Redesigning the Strategy of the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo in the Maquiladoras

This article assesses the consequences of political reform and structural adjustment programmes on trade union development in the countries of francophone West Africa. It addresses the key questions of how and to what extent the democratic upsurge of the 1990s has impacted trade unionism and how structural adjustment has reshaped the industrial relations landscape. It surveys recent developments such as the increasing influence of international labour organisations, the growth of social dialogue in the region, trade union proliferation and the new focus on organising informal-sector workers. The article concludes that, despite the decline in trade union density, the present climate represents opportunities as well as dilemmas for continued trade union vigour.     

Managing the ‘main force’: The communist party and the peasantry in the Philippines

Despite the success of the Communist Party of the Philppines in winning rural support, its work has consistently been characterised by an instrumentalist approach to the peasantry. The article begins with an examination of the foundations of the party's attitude toward the peasantry and its roots in Marxist‐Leninist theory and practice. It goes on to consider evidence of the party's instrumental approach in practice, examining the impact on legal peasant organisations and the experience of socio‐economic projects in the countryside. Attention next turns to an analysis of the party's attitude toward ‘united front work’ and its impact on coalition building among the peasantry. Finally, the author considers the implications of the current split and debates in the ranks of the CPP for the peasantry and for the future of radical politics in the country.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.     

Double Lives, Double Narratives: Tracing the Story of the Family in Rousseau, the Swiss Civil Code and the Fathers’ Rights Debates

A recent parliamentary postulate in Switzerland calling for joint custody as the legal norm argues that fathers are discriminated against in Swiss divorce law. This postulate has incited a debate which circles around issues of equality, the role of fathers and mothers, and the good of the child. Our article, uniting approaches from literature, cultural studies, and science and technology studies, examines the arguments sparked by the debate with a view to different takes on gender and family. In doing so, it traces the roots of contemporary Swiss family law in the Rousseauian narrative of family life in Emile ou de l’education; it explores the manner in which scientific knowledge is marshaled to lend political legitimacy to current debate; and it asks finally how narrative bridges the gap between public discourse and lived experience.

‘Stepping back and moving in’: the role of the state in the contemporary food regime

In recent years, a number of middle-income countries and influential multilateral institutions have instigated actions that frame food system governance around social protection and rights. These state-centered mobilizations raise fundamental questions about how to portray the global politics of food. Since the late 1980s, analysts have largely concurred that US hegemony in the global politics of food has given way to diverse and volatile neo-liberalist and corporate-led food system governance. However, what should we make of a situation where state and supra-state actors are flexing their powers to reshape food systems in line with rights-based models? Should this be understood as reflexes which aim to preserve national order, at a time of intensified food and nutrition insecurities? Or, does it lay the foundations of a re-governed system which curbs and molds a corporate-led politics of food within frameworks of justice? This contribution responds to these questions by tracing the evolution of social protection and rights-based approaches to the politics of food at the multilateral level and in two influential jurisdictions (India and South Africa). We argue that these initiatives underline a robust and continuing role of state power in global food politics, albeit in a novel fashion compared to previous entanglements.     

‘Pinstripes on the prairies’: examining the financialization of farming systems in the Canadian prairie provinces

Drawing on recent scholarship on the financialization of agro-food systems and the global land grab, this paper examines new forms of financial investment in agriculture in the Canadian prairie provinces. We examine the factors underpinning investor involvement in the sector, including its anticipated financial performance as well as processes of agricultural restructuring that, combined with government actions to liberalize farmland ownership, have facilitated the enrollment of land and labour into new financial vehicles. We focus in particular on the emergence of two new forms of investment vehicles – farmland investment funds and an exchange-traded farming corporation – comparing the business model and investment strategy of each. In doing so, we highlight the ways in which the new investment patterns may propel the restructuring of the agricultural sector, alter power relations among key actors, and introduce new logics into the farming landscape. Our findings allow us to comment on the relevance of the land grabbing frame for making sense of the financialization of agriculture in the global North.     

Telling the past – doing the truth: Toni Morrison's beloved

Abstract

This essay challenges the concept of historical truth by arguing that history is only true within its own parameters.One of the main interests of history is to organize (evaluate) events that were important in shaping the world as it presents itself today. What history neglects to describe are the forces and interests that structure that hierarchical system that history applies when writing its text, i.e.history. Taking Toni Morrison's Beloved as an example of writing the past that sets itself apart from writing history, the essays follows a narrative that is doing the truth by giving voice to the repressed fears of a white and black world that do(es) not dare investigate the parameters of existence.     

