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Have women journalists in Israel really integrated into the profession?
Einat Lachover — Tel Aviv University
This study examines the role of gender in the print media industry in Israel from a feminist perspective. The findings, based on a survey of 471 journalists and 47 in-depth interviews, demonstrate the gendered structure of Israeli journalism: (1) Despite the feminization process in the Israeli press, women remain a minority. Furthermore, the feminization trend has slowed down in recent years. (2) There is internal sex segregation (horizontally and vertically). (3) Surprisingly, most female journalists perceive the profession to be egalitarian. Moreover, many attribute whatever inequality they perceive to internal hurdles set up by women themselves.

This study raises the following questions: to what extent have women in the Israeli press gained occupational and economic equality, and how is this related to a world trend.

Feminist Consciousness and the Production of a Contemporary Women's Section
Dustin M. Harp — University of Texas, Austin
Once again in the history of U.S. newspapers a clear border was drawn around news content meant for women when, during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, several U.S. metropolitan daily newspaper editors reintroduced women’s pages to their readers. This re-emergence of women’s sections is especially interesting within a feminist context since it was during the late 1960s and early 1970s, during a particularly active period of feminism, that newspapers first eliminated these gendered sections and started producing lifestyle pages aimed at a general audience. While illuminating how a newspaper staff conceptualizes and constructs a contemporary women’s section, this research demonstrates how a feminist consciousness at times influences an editors work on the section. Through interviews and observation at a Midwestern daily, the research, however, also illustrates how an individual standpoint often becomes overshadowed by organizational concerns and constraints.

Reclassifying “Soft” and “Hard” News – Culture Specific Findings or a Reflection of Gender?
Aliza Lavie — Bar Ilan University
As early as the 1920s, RCA president David Surnoff claimed that of all radio’s tasks, which include the provision of information and national education, entertainment ranks supreme. Several decades later, however, the obliteration of boundaries between entertainment and information was evident. This is also true of radio, which reflects the processes evolving in other media, which, affected as they are by market forces, adopted a profit and competition orientation characteristic of Western mass media as a whole where news and entertainment have become merged. Concurrent with changes in the status of the news – as a ritual, entertainment or the means to satisfy social needs – the Western media experienced a process of feminization. The present study focuses on the contemporary validity of the equation: women = “soft” news; men = “hard” news and the direction of the future development of newsrooms in light of the feminization of the media. In addition, the study examines the question of whether the above dichotomy is affected by gender or is an outcome of the social and cultural factors of change. In this era of obliterated boundaries between news and info-tainment, and between “hard” and “soft” news, a re-categorization of news coverage patterns is warranted.

Towards Understanding the Stunt Girl
Sandra Gabriele — Concordia University
Stunt girls have been understood traditionally as being part of the rise of sensationalism within newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper, instead, considers the stunt girl as a subject position involving a set of practices and ways of writing that risk traditional understandings of femininity and journalism. The risks these women took in transgressing these lines turned their public personas into spectacles, while simultaneously rendering them vulnerable to misunderstanding, scolding and scandals. Using articulation and feminist theory, it seeks to redress conventional approaches that devalue women’s contributions by maintaining divisions between “hard” and “soft” news forms by considering the “whole newspaper” as it was understood and used by readers. The stunt girl wowed her readers with her journalistic exploits that traversed the world and spoke to the changing role of women within the public spaces of late Victorian society. She helped to popularize a new set of journalistic principles that survive today, including personal journalism, investigative practices, and an ongoing dialogue about what the concept of “newsworthiness” meant to women readers.

Structure and Agency in Feminist-Media Interactions
Bernadette Barker-Plummer — University of San Francisco
Feminists have produced fundamental challenges to traditional politics around the world. However, the public communication of these issues remains a key challenge for feminism. In this essay I review recent case studies of feminist-news interactions from around the world, including an empirical study of my own, in order to identify some of the shared structures (and agencies) involved in these interactions. Feminist-news interactions are complex and multi-level and I argue that the contradictory mix of containment and publicity that feminism has experienced in the public sphere is the result of feminists’ uneven success at negotiating different levels of this interaction. Feminists have generally been more successful at negotiating the economic or organizational structures of news – the structures of access – than they have been at countering the discursive rules of news – the structures of representation. Whether this impasse is permanent or negotiable is a critical question for feminist theory and practice.

