the <Emphasis Type="Italic">conditions</Emphasis> of politics: low-caste women's political agency in contemporary north Indian society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.     

reflexivity and queer embodiment: some reflections on sexualities research in Ghana

The ‘reflexive turn’ transcended disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Feminist scholars in particular have taken up its core concerns, establishing a wide-ranging literature on reflexivity in feminist theory and practice. In this paper, I contribute to this scholarship by deconstructing the ‘story’ of my own research as a white, genderqueer, masculine-presenting researcher in Ghana. This deconstruction is based on thirteen months of field research exploring LGBT activism in the capital city of Accra. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes, I examine questions of queer subjectivity, embodiment and self/Other dynamics in the research encounter. Specifically, I interrogate what a reflexive concern for power relations means when researchers share moments of commonality and difference with research participants, here in relation to axes of gender, sexuality, race and class. Finally, I explore the challenge of theorising resistance in light of feminist postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation. I conclude that it is only by locating these tensions and dissonances in the foreground of our inquiries that reflexivity becomes meaningful as a way of rendering knowledge production more accountable and transparent, of practising feminist solidarity, and of excavating our own queer research journeys.     

Images of gender and the negotiation of agency in Salman Rushdie's Shame

This article is concerned with the images of gender in Salman Rushdie's Shame. I focus my analysis on one particular character, Sufiya Zinobia. By drawing attention to two images of gender I want to analyse the fundamental structures of gender with respect to two important concepts in the novel: shame and power. I first strive to unravel the relationship between gender and shame as it is conceptualized in the novel. The second image deals with the image of gender with respect to power. With the help of Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject I pinpoint this image. Finally, I make an allegorical reading based on these two pictures in order to uncover the agency embedded in the character. Since the images are static it is vital to conduct a reading that can entail an eventual shift in the structures. With reference to the Hindu goddess Kali I analyse how agency is negotiated with respect to the character Sufiya Zinobia.     

troublesome threesome: feminism,anthropology and Muslim women's piety

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.     

The Soviet Reception of Selma Lagerlöf

Abstract

The focus of this paper is Selma Lagerlöf’s literary presence in Soviet Russia. Despite being one of the most translated and published foreign authors in pre-revolutionary times, Lagerlöf made very infrequent appearances on the Soviet literary scene for 40-odd years between 1917 and the end of the 1950s. The process of literary production is examined in this paper in search of an explanation for the changing pattern in the publication of Lagerlöf’s texts. To problematize the process of literary production in the newly established Soviet state, Foucault’s conceptualization of the process of knowledge construction is utilized to describe, understand, and explain the interplay between critical resources, such as linguistic and literary expertise, individual initiative, and the government-controlled publishing enterprise in the Soviet state. I argue that the agency of literary workers remained relevant to the literary process, despite increasing ideological pressure on literary production, and that they paved the way towards the official reintroduction of Lagerlöf to the Russian Soviet readership during the 1950s.     

Pregnancy Loss,Skin-Based Body Modifications and Agency

This article utilizes notions of ‘agency’ to explore the relationship between experiences of pregnancy loss and narratives about related skin-based body modifications. The term ‘pregnancy loss’ is used to denote a range of medical events with potentially far-reaching emotional and social consequences. The research from which the empirical content of this article is drawn seeks to bring together feminist interests and the discipline of human geography to examine experiences of pregnancy loss. Different aspects regarding ‘agency’ are attended to through several practices—namely, the acquisition, display/concealment and narration of skin-based bodily marks like stretch marks and memorial tattoos. This includes a discussion on notions of ‘choice’ in terms of receiving/acquiring changes to the skin through pregnancy and pregnancy loss, regarding which stretch marks and tattoos are often pitted as oppositional. A more complex picture of agency is explored and illustrated with the narratives of several women with pregnancy-loss experiences, highlighting that both kinds of skin-based modifications can be framed in more agential ways, including as appreciated reminders of simultaneous love and loss. In doing so, this article constitutes an attempt to engage with pregnancy loss from a feminist perspective, as encouraged by Linda Layne, and to contribute to feminist scholarship on body modifications.     

still,nothing: Mammy and black asexual possibility

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead ‘say nothing’, and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of ‘saying nothing’ is then explored in a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones’s neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975).     

