Group items tagged

Jamaica Kincaid's compact and succinct story "Girl," the lead story in the collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), has been lauded as one of the premier works in Kincaid's corpus, particularly her discourse on the making of "woman" in postcolonial Caribbean contexts. The text is essentially a set of instructions offered by an adult (assumed to be a mother), laying out the script for the performance of womanhood in the fictional society in which the female child is expected to live and perform her gender. "Girl"'s emphasis on performative acts reiterates the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles the experiences of four pubescent girls in 1970s Guyana as they learn about, participate in, and challenge some gender expectations of their immediate and wider communities. The story is told from the point of view of Lula, who keenly observes the ways in which gender roles are enacted and how these roles may be re-enacted. Her observations alert the reader to the novel's preoccupation with uncovering, or perhaps reconfiguring, how gender roles might be at once imagined and played out in contemporary Caribbean societies. Both texts illustrate how the tensions and contradictions surrounding the constructions of womanhood, and in Buxton Spice, manhood, are engaged through performative acts, some of which ostensibly conform to prescribed gender roles but that actually undermine them.

"This paper focuses on competing appropriations of international women's rights standards in the framework of the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) and its follow-up projects. I argue that, even if the ERC's gender approach has been introduced as part of international models of transitional justice, it is geared toward earlier women's rights and human rights activism, as well as to established state practices of at least selectively supporting women's rights. Like political reform in general, the ERC and its gender approach are an outcome of internal, long-time dynamics of change. Within the ERC's politics of gender, there exists a tendency to depoliticize women's rights activism in the process of reconciliation by making women a target for welfare measures and "human development." Yet, at the same time, the officially recognized gender approach also allows for strategies to broaden the basis for women's rights activism by making women's experiences of violence during the "Years of Lead" (the period of fierce repression under the rule of Hassan II), an issue of concern in the framework of its new politics of memory. The implementation of the ERC's gender approach can be interpreted as an example of how women's rights activism may be able to push its agenda while adjusting to both transnational discourses and national politics."

Over the past ten to fifteen years, feminism in China has been marked by three closely related characteristics. The first is the introduction of "Western" feminism with "gender" as the core of theory import. The second is the articulation of the "trouble" this import of Western theory has caused. Chinese feminist texts abound with terms such as trouble, difficulty, and clash, which are used to express worries about the consequences of this new orientation of feminism in China. They prove that the import of Western theory and the transition to "gender" as the basic category of analysis are not the logical and unquestionable developments some authors claim them to be. A third characteristic is the search for an identity for Chinese feminism in a global context. Chinese scholars, under the impact of Western theory, turn to spatial definitions of Chinese feminism vis-à-vis international feminism and adopt the notion of the "local" to define their place in the world. This essay highlights the "troubling" effects the import of "gender" has on feminist theory building in China and delineates the various and sometimes conflicting efforts Chinese feminists have made to restabilize feminist theory and identity. These include different translations and definitions of "gender," diverging outlines of the history of Chinese feminism in a global context, various definitions of the "local," differing visions of a regional "Asian" feminism, and more complex models that try to integrate conflicting perspectives. These responses demonstrate that contrary to its universalist claims, "gender" is a specific concept that finds support among particular groups of feminists only. This essay also tries to explain why Chinese feminists insist on the "local" as a site of theory building and identity formation even where they have acquired global horizons.

"This article investigates the treatment of gender issues in "research for development" natural resources management (NRM) projects. Through discussion of an NRM research project in the United Kingdom and India, the article explores how the use of inaccurate gender stereotypes results in projects being compromised. The article seeks to explain why this happens despite widespread appreciation of the centrality of gender issues to NRM and poverty. In explanation the article identifies the significance of difficulties in the partnerships between the natural and social science dimensions of these projects. The study demonstrates that instead of easy and equal partnership, the relationship between natural and social science practitioners and practices remains characterized by inequality and poor communication, with serious consequences for the understanding of, and response to, gender issues."

"Mediated representations of gender, ethnicity and migration play an increasingly important role in the way these categories are understood in the public sphere and the private realm. As media often intervene in processes of individual and institutional communication, they provide frameworks for the production and consumption of representations of these categories. Thus media - in their production, representations and consumption - need to be analysed, not only as reflections as pre-existing socio-political realities, but also as constitutive elements in the production of meanings of the self and the Other. This special issue includes a number of articles that examine the articulations of gendered ethnic identities and of gendered citizenship as these are shaped in media production, media representations and media consumption."

