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.     

The ‘Great Offender’: feminists and the campaign for women's ordination

Few scholars have investigated the relationship between feminism and religion in the aftermath of suffrage. This article explores how feminist organizations and individual feminists supported campaigns for women's ordination within the Anglican Church and their concern for gender equality within British churches more broadly during the forties and fifties. Focusing in particular on the 1944 ordination of the first female priest within the Anglican Communion (The Bishop of Hong Kong Ronald O. Hall ordained Chinese Deaconess Florence Li Tim Oi) and the institution of female chaplain's assistant positions in 1942, it argues that a full understanding of mid twentieth-century feminism requires consideration of the struggle for women's representation in their churches. The forties and fifties have often been portrayed by historians as the nadir of twentieth-century feminism, yet feminists continued their work for women's rights and religious identity and issues could be motivating factors for their activism. Feminists were neither anti-religious nor militantly secular and this article seeks to foster work which explores the connection between religion and women's political and social activism since the nineteenth century.     

precarious changes: gender and generational politics in contemporary Italy

The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women's lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women's experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.     

What is Black British Feminism?

Young looks at the place of black feminists in today's academy in Britain, and poses some questions for contemporary self-identified black and white feminists based in that country. There is a new confidence among some black, professional Britons but infiltration into the academy remains problematic for many. Black British feminists and writers are largely absent in so-called postcolonial literary canons developed in the Anglo-American institutions, and by and large black British feminists are only offered fragile support by white feminists. Although African-American feminism offers intellectual sustenance and networks, the situation in the United States is very different, particularly as, there, black feminism has had much more impact and recognition. Discussions of the intersections of race, class and gender are rare in Britain outside black feminism, and there has been much less attention than in the States to black women's writing. Perhaps some kind of 'provisional essentialism' is still needed, for it is difficult for black feminist academics ever to feel the question of race is optional. It can be argued that 'blackness' is used to describe women of very different origins, and can obscure differential histories, but 'blackness' is always a political concept, not a register of national belonging. Black women have transformed British culture, but white feminists have largely failed to understand their problems. Attention to the social history of black women in Britain, and particularly to the creative work of black women writers, filmmakers and other cultural workers, is the place at which a new analysis should begin.     

the narrative reproduction of white feminist racism

White women’s racism has been the topic of many critiques, discussions and conflicts within British feminist theory and politics over the last fifty years, driven by women of colour’s insistence that white feminists must take on board the significance of race in order to stop perpetuating racism. Yet still today, feminist academia and activism in Britain continues to be white-dominated and to participate in the reproduction of racism and whiteness. This article examines the role of dominant historical narratives of feminism in enabling this reproduction, arguing that there is a direct correlation between how the feminist past is constructed in relation to race and racism and how feminist theory and politics are articulated in the present. Focussing on three contemporary feminist texts that address feminism itself as a subject, it highlights three techniques used in these texts that, it is argued, are commonly employed in the narrative reproduction of white feminist racism. These are: (1) the erasure of the work of British feminists of colour; (2) white feminist co-option of work by feminists of colour; and (3) the narration of feminist theory and politics as having ‘moved on’ from racism. These techniques lead to evasion of the topic of white feminist racism, both historically and in the present. They also reinforce the construction of British feminism as a story that belongs to white women. The article argues that in order to work towards ending white supremacy, white feminists must relinquish control of the feminist narrative and stop moving on from the topic of white feminist racism.     

feminist-nation building in Afghanistan: an examination of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation.     

Unravelling Identities: Performance and Criticism in Australian Feminisms

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events - the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/Ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garner's The First Stone in 1995 - are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored.     

‘history’ is now: feminist theory and the production of historical feminisms1

Over the last decade, feminist practitioners across a variety of disciplines have been invoking history as an important grounding for both feminist politics and feminist theory. At the same time, however, insufficient account is taken of the extent to which standardized versions of ‘the feminist past’ are being invoked to represent a wide variety of feminist experiences and an equally heterogeneous set of historical circumstances and cultural contexts. It is suggested that if feminist reconceptualizations of history are to be taken seriously – if, in other words, history is the production of knowledges about the past and is itself contingent on the conditions of the present – feminist theorists must begin to reference both the imperial legacies of Anglo-European feminism and the multiplicity of feminist movements around the world. Only when feminists of all disciplinary persuasions begin to acknowledge the complex historical legacies of modern feminisms and situate their own critiques within them will feminist theory be properly grounded in, and responsive to, the exigencies of feminist history.     

rethinking the interplay of feminism and secularism in a neo-secular age

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the ‘secularization thesis’. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize ‘democracy’ and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Finding postcolonial figures: rediscovering Elvira Banotti and her role in the Italian feminist movement

In the late 1960s, many western countries witnessed rising social movements that challenged traditional ideas of gender and race. Italy presents a particular case where divided post-war politics, rapid economic growth and strong Catholic tradition created conditions in which intersecting phenomena of feminism and migration challenged conventional order. Elvira Banotti, a feminist writer from Italy’s former colonies, offers one striking example of this new configuration hiding certain women’s narratives from the public debate. Although historians have already looked at the history of Italian feminisms through a transnational lens, a postcolonial perspective is lacking from these discussions. This article seeks to offer a new perspective, employing a postcolonial lens and a focus on Banotti’s narratives to assess how both voices of women engaged in public debate and of women less heard, particularly of migrants, could provide a new postcolonial view of Italian feminisms.     

Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.     

Feminism,activism and academe: a personal reflection

How the political project of feminism entered academe and how it became an educational project is the subject of this article. It is based upon personal reflection about undertaking the study for a book, Feminism, Gender and Universities: politics, passion and pedagogies. In the book, three successive generations or cohorts of feminists in academia are discussed, starting with those who are now considered ‘second-wave feminists’. In this article the notion of ‘second-wave feminism’ is examined and also how successive cohorts see feminist knowledge in relation to their own education through doctorates or wider forms of learning.     

Why a materialist feminism is (Still) Possible—and necessary

The title of this paper derives from Christine Delphy's (1980) rejoinder to her Marxist critics, formulated at a time when feminist theory was centrally preoccupied with material social inequalities. Since then, we have witnessed the so-called “cultural turn” as a result of which perspectives that focus on social structures, relations, and practices have been sidelined. Not all feminists, however, took this turn, and there have recently been signs of a revival of materialist feminism. In assessing the effects of these theoretical shifts, and in making a case for the continued relevance of materialist feminism, I will focus on the analysis of gender and sexuality. Here, I will argue that a sociologically informed, materialist approach has more to offer feminism than more culturally oriented postmodern and queer perspectives.     

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.     

Fride's corner

This position paper argues that issues related to the future are worth emphasizing and discussing with more feminist fervour and engagement than is now the case within feminist studies and futures studies. It is concluded that feminists cannot just be critical from an outside perspective, but must engage in creating alternative futures. These futures should not be common goals around which to unite, but a way to inspire feminist thinking about different futures. The authors point out the problem that the futures studies field lacks feminist perspectives, and in this position paper they discuss the gap between futures studies and feminism.     

The women's movement in Bulgaria in a life story

This article is a first attempt to research the activity of Dimitrana Ivanova, one of the most prominent Bulgarian feminists and, for almost two decades, chairwoman of the major feminist organisation in the country, the Bulgarian Women's Union (founded in 1901). It explores the social conditions of her life and provides a perspective for the understanding of gender relations in modern Bulgarian history. The article highlights the key issues that were addressed by the women's movement in Bulgaria as well as the international context in which Bulgarian feminism was situated.     

Getting Pragmatic

The history of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL) is distinguished by its extensive involvement in electoral politics and public policy. This paper traces WEL's development as part of the broader women's movement, considers its engagement with government and situates it in relation to Australian and international political traditions. It describes WEL's distinctive style of political engagement, through its candidate surveys for the 1972 federal election to the online party scorecards of the 2000s, and the more than 900 policy submissions along the way. Personal connections via the ‘femocrats’ and feminist members of parliament strengthened WEL's policy influence and helped it realise (at least for a time) the goal of a feminist policy machinery across the whole of government at both commonwealth and state/territory levels. WEL has also been part of a broader women's movement, generating tensions as well as inspiration and support. With characteristic pragmatism, WEL members made sense of their place in the movement by working for the ‘preconditions of revolution’ from the reformist end of a ‘continuum of radicalism’. They were aiming to broaden the impact of feminism by making gender equality part of the core business of government. This is a project that was undermined by major changes in political conditions, but which WEL continues to pursue through its particular focus on policy analysis and advocacy.     

Equality versus difference and gender versus class in Danish women's history

The articulated goals of feminist research and politics in Denmark have been changing during the last twenty years, from “liberation” to “equality” and now perhaps to “difference”. Open theoretical debates on these changes have been rare in the Danish context, but the need for such debates has been made topical by the latest theoretical and political discourses in Denmark on equality and difference, gender and class. The American feminist historian Joan W. Scott has shown the detrimental effects to feminist research and politics of constructing the concepts of equality and difference as binary oppositions. She argues that women's equality with men could be claimed on the basis of sameness/ similarity as well as on the basis of difference. The same detrimental effects occur, however, when sameness/similarity and difference, gender and class, are constructed dichotomously. The history of the women's movements in Denmark around the turn of the century shows that some women have tried to avoid such dichotomies. Other women have contributed to them, however, and their arguments have been sustained by the hegemonic discourses of the time. Women's history research is part of competing discourses on gender. It may have political impact on the gender relations of today. Therefore, an important purpose of feminist history is to expose the way dichotomous discourses act against feminist goals, and to avoid making such discourses part of one's own theoretical framework.     

Women have servants and men never eat: issues in reading gender,using the case study of mass-observation's 1937 day-diaries

Abstract

The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gender is not a discovery, something innately ‘there’ in social life, but is rather to be understood as an invention, an imposed analytic category of great utility for academic feminism, but also one which creates as many analytic troubles as it solves. The article problematises thea prioriand privileged status of gender within feminist analysis by discussing various interpretational issues involved in analysing a set of day-diaries written by women and men for Mass-Observation in 1937, in particular focusing on reading and writing as interpretational acts which are often treated as analytically transparent. Here, however, this epistemological bracketing is suspended, and instead both are scrutinised in analytical detail. Although the argument is discussed in relation to these specific historical materials, it is argued that the same epistemological issues arise in relation to the analysis of all kinds of research materials, whether historical or present-day, for reading and writing are the crucial elements of interpretation, and interpretation is itself central to feminist as to all other analysis.