regimes of visibility: representing violence against women in the French <Emphasis Type="Italic">banlieue</Emphasis>

In 2008, Dutch anti-Islam Member of Parliament Geert Wilders produced a short video called Fitna to visualize his argument that Islam is a dangerous religion. Thousands of men and women across the globe uploaded their own videos to YouTube to criticize or support the film. In this article, we look at these alternative videos from a feminist perspective, contrasting the gender portrayal and narratives in Fitna with those in the alternative videos. We contend that Fitna expressed an extremist Orientalist discourse, in which women are presented as the current and future victims of the oppression of Muslim men and Islam. In contrast, the YouTube videos give voice to women themselves who come from across the globe, are relatively young and often active Muslims. Second, they express different view points in generically new ways, criticizing and ridiculing Wilders or producing serious and committed explanations of their own understanding of Islam. Third, although relatively few women appeared in the videos, those that did speak for themselves, not only take on Wilders, but also claim their right to speak within Islam. We propose to understand these videos as acts of citizenships through which women constitute themselves as global citizens, in some cases by engaging in ‘deliberation’ as it is understood in feminist political theory, in other cases by taking a ‘voice’ that can be responded to.     

active women and ideal refugees: dissecting gender,identity and discourse in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.     

Women's power in heterosexual sex

The ‘male sexual drive’ discourse sees men as sexually insatiable and male sexuality as naturally an uncontrollable drive. Feminist analysis denies its ‘naturalness’ and its constitution as a ‘drive’, seeing it instead in terms of the power conferred on men in patriarchy. However, seeing the penis/male power as monolithic still ends up casting women as victims. Instead this paper looks at actual heterosexual relationships and examines ‘power’ as a more complex process of negotiation. Heterosexual women often fail to recognize that men need relationships; and that women have sources of power in relationships with them; and the paper argues that this occurs through gender-differentiated positions in discourses such as the ‘have/hold’ discourse as well as the ‘male sexual drive’ discourse.     

Florence Nightingale and the Irish uncanny

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall, women and girls have been trafficked from central and eastern Europe to work as prostitutes in the European Union. This paper looks at the response of the international community to the problem of sex trafficking as it impacts on the EU. The focus is on criminal justice intervention with respect to protection of and assistance to ‘victims’, and a specially witness protection, in the light of the following: the tensions and promises between treatment of trafficked women as ‘victims’ of crime and criminal justice informants; and the need to re-focus on a ‘woman-centred’ approach to criminal justice intervention for trafficked women. Given the diverse nature of law and criminal justice practice between EU Member States, the paper necessarily presents a generic critique of current EU and international ‘best practice’ recommendations, with some commentary on practice based on the author's research, with respect to what ‘gold standards’ of practice offer in theory and what is delivered in reality. The question of ‘victim-centred’ justice and/or ‘woman-centred’ justice is raised in an effort to promote effective policy recommendations.     

new millennium’s feminine subject of feminism

This paper explores the changing feminine subject of feminism by investigating women’s sexual daydreams. Described by Rosi Braidotti following Luce Irigaray as the ‘virtual feminine’, and by Teresa de Lauretis as the ‘space-off’, the feminist subject is a mutating configuration embodying that which is not colonised from phallogocentric representations. Following Frigga Haug’s work on daydreams, the paper is informed by a study that draws on responses from nineteen women in a university setting to an anonymous online survey that asked them to write a daydream about how they would like to express their sexualities in an ideal world. The data reveal that these women of the new millennium imagine spaces of gender/sexual equity, characterised by a spirit of sexual adventure and ethical and emotionally intimate sex. I argue that these sexual imaginings are more progressive than earlier ones, filling in some of the details omitted from contemporary hegemonic representations of feminine sexuality. Arguably providing a snapshot of the feminist subject in its ongoing historical metamorphosis, the paper considers the meaning of these transformations.     

Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

from pillar to post: understanding the victimisation of women and children who experience domestic violence in an age of austerity

The dismantling of the welfare state across the United Kingdom (and indeed a number of other Western industrialised democracies, such as Canada and the United States) and the reductions to welfare provisions and entitlements are having a detrimental impact on women’s equality and safety. Towers and Walby argue that the recent cuts to welfare provision in the United Kingdom, particularly for women’s services, could lead to increased levels of violence for women and girls. This paper makes the argument that female victims of domestic abuse experience violence on two levels: first, at the intimate/personal level through their relationship with an abuser and, second, at a structural level, through the state failing to provide adequate protection and provision for women who have experienced violence in intimate relationships. Using a specific example of post-violence community services delivered to both the children of women who have experienced domestic violence and the women themselves, this paper draws on empirical research carried out in 2010–2011 with London-based third-sector and public sector organisations delivering the Against Violence and Abuse Project ‘Community Group Programme’. We argue that the lack of services for women involved in, or exiting, a violent relationship can amount to state-sanctioned violence, if funding is withheld, or indeed, stretched to breaking point.     

