Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism

This essay argues that Riot Grrrl manifestos were instrumental in promulgating a form of radical feminism that demonstrates the enduring nature of feminist radicalism. While a great deal of important work has been written on the movement, little attention has been paid to how these manifestos developed a distinctive political language and culture. By foregrounding the volatility of feminine youth and the historical erasure of the girl subject as a radical political agent, Riot Grrrl manifestos redefined the gendered (and ageist) exclusionary practices of the radical public sphere, promoting unified forms of resistance, often symbolised as a personal, albeit contagious, awakening to the realities of harassment, repression, violence and ridicule. This kind of molecular, contingent politics worked to exploit the contradictions inherent in young women's lives rather than to overcome the differences that had splintered more congealed formations of feminist politics. In rejecting the traditional claims of the radical public sphere, Riot Grrl manifestos insist on a vernacular feminism that strategically emphasises micropolitical action over grand narratives of resistance and revolution. While these manifestos draw on aspects of second-wave radical feminism and older forms of avant-garde culture, they push the genre of the manifesto into new territory by stressing everyday forms of resistance, defining their imagined consistency as porous and reactive rather than exclusive or over-determined.     

Origins and evolution of Maoism in Argentina, 1968–1971

An apparently strange phenomenon in the history of ideas, Maoism was the only new ideological current to emerge in the western Hemisphere after the Second World War. With constant references to popular China, but situated in a local context, Maoism developed as a unique ideology with a particular physiognomy that was forged in the sphere of the political left. In Argentina, the principle organisations that represented it – the Communist Vanguard and the Revolutionary Communist Party – were deeply involved in the class struggles of the industrial proletariat of Córdoba. Following an explication of our understanding of the role of political ideas in labour struggles through the work of the Chilean historical sociologist Tomás Moulian, we describe two foundational phases for these parties: the organisational and ideological. We situate these in the broader context of both the historical development of the working class in Córdoba and the explosive moments of Cordobazo. From here, we assess the tensions and contradictions in these phases and discuss the impact on their efforts to become the ‘vanguard’ party of the working class, thereby showing the importance of tracing the origins and evolution of Maoism for understanding the radical labour history of Córdoba.     

Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.     

African peasants and revolution

The last thirteen years have seen important peasant uprisings in Angola, Guiné and Mozambique, conflicts which must be judged to some extent within the context of traditional colonial wars. Although the influence of events in neighbouring countries and urban notions of freedom and nationalism is undeniable, it is argued that these struggles reveal the rising trend of ‘modern’ resistance and its final dependence on mass participation by local communities conscious of their particular oppressions and fighting together to overcome them. The role of such revolutionary movements as the MPLA has been to organise and guide rebellions which would have occurred spontaneously if less successfully without them.     

Labor radicalism and the local politics of Chinese exclusion: Mayor Jacob Weisbach and the Tacoma Chinese expulsion of 1885

ABSTRACT

The 1885 Chinese expulsion from Tacoma, Washington Territory highlights the importance of local political economy in shaping how a wider anti-Chinese movement played out in a particular community. Tacoma was a newly emerging city where white residents felt the threat of corporate domination in the form of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In this context, the city’s German immigrant mayor, Jacob Weisbach, could draw upon his longstanding labor radicalism to mobilize a broad anti-Chinese coalition that blurred the divide between white workers and the local business class. The result was the forceful removal of Chinese residents following a year-long campaign that culminated in mob action and became known as the ‘Tacoma Method’. This local violence in turn fed into ongoing national efforts to secure Chinese exclusion. Tacoma’s Chinese expulsion illustrates how radical labor traditions could be turned, under particular conditions, to the politics of racial repression even as the proponents of expulsion framed their efforts in terms of an egalitarian and democratic agenda. The participation of the Knights of Labor and other labor radicals in a politics exemplified by the Tacoma Method was accordingly tied to the larger racialized American state-building project as it unfolded in the late 19th Century.     

