Filling In the Missing Link Between Universalism and Democracy: The Case of Costa Rica

This article explores a missing link in the recent literature on the formation of social policies: that between democracy and universalism, one desirable yet elusive feature of these policies. We base our argument on a case study of Costa Rica, the most successful case of universalism in Latin America. We proceed by first depicting Costa Rica's peculiar policy architecture, based on the incremental expansion of benefits funded on payroll taxes. Then we reconstruct the policy process to stress the key role played by technopoliticians in a democratic context. Backed by political leadership and equipped with international ideas, technopoliticians drove social policy design from agenda setting to adoption and implementation. Third, we argue that key aspects of the policy architecture established in the early 1940s were fundamental building blocks for a distinctive and seldom explored road to universalism. We conclude considering contemporary implications.     

Can the Welfare State as We Know It Survive? A View from the Crisis-Ridden South European Periphery

South European countries have been hit hardest and longest by the post-2008 economic crisis. This has brought their welfare states under acute strain. Unmet need has sharply increased while significant welfare reforms and (more or less) deep cuts and changes in social spending have been prominent in the repertoire of the crisis management solutions implemented by the governments (under European Union constraints and the strict rescue-deal requirements for Greece and Portugal). This introduction briefly reviews reform trends prior to and during the crisis in order to highlight convergent and divergent paths among the four countries and outline the major questions addressed by the contributions to this volume.     

Regendering the Rural: The Agricultural Training of Office Ladies in Hokkaido

This article investigates the gendering nature of depopulation and rural revitalization in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. After outlining the cultural politics of these twin phenomena, I explore them further through a case study of the depopulated community of Shintoku. By establishing the Ladies Farm School in 1996, the town hoped that the agricultural training of single urban women would eventually lead them to settle down as young (and productive) “farming ladies.” Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in the school, I examine how gender is contested and constructed by seemingly progressive changes in women's social status. The argument I make here is that we reconsider the sexual division of labor as a (historical) product of modernization, instead of interpreting it as a timeless cultural pattern. A society is deeply marked by the specific forms in which its labor power is prepared. —Paul Willis, Learning to Labour     

Reviews

Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment By Tim Etchells, 1999. New York: Routledge

Up Your Ass Written by Valerie Solanas, Directed and Presented by George Coates, Performance Works at P.S. 122, New York City, February 7–25th, 2001

Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera Edited by Mary Ann Smart. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

The Garden An installation by Paul McCarthy, Dietch Projects, New York City

39 MICROLECTURES: in proximity of performance by Matthew Goulish, London: Routledge, 2000     

Gender politics in conservative men's movements: Beyond complexity,ambiguity and pragmatism

The article examines different attempts to analyse the Christian men's movement, Promise Keepers, and the fatherhood responsibility movement. Complexity used as an argument to abandon the search for a gender ideology in the movements is criticized. Despite the presence of complex features, for example, regarding Promise Keepers' view on gender roles in the family, there are common assumptions of gender. These assumptions are found in the very conception of the movements: in the "society-in-a-moral-crisis" argument. Here, men are actors and women are passively dependent on men. Promise Keepers' "soft" pragmatism and use of feminist rhetoric disguise this gender politics within the movement.     

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.     

Rethinking the urban and rural divide in Latino labor,recreation, and activism in West Michigan, 1940s–1970s

During the 1940s–1970s, Latino labor experiences could not be confined to either urban and industrial or rural and agricultural settings. Unlike large metropolises, Grand Rapids, Michigan is a mid-sized, Midwest city wherein the urban center and industrial labor opportunities are located within thirty miles of agricultural areas. I argue that Latinos in West Michigan used both rural and urban areas for labor to meet their economic and social needs. Due to the gendered realities of labor from the 1940s to the 1970s, women played an instrumental role in planning and executing the movement of their families between spaces. In turn, this community’s activism was not limited to the boundaries of urban or rural space. This research shows how Latinos etched out an economic and social survival in places wherein they are not the majority or have a plethora of resources. As the Latino diaspora spreads into areas in the southern United States, we can look to how Latinos in Grand Rapids and the Midwest lived and worked to better understand the lived experiences of twenty-first century Latinos.