990s. We provide a critical examination of the ways in which “lesbian gender,” power, and desire are represented, (re-)produced, and enacted, often in ways that challenge hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality. By examining word frequencies and collocations, we critically analyze some of the themes, processes, and patterns of representation in the texts. Although rooted in linguistics, we hope this article provides an accessible, interdisciplinary, and timely contribution toward developing understandings of discursive practices surrounding gender and sexuality

Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities

This article examines the tendencies of LGBT intergenerational theater projects. By engaging with ideas of queer time, temporal drag, and the pervasive heteronormative imagery of heritability and inheritance, this article explores the possibility that LGBT intergenerational projects may generate some of the problems they aim to challenge. Through the lens of queer time, the article describes the normativity generated in LGBT intergenerational theater projects as a form of restrictive interpellation. The article explores the temporal complexities at play in such theater productions as The Front Room, a specific LGBT intergenerational theater project performed in the United Kingdom in 2011. The article concludes by noting some ways in which intergenerational theater projects might seek to work through the embodiment of the historical quotidian as a mode of resistance to normativity’s recirculation

On the Sensitivity of Numerical Weather Prediction to Remotely Sensed Marine Surface Wind Data: A Simulation Study

A series of observing system simulation experiments has been performed to assess the potential impact of marine surface wind data on numerical weather prediction. Care was taken to duplicate the spatial coverage and error characteristics of conventional surface, radiosonde, ship, and aircraft reports. These observations, suitably degraded to account for instrument and sampling errors, were used in a conventional analysis-forecast cycle. A series of five 72-hour forecasts were then made by using the analyzed fields as initial conditions. The forecast error growth was found to be similar to that in operational numerical forecasts. Further experiments simulated the time-continuous assimilation of remotely sensed marine surface wind or temperature sounding data in addition to the conventional data. The wind data were fabricated directly for model grid points intercepted by a Seasat-1 scatterometer (SASS) swath and were placed in the lowest active level (945 mbar) of the model. The temperature sounding experiment assimilated error-free data fabricated along actual Nimbus orbits. Forecasts were made from the resulting analysis fields, and the impact of the simulated satellite data was assessed by comparing these forecast errors with those of the control forecasts. When error-free winds were assimilated by using a localized successive correction method (SCM), the impacts in extratropical regions proved to be substantial, especially in lower tropospheric quantities such as surface pressure. In contrast, a less sophisticated assimilation method resulted in negligible impact. The assimilation of error-free sounder data (again by the SCM) gave impacts comparable to the wind data, suggesting that surface wind data alone may be as valuable as temperature soundings for numerical weather prediction. The effects of nominal SASS errors (±2 m/s in magnitude, ±20° in direction) on the impacts derived from wind data were found to be small