Since there are so few female board members of public companies in the UK, when one takes maternity leave, it is news. Information about the leave of Marks & Spencer executive, Wade-Gery has been in the public domain because the London Stock Exchange wished to announce her absence. The statement made is reported as in accordance with Stock Exchange rules about any extended absences of members of senior management in public companies. I am compelled to wonder though whether it would have made the front page of so many newspapers had Wade-Gery been of a different age. The fact that she is 50 was reported in all reports I could find (with the exception of Reuters) and in most of the headlines; generally along the lines of ‘M&S chief, 50, to take maternity leave’. This invited substantial editorial inches to the subject of whether 50 is a good age to become a mother or whether Wade-Gery is to be applauded for taking maternity leave. When British Prime Minister, Cameron, took paternity leave in 2010 (from running the country, not the department of a retail business) I could find no reports that referred to his age or whether it was a good age to become a father. This may say more about how we value money over transitional illusions of power than it does about gender. It seems so tiresomely trivial but to misquote Robert Frost, then 48, – ‘miles to go before we sleep’.
In this issue, in Taymor’s tempest, Turner contextualises the dismissal of Julie Taymor as writer-director of stage musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark subsequent to the disappointing reviews of her cinematic adaptation of The Tempest. Through her depictions of leadership, Taymor has challenged masculinist assumptions, creating aesthetic products at odds with the hegemonic masculinity dominating the cultural marketplace. The contextual dynamics shaping the interplay between gender and leadership is examined as the backdrop to how Taymor’s leadership was undermined by the gender regimes, of Hollywood, Broadway and the music industry.
In A queer analysis of HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, Burns and Veri examine the ways that assumptions of heterosexuality and traditional gender roles are challenged, and alternative performances presented in Flight of the Conchords. The queering of established roles here parodies heteronormative performance and shows possibilities for transcending binary norms. In Constituting Compulsory Monogamy, Willey explores how normative femininity functions to code monogamy and non-monogamy as desirable and undesirable, respectively. The paper uses a discussion of the film, Two Girls and a Guy, to unpack cultural investments in coupling.
In Constituting gender, locating the body, Othman examines the corporeal and its relation to gender. Previous approaches to body and gender posit these as distinct suggesting either the autonomy of the body or the body as a mark of culture. Through examination of texts selected from key collections, this paper aims to develop a critical framework for reading images of the gendered body. Returning to Butler’s ideas of the body as a discursive construct, and Foucault’s theory of power relations in formulating the idea of the body, the author proposes the body as an open text rather than enforcing a resolution that either privileges the body as autonomous or as purely textual and devoid of its flesh.
In How do college students talk about sexual assault, Romero-Sánchez and Megías attempt to capture the complexity of young persons’ perceptions of non-consensual sexual encounters through the use of single-gender focus groups. In relation to sexual assault, women referred to miscommunication and socio-cultural factors, whereas men suggested the offender’s personality or psychological disorder as causative.
In Restoring femininity through religious symbols after breast cancer, Samson, Jansen and Notermans research a Polish breast cancer group’s alternative models of femininity. It is argued that, through the use of religious symbols and practices, opposing and at times seemingly conflicting models of femininity are combined and reconciled, but also renegotiated with other social actors.
In Can the men’s movement attract young men, Serradell, Santa Cruz and Mondejar conducted a case study with the Spanish Men in Dialogue association (MiD). MiD has developed a new approach to masculinity by incorporating into its discourse issues that young people face in their everyday lives; desire, friendship, solidarity and equality – messages evaluated as more attractive to young heterosexual males.
This is our last of six issues in 2015 and though the wait for authors from acceptance to hard-copy publication has been significantly reduced by the availability of six issues this year, we will continue with six issues per year to reduce it further.
Editor-in-Chief, JGS