Judge Judy: Neoliberalism and (In)Justice on Daytime Television
Laurie Ouellette — Queens College, CUNY
Drawing from cultural theory and textual analysis,this paper presents the television program Judge Judy as a technology of everyday citizenship and shows how it attempts to govern the everyday lives of lower-income women in particular. Situating daytime television’s fastest-growing format within a neoliberal context, it argues that Judge Judy’s concern with real women and their seemingly mundane conflicts intersects with the privatization of public life, the dismantling of welfare programs, and the political discourse of "individual choice" and "personal responsibility."

Militarization, Media and the Gendered New World Order: A Case Study of the Burmese Opposition-in-Exile
Lisa B. Brooten — Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Has the post-Cold War emphasis on democracy and human rights contributed to the development of a less militarized world? This paper argues that it has not. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Burmese opposition activists in Thailand, this paper demonstrates how gender operates as the dominant frame through which communications technologies are understood and used. In the Burmese context, conventional understandings of gender have worked together with the global discourses of democracy and human rights to reinforce gender and ethnic inequities, ultimately facilitating the process of militarization. Perhaps the greatest hope for change, however, lies in the fact that women themselves are working to change the practices that have for so long inhibited the process of genuine democratization. It is the work of these women and other marginalized groups around the world to counteract militarized approaches to communication that may ultimately offer us the best hope for the demilitarization and genuine democratization of our interconnected world.

Policing dis-order: Moral panic and pro-ana citizenship
Maria Mastronardi — Universty of Illinois, Urbana
Presents a critical analysis of the moral panic around the \"Pro-Ana\" Internet community, focusing on popular media constructions of the Pro-ana community, eating disordered women, and female adolescence more generally. Argues that representations and narratives of Pro-Ana community rely on commonsense, misogynistic assumptions about female adolescence and that, culturally, the line between “normal” female adolescent and pathologized Pro-Ana is indistinct. As a construct, Pro-Ana offers a scapegoat for reaffirming the collapsing boundary between order and disorder.

The Veil has Fallen: Gender and Media Representations of Islam
Gabeba Baderoon — University of Sheffield and University of Cape Town
Compelling images in international media delineate the connections and fractures that characterize the contemporary world. In this paper I analyse media representations of Islam in South Africa, the US and Britain, examining the recurring figures of the veiled Eastern woman and masked Eastern men. The paper attends particularly to the role of gender in shaping understandings of an Orientalist East, tracing patterns of imagery from the colonial era to their continued impact in the contemporary era. By attending to gender and history, the paper outlines a visual vocabulary through which the East has conventionally been pictured.

The media theorist John Hartley (1996) claims that "journalism is the most important textual system in the world” because, beyond providing information, it leads us to understand the world in particular ways. Significantly, despite the international reach of media organizations, the media still creates a sense of belonging drawn on national lines. Hartley argues that the media provide a "national, political fantasy", and through it, a sense of community. Reading the media of different countries allows one to see who is inside and who is outside of these ‘fantasized’ communities. Gender provides a crucial category and method of analysis of such mediated ‘fantasies’.

Because media representations calibrate gaps and emphases in public debates, they carry enormous power, especially during moments of social stress and conflict. By closely attending to the histories and impact of media imagery, as scholars I hope we may better be able to contribute to urgent current debates about human rights.

Parallel Discourses: Media Constructions of Anorexia and Obesity in the Cases of Tracey Gold and Carnie Wilson
Julie E. Ferris — University of Iowa
Mass media images of gender, beauty and women have been at the heart of many feminist arguments about the need for change in our understanding of gender and the role it plays in our day to day existence. The role of a body, much like the role of a woman, is also negotiated between the pages and airways of our popular culture that precariously favors particular excessive behaviors and norms. A textual analysis of the popular press discourse surrounding two bodies demonstrates specific rhetorical strategies at work in the construction of the "appropriate" cultural body. This paper explores how these two bodies are positioned at the border of cultural intelligibility and how these bodies, acting as discourse themselves, speak to culture and reify their positions on the margins.

