Meeting peasants where they are: cultivating agroecological alternatives in neoliberal Guatemala

ABSTRACT

Social movements increasingly embrace agroecology as an integral part of food sovereignty. This essay has two related aims: first, to highlight the barriers to agroecology and explore how these can be overcome; second, to deepen understandings of how agroecology can strengthen movements for food sovereignty or extend neoliberal governance. I ground these questions by examining state and social movement agroecological programs in Guatemala. I argue that strict rejection of conventional inputs and market production, in addition to insufficient state investment and redistribution, creates barriers to participation among a rural peasantry whose livelihoods have been transformed by decades of scientific, market-led development. Facing these limits, agroecology can work to strengthen food sovereignty movements, but can also reinforce the neoliberal food regime by promoting resilience and indigenous agriculture as sufficient to resolve the food crisis.     

A tribute to Willem Assies (1954–2010): reflections on his contribution to peasant and indigenous studies

This article discusses the manifold contributions of Willem Assies to the social sciences and Latin American studies. It focuses on his writings on agrarian and peasant studies, social movements, and indigenous peoples. In particular, he made important contributions to our understanding of multicultural citizenship, the multiethnic state, and plurinational democracy. His writings had a major impact on those working on rural and indigenous peoples' issues, although the Dutch academic establishment largely failed to appreciate his exceptional talents. It is argued in this article that he never wavered from his early recognition of the importance of class in social analysis, while acknowledging its limitations. In his view, one of the central challenges facing the indigenous peoples' social movements was how to link indigenous issues to general national problems. To what extent had they met this challenge? His premature death prevented him from exploring this key issue further, but hopefully other scholars will take up the baton and continue to debate his ideas.     

Black Mothers,Bad Mothers: African Refugee Women and the Governing of ‘Good’ Citizens Through the Australian Child Welfare System

In this article I explore how the child welfare system in Australia is a basis of governmentality, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 35 women resettled in Australia as refugees originating from African countries. Although the explicit aim of the child welfare system is to protect children from a risk of significant harm, the findings presented here suggest that such systems can concurrently operate to evaluate, monitor, and demand behavioural change from women who are the subject of intervention in accordance with logics of white neoliberal motherhood, in which parental merit is measured through, and problematised by, factors of racialisation, assumptions of cultural difference, counter-heteronormativity, and socio-economic marginalisation. I argue that the child welfare system not only operates to protect children, but can also function as an instrument to govern women to ‘fit’ with an idealised standard of citizenship in Australia. Thereby supplanting maternal guardianship with the mandate of government institutions, operations of child welfare position the paternalistic authority of the state as absolute and render mothers who do not conform to white neoliberal motherhood as vulnerable to intervention.     

Indigenous Struggles for Land and Culture in Cauca,Colombia

This article examines the multiple and interrelated struggles of the indigenous population - composed in the main of smallholding peasants - of Cauca in Colombia. The article discusses not only their struggles against economic exploitation, political and cultural oppression, and military violence, therefore, but their role in a revolutionary process that seeks to build a society based on social justice and respect for human rights. Through a peaceful and persistent collective action, they have recovered a large part of their ancestral territories, elevated the level of literacy and conscientization, and revived many aspects of indigenous culture. However, the intensification in militarization and repression that has accompanied neo-liberal economic policies imposed 'from above' has in effect undermined the formal recognition by the Colombian Constitution of their territorial and cultural rights. It is argued here that current mobilization undertaken by indigenous communities is characterized by two interrelated challenges: resistance that is peaceful, plus a failure to transcend locality and to ally with other non-rural anti-systemic movements.     

This Word is (Not?) Very Exciting: Considering Intersectionality in Indigenous Studies

Gender and intersectional approaches can provide important insights and reflections for indigenous studies. Issues related to indigenous people and communities are broad and complex. Doing research within indigenous studies has to consist of more than simply discussing indigenous identity. I argue that intersectional approaches of varying kinds provide an opportunity to understand several aspects of identity and a diverse set of issues relevant to indigenous communities. Using intersectional approaches enables one to maintain a critical focus on power. In this article, I describe indigenous studies and intersectionality separately, then move on to a discussion of how intersectionality and gender perspectives can be used within indigenous studies. The starting point for intersectional approaches as well as for indigenous studies is the margins rather than the centre. The focus of the article is on methodology, which is based on the reading of literature from indigenous methodologies, gender studies, and intersectionality. A key concept is the cultural interface, which points towards the existence of plural subject positions both for individuals and within a community.     

transgender identity,sexual versus gender ‘rights’ and the tools of the Indian state

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities.     