"Over the last three decades, the role played by phenomena linked to the (re-)making of collective memory, or, more precisely, of collective memories in situations of societal and political change, has gained attention in the humanities and social sciences in general. Only in recent years has this subject been researched with respect to colonial and postcolonial settings (Sengupta 2009) and here also with respect to the Middle East.1 Approaches are highly diverse, ranging from cultural studies to psychosocial perspectives. Rare but highly interesting exceptions studying the violent history of the Middle East from a gender perspective and focusing on contesting memories of women include works by Efrat Ben Ze'ev (2010), Ruth Rubio-Marín (2006), and Alison Baker (1998)-in addition to films like The Forgotten by Driss Deiback (2006). These studies link the general trend toward marginalizing or denying female experiences in the field of officially recognized memory production to the continuing hegemony of gender stereotypes that identify women with passive and "helping hand" roles, thus neglecting their distinct collective as well as individual contributions to society and history. Generally speaking, memory studies seem to suggest that representations of women as "self-abandoning" and "self-forgetful" are one common characteristic element of the making of collective memory. This may be explained by the fact that the making of collective memory is often linked to highly gendered and sexualized models of national, religious, or ethnic identity. Though fully aware that most of the terms describing phenomena of collective memory or collective forms of trauma are highly controversial, we decided not to engage in a more general theoretical debate here but rather to test such concepts with respect to the material presented in the case studies"

This paper is the result of a conversation, started in 2008, about the significance of the struggles for gender and sexual justice taking place in Latin America and more broadly of the challenges global justice and solidarity movements (GJ&SM) are articulating at various national and international levels. Two themes are explored throughout: the extent to which the current Latin American experiments with diversity, plurality, connectivity and mutuality, starting with the 'plural concept of gender and sexuality', challenge existing divides between gender, sexual, social and economic justice and the extent to which they simultaneously question the North/South divide. We also reflect on the problems and challenges that such approaches might present or encounter.

"This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices."

This essay, written in reflection of earlier work, introduces the themes needed to analyze forms of gender and class oppression as these have been mediated through, and by, hegemonic projects of imperialism and nationalism. It argues that the gender criti

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of practices and politics described by the short-hand of 'globalisation', and in various ways the articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their particular and more general effects.

""Post-neoliberalism" or "after neoliberalism"' is a term that is associated with forms of governance that emerged in the mid-late 1990s with the Third Way and social investment states in the UK, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The post-neoliberal state combines features of both neoliberal and social-democratic welfare policies; significantly, it has introduced changes in areas conventionally noted by feminist scholars as having bearing on the lives of women, such as, in public-funded childcare, and women-centered approaches to governance. The core question posed in this paper is: is the post-neoliberal state also a feminist one? Based on a critical review of recent literature, the analysis focuses on the gender implications of post-neoliberal policies in four domains of society and polity: production-reproduction, the public-private, political participation, and the machinery of the state. The paper argues that whilst gains made by some women in these domains are noteworthy, the more fundamental ramifications of the post-neoliberal state are in the changing landscape of gender relations in these countries."

Here, we introduce the articles that comprise this special issue of IFJP, entitled, 'Critically Examining UNSCR 1325'. The aim of this special issue is to examine the implementation of UNSCR 1325 and its implications for women's activism and for peace and security. Given that the articles in this volume approach UNSCR 1325 from various perspectives and in different contexts, our aim in this introduction is to point out a number of conceptual, policy and practical issues that are crucial in the debates around UNSCR 1325 specifically, and women, peace and security more broadly. We do this in four parts: first, problematizing the resolution in relation to changes in global governance; second, examining the Resolution's assumptions about (gendered) agency and structure; third, examining the Resolution's assumptions about the links between conflict and gender; and, fourth, comparing different contexts in which 1325 is implemented. To some degree, differences between contributors may be accounted for by different understandings of feminism(s) as a political project. Different feminisms may underpin different visions of peace and, consequently, different projects of peacebuilding. Ultimately, this volume, while answering the questions that we originally posed, throws up new questions about transnational feminist praxis.

"This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism - within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women's victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure."

