the gendered embroilments of war

Intersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorizing identity and oppression. This paper exposes and critically interrogates the assumptions underpinning intersectionality by focusing on four tensions within intersectionality scholarship: the lack of a defined intersectional methodology; the use of black women as quintessential intersectional subjects; the vague definition of intersectionality; and the empirical validity of intersectionality. Ultimately, my project does not seek to undermine intersectionality; instead, I encourage both feminist and anti-racist scholars to grapple with intersectionality's theoretical, political, and methodological murkiness to construct a more complex way of theorizing identity and oppression.     

Gandhian selfhood and gendered embodiment

Girls, Girls, Girls! Bad Girls. Curaied by Marcia Tucker. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City. Part I: January 14‐February 27, 1994. Part II: March 5‐April 10,1994.

Bad Girls West. Curated by Marcia Tanner. UCLA Wight Art Gallery, Los Angeles, January 25‐March 20,1994.

No More Nice Girls. Curated by Nicole Demerin, Mary Duffy, Joy Glidden, and Tona Hamashige. ABC No Rio, New York City, March 4‐April 1,1994.

Dirty Dishy Divine. Written and composed by Tiye Giraud. Directed by Laurie Carlos. Choreographed by Christina Jones. Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, January 19–23,1994.

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Conceived, written, and performed by Anna Deavere Smith. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Original Music by Wendy Blackstone. Joseph Papp Public Theater, March‐May, 1994, and at the Cort Theatre, New York City, May‐June, 1994.

The America Play. Written by Suzan‐Lori Parks. Directed by Liz Diamond. Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York City, March, 1994.

1962. Written and directed by Iris Rose. Assisted by Christine Larchian. Downtown Art Company, New York City, February 10–20,1994.

Pikipikilauifi. Choreographed and danced by Tiina Helisten. The Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York City, December 17,1993.

Clit Notes. Performed and written by Holly Hughes. Directed by Dan Hurlin. P.S. 122, New York City, February 17–27 and March 4–5 &; 11–12,1994.

Naked Breath. Written and performed by Tim Miller. Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica. February 18‐March19,1994.

Hand‐held Journeys: A Showcase of Experimental Work by Women Filmmakers. Curated by Euridice Arratia. Joseph Papp Public Theatre, New York City, October 1993.

Bodylore. Edited by Katharine Young. Publications of the American Folklore Society, New Series, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1993.     

a gendered critique of transboundary water management

The starting point of this paper is that most of the international transboundary water management (TWM) processes taking place globally are driven by ‘the hydraulic mission’—primarily the construction of mega-infrastructure such as dams and water transfer schemes. The paper argues that such heroic engineering approaches are essentially a masculinised discourse, with its emphasis being on construction, command and control. As a result of this masculinised discourse, the primary actors in TWM processes have been states—represented by technical, economic and political elites operating in what generally gets termed ‘the national interest’. Left out are the local communities relying on the resource directly: the water users; the poor; women; and other important groups. Instruments such as the UN Watercourses Convention of 1997 make an effort to present an attempt at a gender-balanced approach—through asserting the importance of the ‘no-harm rule’ and the ‘equitable share approach’. However, they end up supporting the status quo through the omission of any reference to gender issues. The paper provides an overview of the masculinised discourse on TWM institutions, proposing that this is the case because of the intersection of two masculinised fields—water resource management and the disciplines engaged in the research of transboundary water management, namely, political science and international relations. The paper investigates two southern African examples that illustrate the potential for including a gendered perspective and pro-poor policies that take into account the needs of the water users or ‘stakeholders’. The analysis includes the international and regional legal agreements on transboundary water issues, searching for evidence of a gendered approach. It is concluded that the laws and organisations responsible for transboundary water management currently do not reflect a gendered approach, despite the international recognition given to the necessity of including women in water management structures at all levels.     

‘new wars’ and gendered economies

Feminist Review - This paper draws on the ‘new wars’ literature and global political economy research to explore how feminists and other critical analysts might investigate linkages...     

dialogue as a governmental technique: managing gendered Islam in Germany

Throughout the last decades, state and civil society actors in Germany have undertaken a number of initiatives in order to enter into a structured conversation with Muslim communities, and to find spokespersons who serve as partners for political authorities. This process has commonly been analysed in terms of its empowering effects for Muslims via the emerging ‘institutionalisation’ of Islam. The modes and techniques of power at stake in this process have yet often been undermined. Through the lens of Foucault's concept of governmentality, the starting point of my article is one particular dialogue forum, initiated by the German state in 2006 – the ‘Deutsche Islam Konferenz’ (DIK) – whose primary goal is to institutionalise and regulate the communication between Muslims and state actors and thereby to regulate the conduct of Muslims. Focusing mainly on the way in which gender and Islam have been coupled and played out in this initiative, I argue that the DIK is less a dialogical encounter than a tool of a broader civilising liberal project. Through the inquiry into the modes of power operating in this state led dialogue initiative the article shows that while aiming to secure Muslim's ‘integration’ into German society and to liberate Muslim women from restrictive gender norms, the DIK operates as an enactment of a particular notion of freedom with normative and normalising implications.     