Public and Private Citizenship: From Gender Invisibility to Feminist Inclusiveness

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women.The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms.A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices.It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms.     

promoting freedom from poverty: political mobilization and the role of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union

Contemporary social policy toward low-income women in the United States, as evidenced both by Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and by the AFDC programme that preceded it, is in part an artefact of long-standing conceptions of the nature of citizenship. This view sees citizenship as resting primarily on civil and political rights, not on rights with respect to economic, social, and cultural matters. Drawing on scholarly literature on the development of international human rights regimes, the feminist literature that analyses social policy both comparatively and in terms of US domestic policy, and literature regarding contemporary movements among low-income persons, this paper analyses the efforts of one organization, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), to challenge US policy via international human rights law and international enforcement mechanisms. We will suggest that, despite some of the flaws of the KWRU, their approach is a promising one for low-income women. In particular, we wish to suggest that a broader conception of citizenship that takes into account economic, cultural, and social rights is necessary to create a more equitable and democratic polity for women.     

Using biographical narrative and life story methods to research women's movements: FEMCIT

This paper discusses the use of the biographical narrative interpretative method (BNIM) in a research project that investigated the ways in which intimate life and intimate citizenship have changed in the wake of the cultural and political interventions of women's movements and other movements for gender and sexual equality and change. It outlines the research design of the study, which was the “Intimate Citizenship” work package of the FEMCIT research project, and describes how the biographical narrative interpretative method enabled the project's central research questions to be addressed.     

Shaping the online fat acceptance movement: talking about body image and beauty standards

Over the past decade, in Canada and the United States, blogs have become a popular and important space for fat women and their allies to create and further develop discursive strategies to contest the gendered anti-fat discourses perpetuated by the media, governments and the field of medicine and institutions of public health (e.g., Elliot, C. (2007). Journal of Canadian Studies, 41, 134–149. Gimlin, D. (2002). Body work: Beauty and self-image in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press; Herdon, A. M. (2006). Social Semiotics, 15, 127–141. Rice, C. (2007). Women's Studies International Forum, 30, 158–174. Currently, popular discourses pertaining to fat people, particularly women, tend to range from larger bodies implicating a ‘moral deficit’ to a ‘risky behaviour’ to ‘political discrimination’ where elements from each discourse shape how fat women's bodies are read within the broader culture (Fikkan, J. L., & Rothblum, E. D. (2011). Sex Roles, 66, 575–592. Kwan, S. (2009). Sociological Inquiry, 79, 25–50. These messages in positioning the thin body as the ideal body are embedded in neoliberal discourses around citizenship that, in emphasizing personal responsibility, encourage (sometimes) punishing regimens of strict diets and exercise, and perpetuate an image of responsible citizenship as an extension of modern interpretations (Herdon, 2006). Using content and thematic analysis, we systematically analyze how four female self-identified fat acceptance (FA) bloggers discuss beauty standards and body image as a means to challenge these discourses. Findings suggest bloggers import elements from LBGTQ movements to extend dominant discursive strategies, model alternative forms of fat embodiment, and address the economic marginalization of fat women in industry. Moreover, through discussions on beauty and body image, bloggers use online spaces to contest anti-fat discourses and to develop discursive strategies that move beyond the binary of fat as a lifestyle choice, and body size as biologically or genetically determined that dominate the fat acceptance movement.     

Performing the Filipina “mail-order bride”: Queer neoliberalism,affective labor,and homonationalism

The 2005 video/performance art piece, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride, by the Filipina American performance-art ensemble, the Mail Order Brides, examines the role of affective labor in constituting gay marriage as a form of US homonational belonging. In a contemporary context of capitalist globalization, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride critiques the subjugation of the third-world woman worker within a queer neoliberal logic, highlighting the inability of the mainstream US LGBT movement to address issues of race, migration, and labor. The Mail Order Brides enact forms of feminist camp and ethnic drag to denaturalize the affective labor that is embodied within the figure of the Filipina “mail-order bride.” In doing so, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride links an analysis of transnational Filipina labor with a critique of queer cultural politics in the US In its critique of queer neoliberalism, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride builds on and contributes to queer of color social movements committed to racial and economic justice.     

En-Gendering the Sublime: Aesthetics and Politics in the Eighteenth Century

In this essay I expand on the analysis of the en-gendered sublime, an aesthetic concept of political consequence used in the eighteenth century. In a discussion of the initial phase of modern aesthetics I will present Immanuel Kant's opinions on the sublime's ennobling effect as having solely male connotations. This, I argue, became an important part of the construction of a new notion of citizenship on the basis of nationality and as an exclusively male domain. Furthermore, I will claim that conceptions of the “bad” sublime, as expressed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke, made up another side of this ennobling sublimity coin, which was the politically provocative defined in female terms. Aesthetics has obviously walked hand-in-hand with politics ever since Plato's Republic, and the concept of the sublime only make up a small part of this complex union—but undeniably a rather interesting one.     

special guest contribution: violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of human rights and the effective exercise of citizenship

This article focuses on violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of women’s civil, political, economic, social, cultural and developmental rights, as well as the consequences of this for the effective exercise of citizenship. The value of adopting a citizenship lens, identifying the nexus between violence against women and human rights, and adopting an approach that acknowledges the multiplicity, intersectionality and continuity of violence across the public and private spheres serves to assist in identifying and providing an analysis of the continuing challenges in the quest to eliminate violence against women. Owing to the scarcity of literature that explicitly highlights the link between human rights, citizenship and violence against women, the current analysis highlights some of the existing literature on a situated understanding of citizenship through a women’s human rights lens, while the discussion on violence against women as a barrier to realising all human rights that enable the exercise of effective citizenship is largely underpinned by the work of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences.     

