Kathy Davis

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · Department of Sociology

Breast cancer received little attention until the 1990s when women began to criticize the lack of public awareness as well as research funding. Breast cancer activism emerged across the globe, ranging from feminist grass-roots movements, to initiatives by health organizations to corporate activities, the most famous being Pink Ribbon. Feminists hav...

Feminist scholars have increasingly expressed their worries about the depoliticization of intersectionality since it has travelled from its point of origin in US Black feminist theory to the shores of Europe. They have argued that the subject for which the theory was intended has been displaced, that Black feminists have been excluded from the disc...

In this paper, I will analyse the recent revival of Argentinean tango as an example of a transnational cultural space. Based on biographical research with tango dancers both within and outside Argentina, I show how these dancers participate locally in what is also a global dance culture and what it means for their lives, aspirations, and sense of t...

Poststructuralist, feminist, queer, postcolonial theory, critical race and diaspora studies have all taken issue with the assumptions of value neutrality and objectivity of mainstream science and demonstrated that scientific knowledge is never disinterested and universally valid, but always embodied and embedded in the context in which it is produc...

Poststructuralist, feminist, queer, postcolonial theory, critical race and diaspora studies have all taken issue with the assumptions of value neutrality and objectivity of mainstream science and demonstrated that scientific knowledge is never disinterested and universally valid, but always embodied and embedded in the context in which it is produc...

In this paper, I will analyse the recent revival of Argentinean tango as an example of a transnational cultural space. Based on biographical research with tango dancers both within and outside Argentina, I show how these dancers participate locally in what is also a global dance culture and what it means for their lives, aspirations, and sense of t...

Tango, of all popular dances, would seem to be the most extreme embodiment of traditional notions of gender difference. It not only draws on hierarchical differences between the sexes, but also generates a ‘politics of passion’ which transforms Argentineans into the exotic ‘Other’ for consumption by Europeans and North Americans in search of the pa...

Biographical researchers depend upon communication with their informants, usually in the form of a chronological story about their lives. However, not all experience can be put so easily into words, let alone into a linear narrative with a beginning and an end. Drawing upon my research with people who are passionate about dancing Argentine tango, I...

This article explores shifts in feminist and postfeminist discourse on sexuality using two influential novels about women's sexual agency and empowerment as a case in point. The first novel, Hautungen [Shedding], appeared in the mid-1970s at the peak of the New German Women's Movement and went on to become one of the most important feminist fiction...

This paper is situated in the emerging field of the sociology of popular dance, a field which explores the relevance of dance in people’s everyday lives, its significance in the construction of identity, and its entanglements with power, and subversion. Taking the recent craze of Argentinean tango as a case in point, I argue that sociologists shoul...

In this article, we explore the possibilities for using the concept 'masculinity ', as developed in gender theory, to explain 'senseless violence '. We analyze stories that informants tell about fights they have been in. The empirical analysis of these fight stories shows how getting into a fight is a takenfor-granted expression of 'normal ' mascul...

Intersektionalität wird als der „wichtigste Beitrag, den die Frauenforschung bisher geleistet hat“ (McCall 2005: 1771) gepriesen. Feministische WissenschaftlerInnen aus verschiedenen Disziplinen (Philosophie, Sozial-, Geistes-, Wirtschafts- und Rechtswissenschaften), mit verschiedenen theoretischen Ausrichtungen (Phänomenologie, strukturalistische...

Cosmetic surgery emerged at the end of the 19th century in the U.S. and Europe. Like most branches of surgery, it is a ‘masculine’ medical specialty, both numerically and in terms of professional ‘ethos’. Given the role cosmetic surgery – and, more generally, the feminine beauty system – play in the disciplining and inferiorization of women's bodie...

In a path-breaking essay, ‘The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order (1999),’ Donna Haraway links Our Bodies, Ourselves (the book and the slogan) to a critique of the US women’s health movement, claiming that both draw implicitly upon colonialist metaphors of discovery and acquisition of territory. Haraway’s critique does not stand alone, but bel...

Global feminism has been criticized as a form of cultural imperialism, whereby a white, western model of feminism is imposed upon women in non-western contexts under the banner of universal sisterhood. In order to provide this theoretical critique with some empirical grounding, this article focuses on the worldwide impact of one of the most influen...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.4 (2000) 848-849 Sander L. Gilman. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xxii + 396 pp. Ill. $29.95; £17.95. The medical historian Sander Gilman is well known for his work on the cultural construction of bodies (as pathological, ugly, s...

Cosmetic surgery emerged at the end of the 19th century in the United States and Europe. Like most branches of surgery, it is a ‘masculine’ medical specialty, both numerically and in terms of professional ‘ethos’. Given the role cosmetic surgery—and, more generally, the feminine beauty system—play in the disciplining and inferiorization of women's...

Embody-ing Theory - Kathy Davis Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist Readings of the Body PART ONE: THE FEMALE BODY: DIFFERENCE AND POWER Reading the Body - Anne Woollett and Harriette Marshall Young Women's Accounts of Their Bodies in Relation to Autonomy and Independence Performing the Body, Creating Culture - Anna Aalten Female Bodies and Brittle...

Feminist research is explicitly committed to validating (women) informants' experiences, situating them in a context of gender and power relations, and explicating the researcher's own social and cultural position. Such commitments may not be enough, however, when our negative and positive feelings about our informants get in the way of doing our r...

This article focuses on the gendered underpinnings of the profession of plastic surgery, drawing upon a popular autobiography of a plastic surgeon. Written at a time when plastic surgery made its entrance as a legitimate branch of medicine, the author presents himself as a mouthpiece of his profession, as the person whose task it is to explain the...

For several decades, femininity has been a favorite topic within feminist theory. Masculinity, by contrast, received short shrift. This essay focuses on masculinity and how it should be theorized, drawing upon the several recent books on men and masculinity, written from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Despite the considerable...

This paper focusses on how women who have cosmetic surgery experience their bodies and what lead them to decide to have their bodies altered surgically. Based on the biographical analysis of women's surgical marratives, I show how they make sense of their relationship to their bodies and trough their bodies to themselves. Contrary to sociological a...

Proefschrift Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam. Lit.opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands. Auteursnaam op omslag: Kathy Davis.

Using the feminist critique of the health care system as a starting point, this article indicates some of the relevant issues facing women as patients in general practice: lack of control over our bodies and reproductive functions, ‘psychologizing’ of women's complaints, the medicalization of social problems experienced by women as a group. Current...