Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean

This attempt to develop an indigenous reading of feminism as both activism and discourse in the Caribbean is informed by my own preoccupation with the limits of contemporary postmodern feminist theorizing in terms of its accessibility, as well as application to understanding the specificity of a region. I, for instance, cannot speak for or in the manner of a white middle-class academic in Britain, or a black North American feminist, as much as we share similarities which go beyond the society, and which are fuelled by our commitment to gender equality. At the same time, our conversations are intersecting as a greater clarity of thought emerges in relation and perhaps in reaction to the other. Ideas of difference and the epistemological standpoint of ‘Third World’ women have been dealt with admirably by many feminist writers such as Chandra Mohanty, Avtah Brah and Uma Narayan. In this article I draw on the ideas emerging in contemporary western feminist debates pertaining to sexual difference and equality and continue my search for a Caribbean feminist voice which defines feminism and feminist theory in the region, not as a linear narrative but one which has continually intersected with the politics of identity in the region.     

Women's Organizations and Movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Response to Global Economic Crisis in the 1980s

In this paper I explore the emergence of women's organizations and feminist consciousness in the twentieth century in the English-speaking (Commonwealth) Caribbean. The global ideas concerning women's equality from the 1960s onwards clearly informed the initiatives taken by both women and states of the Caribbean. None the less, the paper illustrates, by use of examples, the interlocked nature of women's struggles with the economic, social and political issues which preoccupy the region's population. I examine in greater detail two case studies of women's activism and mobilization around the impact of structural adjustment policies in the two territories of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. By tracing the connections between and among the organizations and initiatives of women in the region, the paper situates the feminist movement in the English-speaking Caribbean as a continuously evolving one, fusing episodic struggles in different territories, engaging women of different classes and groups, and continuously building on past experience.     

Historicizing Slavery in West Indian Feminisms

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society.     

Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the Caribbean

In this paper we discuss the relatively recent integration of feminist thinking in the discipline of International Relations. We argue that the theoretical foundations of International Relations are still primarily based on traditional male-female dichotomies, particularly that of separate public and private spheres. By extension, women are largely excluded from state power and decision making. The state is itself gendered. The growing recognition of the links between the global economy and gender forces us to engage with International Relations in foreign and international policy. In this article we look at feminist interpretations of three main International Relations areas: international security, human rights, and international political economy and their implications for gender policies in the Caribbean. We also look at the contributions of Caribbean women to the international feminist agenda and suggest a research agenda for ongoing feminist theorizing in the discipline of International Relations.     

From movement protest to state feminism: The women's liberation movement and unemployment policy in Denmark

The new Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s took a negative attitude towards the state, seeing it as capitalist and patriarchal. Today, this attitude has changed, with many former activists now supporting the “state feminism” that has developed in all the Nordic countries. The case of unemployment policy in Denmark is used to illustrate the changing relations between the radical and leftist feminist movement and the state. In spite of strong resistance in most political parties to any kind of radical feminism, many of the unemployment projects and training courses for women which have flourished since the mid‐1980s have been based on the ideas of the radical feminist movement and have been staffed by women from the movement of the 1970s. The methodologically complicated issue of studying social movement effects is approached here by studying changes in discourse and actions. Four factors are used to explain the changing relation between movement and state.     

resistance at the limits: feminist activism and conscientious objection in Israel

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.     

Towards indigenous feminist theorizing in the Caribbean.

This theoretical study of feminism in the Caribbean opens by presenting the contemporary image of the Caribbean and then pointing to the continuing influence of the colonial past in the creation of contemporary community and the establishment of identity. The paper continues with a focus on three aspects of identity, or difference, that have influenced the daily articulation of feminism and academic debates. The first concerns the positions taken by women in the region's political struggles. The second is an exploration of the linguistic meanings of the gender discourse within the region. Finally, the essay examines the idea of linguistic difference in light of contemporary Western feminist views of "sexual difference" versus equality. The discussion of each of these issues is grounded in historical analysis and illustrated with specific examples. The study concludes that, in this region, feminism offers a new way to investigate the past while creating challenges and opportunities in the struggle to establish a Caribbean identity.     

‘Big sisters’ are better domestic servants?! comments on the booming au pair business

This paper attempts to describe the present situation in the women's movement in Serbia and Montenegro and to tackle questions about its future, on the basis of a sociological study of newly formed women's groups. In the past, the women's movement in these societies has surged several times, only to be completely annulled, and its proponents falling to oblivion. Now, for the first time ever, the seeds of the movement originating from the long gone period of the socialist regime in Yugoslavia have survived the turmoil of disintegration and wars, and are germinating as women's groups and networks spring up alongside are being formed. The crucial task for the future will be strengthening this fragile and diffused network structure and laying down solid foundations for a movement with proper institutional mechanisms on a nation/state level. This investigation examined the prerequisites for this: firstly by examining the visibility and distinguishing features of women's groups and their activities in their current local environment; and secondly, by assessing activists' clear acceptance of feminist (and their groups') self-determination, which confront existing social attitudes towards feminist identities. In both respects, considerable advances towards a broader and clearer recognition of the aims and essence of women's groups' activities are identified, in spite of the ever-present traditional and ideological resistance to this type of women's engagement.     