linking radical traditions and the contemporary Dalit women’s movement: an intergenerational lens

Anti-caste movements in India have a long history. Cultural heritage became and remains a site of political contestation by excluded communities searching for identity and equality, and gender remains at the core of their engagements. The meanings underlying the more homogenous term of ‘Dalit’ used today are part of a historical process of self-definition. Moreover, diverse Dalit countercultures suggest varied social domains in which Dalit communities are located. South Asian historiographies have been critiqued as denying histories and historical agency to Dalits. Yet Dalit studies have developed epistemologies, bringing articulations and ideas from the margins to the centre of writings on history, leading to debates around caste that have transformed notions of politics. This paper draws from one such trajectory through a nonlinear narrative, juxtaposing the intergenerational contexts of engagements: my mother Dakshayani’s political and life experiences, as narrated in her autobiography (1912–1978), and my own experience in the Dalit women’s and other movements in the 1980s and 1990s. While my experience saw the onset of liberalisation and the emergence and growth of ‘new social movements’, the context of Dakshayani’s narrations is the Pulaya (agrestic slave caste) community in the early 1900s in Cochin, a community in the process of transforming itself. Both narratives highlight how radical traditions within the Dalit women’s movement over time have consciously and critically addressed anti-caste movements, social reform, the state, peoples’ movements and the nation within a conceptual framework of equality, liberty and non-discrimination.     

Gender troubles,Redux

Thirty years ago, women's history written from a feminist standpoint was the revolutionary force, challenging androcentric thought and definitions of experience. Today, gender has become the more threatening moniker to those who would maintain patriarchal power and suppress knowledge. While not new, recent attacks on ‘gender ideology’ by conservative, often labeled right-wing governments, threaten the continuation of degree programs, as in Hungary, and pose manifold dangers to scholars world-wide. In the context of women's and LGBTQ movements, twenty-first century globalization, and political and economic changes, those who cling to the gender binary simplify the subject of women's history.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

imagining and living the revolution: an Arendtian reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters and writings

In this paper, I look into personal and political entanglements in Rosa Luxemburg’s letters and essays revolving around questions and problems of the revolution. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of revolutions in modernity, as well as her reading of narratives within the political. What is intriguing about the Luxemburg/Arendt encounter is the fact that although both theorists consciously refused to connect themselves with feminist ideas and movements of their times and geographies, their writings have inspired a rich body of feminist theorisations of the political. What I argue is that Luxemburg’s ideas and lived experiences of the revolution largely inspired Arendt’s theorisation of the revolution as a political phenomenon in the pursuit of freedom, and are opening up new vistas in our understanding of gendered dynamics in historical and contemporary revolutionary events.     

Peasant counter‐revolution?

This paper discusses some aspects of the wide peasant support of Spanish counter‐revolutionary movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This support should not be viewed as a mere manipulation by the church of the religious ‘fanaticism’ of the rural population, but as a political reaction consistent with the peasants’ perception of their antagonisms with other classes. The peasant opposition to liberalism does not necessarily signify support of the old order but can be understood as the expression of a preference for an alternative to that project which was materialising in the politics of the liberal governments.     

Body and Self: learning to be modern in 1920s–1930s Britain

Observing the divergent tracks taken by historians of the ‘modern self’ and those of the ‘modern body’ the article focuses on health and fitness movements in Britain, c.1920s–1930s. Asking whether there is a place for the body in the history of women performing ‘the self’ in this context, the article suggests a way in which contemporaries found a way to have a ‘self’ in the body. Contemporary notions of the body emphasised its interdependence with ‘the mind’, health and happiness being functions of each other. In the language of health and beauty was a language of inner vitality and outer radiance, a modern formulation of the individual as a ‘self’ equipped to embrace the exciting but uncertain possibilities of the ‘modern world’. Popular print culture on ‘healthy living’, reports by the BMA and the National Fitness Council are considered along with more extensive discussion of the Women's League for Health and Beauty founded in 1930 by Mollie Bagot Stack and inherited by her daughter, Prunella, ‘Britain's Perfect Girl’, in 1935.     

