I want to raise some questions in this essay about the impoverished way debates on the relation among gender, religion, and human rights are often framed. I approach this issue as an anthropologist who comes from a discipline that, whatever its flaws, thinks hard about social and cultural processes and what it is to be human; I also approach it as someone who has spent her academic life thinking about and studying the Muslim Middle East, a region that carries a heavy symbolic load in the Western imagination with respect to the relation between religion and women's rights.

The known biography of the early african american writer and lecturer Maria W. Stewart (1803–79) is as brief as it is fascinating. After the childhood loss of her parents, she married James W. Stewart, a Boston shipping agent, in 1826. The Stewarts had close ties with the black radical David Walker, whose fiery 1829 Appeal kindled fears of slave rebellion and was in its third edition when Walker died under suspicious circumstances in August 1830. After James Stewart's own untimely death, in December 1829, his executors swindled Maria Stewart out of her inheritance, and she turned to the church and to writing and lecturing. Revising Walker's combination of jeremiad and Enlightenment-influenced political argument to reflect her own sense of faith, racism and racial uplift, and gender politics, Stewart became one of the first American women to address “promiscuous” audiences. She published a series of probing meditations as well as a set of her lectures—texts still startling for their power and bluntness—in pamphlets and, later, as Productions of Mrs, Maria Stewart (1835).

The sharp division, not to say chaos, of opinion on whether the native English suffix -dom is dead or is active and freely available for forming nouns is illustrated by the following thirteen representative views, all but one of which are of the twentieth century.

In a Compelling Reading of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, Bhekizizwe Peterson Remarks on the Work's Inscription of multiple imagined readers with different investments in the narrative (79). Quoting from Jean-Paul Sartre's reflections on the intricacies of addressing fractured, and sometimes future, publics, Peterson writes:

[T]he works of writers who find themselves on the “margin of the privileged class” contain a “double simultaneous postulation,” a consequence of the “fracture” in the “actual public” in which their art is produced and consumed. Because the “real public” consists largely of the conservative forces that compose the dominant class and ideology, the marginal writer is compelled to address “the progressive forces, or the virtual public” even if “the oppressed classes have neither the leisure nor the taste for reading.” In engaging the future and its virtual public—“an emptiness to be filled in, an aspiration”—the writing exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step by step to the infinite. (81)

On the evening of 13 May 1921 André Gide spent an hour with Marcel Proust, apparently for the first time in several years. For the past four days Proust had sent a car and chauffeur to fetch Gide every evening. Finally on the night when the latter could come, the invalid who had not been up in some time, had dressed to go out. The meeting took place in the little salon at 44, rue Hamelin, with its hideous Barbedienne bronze on the mantel and the Jacques Blanche portrait of the foppish young Marcel on the next wall. To one the atmosphere seemed stifling, but the other, having just left a still warmer room, was shivering.

Readers of Shelley's poetry must regret the lack of a biography of the poet by his gifted second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. More keenly than any other of those among whom his life was lived, she apprehended the presence of the “divine fire” in his work. For it she endured public ignominy, poverty, exile, and more—the occasional wavering of his affections toward her—with unexampled patience. For it she set aside her own literary aspirations, themselves neither slight nor groundless, until that blow which stilled forever the voice of her beloved numbed also her genius and left her desolate. Afterwards, when that which the sea gave up had vanished in mist or been resolved to dust on the sands of Spezzia, and when that dust had been laid away near the pyramid of Caius Cestius at Rome, there remained the memory of him to be cherished, and his fame to be kept pure to succeeding ages.

The american “international novel” derives its importance as a genre from a few outstanding practitioners—from the early Howells, above all from James and Edith Wharton. To say this is of course to suggest a definition which fits novels like A Foregone Conclusion, or The Ambassadors, or Madame de Treymes, the kind of definition Professor Cargill proposed recently in an article claiming the title of “The First International Novel” for James's The American. In such novels the conflict between different sets of manners and mores, “the mixture of manners,” as James called it in the preface to “Lady Barbarina,” is essential. Usually it leads to illumination, an illumination sometimes but not always shared by the hero. That depends on his intelligence and character.

Critics generally have assumed that the millennial fulfillment Shelley's masterpiece dramatizes takes its origin from the hero's moral recognition and repentence at the opening of the play. Apparent shortcomings in Shelley's dramatization of that realization suggest, however, that the traditional view is an oversimplification. Instead of viewing Prometheus' change of heart as the determining cause of universal regeneration, we can better see it as the first manifestation of a greater change with which the hero sympathizes but that nevertheless exists beyond him and his control, the power of universal Necessity. The distinction, although difficult, is crucial to the metaphysical subtlety of the drama and of Shelley's insight into the tenuousness of humankind's existential situation. Despite the frequent contention that Shelley rejected the doctrine of Necessity early in his career, Prometheus Unbound evolves directly from the poet's long and unresolved deliberation on the rival claims of free will and determinism in human affairs.

