woman in the following ways: Woman as Mother Nature,
Woman as Enchantress-Seductress, Woman as Necessary
Evil and Woman as Mystery. This paper extends the
analysis to consider other possible roles and
representations of Woman considering other cultural and
unconscious underpinnings expressed communicatively in
multiple contexts. The paper examines each of these
representations and adds to feminist and organizational
scholarship by including representations of African
mythology and heritage. It also explicates how these
infiuence our communicative experiences within the
organization. The group-as-whole theory (Wells, 1985) is
applied to explain how groups participate in assigning
Differential Detecting: Female Sleuths in a Masculine Tradition. Grace Giorgio, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign
Gender as a discursive force governs how we
anticipate and negotiate space. The discourse of safety,
which foregrounds women's vulnerability and downplays
our strengths, indicates to us that we still do not belong in
the public sphere. In resistive response, many women of
all ages, races, class and educational backgrounds read
female detective novels as a feminist practice. In a world
where media culture is committed to the perpetuation of
the discourse of female victimhood, the female detective is
a welcome anomaly. This paper explores various feminist
positions and possibilities locatable (however not fixed) in
female detective novels. Like the female detective, I
And Sarah Laughed: The Biological Clock Metaphor And Its Entailments. Nicole Marie Keating, Univ. of Pennsylvania
This paper concentrates on the central entailments of
the biological clock metaphor, elaborating on the attitudes
that are generated from its use in contemporary discourse.
Although the entailments are numerous and varied, the
material collected through interviews and examination of
popular and scholarly literature suggests three essential
ones. The biological clock metaphor (1) performs a
regulatory function regarding women's childbearing
decisions, (2) structures women's role in contemporary
Creating a Female Language In Shangjiangxu, Jiangyong, China's Hunan Province: The Rhetorical Study of Nushu.
Lin-Lee Lee, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis
I survey the context in which Nushu, an allegedly
thousand-year-old female language created by illiterate
rural women in Jiangyong, Hunan, China, was developed,
including the location, religion, and cultural norms,
particularly relevant to the status of Chinese women. I tum
to examples from the ten extant Nushu genres, using
Women and Language, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Page 44
roles to members and how members accept them and
therefore participate in shaping their own identity as well
as the organizational experience.
References
Wells, L. (1985). The Group-as-a-whole perspective and its theoretical
roots. In A. Coleman and M. Geller (Ed.)., Group Relations Reader
2.
Washington, DC: A. K. Rice Institute pp. 109-126.
Williams, J. (1987). Psychology of women: Behavior in a biosocial
context (3'^ edition). New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.
navigate space to uncover how the detective novel
interpellates the detective and the reader, locating the
interstices for the differentiating operations of feminist
resistance within patriarchal, racist and homophobic
confines. The polysemetic text of the detective novel
presents a hierarchy of discourses, the investigation the
primary one, through which and in which the female
private investigator navigates currents of power while
solving the crime. In this paper I suggest that the female
detective novel as a sub-genre draws from a masculine
narrative tradition to articulate the multiple subjectivities
that its female readers experience.
society in terms of motherhood, and (3) defines fertility in
terms of constraint. These notions of the biological clock
metaphor emerged from interviews and were then
substantiated through analysis of popular/scholarly
literature. The paper also speculates on possibilities for
altemative metaphors or conceptualizations that might
shift the focus away from external mechanical devices (i.e.
clocks) and toward internal stages of personal readiness.
Kenneth Burke's theory of pure persuasion to analyze the
themes that emerge. I argue that pure persuasion
embedded in Nushu enables these village women voice to
cry out against the marriage system and the Confucian cult
of womanhood that condemns Chinese women to
inferiority, ignorance, and dependence.
 Nushu is as close to pure persuasion as we can get. It
is close for primarily two reasons: 1) The pleasure of
Nushu is in the performance; and 2) No true political or
social "action" will result from its performance. It is pure
as a kind of "dwelling" or "home" discourse, a place to be
mindlessly (comfortably) mindful (reasonable). In this
Women, Technology and the United Nations: An Analysis of the Recommendations of the 1995 Platform for Action.
Barbara S. Monfils, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
The Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth United
Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995
differed from its counterpart after the 1985 UN Nairobi
Conference on Women. The Platform did not contain a
separate section on technology. Instead, technology was
subsumed in a section that identified access to mass media
industries as the primary means of bringing about change.
Platform writers argued that if women were given greater
access to media and training in production, several benefits
of significance to women would occur, including fewer
gender-biased portrayals of men and women, a decrease in
the number of messages that exploited women and girl
children, and greater use of the media to promote women's
rights.
Engendering a Market: Women, the Family, and the Personal Computer. Lori Reed, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
In the history of the personal computer, it is generally
accepted that by 1971 it was technologically possible to
mass produce affordable, functional, and useful personal
computers for the home. Yet, it is also true that a viable
consumer demand for such a machine was not successfully
cultivated until the late 1970s and early 1980s. This paper
investigates the industrial and cultural work involved in
marketing personal and home computers from the 1970s to
the 1990s. In particular, this paper focuses on the cultural
tensions surrounding the computer as a gendered
(masculine) technology, and pays attention to how this
en-gendering of the machine stood in the way of
A Technological Dis-ease: Scientific Discourses, Mass Media, and the Gendering of 'Computer Addiction'. Lori Reed,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper explores the gendered aspects regarding
the cultural emergence of psychological, medical, and
popular discourses surrounding contemporary conditions
variously labeled "computer addiction," "Internet
Addiction Disorder," and "Pathological Computer Use."
paradox, Nushu is hence "pure" (mindless, comfortable,
home) "persuasion" (logical, reasoned, active, etc.). Nushu
is pure persuasion par excellence. It is a paradigm example
of the "form" Burke says is necessary for any rhetoric of
motive.
The UN Charter identifies the UN as the primary
intemational organization for promoting human
development throughout the world. The failure to identify
technology as a major means of contributing to the
development of women in the Platform was criticized by
some feminist scholars as a "step backward" by the UN.
This presentation provides a progress report on the issues
identified in this section of the 1995 Platform for Action.
Included are an analysis of the issues relating technology
to women's development, and an assessment of their
impact on women in eight selected countries in Europe,
Africa, and Asia since the Platform for Action was
adopted.
integrating the personal computer into the home. This
paper draws on popular magazines, advice manuals, and
advertisements from the 1970s-1990s to trace the
discourse surrounding the perceived promises and
problematics of integrating computers into the home. The
paper then explores how this discourse is significantly
linked to cultural ideals, desires, and fears surrounding
technology, gender, and the nuclear family, and discusses
the strategies that were used to transform the personal
computer from a masculine war machine and into a
"woman-friendly" and "family-friendly" machine.
The paper draws on theories and methodologies from
historical and cultural studies of media, science, and
technology, to explore how the discourse on computer
addiction is historically situated and is implicated in a
complex cluster of social, political, and economic
Women and Language, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Page 45