Subjectivity and Cocustody Policy
Lynn Comerford — CSU, Hayward
A feminist / postmodernist approach to cocustody policy is undertaken in an effort to examine how such policy turns human beings into subjects and objects. I am interested in how cocustody “experts” use their “knowledge” to discipline, to dominate, and (in Foucauldian terms) turn human beings into "docile bodies." Based on 30 open-ended interviews with coparents in California, United States, I examine how cocustody discourse collides with maternal and paternal discourses and how subjectivity becomes fragmented in new and potentially feminist directions. I find that notions of “mothering” and “fathering” are both disciplined and emancipated by cocustody policies.

Power Play: The Politics of Orgasm in Cyberspace
Elena Bertozzi — Indiana University
This paper argues that the ways in which female orgasm is enacted and represented in media has significant social, cultural and political effects. The experience of orgasm and the representation of orgasm in the mass media are closely related to hierarchies of power and politics. The importance of play in enacting and practicing ways of being powerful is related to the current increase in digital gameplay In cyberspace the link between orgasm, power and play becomes more evident and perhaps more malleable.The possibilities of cyberspace and gameworlds in particular as arenas where women can represent themselves and play in ways that are empowering are discussed. Examples are presented documenting games which perpetuate androcentric representations of female sexuality as well as examples of games which might be interesting to females and which create different models for sex and gender representation in digital environments.

New Women, Deviant Bodies: Unruly Functioning, Diagnosis and the Refeminization of Depression
Paula M. Gardner — Bridgewater State College
Historically, women’s untraditional or gender-disrupting behaviors have been fodder for psychiatric diagnosis. The 19th century hysteria epoch, for example, has been critiqued as a moment of pathologization of mass middle females challenging the gender status quo rather than an actual epidemic of mental disorder. This paper argues that hysteria shares numerous symptoms with other periods in western history where women have been pathologized. It tracks these similarities by deconstructing the "symptoms" ascribed to the different disorders, including neurosis in the 1950’s, personality disorders and post traumatic stress disorder in the 1980s and most recently, depression. Even while psychiatric literature describes depression as a disease that doesn’t discriminate, this study argues that the psychiatric discourse works specifically to dub women’s coping mechanisms and low productivity as dysfunctional and thereby "re-feminizes" depression. By drawing out the similarities among 20th century "female" disorders, the study contends that depression and depression-linked diagnoses have become normalized in the late 20th century. More, this cultural comfort with naming women’s distress as disorder has allowed for new "technologies" of behavioral discipline to arise, namely activities of self-scrutiny, self-diagnosis, an appetite for psychopharmaceutical drugs and self-conducted treatments, and finally, new diagnosis created by mainstream media.

The Effects of Media Consumption on Abortion Attitudes
Larry C. Stephenson — Washington State University
Tien-Tsung Lee — Washington State University
Using data from a national political survey, the present study examined factors predicting attitudes toward abortion, with a focus on the relationship between the type and frequency of media consumption and its effect on stands towards abortion rights. Our findings indicated that religiosity was the strongest predictor, followed by one’s view of women’s equal role in society. The only significant media factors were political talk radio listening and newspaper readership. Implications were discussed.

The Eastern European Woman’s Search for Identity: A Gold Digger or an Independent Spirit?
Elza N. Ibroscheva — Southern Ilinois University, Carbondale
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern European women enthusiastically embraced the radical social and political changes which advocated true equality at home and at the working place for women and men alike. However, the position of Eastern European women in society did not change as expected. On the contrary, the feminization of poverty overwhelmed the female population in Eastern Europe, leaving many women unemployed, devalued and depressed.

This paper argues that the woman of the new Eastern European democracies has asserted a new identity in sharp opposition to the traditionally established image of the Eastern European woman as a caretaker and a heroine-worker conditioned in a highly traditional patriarchal society.

By examining the rhetoric of the lyrical content of contemporary Bulgarian pop folk songs, this paper contends that Eastern European women have overthrown traditional stereotypes of femininity and asserted a new sexualized and aggressive role of independence, rejecting the stereotypes of the submissive, docile woman of the patriarchal society as well as the stereotypes of the asexual, emancipated woman of communist Eastern Europe.

