‘disparate in voice,sympathetic in direction’: gendered political blackness and the politics of solidarity

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women’s organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present.     

‘Queen of the Bristol Channel Ports’: the intersection of gender and civic identity in Cardiff,c.1880–1914

This article explores how civic identity could shape, and be shaped by, gender distinctions during the period of commercial and municipal development. It argues that women's relationship to the urban scene was more nuanced than theories of exclusion imply, gender and civic identity being mutually constitutive. Through the case study of Cardiff, the article advocates the need for deeper analysis of the way regional and national complexities permeated gendered civic sentiments. Notions of femininity in Wales had been defined in opposition to England ever since the 1847 ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’. However, Cardiff's relatively anglicised status and aspirations in the local and global urban hierarchy meant there was often a desire by civic leaders to emulate what was occurring elsewhere, or to develop their own definition of Welsh femininity. Consequently, these competing gender ideals underlined Cardiff's civic and national—Welsh and British—identity.     

coloniality,political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.     

‘The earrings:’ friendship across ethnic and gendered boundaries in the American West

How were relationships negotiated across ethnic, racial, and gendered boundaries in the American West in the 1920s and 1930s? Were friendships possible? What limits shaped them? In 1927, four Kiowa students enrolled at Oklahoma University as students of Swedish-born Professor of Fine Arts Oscar B. Jacobson. This article investigates the relationship between Jeanette Berry, wife of one of the Kiowa artists, and Sophie Brousse, Jacobson’s French wife. It focuses on an incident when Berry presented Brousse with a gift of earrings. Placing this gift within a discussion of friendships between strangers illuminates the lines of culture, meaning, and power that separated these women. This relationship had individual ramifications but also formed part of their respective attempts to establish positions and maintain culture within Oklahoma where both American Indians and immigrants faced changing and volatile conditions. Their encounter highlights issues of class as well as ethnicity and culture.     

‘The knife in the hands of the children’? Debating the political mass strike and political citizenship in Imperial Germany

German trade union leader Ludwig Rexhäuser compared workers who might use the political mass strike to children one could not trust with a knife. No other worker leader so openly disparaged the masses, and some embraced worker activism. Nonetheless, pre-1914 German Social Democrats, in debating the mass strike, differed sharply over whether and which workers could be trusted with political agency, how workers could attain political maturity, and what tactics citizens might or should legitimately use. The contested nature of political citizenship within Germany's most democratic movement illuminates just how complex democracy and democratization have proven in practice.     

‘Keeping the Ruins Private’: Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction

Abstract

In 1964, the number of registered heroin addicts in Britain was 753. One of these was Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods. Beginning her writing career under the name Helen Ferguson, she wrote conventionally realist novels that enjoyed modest commercial success. In 1939–40, after a number of serious breakdowns and suicide attempts, and now calling herself Anna Kavan, Woods/Ferguson left a Swiss sanatorium addicted to heroin, which had almost certainly been therapeutically prescribed for sleeping disorders and severe depression. From then until her death in 1968, when she was found collapsed over a box of heroin, Kavan had an intermittent but intense relationship with the drug. This essay examines the ways in which Kavan has been constructed as an ‘addict writer’, both by her biographers and critics, and how this designation has influenced critical readings of her work.     

‘Philosophical vacuity and political ineptitude’: the freewoman's critique of the suffrage movement 1

The Freewoman has commonly been read as an example of New Woman periodical publishing, through its focus on women's sexuality and autonomy from men. The journal appears to offer a more daring, twentieth-century and modern ‘new woman’, more willing than even her 1890s counterpart to embrace free unions or sexual experimentation. The Freewoman's extraordinary discussions of sexuality have tended to distract historians' attention from other elements of the debates it engendered. In particular, the political argument found within its pages has received insufficient attention; the journal tends to be misread as a socialist publication. Placing the journal as part of the New Woman narrative lends itself to an alternative view of the political subject of The Freewoman; the New Woman focus on individuality, autonomy and creative genius plays an important part in the distinctive political debates found within the journal. Although the suffrage struggle dominated Edwardian feminist activism, many Freewoman contributors rejected the vote entirely. In aperiod when new liberal or Fabian conceptions of an increasingly interventionist state appeared to sit comfortably with feminist demands for a more inclusive and socially responsible state, The Freewoman took an anti-statist stance. Rejecting the common suffragist metaphor of the state as the home writ large, Freewoman contributors saw the state as machine-like. The author explores the motivations for these positions, and the development of an individualist-feminist, or even egoist stance. Specifically, she outlines contributors' rejection of militant suffrage activism, and their contestation of the citizen as a rights-holding and consenting political subject, and maps the alternative political structures suggested within The Freewoman, and the manner in which concepts of individuality found within New Woman discourse served to construct a disturbingly elitist and even coercive feminist politics.     

‘So nobly struggling for their manhood’: masculinity and violence among steelworkers in the wheeling district, 1880–1910

ABSTRACT

Between 1880 and 1910, new technologies and managerial schemes undermined skilled steelworkers’ ability to control production and demand high wages, which also threatened their sense of manhood. The steelworkers in the Wheeling District of northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio remained a union stronghold until the 1909–1910 steel strike. Steelworkers defined manhood in terms of their family wage, a manly bearing toward their bosses, solidarity with fellow workers, and their rights, all closely associated with union membership. Faced with the loss of their union, they turned to violence – not just out of frustration or to win the strike – but also to defend their rights and freedoms and reclaim their masculine identity.     