New social movements in Latin America: The dynamics of class and identity

This essay provides a counterpoint to the postmodern interpretations of social movements in Latin America. Its purpose is to argue for the necessity of a class analysis of these movements. The main focus of this argument is on the emergence of what has been labelled ‘new peasant movements’, which, it is argued, constitute the most dynamic forces of resistance to neoliberal capitalism in Latin America. Postmodernism in this context is viewed as a deficient intellectual approach, premised as it is on an idealist conception of reality.     

A Woman’s Work is… Unfinished Business: Justice for the Disappeared Magdalen Women of Modern Ireland

In this article I explore one core feature of contemporary campaigns for justice for Ireland’s Magdalen women concerning their deaths and disappearances, which continue to be denied by a State that has only recently started to acknowledge civilian deaths in other contexts such as armed conflict. I examine the treatment of the disappeared and deceased Magdalen women in the economic and political context of the Irish use of religious institutions and consider the significance of this regime for women’s citizenship in the postcolonial nation-building processes of the twentieth century. I aim to illustrate the connections between gender, violence and citizenship that are implicated in outcomes for justice for Magdalen survivors and victims, as well as conceptions of Irish women’s citizenship in general. In this discussion I consider the Magdalen campaigns for justice as significant for the individual women and families involved, as well as the entire nation’s conception of self as represented in history.     

Advocating for the Right: Alliance Defending Freedom and the Rhetoric of Christian Persecution

In this article I trace the legal and cultural advocacy work of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the single largest Christian conservative legal organisation operating in the US today. I begin by locating ADF strategy within the longer history of Christian persecution rhetoric articulated by the Moral Majority during the 1970s and 1980s. I then analyse both legal and cultural outputs of the organisation in two key cases: the so-called bathroom bills limiting transgender access to public facilities in several states, and the service denial of florist Barronelle Stutzman. I argue that by emphasising the perceived vulnerability of white cisgender women and girls in these cases, ADF litigators and cultural producers advance a narrow conception of religious freedom rights located in the specific cultural politics of neoliberal, white evangelicalism. As a result, while these cases have been legislative and policy failures for ADF they nevertheless provide useful insight into the rhetorical project of Christian persecution.

     

Forms of production in practice: Fresh approaches to simple commodity production

Jaques M. Chevalier, Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin and Cult in Eastern Peru, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

In an important new book, Jacques Chevalier advances the concept ‘form of production’ by giving it explicit theoretical treatment. In doing so he reveals a number of significant differences in the way various scholars have used the concept, especially on the central question — the relationship between capitalist and non‐capitalist forms of production in peripheral social formations. This is an old problem, but one that refuses quietly to die. It thus deserves continued discussion. What makes Chevalier's book worthy of extended discussion, however, is that it provides an anthropological treatment of the cultural elements involved in creating and sustaining distinctive forms of production. It does so by elaborating some of Pierre Bourdieu's notions about social practice in creating cultural as well as material life. The two sets of issues are not as far apart as one might think, since both consider actual social practice within particular material and cultural contexts, giving agency to both economic practice and to the environment containing it in determining the resulting social dynamic. In this way the scholars working on these two traditions hope to avoid many of the deterministic assumptions embedded in most analysis of production ‐ a problem that has long bedevilled marxists (as well as anthropologists). In this review essay I reflect on both sets of issues and the advantages to be gained by considering them as interrelated.     

Women's Citizenship and the First World War: general remarks and a case study of women's enfranchisement in Austria and Germany

Historians' views about the impact of World War I on women's citizenship have diverged. Some scholars have emphasized that the war changed cultural understandings of suffrage due to women's patriotism and dedication to the war effort. Others have underlined that the politics of electoral reform determined whether or not women attained voting rights. Based on the cases of Austria and Germany where women were enfranchised in the context of revolutionary unrest triggered by the war, this article argues that the political process was in fact crucial. However, the claim of women's suffrage during the war is to be contextualized within a general understanding of republican citizenship and the concept of the ‘citizen soldier’. This discourse was essential to keeping the issue alive during the war. Nonetheless, further studies are still required to assess the war's impact on women and citizenship in the subjective sense of participation.     

Gendered Citizenship in a Multidimensional Perspective: The Challenges Facing Norway within the Nordic Model

This article discusses the challenges that continue to exist in the struggle for full and equal citizenship in Norway, focusing particularly on the multidimensional citizenship that has been central to the overarching project of women's movements. It reports on comparative research on the social, economic, multicultural, and intimate dimensions of citizenship which offers grounds to regard Norway as an example of good practice and supportive policies in relation to gendered citizenship, and at the same time highlights that fully equal and just citizenship remains to be achieved, particularly for minoritized women.