Women Entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan: A Circuit of Culture, A Ring of Hope
Valerie Terry — Institute of International Relations, Republic of Kazakhastan
In this work in progress paper, narratives collected from women business leaders in Uzbekistan are analyzed vis-a-vis the circuit of culture model. These entrepreneurs talk about public relations in terms of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. Their words illustrate how they are navigating borderlands economically as well as culturally.

Balancing tradition and modernity in narratives surrounding contraception use among poorer women in West Bengal, India.
Devalina Mookerjee —Purdue University
This paper investigates how poorer women in West Bengal, India balance the ideas of modernization and tradition in their choices to use birth control. Ideologically, Indian women have traditionally been placed within the context of the home and valued principally as wives and mothers. Children, therefore, are tremendously important for women within this framework.

In contrast, the ideology of the relatively well structured and very large family planning program asks especially poorer women to have fewer children for the good of the family and the nation.

How do poorer, predominantly illiterate women balance these two oppositional ideas in an area that is of such importance in their lives? Qualitative feminist interviewing conducted in government family planning clinics is used to investigate how these women negotiate fertility control decisions with themselves and others, and how they place these decisions in the chronological borderlands between tradition and modernity in a changing world.

Young migrants in the borderlands: femicide in Cd. Juárez and the state discourse and initiatives on female working class, brown citizens in the border.
Martha I. Chew — St. Lawrence University
Leonel Prieto — New Mexico State University
The general objective of this paper is to analyze the contradictory cultural repercussions of the feminization of the labor force in the racialized and gendered socio-economic dynamics that take place in Cd. Juárez . This paper explores the ways in which sexist violence, social structures, and gendered patterns of domination are constructed, disguised, reinforced and disseminated in the official discourse of the neo-liberal state, particularly in regard to the killing of working class, brown young women. We are specifically interested in understanding the struggles of identity politics and representational tensions that occur in the construction of brown working-class young women by the state and different sectors of the border city of Cd. Juárez. This paper focuses on a specific kind violence against working class women in Cd. Juárez and some of the ways in which the State and other social forces have responded to the femicide that is taking place in the border. Using qualitative research methods, this paper explores questions of gender representation and resistance. Theoretical frameworks from cultural studies and feminist theory in addition to foundations provided by communication studies.

Court Appointed Mediation & Child Custody Decisions: Family Regulation or Family Resource?
Lynn Comerford — CSU, Hayward
In this paper, I examine the practice of court-appointed mediation and its impact on parenting behavior in child custody cases. In contested child custody cases, in the state of California, judges often rely on the testimony of court appointed mediators to determine how child custody is settled. This leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of mediators. Child custody mediation, as a coercive state practice, can be problematic and its consequences significant. In my sample of 30 semi-structured interviews with coparents, I found that court appointed mediation, and mediators, can be coercive for some coparents and a welcome resource for others. Often, gender is an important variable.

The book paradox: The feminine Book Clubs, Cultural Consumption Habits and Women Social Imaginary Reconfiguratio
Ana Leticia Gaspar — University of Valle de Atemajac, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México
The objective of this article is to propose an approach to the feminine associations denominated "Book Clubs", as a study object inside two areas of knowledge: cultural consumption and gender investigations. Regarding the first focus, the starting point is the current necessity of understanding the part that this Clubs have as social actors inside the urban ways to communicate and to consume; on the other hand, these associations present characteristics that allow to include their study inside the social movements related with gender and cultural feminism.

Here the theoretical boarding is presented starting from the proposal on production and cultural consumption of the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu, presented in two of its books: The Rules of the Art and The Distinction; as well as the perspective of Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of the Reality. The empiric data is based on the observation carried out in several “Book Clubs” in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, specifically one of the oldest: the Rosario Castellanos, during a three year period.