‘Give us peace’: Gladys Avery Tillett and the search for women's political activism in the United States, 1945–1950

As previously demonstrated by scholars, the social justice feminism movement in the United States accomplished its two central goals by the time of that nation's official involvement in World War II. This article examines the subsequent development of former social justice feminists' search for political activism after World War II through the activities of one of the social movement's later, significant leaders, Gladys Avery Tillett, particularly in her participation in the controversial and bitter campaign of North Carolina United States Senator Frank Porter Graham to retain his seat in the 1950 Democratic party primary.     

‘Our conception of non-partisanship means a partisan non-partisanship’: the search for political identity in the American Federation of Labor, 1947–1955

This article reconsiders the evolution of political action in the American Federation of Labor between 1947 and 1955 by examining the American Federation of Labor's (AFL's) first overtly political arm, Labor's League for Political Education. It argues that the key dynamic shaping labor's political activities in this crucial period was the tension between a tradition of non-partisanship and the imperatives of an evolving political landscape that made meaningful neutrality impossible. By 1952, decentralization, local autonomy, and non-partisanship had given way to a political identity marked by centralization, national coordination, and partisan alliances.     

‘Girls who arouse dangerous passions’: women and bathing, 1900-39

Abstract

This article focuses on the struggle by women to achieve unsegregated access to beaches and swimming pools in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of the Second World War against a background of bureaucratic regulation. Through a variety of sources that contrast official material with the mood within popular culture, it exposes the clash of patriarchal prudery against changing public opinions. It poses questions on the notions of female modesty and emancipation as women's swimwear reflected changing perceptions of the female body and explores conflicting discourses of glamour and sex versus health and efficiency.     

A view of the observable: A positivist ‘understanding’ of Agrarian Society and political protest in colonial India 1

The great uprising of 1857 in India was once discussed predominantly in terms of the debate, military mutiny or war of independence. Twenty years ago S.B. Chaudhuri pointed to something of the complexity and range of the rising in his ‘Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies 1857–59’ (1957). Some recent writers have seen in the events of the period a classic example of a peasant war. Now, in a new book, ‘The Peasant and the Raj. Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India’ (Cambridge 1978), E. T. Stokes concludes that ‘1857, like 1848 in Europe, remains a date to conjure with’ (p. 139). Stokes's judgements on the rebellion and its context bid fair to becoming the new orthodoxy. Like all orthodoxies they have a good deal of force in them. At the same time they are loaded with implications, some of them perhaps not fully foreseen, that bear careful examination.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

To ‘Better the Breed of Men’: women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935

Over the past decade the relationship between feminism and eugenics has become an increasingly important site of research. This relationship, however, remains to be examined in New Zealand. This article interrogates the ways in which female reformers, colonial feminists and female health and welfare workers engaged in eugenic debates in New Zealand during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It situates the 1924 Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders in New Zealand and the sterilization debate of the 1930s as representative of women’s role as both the agents and subjects of eugenics in this period. Eugenics offered women a discourse of moral and social reform that fitted neatly with the ideals of colonial feminism and, by extension, enabled them to participate in national debates about racial health. However, in their testimony before the 1924 Inquiry and in the subsequent debates surrounding sterilization, women articulated and prescribed eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’ and cast themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’. As authors of eugenics for other women, white middle‐class female reformers, health professionals and colonial feminists complicate the history of eugenics in New Zealand.     

‘No Suggestion of Suffragettism’: the Blue Blouses in Ireland, 1933–1936

In July 1933 membership of the Irish fascist organisation, the Blueshirts, was officially opened to women for the first time. Within a year the Blue Blouses, as the women's auxiliary was colloquially called, became the largest women's political organisation in Ireland. This article examines the group as a vehicle for the politicisation of conservative pro-Treaty Irish women. The Blue Blouses willingly used parades, mass rallies, athletics, and a specific discourse of domesticity to articulate a strategy of political involvement that did not conflict with the patriarchal presumptions of inter-war Irish political culture. As such, this analysis is intended to augment the history of inter-war Irish women politics that to date has focused almost exclusively on feminist organisations.     

The Women's Movement and ‘Class Struggle’: gender,class formation and political identity in women's strikes, 1968–78.

ABSTRACT

Women workers’ industrial disputes were of fundamental importance to the WLM, reflected in the deeds of activists and early participant-histories. These disputes were sites of worker-employer conflict and conflict between feminists and the wider Labour Movement. This article considers how these differing interpretations related to the striking women themselves. It focuses on four key disputes and analyses contemporary reports and the accounts of those involved. It argues women strikers' particular experiences of trade unionism, class politics and feminism resulted in gendered, but still fundamentally class-based, identities, and concludes by considering the position of women workers' industrial actions in feminist histories.     

Keeping ‘our’ land: property,agriculture and tensions between Indigenous and settler visions of food sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence.     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.     

‘lay experts’: women's social purity groups and the politics of sexuality in Switzerland, 1890–1915

Women's social purity groups were significant participants in the debates of the regulation of sexualities during the unification process of Swiss Criminal Law between the 1890s and the 1930s. Although not yet enfranchised, women claimed political participation through their status as ‘lay experts’ with regard to sexual matters and as an interest group with backing from their male counterparts. The article examines their demands in the reformulation of the regulation of sexualities and investigates their aims and strategies. Their expertise, gained through the experience of and investment in ‘moral guardianship’, is examined here in relation to their interventions on the age of protection, or the age of consent in contemporary terms. As ‘lay experts’ on sexual morality, the women's social purity groups participated in the increased interests and discourses of sexuality between 1890 and 1915 in the midst of legal, medical and political experts.