"This article pieces together a complex genealogy of the multiple contexts that helped reshape women's international organizing and create a global women's human rights movement following the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women, 1975-85. It maps a multilayered history consisting of many different strands of women's activities around the globe that increasingly converged in the 1970s, although in unanticipated ways. Through its broad focus on women in distinct social, political, and intellectual arenas, it links the UN human rights system and its oversight committees and commissions with the first two UN Development Decades of the 1960s and 1970s. And it interconnects these global structures, discourses, and activities with old and new patterns of women's postwar organizing and with the emerging challenges to canons of knowledge and research methodologies from feminist theory and epistemology. Starting in the mid-1970s, four distinct yet overlapping endeavors converged: the work for international human rights, colonial and postcolonial expectations of economic development and well-being, women's rights and liberation movements, and women's studies in their global translations. This critical history, however, has all but been lost in the fraught contemporary debates about human rights as a vehicle for radical gender and social change."

Millions of refugees are stuck in camps and cities of the global South without permanent legal status. They wait in limbo, their status unresolved in what the United Nations (UN) calls 'protracted refugee situations' (PRS). The material conditions and depictions of such refugees as immobile and passive contributes to a feminization of asylum in such spaces. In contrast, refugees on the move to seek asylum in the global North are perceived as threats and coded as part of a masculinist geopolitical agenda that controls and securitizes their movement. Policies to externalize asylum and keep potential refugees away from the affluent nations of the global North, in which they may seek legal status, represent one strategy of exclusion. This article traces these divergent trajectories of im/mobility and demonstrates how humanitarian space for both groups is narrowing over time. For those seeking asylum in the global North, measures such as increased detention and rapid return to transit countries aim to deter migrants from arriving at all. It is contended that the discrete systems that manage asylum seekers in the global North and refugees in long-term limbo are themselves gendered. European Union policies to 'externalize' asylum and keep asylum seekers offshore dovetail with policies by EU member states to 'build capacity' for refugee protection in refugee 'regions of origin'. These represent a shifting, not a sharing, of responsibility for their welfare and prolongs their wait.

This article proposes aging black women's geographies as a critical forum to rethink human-spatial relationships in Brazil. It ethnographically explores aging black women's life narratives recounted while walking through their neighborhood in the city of Belo Horizonte. Their accounts of their lives in the neighborhood speak to racial, gender, and class positioning in Brazil and how these positions manifest in spatial configurations. However, their stories also reimagine the relationship between individuals, communities, and space offer counter-narratives to traditional concepts of geographic hierarchy, domination, and separation, suggested in ideas such as the 'favela'. The analysis shows how aging black women's geographies model possibilities for re-envisioning liberatory practices and environments.

"Through readings of Cherríe Moraga's book of poetry and prose The Last Generation and memoir Waiting in the Wings, this essay argues that Moraga's refusal to ascribe to any notion of ideological or political purity-whether normative or queer-regarding reproductive sexuality indexes the dual nature of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power in the contemporary moment. That is, Moraga's complex identifications as butch and mother, queer and nationalist confounds any categorical definition of radical politics or recalcitrance to power. In the wake of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a new mode of power emerged that constitutes surplus as both surplus labor-produced out of the conditions of exploitation-and surplus existence-produced out of conditions of devaluation. In this new capitalist configuration, Moraga's very inconsistency can be read as a condition of "crisis.""

This article examines the notion of empowerment as it has been conceptualized, operationalized, and applied through various programs and projects by some donors funding women- and gender-related projects in the Middle East between 1998 and 2008. The main

Mayas living in the western highlands of Chiapas, Mexico are defining a new relationship with the national government. Rejecting paternalistic forms of development and military repression with which the nation in which they live have tried to eradicate their culture, Mayas are now asserting the right to autonomy within regions where they constitute a majority. I argue that the movement for autonomy based on collective norms of Mayan culture is most acute in areas that were the least incorporated in the 1910-1917 Mexican Revolution and have become important because of mineral, water, and genetic biodiversity that are attracting global investors. The strategies for practicing autonomy developed by indigenous municipalities and campesino organizations in distinct regional settings provide them with patterns for organizing themselves as distinct entities and for participating in national and global settings. Gender differences in all these settings influence the interpretation of autonomy as it is practiced in the communities that have declared themselves as autonomous. I shall compare these practices in regionally distinct settings of Chiapas in an attempt to demonstrate how this enters in to the formulation of an alternative model for pluricultural coexistence in the global ecumene.