feminist ‘selves’ and feminism's ‘others’: feminist representations of Jamaat-e-Islami women in Pakistan

In Pakistan, as in many other societies, politico-religious movements or so-called Islamist fundamentalist movements are becoming an important site for women's activism as well as the harnessing of such activism to promote agendas that seem to undermine women's autonomy. This has become a concern for a growing feminist literature which from a variety of political and theoretical positions seeks to understand and explain the subject-position of Muslim women as politico-religious activists. This paper attempts a deconstructive reading of texts by leading Pakistani feminist scholars as they attempt the difficult process of steering between fundamentalism and Orientalism in their accounts of ‘fundamentalist’ women in the political ideological space of Pakistan.     

museums,poetics and affect

This paper follows the Salt-Wind and subterraneous freshwater flows in Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall's collection of poetry The Salt-Wind/Ka Makani Pa‘akai. McDougall illustrates that in order to begin again in the aftermath of American imperialism and environmental destruction, one must return to the salt-water and sub-surface waterings, and the ancestral connections and voices therein who beckon her (and others) home. In this way, her work is situated within contemporary movements within the Pacific, presently coming together in deimperializing efforts to restructure a future for the Pacific that is ‘beyond empires’ (Fujikane, 2012: 191). Selecting two poems in particular from McDougall's collection—‘Hāloanaka’ and ‘On a Routing Slip from the U.S. Postal Service, Pukalani Branch’—I illustrate how they chart the ancestral, cosmological, and historical flows of kinship between Kānaka Maoli and their near and distant earthly and spiritual relations. In particular, the water that passes through the taro plant infuses all manner of kinship, economic, and social relations in Hawai‘i, connecting Kānaka Maoli to their ancestor Hāloa, and to land, sea, and each other, as well as—through the formative oceanic movements of Moana Nui—to other Pacific islanders. A thirst for water—sacred, imaginative, mobile, past, present—underwritten by an assertion of Hawaiian sovereignty, language, and tradition flows just beneath the surface of McDougall's words.     

Mimesis,metaphor and representation: holding out an olive branch to the emergent schreiner canon [1]

There are complex and interesting representational issues and interpretational practices involved in claiming to ‘know past lives’ and these have particular resonance in feminist terms. These ideas are examined in relation to a particular case study, of the feminist writer and theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), although the discussion contributes to the ‘women's history and post-structuralism’ debate by eschewing taking up an abstract ‘position’ in favour of examining these ideas through a grounded historical example. A range of representations of Schreiner is discussed, including a photograph which her estranged husband contemporaneously had ‘touched up’ before sending it to some of her friends just after her death, and presentday representations of Schreiner in the emergent feminist canon of claimed knowledge about her. The ideas of mimesis and alterity are used both in relation to photographic representation and also in relation to the use of metaphor to stand for perceived facets of Schreiner's character. Representational issues are fundamental and ought not to be excised from feminist discussion; at the same time, the past and its ‘irreducible things that happened’ must also be taken seriously.     

The politics of publishing: Selection and rejection of women's words in print

The commercial publishing industry is controlled by men and under the guise of rational and objective decision-making, it manages to produce and disseminate material that it claims to be ‘universal’ and representative of all humanity. In fact, through gatekeeping, the publishing industry selects and promotes the ideas and knowledge that effectively maintain and support the dominant male view of the world. This constitutes a rarely acknowledged ‘political’ dimension in the production of knowledge and in the publishing industry. Alternative views, such as those presented by feminists, are contained at a level where they inevitably remain marginal and without the legitimacy that the sheer volume of production and expensive promotion accord to masculist ideals and practices. Feminist publishing cannot compete in terms of scale or influence and feminist writers and feminists in publishing have to contend with the issue of marginality — both ideological and pragmatic — in a male-dominated area. ‘Book publishing, like all industries, is controlled by rich, white heterosexual men’. (West, 1978:6)     

