Laurie Jeanne Shrage

Laurie Shrage attributes much of the long-standing controversy about abortion to Roe v. Wade and to the Supreme Court's controversial regulatory scheme in that 1973 decision. Shrage explores the origins of that scheme but argues for an alternate scheme - therapeutic abortions shorter than six months can protect women's interests and advance important public interests, but that reproductive rights campaigns should also focus on the social and economic conditions that prevent women having access to the abortion services they need. Including over 40 illustrations of pro-life and pro-choice advertisements to demonstrate the nature of the debate, this timely and provocative work will appeal to feminists in a wide range of fields including philosophy, political science, women's studies, communication, and public policy.

This paper considers some problems with text-centered psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches to film that have dominated feminist film criticism, and develops an alternative contextual approach. I claim that a contextual approach should explore the interaction of film texts with viewers' culturally formed sensibilities and should attempt to render visible the plurality of meaning in art. I argue that the latter approach will allow us to see the virtues of some classical Hollywood films that the former approach has overlooked, and I demonstrate this thesis with an analysis of the film Christopher Strong.

I shall forgive the white South much in its final judgment day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive its fighting for a well-lost cause, and for remembering that struggle with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called “pride of race,” the passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust. The assumption that one can privilege gender, in advance, as a category, setting the terms of inclusion without fully considering those for whom gender alone fails to capture the multiplicity of experience, is itself an Orientalist move