It is generally known that the timely discovery in Paris of specimens of Japanese color-prints and watercolor painting in the late sixties had an immediate influence on the French Impressionist painters. However, it is not always noted that the writers who supported this school of painting: Baudelaire and Zola, Manet's special friends; the Goncourt brothers who admired Degas; Clemenceau and Théodore Duret, knew certain aspects of Japanese art, and were collectors of curios. Japanese stories and legends entered Europe at about the same time as the color-prints, descriptions of Japanese life are numerous in the magazines of the period. The first poem in French about Japan appears to be this sonnet by Catulle Mendès, which he dates back in his Œuvres complètes to the volume Philoméla (1863).

The rhetoric and the models of social process that inform much of the work of new historicists and cultural materialists in the field of English Renaissance studies are governed by a subversion-containment binarism. While conceptualizations of the operations of power based on this binarism (and its underlying Foucauldian vocabulary) have generated important insights, it may prove useful to reconceive conflict as negotiation, exchange, and accommodation. The Elizabethan English constable, representing a flexible deployment of power, offers us an alternative to repressive masters and subversive peasants. His role in Shakespearean drama and his characteristic malapropisms suggest that aristocrats and common folk were together enmeshed in what Anthony Giddens calls a “dialectic of control”.

Focusing on William Wells Brown's one published play. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1858), I address Brown's decision to supplement his antislavery lectures with dramatic readings of original plays. In this effort to challenge the terms of a representative identity as a black antislavery lecturer, Brown presented a conception of social life grounded in what I term multiply contingent identity. By this formulation, one's social identity is always contingent and is always in danger of being undermined as one's performance of selfhood awaits verifying responses in the form of reciprocal performances in the field of social relations. In The Escape, Brown turned his own performance of identity on the antislavery lecture circuit into a commentary on performance itself, especially on performances both shaped and veiled by the ideology of race. In this way. Brown attempted to reposition white northern antislavery sentiment, reconstructing whiteness by emphasizing its contingent relation to a reconfigured vision of African American identity.

A discussion of the significance of the letters AOI in the Chanson de Roland should properly begin perhaps with a description of the appearance of these letters in the Bodleian manuscript, Digby 23, of Oxford, the only manuscript in which they occur. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of determining with certainty whether these mysterious letters were invariably written by the hand (or hands) responsible for copying the text of the poem. Sometimes no differences of transcription can be perceived between a line of the poem and the AOI that accompanies it. Occasionally, however, slight variations in the forms of the letters, in the alignment, in the color of the ink, or in the thickness of the strokes would seem to indicate that the AOI was written some time after the verse beside which it stands had been penned. In the latter case, it may be that the scribe waited only until he had copied a whole page—or several pages—of text before adding the letters; it may be, on the contrary, that he waited longer, or that some other person interested in the interpretation of the poem put them there. Certain it is, at any event, that the letters occur at variable intervals: some pages are without them, some present but a single instance, others contain a relatively large number of examples.

What is the location of Jewish identity? Cultural studies has provoked reexaminations of many long-standing tropes of ethnic and religious identity, including that of exile. Such inquiries have potentially explosive consequences for the already vexed notion of Jewish identity, especially in the context of an American experience. This essay means to trouble the relation between Jewish identity and the problematic marker of exile, within the contexts of cultural and postcolonial theory, drawing on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, including Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Boyarín, and Edward Said. This analysis allows for a sustained consideration of a diasporic poetics—an alternative aesthetic model for imagining community and the attendant terms of belonging. The experimental Yiddish-English bilingual verse of the contemporary poet Irena Klepfisz serves as a paradigmatic example of such a vision that challenges the familiar opposition between home and exile. Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a by-product of the Diaspora, is central to her inquiries into the relation between individual and collective identities and into the role gender plays in the construction of such entities.

Between the credit crunch and the greek debt crisis, the cohead of emea global finance kindly found time to walk me through the fixed-income trading floor of Barclays Capital. I noted no vestige of bull pen or bear pit in what seemed a high-end call center, but mainly I listened. At one point, in relation to derivatives trading, my guide spoke of “real money,” “less real money,” and “barely real money.” Perhaps prompted by the economic historian Robert Brenner's assurance that “the real economy” retains links to manufacture (1), I asked what made money real. The ensuing rebuke, graciously delivered, continues to give pause: “You sound like my father.” He had a point: given that I am a child of Britain's long postwar recovery through manufacture (there was no economic miracle here), might not my allegiance to a labor theory of value in matters literary be no more than an archaic, conditioned response? Karl Marx and Frederick Engels define language as “practical consciousness” made from “agitated layers of air” (51) and acting on a reality whose elements it renders inseparable from its processes. Their definition, in its subsumption of the intellectual in the laborious, might have been made for the academic son of a printer.

Critical comment on the Nun's Priest's Tale often seems to be of two sorts. One is a straightforward response to the plain fact that the tale is funny. The other is a response to the somewhat less obvious fact that the tale is also serious, or at least that it makes a statement worthy of serious consideration. The second sort of comment may find the seriousness of the poem in an allegorical reading and it often seems a trifle defensive, as if written with an anxious or reproving eye on Matthew Arnold. However, even if one feels, as I do, that this defensiveness is a critical disadvantage, reluctance to read the poem as more than a simple joke would be equally disadvantageous. To identify Chauntecleer with Adam seems as mistaken as to take what looks like a fabular Moralitas for the final statement of the poem's import.

