Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies

Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.     

Was there feudalism in Indian history?

The notion of an ‘Indian feudalism’ has predominated in the recent historiography of pre‐colonial India. This notion, in its different interpretations, has West European feudalism as the model for reference. At times the close resemblance of Indian feudalism to this model has been emphasised, while on other occasions its divergence from it has been given prominence. The manorial regime and the role of trade provide the points of departure for comparison in all such arguments. In this article the validity of ‘Indian feudalism’, whichever way it is defined, is questioned. The author compares the processes of agricultural production in medieval Europe and medieval India in terms of the respective ecologies and social structures and suggests a basic dissimilarity between them such as would make any comparison futile. He argues that unlike the structured dependence of the entire peasantry upon the lords in medieval Europe, pre‐colonial Indian society was characterised by self‐dependent or free peasant production.     

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments.     

Whatever happened to the women in folktale?

This study examines the representation and function of women in English romance, specifically their development from older traditional Western narrative forms. It considers three English romances and their analogues: Le Petit Berger from the Lorraine valley, Cu Chulainn and the Wooing of Emer from Ulster, both folktales, and The Lord of Learn, a Scottish ballad. Then to show how the function of women dilates in romance, Sir Orfeo, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn are examined. In Western folktales women are stock characters who symbolically complete the hero's experience; their marriage provides a resolution to the action. In romance, however, women begin to determine the hero's sense of himself and his role in the world. This study provides a new way to look at the structural function of women characters in a genre that is thought to reinforce the values of the ruling class.     

Neo-feudalism in Latin America? Globalisation,agribusiness, and land re-concentration in Chile

This article traces the effects of globalisation on an export-oriented ‘hotspot’ in Chile's non-traditional agricultural export sector. Drawing on evidence from fieldwork carried out in 1994 and in 2004/5, the analysis examines the impact of neoliberal policy over the past two decades. Although the fruit export sector is seen as a key success story of the Chilean economy, and is an area to which small producers are often encouraged to ‘reconvert’, it is argued here that the outcome has been land re-concentration, marginalisation and proletarianisation. Small farmers become increasingly locked into dependent relationships with larger landowners and agribusiness, whilst others form a rural proletariat that serves these concerns. Whilst some commentators have labelled this process ‘semi’ or ‘neo’ feudalism, this article maintains that we are witnessing a deepening fragmentation of the peasantry driven by the continued development of capitalism. The gains of the earlier land reform period are being eroded as rural Chile differentiates and depeasantisation unfolds.     

What are we fighting for? Rethinking resistance in a Pewenche community in Chile

The contradictory reactions by members of an indigenous group in southern Chile to the prospect of their displacement by a hydroelectric dam presents an opportunity to reconceptualize ‘resistance’, studies of which have come under increasing attack in recent years. Using this case, I explore contemporary perspectives on ‘subaltern’ struggle and propose an alternative framework for the interpretation of this phenomenon that seeks to salvage a viable conception of ‘resistance’ for future study. I argue that resistance studies’ current critique finds the bulk of its substance in deficiencies of the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ paradigm presently dominating the field and offer a tentative outline of ways in which the field might be reconceived so as to transcend this paradigm and direct the study of resistance into more productive arenas.     

Social Investment in Gender Equality? Changing Perspectives on Work and Welfare in Norway

In many EU countries, the so-called social investment perspective has provided new arguments for active welfare state policies. The social investment perspective is characterized by emphasizing the role of the state to increase participation in employment by investing in the working capacity of the population—particularly women—through activation programmes and social policies. In this article we depart from recent debates surrounding this perspective to explore changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies, and the role of gender equality in these changes. In Norway, both female employment and fertility levels are high, but women still have a looser connection to the labour market compared to men, for example due to the large proportion in part-time positions, which makes changes in work and welfare policies an interesting case for exploring the relevance of the social investment perspective in this context. The empirical analysis suggests that ideas of social investment indeed have permeated recent changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies. However, questions of gender equality are not addressed in the documents introducing these changes, except when the problem at hand is the employment rate of migrant women—who are the main recipients of activation policies. In conclusion, we claim that social investment is a relevant lens for analysing changes in Norwegian work and welfare policies, but that a dual-tracked vision of gender equality is emerging, making migrant women the significant target of social investment.     

Grounds for self-government? Changes in land ownership and democratic participation in Chinese communities

Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.     

Identity Formation in Adolescence: Change or Stability?

The aim of this five-wave longitudinal study of 923 early to middle adolescents (50.7% boys; 49.3% girls) and 390 middle to late adolescents (43.3% boys and 56.7% girls) is to provide a comprehensive view on change and stability in identity formation from ages 12 to 20. Several types of change and stability (i.e., mean-level change, rank-order stability, and profile similarity) were assessed for three dimensions of identity formation (i.e., commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration), using adolescent self-report questionnaires. Results revealed changes in identity dimensions towards maturity, indicated by a decreasing tendency for reconsideration, increasingly more in-depth exploration, and increasingly more stable identity dimension profiles. Mean levels of commitment remained stable, and rank-order stability of commitment, in-depth exploration, and reconsideration did not change with age. Overall, girls were more mature with regard to identity formation in early adolescence, but boys had caught up with them by late adolescence. Taken together, our findings indicate that adolescent identity formation is guided by progressive changes in the way adolescents deal with commitments, rather than by changes in the commitments themselves.     

Increasing Employment Precariousness in Post-socialist China: Everyone Equal in a World of Uncertainty?

ABSTRACT

Based on a mixed-methods research design, this article explores young adults’ work trajectories. The findings presented in this article are based on retrospective longitudinal data collected in Beijing between September 2012 and August 2014. It is argued that, in China, neoliberal ideology has been mobilized in conjunction with a neo-familialist discourse which emphasizes the central role of women within Chinese families. Once married, women are compelled to embody “traditional” Chinese values. Although the country has a high level of female labour-market participation, in post-socialist China, the public discourse on family tends to reassign women to their roles as wives and mothers above their role as workers. Women are also more at risk than men of encountering vulnerabilities in their employment trajectories. Since the opening-up to a market economy and the individualization of labour relations, the market ideology has imposed itself and deepened socio-economic inequalities and social stratification. As the collectivist welfare system has not yet found a solid substitute able to provide social protection for the whole population, the family, and especially women, are asked to take on part of this role.