Who was Andrea? Writing Oneself as a Feminist Icon

This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin’s autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin’s major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin’s name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others’ construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin’s world-view and highlights how Dworkin’s own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.

Re-Visiting Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in 1893 in Harrow and died in Dorset in 1978. Her writing career was both productive and diverse, spanning poems, short stories, novels, music reviews, a biography, translations of Proust, and a guide to Somerset. But this list, impressive as it is, does not do justice to the idiosyncrasy and heterogeneity of her work. While she is well known mostly for the seven novels she published, those works are all radically different in style and content. Indeed, Townsend Warner's singularity has, it could be argued, made it difficult to place her in the various fields and sub-fields of 20th-century literary studies. She shares as many similarities as differences with the high modernists who dominated the literary landscape of the interwar period. Likewise she fits, yet also resists, the more recent formulations of intermodernist and middlebrow scholarship that have attempted to interrogate and expand the horizons of mid-20th century literature.

Enabling Others in Social Work: Reflexivity and the Theory of Social Domains

This paper sets out a framework to structure reflexivity in social work practice. Based on the thinking of the sociologist, Derek Layder, it comprises five domains that impact on the individual and social life, namely: (i) psycho-biography – referring to a person’s unique experience throughout the life-course; (ii) situated activity – highlighting the impact of every day social interaction; (iii) social settings – addressing the role of organizations in social life; (iv) culture – covering the influence of attitudes, beliefs, tastes and ideas on symbolic meaning; and (v) politico-economy – alluding to the ramifications of political and economic forces on people’s lives. It is contended that power circulates throughout each domain as an enabling and constraining force. The paper then outlines a process for using the reflexive framework in ‘enabling’ activities such as practice learning, supervision, mentoring and coaching. By applying the framework in these contexts, it is argued that social workers can reflect critically on their role and develop emancipatory forms of practice.

Religious Geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine

The introduction of Protestantism into the Middle East by American missionaries in the nineteenth century met with limited success while the responses and internalizations of local converts proved incredibly diverse. The two resultant theological descendants are Palestinian Christian Zionists and Palestinian Liberation Theologists. The article provides a short history of these two movements and highlights influential voices through interviews and media analysis. This article argues that hybrid religious identifications with nation and place has transcended, in some cases, political struggle for territory.

John Maxwell

Biography of General Sir John Maxwell

Hanna, John Connor (1871-1947)

Profile and biography entry of John Connor Hanna, early film censor

Wilkinson, Joseph Brooke (1870–1948)

Profile and biographical entry of Joseph Brooke Wilkinson, early film Censor

Beyond Typologies: Foregrounding Meaning and Motive in Domestic Violence Perpetration

Within the study of domestic violence typological approaches have gained prominence in part as a response to the wider feminist canon that presumes perpetrators are all simply motivated by male power. In this article we use a single case study to query the presumption inherent in the most commonly used typological approaches that offender motivations remain largely static overtime and can be read off easily from self-reports or official records. We conclude by pointing to the need, both for academics and practitioners, to engage interpretively with the specific meanings acts of violence hold for domestic violence perpetrators - informed as they can be by sexist values, perceptions of entitlement and a specific history of conflict, suspicion or grievance – that can change who they are and the way they behave in the aftermath of assaults and breakups, as the foreground of crime is reincorporated into a background narrative.