Vagina equals woman? On genitals and gendered identity

Gendered identity is often assumed to be predicated on the prior existence of dichotomously sexed bodies: penis equating to maleness and vagina (or the absence of a penis) equating to femaleness. But is it experienced in this way? We analyse talk about the vagina and female gendered identity in focus group (and interview) data collected from 55 women that explores this very issue. Women talked about genitals and identity in four ways: they affirmed a link between having a vagina and being a woman; they explored this link though associated functions (heterosex and reproduction); they questioned the inevitability of the link; and they attempted disruption of the link (although this frequently served only to reinstate the normativity of it). The implications of this analysis for theory and practice are discussed.     

diasporic governmentality: on the gendered limits of migrant wage-labour in Portugal

This essay explores the meaning of diasporic practice as it has been applied within the contemporary Black Atlantic context. The general focus of this topic has been visible or performative practices that have broad audiences, ranging from diasporic members to the sociopolitically included or the privileged citizen. Moreover, the objects or products of diasporic practice are largely understood to be aesthetic; the literature has highlighted music, dance, art, and religion, for instance. In this essay I argue that a taken-for-granted prerequisite of a hierarchized viewing audience misses passing moments of negotiation that occur in silence or within disciplined exchanges among persons who we identify as diasporic. These practices build community in very powerful ways but may not leave lasting traces or archives; they have to do with fleeting displays of affect such as rage, shame, joy, etc. The ethnographic focus is African immigrant women's constrained work schedules in Lisbon and the ways their labour-time textures the types of community - building practices in which they engage on a daily basis. I address how gendered configurations of migrant labour-time -a condition for governmentality – influence the diasporic process by which a form of racial identification is assumed in the context of Portugal.     

crisis,austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.     

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.     

gendered embodiments: mapping the body-politic of the raped woman and the nation in Bangladesh

Feminist Review - There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social...     

Adolescent discipline: Different family members' perception

Adolescence is perhaps the most difficult period of child rearing for parents. This study attempted to identify disciplinary techniques used by parents as perceived by mothers, fathers, and their adolescent children. Results indicated several significant areas of intrafamilial disagreement in regard to disciplinary techniques utilized, although all subjects tended to agree that some form of verbal reasoning was the primary disciplinary technique utilized with these adolescents.This study was funded, in part, by the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (H-644) and the School of Home Economics, The University of Georgia.Received his Ph.D. in child and family studies from the University of Tennessee. Current interests include adolescent development, family influences on sex-role development, and dual-work families.Received her Ph.D. in sociology from Iowa State University. Major interests include family research methodology, assessment of family power, and marital dissolution.Received her Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Texas. Current research interests include parenting, sex roles, and socialization across the life-span.     

The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice

This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional–structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other ‘First World’ perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the ‘developing’ world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of… but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice.     

Moral development and discipline encounter in delinquent and nondelinquent adolescents

The present study tested whether Hoffman's conceptualization of the relationship between disciplinary techniques and moral development can account for findings that delinquents score lower than nondelinquents on various measures of moral development. Twenty-six delinquent adolescents, 20 middle class nondelinquents, and 20 lower class non-delinquents were assessed on moral development using the following measures: resistance to temptation, moral stage, feelings after offense, judgment about the severity of punishment, and confession. The use of induction by parents was examined with a Q-sort administered to adolescents and their parents. On most measures of moral development delinquents performed lower than nondelinquents. Less induction was found to be used with delinquents than with nondelinquents. Induction was positively related to most moral measures. It was concluded that disciplinary methods may account for differential moral development of delinquent versus nondelinquent adolescents.This research was supported by grant No. 10/B-6 from the Ford Foundation—Israel Foundation Trustees and the School of Social Work Research Committee, University of Haifa.Received Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1977. Current research interests are juvenile delinquency and residential care.Received Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. Current research interst is the role of the father in child development and early social development.The contribution of the authors is equal.     

Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices,gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora

In this article, which is based on twenty four months of combined online and off-line ethnographic research, I show the way that some Iranian diasporic bloggers use their weblogs as entrepreneurship resources during the ‘war on terror’. Through a discourse analysis of a documentary film about Weblogistan and interviews with diasporic Iranian bloggers in Toronto, I argue that Weblogistan is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a gendered neoliberal homo oeconomicus. The production of knowledge about Iran in transnational encounters between the media, think tanks, policy institutions and the Iranian diasporic self-entrepreneurs, relies on gendered civilizational discourses that are inherently tied to the ‘war on terror’. Following feminist scholars who have theorized militarism and gender, I argue that dominant representations of Weblogistan produce different gendered subject positions for Iranian bloggers. Although the masculine blogger soldier takes freedom to Iran through his active participation in proper politics (enabled by his freedom of speech in North America and Europe), the woman blogger finds freedom of expression in writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex in a confessional mode. It is in this war of representation that women bloggers negotiate their subjectivity while shuttling in and out of local and global politics, as subjects of politics (markers of freedom and oppression) and political abjects (not worthy of political participation).     

The New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India

Miss New India is the title of a 2011 novel by Indian-born (now American-based) Bharati Mukherjee, which tells the story of a young woman who leaves her small-town home and family to find work in a call centre in the information technology city of Bangalore. The call centre is emblematic of a ‘new India’, in which educated young people seize the possibilities of a global labour market. This is a generation for whom colonialism is ancient history, a generation who have grown up in the aftermath of economic liberalization in India. Chetan Bhagat refers to this generation as ‘Young India’ and has written a series of best-selling novels that feature ambitious young men in the ‘new India’. There is, however, an emerging genre of similar narratives written by women and addressed to a female readership. This article discusses a range of contemporary Indian women’s popular novels and argues that, while Bhagat and his male heroes may embrace globalization and the market, the narratives written by women are more nuanced in their celebration of economic liberalization. The novels dramatize the tensions between tradition and modernity, family and independence, and suggest that these are particularly fraught for young Indian women. These texts pick up on the discourses of contemporary journalism about ‘Young India’, within the generic form of the romance, but their resolutions are repeatedly uneasy and suggest that the ‘new India’ is not an entirely comfortable space for the new Miss India.