‘I Like Your Colour!’ skin bleaching and geographies of race in urban Ghana

This article explores chemical skin bleaching practices in urban Ghana to demonstrate the ways that particular racialized understandings of meaning are deployed in a contemporary postcolonial African society. I argue that the processes of racialization indexed by skin bleaching in Ghana must be contextualized within global racial formations; specifically, they can only be understood by examining the interlinked local and global ideologies and practices of race. In elaborating this argument, the essay also engages with contemporary African diaspora theorization that tends to foreground diasporic identity and experience at the expense of contemporary continental processes. By bringing a postcolonial African society into a dialogue about race, processes of racialization, and the interlinked transnational construction of black identities, this essay offers one way out of the ambivalent relationship that I believe diaspora theorization has with Africa.     

why queer diaspora?

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/Butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer.     

wal-mart, ‘katrina’, and other ideological tricks: Jamaican hotel workers in Michigan

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers' notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres.     

postcolonial criticism,transnational identifications and the hegemonies of dancehall's academic and popular performativities

Despite the unprecedented freedoms that decolonization has brought for many Black people – especially in specific regions of the African Diaspora – freedom and its fulfilment, adequate signs and contested meanings remain a preoccupation within Black cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, while political and cultural nationalisms have led to greater political and civil rights, racism has not been eradicated. Furthermore, the new postcolonial globalizations of capital, people and cultures have destabilized the collective identities that framed twentieth-century struggles for national sovereignty and equal citizenship, without necessarily erasing them. Instead, they remain, no longer securely anchored in their old homogenous appearances, but re-configured through the inner differences and contradictions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. This article addresses these internal differences and the ways in which they produce new contestations over race, the meaning of Black representation and postcolonial freedom, negotiations that are increasingly traced on the intimate contours of the body and the self, through practices of personal consumption, erotic hedonism and style as key performances of freedom. It achieves this through examining two localized moments in the transnational and diasporic circulation of Jamaican dancehall culture, understood as a privileged public space for the performance of Black identifications and personal freedom. It argues that the eroticized discourses of ethnicity, race and gender found in dancehall culture articulate the dominance of neo-liberal conceptions of freedom at the same time as they express, resist and comment on new cultural hegemonies not reducible to racism or the power of the West; that is how dancehall expresses the new problematizations of postcoloniality.     

Friendship and care: gendered practices within personal communities in Portugal

What is the role of friends in practices of care within intimate relationships, either towards each other, or in supporting caring practices towards other persons (children, parents or other kin)? And to what extent are these caring practices gendered? I explore how friendship either disrupts, or reproduces, the ethics of care that cross-cuts gender relations throughout society. I focus on the experience of Portuguese men and women and take as reference their personal community, understood as the active and meaningful personal ties they consider to be central in their lives. Drawing on qualitative data from 30 in-depth interviews, I explore their experiences of care in three dimensions: caring for others; caring for oneself; and being cared for. Results show that, while it is not possible to assert a complete centring of personal lives on friendship, friends stand out as important sources of care in these three different situations, providing both emotional and practical support.     

The production of a woman in Andrei Tarkovsky's the sacrifice

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfigurations of the infamous “butterfly dress” by multimedia artist groups Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically, the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.     

theorizing ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications: a critique of the continuum and analogue approaches

Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between ‘African’ practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘western’ body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are compared within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the ‘continuum’ and ‘analogue’ approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single ‘continuum’, ‘spectrum’ or ‘range’ of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘western’ empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege.     

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.     

Queer love economies: Making trans/feminist film in precarious times

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.     

‘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.     

affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

Governing the Taiwanese countryside: Guanxi,power and agency

Over the past two decades, bottom-up rural development has become the prevailing approach in Taiwan. The rise of community-based projects for Foucauldian thinkers should be understood as new ways of thinking about governing social life, in which political authorities create ‘active’ rural citizens through the deployment of political technologies. Foucault's emphasis on the intimate association between power and knowledge has been taken further by actor-network theory (ANT) authors. However, ANT tells more empirical stories about the dissemination of power and the assemblage of actors. Although ANT has been readily employed in the studies of social sciences, it has been subject to severe criticism; on the one side, the death of man, on the other, the demiurgic. Echoing these comments, this paper argues that the process of translation is far more complicated than ANT authors have proposed. In the Chinese context, social interactions rely heavily on the social interaction model known as guanxi. With reference to an anthropological participant observation I conducted in a Taiwanese rural community, this paper demonstrates that guanxi practice functions as a mechanism for coping with political collective action.     

Jordanian women in education: politics,pedagogy and gender discourses

The ‘epistemic’ violence that has beset gender discourses in education refutes the claim that progress is measured by figures and numbers of Jordanian women in schools and the workplace. While such discourses demand to be contextualized, deconstructed and resisted, they also necessitate creating a link between political praxis and gender politics. My argument centres on the indispensable role critical discourse can play in locating these instances of ‘epistemic’ violence and revealing the manner in which the themes of constructed gender knowledge have been subjugated to the political praxis of each context. Interventions by donors and NGOs have more often than not been emasculated by the political considerations of governments and establishments. The result has been ‘disciplined’ gender politics in education, perpetuating traditional discursive practices, roles and stereotypes instead of acting as an emancipatory power. Human development reports and traditional literature on gender bias in education have failed to account for such discursive/power practices. In this paper, I shed light on the national, the international and the textual ‘knowledge’ that surrounds gender bias in education in a context like Jordan. I conclude by demonstrating the importance of the national and its discursive practices in reformulating approaches based on the international (human development reports) and the textual (literature on gender bias and stereotypes in education).     