中国雇农工会的发展与演变

雇农工会是中国革命中的一个极为重要的组织现象,是中共在马克思主义指导下结合中国实际 进行的一次伟大革命实践。雇农工会经历了理论准备与实践探索、初步建立与缓慢发展、快速发展与消亡等历 史时期。雇农工会的发展是多种因素综合作用的结果,在其发展过程中,构建了工会的三维合法性基础,即意 识形态合法性、组织形态合法性和革命行动合法性。雇农工会工作与城市工会工作共同构成中共领导下工会工 作的“一体两面”,统一于中国革命的历史进程,为中共执掌全国政权奠定了治理基础,同时也为当前背景下 加强党的领导、推进工会工作提供了历史启示。     

Blue growth: savior or ocean grabbing?

While the global rush to control land resources is well established, ‘power-grabs’ in relation to marine and coastal resources are less well researched. Under the banner of ‘blue growth’, such power-grabs are taking shape through global policy processes that purportedly align the needs of the poor with profit interests and climate change concerns. This contribution critically interrogates these policy proposals and situates them within broader neoliberalization of nature debates. It is argued that the policy proposals fail on their own terms and are a form of ‘antipolitics’ that precludes more radical visions of addressing environmental and climate change issues. In an attempt to challenge this, small-scale fishers’ movements are increasingly framing their opposition in terms of the broader struggle for ‘food sovereignty’.     

坚持马克思主义指导思想的几点思考

坚持马克思主义指导思想应当做到:一是坚持以人为本的群众立场.人民群众是历史的创造者,实现好、维护好和发展好广大人民群众的根本利益符合马克思主义核心价值的要求；二是实事求是地对待马克思主义.马克思主义经典作家是坚持实事求是原则的典范,正是这一点造就了他们运用马克思主义指导实践的成功；三是坚持马克思主义的基本精神.马克思主义的基本精神在其使命完成之前是不会过时的；四是根据实践创新发展马克思主义.只有创新的马克思主义才能根据时间、地点、条件的变化去丰富发展自我,才能有针对性地指导当代社会主义实践,实现马克思主义时代化.     

The liminal body: the language of pain and symbolism around Sati

Recent scholarship on sati has stressed the fact that the ‘problem’ of sati is that the problem extends far beyond and begins far before the act itself. One of the things that lies prior to and post the act is language, yet sati is an act that stands in a curious relationship to language. I will examine the relationship between the physical act of sati and the language that surrounds it: the ‘story’ prior to the act which gives the act its meaning; the act itself which stands in an ironic relationship to the story – I will argue that the act is in fact possible only because it displaces the original story, so that every act of becoming sati presents itself not as a radical act in experience, but as an ‘acting out’ of the original story. It is in this acting out of a displaced story, that the boundary between the physical act and language becomes obscured and the body doing the act begins to occupy a liminal position, as it itself begins to function as a language – a language, which in its aspect of an ‘acting out’ obscures its own act. Lastly, I will consider the implications of the symbolic language of sati for the contemporary woman.     

Whales and minnows: Some sexual theorists and their followers and how they contribute to making feminism invisible

Past feminism was made to vanish, so that only now are we beginning to realise the full extent of our history. The same process is already beginning to happen to present feminism—we too are being made invisible. One instance of this process is examined in the work of some ‘radical’ male academics. They use the work of various sexual theorists (Lacan, Gagnon and Simon, Foucault) to construct a particular and de-politicized version of ‘sexual politics’; and in doing so they recognize only an equally partial version of ‘feminism’. It seems that ‘our friends’, ‘radical’ men, are at least as dangerous as the rest, for they increasingly claim the right to ‘name’ feminism and sexual politics for us.