Appealing to the Female Vote: Dutch political parties and the approach of women voters in general election campaigns,c.1922–1980

This article explores the effects of female enfranchisement on the nature of political identity formation in Dutch election campaigns between 1922 and the early 1980s. It argues that women voters played a key role in the imagination of the Netherlands as a ‘pillarised society’ in which political constituencies were represented as stable and based on ‘objective’ characteristics like class and religion. The continuous representation of women as politically ignorant and indifferent served to maintain a self-identity that made women susceptible to ‘be educated’ and ‘learn to understand’ their political identity. The second feminist wave did much to upturn dominant representations, but older discourses proved persistent. The call to take women more seriously as members of the demos, again resulted in a separate treatment of women in political propaganda, with organisations like MVM and the parties' (rebranded) women's clubs, as well as commercial women's magazines now playing a key role in their ‘political education’.     

‘A Woman’s Place …’: Male Representations of University Women in the Student Press of the University of Liverpool, 1944–1979

Deciphering the manner in which women have been, and continue to be, represented in society is an integral element of a feminist critique. This article explores male representations of university women as presented in the student press of the University of Liverpool between 1944 and 1979. It is suggested that university women were represented as ‘other’ and stereotyped in a negative manner in the years 1944 to 1959. Furthermore, they were presented as unattractive, unwelcome, and in most cases at university to find a husband. The years 1960 to 1979 signified a shift with regard to the representation of university women; however, continuity with the earlier period was retained in the visual imagery of female students and the way in which ‘careers’ were presented as distinctly male. University women remained part of the ‘male gaze’ and were, ultimately judged on the basis of their sexual attractiveness to the derision of their intellectual abilities.     

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value women's ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.     

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. ‹Other’ women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, ‹other’ women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted.     

gendered Islam and modernity in the nation-space: women's modernism in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity.     

Dainty little fairies: women,gender and the Savoy Operas

Abstract

Since the 1890s, amateur operatic societies have enabled middle-and lower middle-class women to overcome any stigma associated with public stage performance through their constitution as ‘serious’ leisure organisations. Some women have occupied positions of (situated) prestige, though others were confined to supporting roles. Amateur ‘operatics’ have generated a carnival atmosphere around the activity of performance, where boundaries between members' leisure, social and performing identities became permeable and easily crossed. The Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a staple of the amateur repertoire since their late-Victorian composition, draw on a range of representations of masculinity and femininity that acquired new cultural relevance for the middle classes from the inter-war period. Positive representations of femininity are predominantly youthful. More negative representations of older women have their origins in the grotesque, cross-dressed dame of burlesque. Nevertheless, interview evidence demonstrates that older women in particular, aided by the possibilities of moving between performing and social identities that this leisure activity encourages, have made empowering and selective imaginative appropriations from these gender ideals.     

Gender,Thrift and Indigenous Adaptations: money and missionary medicine in colonial India

This article examines the skills in money and the management of resources that were developed by women missionaries in India between the 1870s and the 1940s. Focusing on the strategies and initiatives of three physicians—Clara Swain, Anna Kugler and Edith Brown—it argues that women disrupted existing patriarchal arrangements by entering ‘male’ domains of finance and administration. Modest ventures were transformed into state institutions through alliances with stakeholders, including missionary boards and donors at ‘home’ as well as members of indigenous elites who provided valuable land donations. Western institutional models needed to be adapted to function within local economies. Western missionary women used an interesting blend of thrift, innovation and indigenization to stretch their material and human resources. Thus, women physicians used their medical work with overseas missions to carve out new roles, which empowered them socially and professionally.     

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.     

Unnecessary bleeding,unnecessary suffering: normalcy and necessity of menstruation in promoting NovaSure®

NovaSure® is an endometrial ablation procedure that destroys the inner lining of uterus to stop heavy bleeding. It is performed mostly on women entering menopause who are experiencing irregular and heavy bleeding. In this article, this biotechnology, promoted for women approaching the end of their reproductive life, is analyzed. The analysis is informed by a feminist science studies and medical anthropology background. The discourse of ‘normal’ menstruation and representations of menstruation in the promotional materials for NovaSure® are explored through a textual analysis of the NovaSure® website and patient brochure. The themes in the materials analyzed include the idea of getting back to life, ‘normal’ bleeding, and having a choice among different medical procedures and interventions. The possibility of getting rid of embarrassment that accompanies heavy bleeding is also emphasized. It will be argued that NovaSure® contributes to the redefinition of what is ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ by combining the ‘unnecessary period’ idea of pills such as Seasonale®, which is aimed toward women in their reproductive years, with the ‘unnecessary suffering’ idea related to menopausal complaints. While advertising the procedure, NovaSure® promotional materials co-construct the ideal user for the technology and reproduce the taboos and embarrassment that accompany menstruation.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.     

Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.     

‘The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Purdahnashin</Emphasis> in Her Setting’: Colonial Modernity and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Zenana</Emphasis> in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s – India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) – in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji's apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a practice of history – how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period.     

Nothing Special? Propaganda and Women's Roles in Late First World War Britain

Women's roles and work did not dramatically change during the First World War; their contributions as citizens simply received greater recognition. This article explores women's roles as subjects, objects and producers of National War Aims Committee propaganda in Britain during 1917–18. It examines differing representations of, and outlines the production of, ‘special’ propaganda for women, discussing women's interactions with and employment by the Committee. Finally, it analyses a series of articles which mixed patriotic rhetoric, practical domestic tips and observations on women's ‘new’ work. Far from uncritically accepting their ‘special’, separate place, the evidence suggests that women, as both objects and producers of propaganda, engaged with it on their own terms as British citizens.