Tensions in israeli feminism: The mizrahi ashkenazi rift

The idea of women's liberation was imported in the 1970s from the West by liberal feminist activists who immigrated to Israel. The first Israeli feminists adopted all the liberal feminist slogans and ideology together with their advantages and the disadvantages. The implantation of these ideas in the Israel—a country torn ethnically—has produced a conflict from which Mizrahi feminism has evolved. By the 1990s, Mizrahi women who participated in feminist activity, and who found themselves excluded and marginalized by the Ashkenazi women who dominated the Israeli feminist movement began to give expression to their feelings of oppression. This reached a peak in 1995 in Natanya with the First Mizrahi Feminist Annual Conference. This article outlines the historical, social, political and ideological processes in which Mizrahi feminism developed. It shows how slogans such as sisterhood and solidarity, have been used to endorse activities which do not benefit women of all the different ethnic groups in Israel. The article includes a discussion of dilemmas that arise from “tokenism” and the purportedly universalist feminist agenda. The Mizrahi feminist agenda and its ideological framework, as well as its strategic aspects, are also critically reviewed.     

Freelancers,Temporary Wives,and Beach-Boys: Researching Sex Work in the Caribbean

This article presents insights from a research project on sex work that took place in the Caribbean region during 1997–8. First it briefly summarizes common themes in historical and contemporary studies of sex work in the region, then describes the aims, methodology, and main trends of the project. It pays particular attention to the differences between definitions and experiences of sex work by female and male sex workers and of male and female sex tourists, as well as describing conditions in the Caribbean sex trade. Finally the article identifies some implications of the complexity in the region that were uncovered through the research project for feminist theorizing about sex work.     

Women's Studies: Between a Rock and a Hard Place or Just Another Cell in the Beehive?

The article traces the history of Women's Studies from its beginnings as the ‘intellectual arm of the women's movement’. It argues that the complex story of Women's Studies has been marked by both ambiguity and uncertainty as well as sustained political commitment in the face of both institutional opposition and feminist ambivalence about Women's Studies as a field of scholarship. The development of Women's Studies occurs through crucial shifts in the theoretical paradigms of feminism and the political preoccupations of the women's movement. These shifts have both deconstructed the founding premises of feminist theory and generated a greater depth to feminist thinking and research. These challenges to Women's Studies have paralleled a different set of problems arising from the increasingly market-oriented direction pursued throughout the tertiary education sector. In spite of these difficulties Women's Studies continues to survive and constitutes an important and contested site of contemporary feminist thought.     

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade. The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa. It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa. There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state. Initial evidence suggests that recent land investments have consolidated the earlier trend away from (re)distributive land policies in most countries in the region, and are likely to result in widespread reconcentration of land and capital.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

Feminist Political Science and Feminist Politics

Abstract

This article moves away from issues of the impact of women and feminist scholarship on political science to examine the relationship of feminist political science to a political constituency. It traces the trajectory of feminist political science from its close relationship with women's movement activism in the 1970s to the highly professionalised disciplinary subfield of today. It highlights some of the dilemmas resulting both from professional imperatives and from the norms of research excellence stemming from new forms of research governance. It finds that feminist political science has been pushed towards addressing an international community of scholars in a language inaccessible to local publics. But it finds that despite such pressures, feminist political science has still sought to produce work that is of direct relevance to achieving women's movement goals, whether within public policy or within political institutions broadly conceived. While it may no longer be speaking the same language, it is still seeking to identify the obstacles to change and the possibilities for transformation. This can be seen particularly clearly in the area of research on the intersection of electoral systems, quotas and party structures. Yet even here tensions can emerge, as with the concept of ‘critical mass’, perceived by activists as a crucial discursive tool but problematised by feminist scholars.     

‘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.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

The women’s liberation movement,activism and therapy at the grassroots, 1968–1985

The women’s liberation movement was the impetus for the founding of new institutions of psychological and mental health care for women in the late 1970s and 1980s. This article draws upon the archive of one such site, based in Islington, North London, to explore the ways that members of the movement interacted with local politics and were attentive to racial and economic oppression. It demonstrates that consciousness-raising groups and feminist magazines made women’s distress visible and that this visibility led to the development of feminist critiques of mainstream psychiatric care. The critiques of mainstream provision laid the ground for grassroots interventions into women’s mental healthcare in the community.     

"Sort of part of the women's movement. But different": mothers' organisations and Australian feminism

In spite of the ‘maternal turn’ in feminist theory, at the level of policy and practice feminism has neglected the politics of motherhood. This article explores the ambivalent relationship between the Australian women's movement and mothers' organisations formed to contest the management of childbirth and lactation. It argues that the advent of a ‘politics of difference’ allows greater acceptance of seemingly non-feminist positions on maternity and recognition of the role played by childbirth reformers in effecting social change. It examines Australian feminist attitudes to motherhood before discussing the response to feminism of women's groups which saw themselves as possibly part of a wider women's movement, but ‘different’ from mainstream feminism. A strong familial orientation was often contradicted by the everyday lives of activist women, who gained new skills and self-confidence in a significant challenge to medicalised reproduction.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

Lavinia seabrooke,gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia

The strained relations between feminist organisations and the labour movement have often been attributed to the male dominance of the labour movement rather than the influence of class and political loyalties. This article questions that approach. Using the minutes of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society, labour movement organisations, and Glasgow City Council and newspaper accounts, it examines relations between the Independent Labour Party in the west of Scotland and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society. These highlight how the class and political loyalties of feminists from this organisation were as destructive to any potential feminist and non-feminist alliances which would improve the lives of working-class women as the ‘male dominance’ of the Independent Labour Party.