Elizabeth’s Pious Pilgrimage; or the Ghost in the Garden

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the ‘Pious Pilgrimage’ section of Elizabeth and Her German Garden from a psychoanalytical perspective, focusing on the uncanny sense of the spectrality of the living and its connection to gender identity. It also offers an intertextual reading, placing the passage in the context of ‘the ghost in the garden’ as a recurring trope in the English novel. When ‘Elizabeth’ returns to the garden of her childhood, she experiences two spectral encounters: an imagined glimpse of her grandfather’s ghost and an encounter with a doppelgänger in the shape of a real child with her own name, who makes her feel as if, like Shelley’s Magus Zoroaster, she has met her ‘own image walking in the garden’. She is not the only figure in English literature to do so: behind the kitchen garden where Elizabeth has her encounter we can feel the presence of the kitchen garden in Great Expectations, where Pip sees a prophetic vision and encounters a double in the form of a ‘pale young gentleman’. This same encounter with ‘the ghost in the garden which is not a ghost’ resurfaces in a number of later texts, of which the author discusses two instances: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and David Profumo’s The Weather in Iceland. These can be taken as positive and negative conceptions of the spectrality of the living: von Arnim’s ‘ghost in the garden’ is balanced between the two in a passage treading the boundaries of comic realism and Gothic horror.     

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.     

Gendering the union: imperial feminism and the ladies’ land league

The Act of Union of 1800, establishing Westminster control over Irish affairs, had important repercussions for the development of feminism within nineteenth-century Ireland, as well as contributing towards adifferentiation of Irish from British feminism. Feminism within Ireland was shaped by class, religion and racial identification: one strand followed theBritish model of Protestant philanthropy, while the other was concerned with asserting women's right to take part in nationalist political struggle. ‘Imperial’ feminists in Britain and Ireland, concerned with establishing their right to take part in the affairs of the ‘nation’, perceived those Irish who rejected British imperial rule as uncivilised, reserving sympathy for those whose economic position was threatened by the activities of those who campaigned against the landlord system. The period of the Land War of 1879–82 illustrates these conflicting discourses. The subsequent decline of imperial power in Ireland can be traced through a gradual change within Irish feminism from an initial support for the Union to a later embrace of nationalism, as young middle-class women, many from Catholic backgrounds, became involved in the movement     

‘The Women's Branch of the Commonwealth Relations Office’: the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women and the long life of empire migration

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women from its formation in 1919 to its closure in 1964 upon the withdrawal of the Treasury grant that provided the bulk of its funding. Describing the imperial network of voluntary organisations and migrants, through which the Society operated, it shows continuity in its activities, geographical remit and personnel from the interwar period despite efforts, especially by the 1960s, to reframe the Society's imperial mission with the rhetoric of Commonwealth and development. It highlights the persistence of imperial institutions and networks after the Second World War.     

Adolescents’ Identity Formation: Linking the Narrative and the Dual-Cycle Approach

The narrative and dual-cycle approach conceptualize and operationalize adolescents’ identity formation in different ways. While the narrative approach focuses on the construction of an autobiographical life story, the dual-cycle approach focuses on the formation of identity commitments. Although these approaches have different emphases, they are conceptually complementary. Yet, their empirical links and distinctions have only scarcely been investigated. Empirical knowledge on these links in adolescence and across time has been especially lacking. In the present research, it was therefore examined whether key characteristics of adolescents’ narration (autobiographical reasoning and agency) were concurrently and prospectively related to engagement in the dual-cycle processes of commitment making, identification with commitment, exploration in breadth, exploration in depth, and ruminative exploration. The findings from a cross-sectional sample of 1,580 Dutch adolescents (M_age?=?14.7 years, 56% female) demonstrated that autobiographical reasoning was significantly positively associated with the commitment and more adaptive exploration processes (i.e., in breadth and in depth). In addition, agency was significantly positively associated with the commitment processes and exploration in depth. Yet, these associations between the narrative characteristics and dual-cycle processes were only weak. Subsequently, the findings from a two-year longitudinal subsample (n?=?242, M_age?=?14.7 years, 62% female) indicated that on average commitment strength remained stable but exploration increased across middle adolescence. A stronger increase in identification with commitment and adaptive exploration (i.e., in breadth and in depth) was predicted by a higher degree of agency in adolescents’ narratives. Overall, these findings indicate that both approaches to identity formation are associated, but the small size of these associations suggests that they predominantly capture unique aspects of identity formation. Both approaches could thus complement and inform each other.

     

Slovenia’s socialist superwoman: feeding the family,nourishing the nation

In this article we critically reflect on ‘feminist research methods’ and ‘methodology’, from the perspective of a feminist research unit at a South African university, that explicitly aims to improve gender-based violence service provision and policy through evidence-based advocacy. Despite working within a complex and inequitable developing country context, where our feminist praxis is frequently pitted against seemingly intractable structural realities, it is a praxis that remains grounded in documenting the stories of vulnerable individuals and within a broader political project of working towards improving the systems that these individuals must navigate under challenging social and structural conditions. We primarily do this by working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) providing gender-based violence services in research conceptualisation, design and implementation. This raises unique and complex questions for feminist participatory research, which we illustrate through a case study of collaborative, participatory research with NGOs to improve health and criminal justice outcomes for survivors of sexual violence. Issues include the possibility of good intentions/good research designs failing; the suitability of participatory research in sensitive service provision contexts; the degree(s) of engagement between researchers, service providers (collaborators/participants) and research participants; as well as our ethical duties to do no harm and to promote positive, progressive change through personal narratives and other forms of evidence. Given the demands of our context and these core issues, we not only argue that there are no ‘feminist methods’, but also caution against the notion of a universal ‘feminist methodology’. Whilst we may all be in agreement about the centrality of gender to our research and analysis, the fundamental aims and assumptions of mainstream (Western) feminist approaches do not hold true in all contexts, nor are they without variance in mode, ideal degrees of participation and importance to social context.     