Inside these groupings of “rich women” it has been possible to observe a dynamic that presents two simultaneous processes: on one hand, they reproduce the habits induced by a social system that has transformed them in promoters of an elitist cultural consumption; on the other hand, the group interaction as well the reading is provoking changes in their perception towards the women world, therefore they are becoming aware of their oppressed situation.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session: The Raced Female Body in Mass Culture
Participants:
1. Jane Rhodes — U of California at San Diego (Chair)/i>
2. Anna Everett — University of California, Santa Barbara (Respondent)
3. Ruby C. Tapia — Ohio State University
4. Julietta Hua — University of California, San Diego
5. Monika N. Gosin — University of California, San Diego

The mantra of gender, race and class has become a common standpoint through which to analyze the processes of communication and the workings of mass culture. Nevertheless, most scholarship that considers gender and mass culture examine the representations or reception of white female subjects, or homogenize women into a raceless whole. This panel seeks to address new ways of carrying out this research through an explicitly Ethnic Studies framework. In particular, the papers in this session all take for granted three propositions: 1) that Western society is organized around racial hierarchies; 2) that mass culture plays a crucial role in constructing the racial categories that serve and enforce these hierarchies; and 3) that the process of racialization is always gendered. In addition, the raced and gendered subject—whether it is a white male or a Japanese woman—is constantly reconfigured depending on the historical, social and political context. The raced female body is a particularly contested site; gender conventions make femininity the centerpiece of Western eroticism, but women of color pose contradictory impulses. They are both desired and repulsed, appropriated as sexual objects and rendered invisible, imitated and reviled. Borrowing from Eric Lott, the raced female body suffers from the dual impossibilities of “love and theft.” In the late twentieth century, women of color claimed some of the principles of modern feminism in their efforts to define themselves and control their representations—wresting their image from the classic stereotypes of the black mammy, hot-blooded Latina, and Asian “dragon-lady.” Despite their growing influence in mass culture, however, these representations remain resilient, often reappearing in novel forms. The papers presented on this panel address the intersections of image, identity, history, and media, methodological and theoretical approaches that can enrich communication studies.

The session will begin with an overview by the Chair, which will offer a critique of research that uses race and gender as independent variables rather than constitutive elements of larger systems of subordination and discrimination. This brief commentary will also consider what can be learned from scholars in Ethnic Studies, who employ a comparative and relational approach to understanding race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in a global framework. Each of the panelists will present an extended discussion of a discrete research project rooted in this acknowledgement of the interdependence of race and gender. One presentation discusses the way the figure of the Japanese Geisha has reemerged as a symbol in popular culture, from literature to film and television. Another presentation considers the Latina megastar Jennifer Lopez, and the importance of her physical presence as a trope of the maternal figure. The third paper looks at how African American women struggle with the symbolic significance of black hair, and the role of mass media in presenting idealized representations of black female beauty. Each author addresses the importance of the body, demonstrating the intractability of the visible and the imagined, the socially constructed and the material. The commenter is a scholar with expertise in films studies, visual culture, and African American studies. Following her assessment, the session will encourage audience response and discussion.

Representations of Muslim women and the veil: questions of image and voice
Myra Macdonald — University of Sunderland, UK
This work-in-progress paper explores the visual construction in Western media representations of the veiled Muslim woman. It especially investigates these images’ denial of voice, and their universalizing abnegation of the ambivalent, borderland position of many Muslim women both in the diaspora and in countries such as Iran caught between Western and Islamic values. Arguing that the image of the silent and silenced veiled woman has been used to derogate Islam as a pre-modern and barbaric religion, it also acknowledges the possibility of desire and fantasy evoked by this figure in Western eyes. Through an examination of instances when veiled Muslim women have, exceptionally, been granted speaking rights in media representations, the paper examines the complexity and ambivalence of the border territory that is denied expression in the dominant visual trope.

What is Theory? Interpreting Spivak, Postcolonial and Indigenous Theory
Shakuntala Rao — SUNY
The August 2002 issue of Communication Theory (an ICA journal) recognizes the importance and relevance of the term 'Postcolonial' in contemporary analysis of culture and politics. A raging definitional debate in various disciplines about Postcolonial theory and the term Postcolonial has continued for some time. Shome and Hegde's introductory article in Communication Theory outlines the possible connections between Postcolonial and Communication theory. In such an effort, they interview Gayatri Spivak as a prominent Postcolonial and feminist thinker whose scholarship they write, "...has significantly shaped the course of postcolonial thinking and has had profound impact on conceptualizing issues of culture, identity, communication, and transnationalism." In this paper, I hope to provide a brief critique of Spivak. I also provide an outline of what Poonam Pillai and others have termed as "Indigenous theory" and its relevance to Postcolonial theory, an area of study marginalized both by Spivak and others. At the core of this critique is the unspoken assumption of "West as Theory, East as Evidence." My primary aim is to examine the ways in which metropolitan and Postcolonial theories (such as Spivak's), which apparently critique colonialism and imperialism, themselves participate in perpetuating Western cultural imperialism.