Moving beyond ideas of laddism: conceptualising ‘mischievous masculinities’ as a new way of understanding everyday sexism and gender relations

Abstract

This article engages with current debates on ‘lad cultures’ by questioning how we understand the term in the specific context of everyday sexism and within groups of men varying in age. Further to this, using a feminist and critical masculinity studies perspective, the article will explore how men do not necessarily comprehend their behaviour within the framework of lad culture or within the continuum of sexual violence. Through discussion of ethnographic and interview data collected over a year at a site historically associated with lad cultures, that of a Rugby Union club in Northern England, an alternative way of conceptualising masculinity and everyday sexism, ‘mischievous masculinities’, is proposed. Men in the research practiced what I term mischievous masculinities, whereby they implemented ‘banter’ to aid in both the construction and de-construction of sexist ideas within the rugby space. Performing mischievous masculinity enabled men of all ages to both engage in and simultaneously challenge everyday sexism in ways they understood to be ‘innocent’. However, the continual framing of banter as ‘just a laugh’ demonstrated that this form of sexism can be construed as problematic, due, in part, to its subtlety, in relation to more overt and violent sexist practices. A key difference between the men in my research and previous theorising of ‘lad culture’ is the recurring theme amongst older participants that ‘I should know better’, demonstrating consciousness of the sexist and problematic connotations which could be drawn from this interaction. This notion of mischievous masculinities then, in the context of a life course perspective, can be seen to challenge more established notions of an unreflexive lad culture, thus affording a more nuanced understanding of everyday sexism amongst more diverse groups of men than currently exists, as well as allowing for men’s agency in a specific site.     

The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.     

Embodying Transition: FGC,Displacement, and Gender-making for Sudanese in Cairo

In this article I analyze both generalized propriety as a boundary marker of Sudanese identity in Cairo, and gendered attitudes toward morality and female genital cutting (FGC) as a fundamental aspect of that boundary. Sudanese have been profoundly affected by the ongoing political crisis in their home country, by the displacement triggered by political and economic collapse, and by their deteriorating legal and social status in Egypt. The dramatic changes in the circumstances of Sudanese residence in Cairo have challenged the cultural norm of gender complementarity as men ‘stay at home’ for want of work while women seek and find new opportunities for themselves. This unstable situation has led Sudanese to place more emphasis on ‘proper’ ways of behaving and being, an assertion that helps define the ethnic boundaries of the Sudanese community in Cairo. I demonstrate the inconsistencies between discourse and reality through ethnographic data while analyzing how Sudanese have found new ways of asserting their identity and resisting the practice of FGC.     

Off-island hawaiians “making” ourselves at “home” : A [gendered] contradiction in terms?

This article explores some of the recent developments in movements to reassert Hawaiian sovereignty that occur in Hawai‘i, but with special reference to displaced nationalisms and political formations in Hawaiian communities off-island. I examine the gendered nature of the terms in which activists in the Hawaiian Islands describe and invoke diasporic Hawaiians, particularly in the calls they send out for diasporas to “return home” to Hawai‘i. I call attention to Hawaiian women’s prominence in some areas of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the symbolic bases on which they draw in the process of forging such a position. The very process of making and remaking oneself, whether at home or not, is, among other things, always gendered. I argue for the difference that the infusion of a diasporic feminist sensibility could make to Hawaiian nationalist projects, pushing them further in the direction of specifically gendered possibilities of decolonization.     

“She's not really a woman, she's half a man”: Gendered discourses of embodiment in a French farming community

This paper is about constructions of embodiment in farming families in a community of the Aveyron region in Southern France. More particularly, it explores how the discursive representation of women's bodies both reproduces and legitimates unequal gender relations between women and men on the farm and in the local community. It is argued here that gender is constituted through the ways in which individuals live and construct their bodies within a particular social, cultural, and economic context. But because what is constructed as masculine is valued over what is constructed as feminine, women's bodies and abilities are inferiorised and devalued. In the farming context discussed in this paper, farm women are never seen as having bodies which enable them to farm in the same terms as men. Women's work on the farm is seen as only secondary and complementary to that of farmers in the same way that women's bodies are seen to be lacking in masculine attributes which are defined as central to farming. So that even when women show that they can run farms by themselves and do work which is usually defined as masculine, they are either represented as only being able to do so because they have male help, or because their bodies and attributes do not conform to culturally constructed heterosexual norms of femininity.     

How to live precariously: Lygia Clark's Caminhando and Tropicalism in 1960s Brazil

Economic booms and busts, major social upheavals, brutal military dictatorships: precariousness has been a feature of everyday life in Latin America since its independence. But what does it mean to “propose precariousness as a new idea of existence,” as Brazilian artist Lygia Clark did in 1966? This essay focuses on one specific work by Clark, her 1963 Caminhando, in order to explore the ways in which the very status of performative practices can respond to their social and political conditions and thus offer a model for a subjective experience of precariousness in everyday life. A close study of the process that led Clark to create precarious works will be further supplemented by a contextual analysis of debates about precariousness and adversity within the Tropicalist movement that emerged in late-1960s Brazil, which included artist Hélio Oiticica as well as singers and film-makers.