Chaucer's Wife of Bath longs to counter the assertion of antifeminist satire that women's authority over men is noxious and undeserved. At first it seems that for her tale she chooses romance as the genre that can imagine a worthy sovereignty of secular women, yet she undermines romantic elevation by frequently returning to satiric stances. The generic mixing in her tale signals that romance is inadequate to her argument and indeed that no conventional discourse sustains women's sovereignty. Alison attempts to reach beyond the discourses available to her by destabilizing gender, genre, and gentillesse in her narration, intimating that these categories are flexible and open to new meanings.

During my ten years teaching college classes and directing eight plays at framingham women's prison in massachusetts, I was always at odds with institutionally funded education programs behind bars. While I chose plays and ran discussions to expand thinking (The Merchant of Venice, Lysistrata, The Taming of the Shrew, Simply Maria, and Waiting for Lefty, to name a few) the unspoken aim of the education department was to reform the women—that is, to enlighten them on what society says is the “best” way to be, to teach socially accepted behavior as an antidote to crime.

What it is to be gendered remains a disputed topic in feminist philosophy, not to mention in the quotidian struggle over gender categories as they are lived and questioned outside the academy. In this paper I want to explore what contemporary work in analytic feminist philosophy can tell us about how the “categories we live by,” or the categories that organize our social lives and constitute our identities, can sometimes render life unlivable because of their restrictive or oppressive effects (Kapusta; Ásta Sveinsdóttir, “Metaphysics”; Butler, Undoing 4 and Notes). The phrase “categories we die for” captures this ambiguity. On the one hand, many of us have died, and continue to, for gender categories that we couldn't, or refused to, live up to. Think of the violence done in the name of normative and regulatory gender ideals to gender nonconformists—those who do not find a place in gender binarism (“man/woman”) or sexual dimorphism (“male/female”). Queer populations continue to be vulnerable to marginalization, pathologization, and aggression for not doing their gender, sex, or sexuality “correctly” (i.e., heteronormatively or cisnormatively). In this sense, social categories and norms can ruin lives, and we ought to argue against their restrictive regulation. On the other hand, we are also willing to stand behind, defend, and even sacrifice ourselves for gender categories that promise to make life more livable, flexible, and sustainable for those we cherish (Kapusta; Butler, Undoing). When we fight for the recognition of categories like “genderqueer,” “trans∗,” and “agender” we seem to be saying that these are categories worth dying for (a further issue, we will see, is whether binary gender categories like “man” and “woman” per se are worth dying for, or whether the effort to make these existing categories more inclusive is). The contemporary struggle to expand the compass of gender terms and concepts, to expand the sense of the livable, seeks to make categories more inclusive. When we mobilize for trans∗ inclusiveness, gender variance, intersex visibility, and more, we are fighting for categories to be protected, in law and in life. So, to speak of “categories we are dying for,” as I will, implies both a punitive sense (“categories due to which many of us die”) and a positive sense (“categories worth dying for”). Depending on their uses and effects, gender categories can make or break one's life.

A recent wave of commentary on Sophocles's Antigone by critics from Judith Butler to Bracha Ettinger to Simon Goldhill has begun to emerge from the shadow of two paradigmatic interpretations: Lacan's reading of the title character in splendid structural isolation and Hegel's dialectical opposition of familial and political spheres. Even the newer criticism, however, continues the critical elision of Antigone's siblings (particularly her sister, Ismene) and of her relationship to them. This oversight is emblematic of the problematic omission of the sibling from theoretical discourses in general. The neglected sibling is a model that allows us to move beyond both self-other dualisms and the mother-child dyad, which form the only grounds for intersubjectivity in contemporary debates. Sibling logic recognizes the subject as embedded in a transsubjective network of partial others, whose subjectivities are nonetheless partially, though differentially, shared. This article thereby provides a new approach to poststructuralist debates on subjectivity and the political.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis has been embraced by critics and popular audiences alike as an accessible intercultural memoir-in-comics that challenges predominant Western stereotypes about Iran through the universality of its first-person narrator. But the text's global legibility goes beyond the familiarity of Satrapi's graphic avatar. In examining the surprising factors on which the text's globalism depends, I look closely at one of Persepolis's diverse inter-texts—the Persian miniature painting—and situate Satrapi in both Parisian bandes dessinées and Iranian diasporic artistic contexts to argue that the work's concurrent production of local, national, and global scales is inseparable from its connection to several genres and across several media, engaging its readers through multiple modes of perception. Persepolis draws on a global history of graphics as dissent by challenging preconceived notions about comics as a mass culture form, memoirs as limited confessionals, and Iranian women as silenced victims of an oppressive fundamentalist state. The global accessibility of this graphic novel exists not despite but because of porous categories of genre and culture, which are at once integral to its narrative structure and secondary to the aesthetic of protest that it ultimately embraces.