Parenting,Communication about Sexuality,and the Development of Adolescent Womens’ Sexual Agency: A Longitudinal Assessment

Sexual agency (i.e., the ability to make decisions and assertions related to one’s own sexuality) is associated with sexual health enhancing outcomes. Given that young women are expected to act passively, rather than with agency when it comes to sexual encounters, the present study aimed to explore whether parental support, knowledge, and communication about sexuality during late adolescence contribute to an enhancement of sexual agency in a sample of young women in the long-term. Using a longitudinal design (panel study), 320 female participants who participated in three data collection waves (T1, T2, and T5) were included in the analyses (M_age?=?16.2 years, SD?=?0.50 at baseline). Mediated by the frequency of parents’ communication about sexuality with their daughters, both dimensions of parental support (emotional engagement and support of autonomy) positively predicted adolescent women’s sexual agency two years later. In contrast, parental knowledge of their children’s whereabouts was unrelated to communication and female sexual agency. Specific dimensions of parenting seem to play a crucial role in empowering adolescent girls to act agentic through communicating, emotional support, and encouraging autonomy, which in turn may contribute to healthy sexual behavior in young adulthood.     

Labour in post‐colonial India: A response to Jan Breman

Resuming the debate with Breman about debt bondage in post‐Independence India, this reply to his two‐part survey explores the fact of and the reasons for continuing disagreements about the capital/unfreedom link in general, and in particular the connection between accumulation, the decommodification of labour‐power, the enforcement of debt‐servicing labour obligations, the presence/absence of coercion, and worker agency. Also considered is the analytical efficacy of using a depoliticized concept of worker ‘assertiveness'; the mere existence of the latter, it is argued here, is neither a defining criterion of proletarianization, nor an indicator of rising levels of class consciousness, and thus not as empowering as claimed.     

Pat Cadigan's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Synners</Emphasis>: Refiguring Nature,Science and Technology

This article analyses an anti-essentialist SF novel, focusing on the extent to which A anti-foundationalism enables a more accurate as well as a more productive representation of postmodernity. My argument stresses the ways in which Pat Cadigan's novel Synners, mostly because of its remarkable narrative form, challenges some of the most dangerous norms and normativity of American thought and culture. I argue, that, in order to understand this complex novel correctly, we must approach technoscience and transnational capitalism as separate, interacting discourses and material practices. The representations of technoscience, in the novel, are definitely not ‘figures’ for late capitalism: they are representations of a discourse which interacts with capitalism in the fictional world as in the real world.Contrary to what has been suggested by a number of critics writing about Foucault, use of this notion of discourse does not preclude use of notions of agency. As the queer theorists who have drawn on Foucault's work show, agency can be theorized in terms compatible with the notions of discourses, material practices and technologies. My discussion of Synners thus focuses on questions of agency, showing how Cadigan uses a deconstruction of Judeo-Christian religious tropes to argue for a responsible, and knowledgable, ‘incurably informed’ approach to technology.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

浅谈对劳动价值理论的再认识

马克思主义经典作家创造劳动价值论的目的 ,是为了划清劳动与剥削的界限 ,揭示劳动与资本的对立 ,从而进一步阐明资本主义必然为社会主义所代替的历史规律。当社会进入知识经济时代时 ,创造价值的劳动越来越依靠科技、知识、资本等新的生产要素。因此 ,运用马克思主义的劳动和劳动价值理论指导社会主义市场经济的运行 ,就应对其理论进行新的再认识     

Interrogating the Look of the Gaze: Theorizing a Latina Cine-subjectivity

Abstract: This article concerns sexual object choice, transgender subjectivities and emancipatory heterosexuality as imaged in three films: The House of the Spirits (1993), I Like It Like That (1994) and Mi Vida Loca (1994). The author argues, through her examination of the three films, for cinematic ways to refocus and interrogate the look and gender of the gaze, thereby envisioning what the author theorizes as a Latina cinematic subjectivity. The idea of a Latina cinematic subject is presented in order to articulate how at particular moments in the films an autonomous Latina subjectivity is created through narrative and mise-en-scène. It is at these narrative and aesthetic moments that the characters look back at the objectifying gaze, thereby creating a cinematic sexual subjectivity for the characters and a model of agency for the culturally resistant spectator who is doing the looking. The House of the Spirits points to the contradiction of sexual object choice and female desire; I Like It Like That reveals the performative and fluid possibilities of gender, as well as the hybridity of black and Latino cultures; and Mi Vida Loca reflects the struggle for agency in Chicana heterosexual relationships and in their material lives. The author argues that the three portrayals begin important cultural work in the rethinking of sexualities, as they unthink the rigidity of monosexuality, destabilize normative conceptions of gender and reinvigorate agency and egalitarianism in heterosexual relations.     

The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary.     

Too Hot to Handle: The Cultural Politics of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Fire</Emphasis>

This essay explores the ways in which the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta's diasporic film, Fire, in India. I locate this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex and sexuality, betrays an underlying fear that sex is something that is threatening to Indian cultural values, to the Indian way of life, to the very existence of the Indian nation. I discuss the responses to the release of the film by the forces of the Hindu Right as well as feminist and lesbian groups and critique the uncomplicated understandings of culture that informed these positions. Contingent upon these responses rests the story in Fire and the way in which the lesbian subject, a sexual subaltern, is constructed in the cultural space represented in the film. I challenge the positions that suggest that the women are represented as victims in the film, and draw attention to the cultural, sexual and familial ruptures brought about by the main protagonists through their desire for one another. I explore the complicated understandings of agency and desire that are represented through the assertion of this relationship.     