the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women's literature in early Jamaican nationalism

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.     

The “Will to Empower”: Managing the Complexity of the Others

Intersectionality is a concept that aims at handling the complexity of social life. It is often presented as a sensitive, and thus accountable, approach to the complexity of life lived in an age of globalization, migration, and displacements of identities, individuals, and groups. This notion of intersectionality presupposes that approaching complexity requires more than the mere adding up of categories like race, class, and gender; it requires an approach presupposing that these categories intersect in mutually constitutive ways in and through socio‐cultural hierarchies and power dimensions that produce complex relations of inclusion, exclusion, domination, and subordination. For feminists, this constructivist approach to identity categories seems promising; on the one hand, intersectionality rejects essentialism and reductionism, on the other hand, the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality maintains the possibility of feminist politics in a complex world, because politics no longer amounts to essentialist identity politics. In this article we want to ask, however, if the complexity sensitivity of intersectionality really is the solution to the problem of potential essentialism and reductionism in feminism. Or does intersectionality rather reproduce the problem of reductionism and the logic of identity in new, more sophisticated forms? Can feminism at all avoid essentialism and processes of othering? Is it possible to come to terms with the “will to power” inherent in all research by demonstrating a “will to empower”? The purpose of this article is not to evaluate whether different intersectionality studies are capable of accounting for complexity and thereby making it possible to avoid essentialism, reductionism, and othering. The purpose is, rather, to highlight and discuss some implications of the constructionism of intersectionality. As we will try to show, the constructionism that is claimed to form the basis of intersectionality, in opposition to additive approaches to social differences, is sometimes compromised for the sake of accountability.     

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.     

Dancing on the head of a pin? Foetal life and the european convention

The case of Vo v. France represents the latest phase of the European Court of Human Rights’ thinking on the scope of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life) in relation to foetal life where a foetus had been lost owing to a medical accident. The Court by a majority decided that, “even assuming” Article 2 applied to the instant case (albeit to the life of the pregnant woman rather than that of the foetus), it had not been violated. While the facts in Vo were extreme and exceptional, the Court will shortly hear the case of D v. Ireland concerning access to abortion for foetal anomaly, an application made under Articles 3, 8, 10 and 14 of the European Convention. If the case of D were declared admissible, the Court would then have to consider whether a denial of access to abortion for foetal anomaly constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3, or an interference with a pregnant woman’s right to respect for private life under Article 8 (and if so, how the doctrine of the margin of appreciation applies). The Grand Chamber precedent of Vo displays ambivalence about whether Article 2 should apply to foetal life, and its resort to the “even assuming” formula spared Member States the difficulty of having to justify their various abortion regimes, by reference to this Article. It remains to be seen whether in a case like D that is directly concerned with abortion, the Court will take a more definite stance on the correct balance to be struck between the State’s interest in protecting foetal life and the Convention rights of pregnant women. Vo v. France [G.C.], judgment of 8th -July 2004, no. 53924/00; D v. Ireland [4th section], no. 26499/02, oral hearing on admissibility and merits, 6 September 2005     

Writing the Self: the journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, 1774–1843

This paper is concerned with Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt and her text, Journal of My Trip to Scotland, written in 1822 and first published by Le Gallienne in 1893. The journal was written during a three-month trip to Scotland and Ireland as Sarah awaited the progress of divorce proceedings from her husband, the essayist, William Hazlitt. The article looks at the journal in its context as travel writing of the Romantic period and examines Sarah's identities performed in the text.     

Mum's the Word: the cycling career of Beryl Burton, 1956–1986

The English cyclist, Beryl Burton, was one of the few women athletes whose performances matched and sometimes surpassed those of men. Despite the potential threat to hegemonic gender relations thus posed, Burton was, with the important exception of a well‐publicised disagreement with her fellow‐cyclist daughter, Denise, an uncontroversial figure and much respected within the male sporting community. While many personal and sporting factors contributed, this was largely the result of her highly public performance of her roles as wife and mother. However, those roles were also skilfully constructed so as to generate the maximum space for her development as an elite athlete. As a woman and as an amateur, she received less media attention than she deserved in her lifetime and, despite being one of the greatest athletes of all time, has received little serious scholarly or wider public attention since her death.