Uniting the perspective of narrative psychology with feminist and narrative criminology, we analyzed interviews with 58 formerly incarcerated women. We identified four distinct ontologies of blame that the women used to characterize the events, actors, and circumstances that resulted in their incarceration. We argue that these four ontologies of blame-personal responsibility, socioeconomic exclusion, relational caregiving associations, and compromised decision-making-each derive from the dominant U.S. cultural value of accountability that accords great social, moral, and personal weight to accepting responsibility for, and expressing willingness to endure the consequences of, wrongdoing. Our findings suggest that academics and therapeutic practitioners could assist the formerly incarcerated women with whom they work by encouraging a critique of dominant cultural values; by expanding accountability from the individual to the community; by situating accountability in past, present, and future contexts; and by facilitating ontologies of security.
Over the past decade clever marketing and wider access to the internet has led to the exponential growth of ‘mail-order’ marriage industries, vastly increasing the number of women who migrate for marriage using these commercial services. Taken within the context of global predatory capitalism, such phenomenon is of interest in that it appears to convene in its dynamics the intersecting operation of gender and class inequality, sexism, racism, and colonialism that, far from diminishing, seems only to further intensify with the increase in transnational cross-border traffic between populations. In this study, we investigate the complicity of knowledge-production practices within popular culture in the perpetuation of such dynamics within the ‘mail-order’ marriage industry. In particular, we focus on the politics of representation around the figure of the so-called ‘mail-order bride’ as produced in various genres and sites in North America over the past 15 years. Our study revealed, as expected, an intensely narrow and colonialist discourse constituting the women involved in such commercial transactions as commodity objects, victims, or victimizers. But, as well, we found five potentially counter-hegemonic works that serve to represent an alternative discourse that at least gestures toward a more diverse and complex representation of these women and of married life, employing devices such as irony, parody, spoofing, and other tongue-in-cheek references. However, as our conclusion demonstrates, despite such admirable interventions, some aspects of agency-arranged marriages remain utterly absent in North American popular culture, thereby perpetuating and ultimately failing to displace the dominant discourse on this population of women.
South Asian American women's stories are primarily written from one female character's point of view; few stories by these writers have explored Indian men's confl icts as they work through internalized colonialist, consumerist and patriarchal norms. Two recent exceptions are Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Meera Nair's Video and Other Stories (2002). These authors depict middle-class male householders struggling amidst the invasion of Western and hypercapitalist assumptions. Lahiri and Nair lead readers to admire men who question traditional precepts and thus make a new contribution to South Asian American feminist literature.
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