The Troubled Position of the Subaltern Woman in Western discourses, and Creating a 'Third Space' within Global Feminist Discourse
Rashmi Luthra — University of Michigan
The representation of subaltern women or women of the South, women in positions of marginality in both the industrialized and periphery countries, has been troubled in a variety of Western discourses, including Western feminist discourses. This paper is an attempt to explore to what extent distinctly global feminist discourses have attempted to create an alternative "third space" allowing for the articulation of the visions and voices of subaltern women, to what extent global feminism is informed and shaped by this third space. The paper begins by charting the troubled position of subaltern women in a variety of Western discourses, including Western feminist discourses. It then proceeds to examine ways in which global feminisms are attempting to articulate a "third space" from which subaltern women might speak and shape the ideology and practices of the global feminist movement itself.

Beautiful and Bad Women: Media Feminism and The Politics of Its Construction in Taiwan
Fangchih I Yang —National Dong Hwa University
This paper uses the image of the new "feminist" - the beautiful-and-bad woman - to explore how feminism gets defined in popular media in Taiwan and the power relationships involved in this construction of this particular version of feminism, hence, feminist identity. My argument is, the history of popular feminism in Taiwan adheres to two contradictory stories: beautiful-and-bad, difference and sameness. These two seemingly contradictory rhetorical strategies coexist in order to construct a global female subject for capital production and consumption. In constructing this new feminist subject, Western second-wave feminism is assigned to the past, while American postfeminism is designated as ¡§our¡¨ feminism. This process of translation of Western feminism makes clear the ideology of heterosexuality and consumerism that structure the inclusion and exclusion of heterogeneous feminist events. This selective appropriation of Western feminism has to be explained within the context of media production, Taiwanese women’s movements, and mostly, neocolonialism.

The process of developmental empowerment in Charmed: Implications of a television narrative on third-wave feminism, witchcraft, and disempowerment
Michaela D.E. Meyer — Ohio University
This study exposes the representation of developmental empowerment in Charmed and accesses how audiences synthesize this representation as relevant to their own experience. To do so, the study employs a dual methodology, performing a narrative reading and investigating audiences’ responses to Charmed. The process of developmental empowerment, defined as empowerment based on cumulative knowledge and experience, is linked to third-wave feminist discourse. Audience responses recognized this process of empowerment, but also identified two key disempowering elements in the text that surface as consequences of empowerment. Ultimately, implications of the intersection of empowerment, disempowerment, third-wave feminism and witchcraft are explored.

Representations of Race and Sexuality on Feminist Web Sites
Cindy L. Royal — University of Texas, Austin
Second-wave feminist theorists have been criticized for lack of diversity and inclusiveness, and a general disregard for the social ramifications of location and experience. Such criticism has fostered the post-modern environment in which one’s experience impacts her position in society. This paper analyzes theories of multiracial feminism and then applies these perspectives to representations on three feminist Web sites: Feminist.com, the Ms. Magazine site (msmagazine.com), and the National Organization of Women site (now.org).

Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France
Michela Ardizzoni — Indiana University
Much of the discussion that surrounded the question of the veil in France, following the 1989 in-famous ‘affaire du foulard”, has been couched in terms of restricting binaries: secularism-Islam; Us-Them; East-West. There have been few attempts to look at the resurgence of the veil among Muslim schoolgirls in French public schools outside of the politicized discourse of ‘Islam is reversing the colonizing process’. There has been only sporadic reflection on the significance of dress, and other bodily markers, in the contestation and re-negotiation of group identities within conflicting cultural spaces. Rather, the predominant discourse, which is consistent with the Orientalist mystique of the Orient as the ‘Other’, has revolved around the threat Islam and its dress code pose to the cultural integrity of French society.