‘Settled in mobility’: engendering post-wall migration in Europe

The end of the bi-polar world and the collapse of communist regimes triggered an unprecedented mobility of people and heralded a new phase in European migrations. Eastern Europeans were now not only ‘free to leave’ to the West but more exactly ‘free to leave and to come back’. In this text I will focus on gendered transnational, cross-border practices and capabilities of Central and Eastern Europeans on the move, who use their spatial mobility to adapt to the new context of post-communist transition. We are dealing here with practices that are very different from those which the literature on ‘immigrant transnationalism’ is mostly about. Rather than relying on transnational networking for improving their condition in the country of their settlement, they tend to ‘settle within mobility,’ staying mobile ‘as long as they can’ in order to improve or maintain the quality of life at home. Their experience of migration thus becomes their lifestyle, their leaving home and going away, paradoxically, a strategy of staying at home, and, thus, an alternative to what migration is usually considered to be – emigration/immigration. Access to and management of mobility is gendered and dependent on institutional context. Mobility as a strategy can be empowering, a resource, a tool for social innovation and agency and an important dimension of social capital – if under the migrants' own control. However, mobility may reflect increased dependencies, proliferation of precarious jobs and, as in the case of trafficking in women, lack of mobility and freedom.     

Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses? Differentiation among petty commodity producers in guatemala

In this paper I discuss the way in which rural artisans in one municipio of Guatemala organize production and how this organization impedes the differentiation of the artisanal population into owners and workers. I show that categories of owners and workers exist in the municipio, but that these categories do not reproduce themselves as classes; instead, they reproduce each other through the life cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, I look at internal relations of production, the external environment of large‐scale capital, and the role of migration and the stale in the creation of a permanent Guatemalan proletariat and in the creation of an undifferentiated artisanal economy.     

“It’s New But Not <Emphasis Type="Italic">That</Emphasis> New”: On the Continued Use of Old Marx

This essay reviews Skeggs’ and Wilson’s papers in this issue of Feminist Legal Studies in terms of their development of, and departure from, ideas central to the Italian post-Marxist, post-workerist tradition; specifically their understanding that capital is increasingly converging with the production and reproduction of social life itself. I interrogate the assumed necessity to move beyond ‘the limitations of Marx’ by revealing, via the Communist Manifesto, Grundrisse and Capital, how the ideas of ‘old’ Marx can offer important engagements and interlocutions with the ‘new’ empirical phenomena explored by Skeggs and Wilson. I show how Marx’s notion of creative destruction is in tune with Wilson’s work on the erotic generativity of capitalism, and how his observations on labour-time as the measure of value illuminate the exchange and circulation of Wife Swap. Finally, I suggest that we might be wary not to lose sight of the question of resistance by regarding immaterial labour as productive labour, and thus relinquishing Marx’s conceptual tools of labour, value and capital.     

Neoliberalising the food regime ‘amongst its others’: the right to food and the state in India

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores the role of the state in the contemporary food regime in light of critical theories of neoliberalisation. Heeding recent calls for downscaling food regime analysis, I suggest a Gramscian reinterpretation of recent right-to-food legislation in India on the backdrop of longer histories of capital, power and nature. I argue for seeing the recent right-to-food case in India as partaking in a longstanding hegemonic process of neoliberalising the country’s agro-food system, where hegemony is negotiated through unstable equilibria facilitating renewed capital accumulation for dominant classes.     

Invited Commentary: Seeking a Coherent Strategy in our Response to Homeless and Street-Involved Youth: A Historical Review and Suggested Future Directions

This invited commentary seeks to encourage a critical dialogue about youth homelessness that might assist in re-energizing a field that seems increasingly stagnant with a research body focused primarily on analyses of risk, hopelessly inadequate policy frameworks in most cities, diminishing funds for services, and decreasing media attention. Reviewing major trends in research and public responses to youth homelessness in the past century, I propose that there exist three major culturally-bound dimensions from which we construct our understanding of and responses to youth homelessness. These dimensions, which are considered in a transactional framework, are the scope of responsibility, the location of moral responsibility, and the amount of agency attributed to the youth. In this review I highlight the manner in which our historically binary and uncritical understanding of these dimensional characterizations of youth homelessness has led to major lapses in the effectiveness of our collective efforts to address this problem. I highlight gaps in the existing body of research literature and provide this framework, arguing that a strategic and cohesive response is vital if we are to move from reiterations of risk and hackneyed calls for prevention strategies to the generation of meaningful solutions.