The underlying premise behind such a parochial interpretation is the notion of identity as a bounded, already completed entity. This is mainly due to the limiting political discourse that has surrounded the veil affair ever since it was made public. Following Stuart Hall’s argument that identities are contextual and relational positionings which are never fixed but always ‘in process’, I argue that the young women’s decision to wear the veil should not be viewed, exclusively, as a religious statement with an intent to subvert the status quo in French society. Dress is an important marker of difference, and highlighting one’s religious, cultural, or social difference is expected in a context of marginalization and racism. In this paper, I will probe the cultural specifics as well as the political complexities that form the background of this affair.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session:
Unsettling Feminist Borderlands: The Afghan 'Woman Question'
(Jointly Sponsored with Admin)
Participant(s):
1. Deepa Kumar — Wake Forest University
2. Lisa M. McLaughlin — Miami University of Ohio
3. Sonali Kolhatkar — Afghan Women's Mission and KPFK-Los Angeles
Chandra Mohanty has noted that, "It is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery, in its boundedness, that determines the center" (Third World Feminism and the Politics of Feminism, 1991, pp. 73-74). In recent times, in which Afghan women have become central in Western political discourse surrounding the creation of civil society in a "new Afghanistan," we see a continuation of an ideological and material project in which Western "voices of civilization" achieve self-representation both through the discursive construction of un- or less-civilized others and the myth of having saved or liberated these others. The participants on this panel maintain that Afghan women have been displaced within the discourses and projects of neocolonial interests. This panel raises critical questions in relation to the notion of feminist borderlands by offering insights into the implicit and explicit complicities between mainstream, conservative interests and the progressive agenda that is often thought to shield feminist politics from the charge of neocolonialism. In this sense, the panel is intended to interrogate the ways in which the central status of Western humanism and Western feminism is reconstituted against the Afghan borderlands.

Feminist Scholarship Division Panel Session:
Women and Online Space: How the World Wide Web Creates Borders between the Personal and Political
Participant(s):
1. Nancy Worthington — Quinnipiac University
2. Judi L. Hetrick — Miami University of Ohio
3. Jane R. Ballinger — California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
4. Merrill C. Morris — Georgia State University
5. B. Christine Shea — Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo (Chair)
Feminist theorists have warned about the borders technology can shore up between groups: borders between genders, classes, ethnicities, ages. At the same time, the liberating potential of communication technology has transcended – or appeared to transcend – these same borders. The papers on this panel examine such claims about the Internet’s ability to open spaces and knock down walls for women and other groups. Can the Internet help break down borders? In opening up the borderlands, has mediated communication online also colonized the borderlands? The papers in this panel investigate gender boundaries online, boundaries that go beyond simple familiarity with technology. In a technologically literate time and place, where women of all ages are becoming familiar with communicating by computer, how does the hegemony of gender operate? Instead of galvanizing support for structural change, has the Internet created a space for women and girls that isolates them rather than empowers them? In a textual analysis of two popular women’s web magazines, one panelist looks at the way these online publications discuss women’s work, finding that their approach is generally postfeminist; that is, they suggest that the experience of white middle-class straight women in the world of work can be generalized to all women, ignoring the concerns of poor and working-class women. Another panelist explores a growing phenomenon of women’s videos going online. While men traditionally shot home movies, the videotape age has put cameras into the hands of women. The resulting cultural documents capture not just images of family life, but also document important community events through the eyes of community members themselves. These videos were not widely seen before the web, but are now being put online. This research looks into how gender dynamics factor in when such videos go public. Girl’s web sites are the focus of another paper, which analyzes different messages put out by mass media sites popular with pre-teen girls vs. sites created specifically to empower girls. How are the boundaries set for these girls about what it means to be an adult woman? Finally, another panelist examines gender politics involved in blogging, or web logging, the growing movement where people write daily in an online journal. Analyzing the most popular men’s and women’s blogs, this researcher looks at the subjects men and women write about, finding that popular male bloggers tend to be concerned with political issues, while popular female bloggers often write about personal issues.