‘Call Us Ms.’: Viva and arguments for Kenyan women's respectable citizenship 1975–80

Drawing on Viva, the first women's magazine published in East Africa, this article articulates the ways educated Kenyan women actively inserted themselves into public debates and constructions of the new nation. It argues that Viva authors and editors employed rhetorics of nationalism and development to advocate for Kenyan women's right to equal citizenship. They wanted participation in the possibilities, power, and self-reliance that postcolonial nationalism promised its citizens and mobilized images of a productive, modern woman to make their case. Viva's producers appropriated the momentum of 1970s development rhetoric and international women's liberation to show that Kenyan women were already fulfilling mandates to develop themselves and their fellow Kenyans through education, wage labor, consumer habits, and moral respectability. Viva reveals the ambitions, strategies, and desires of Kenya's educated women, not only for themselves but also for their nation and their rural ‘sisters’.     

The Sudanese Woman

The nature of the relationship between (proto-)feminism and (anti-)imperialism is highly contested. A case in point is the work of Olive Schreiner, and the articulation of gender politics with (anti-)imperialism which has been subjected to repeated scrutiny in the last twenty years. One strand of criticism, exemplified by critics like Laura Chrisman, Anne McClintock and Carolyn Burdett, argues that Schreiner generally successfully integrates a (proto-)feminist politics with criticism of imperialism in her writing produced after The Story of an African Farm . However, her first novel is viewed as more problematic in this regard. While acknowledging it as a major early text of the women's movement, such critics see the novel as in large measure endorsing prevailing Victorian ideologies of racial hierarchy. Drawing on the methodology of Sub-altern Studies, Moore-Gilbert proposes a rather different interpretation of The Story of an African Farm . Following the lead of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, he seeks to trace the impact of (the resistance of) the colonized subaltern on the colonizer's unconscious and how this is reflected in the colonizer's regimes of representation and self-image. He proposes that Waldo can be read 'catachrestically' as a figure of the (partially resistant) colonized who at the manifest level occupy only a marginal role in Schreiner's text. The aim is not to overturn readings of Waldo that see him as an exemplary 'modern', embodying many of the characteristics of western civilization at the time. Rather, the argument is that such a 'catchrestic' reading can co-exist simultaneously with these received interpretations of his role, thus corroborating the perception of the Subaltern Studies historians on the existence of conflicts and contradictions in the colonizer's unconscious that mark the (oppositional) presence of the (historically effaced) subaltern. Against their emphasis, however, Moore-Gilbert suggests that the colonizer's unconscious can also be the seat of 'progressive' drives. And the presence of such drives on Schreiner's novel suggests that its racial politics are more consonant with those of her later work than is commonly assumed.     

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.     

Property and proper chastity: Women's land rights in South Asia today

Bina Agarwal's ambitious and wide‐ranging book, A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), is reviewed. Agarwal's argument is that women in South Asia should have the same land rights as men. She considers, in detail, the pervasiveness with which such land rights are absent (although they do exist in certain limited areas), why this is so, and the means by which such rights might be obtained. Among the issues raised are: the need for women's organisations at the village level, whether legislation on its own can confer genuine rights (the answer is ‘no'), how control of women's sexuality connects with male control of land, and regional differences within India (especially between North and South). The book is seen to be a magisterial study of high quality. The one criticism made of it is the implication of Agarwal's theoretical discussion that gender ideologies are determined by economic causes. This is contested.

A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Bina Agarwal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp.xxii + 572. £60 (hardback); £24.95 (paperback). ISBN 81 85618 63 1 and 64 X.     

‘Porn Trouble’

In this article, I explore the emergent relationship between feminist media studies/cultural studies and the field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). EP scholars increasingly conduct research on media and popular culture. At the same time, media/ted texts are increasingly marked by EP discourses. I take as my focus commercial women's online magazines produced in the UK and in Spain and accessed globally. Specifically, I explore a recurrent thread in their discussion forums: women expressing confusion, concern, disappointment, hurt and/or self-doubt, and asking for advice on discovering that their male partners consume various pornographies. A feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis is developed to explore both peer-to-peer and editorial advice on such ‘porn trouble’. I show how pseudo-scientific discourses give support to a narrative of male immutability and female adaptation in heterosexual relationships, and examine how these constructions are informed by EP accounts of sexual difference. The article offers empirical insights into the penetration of EP logics and narratives into popular culture transnationally. Advancing the notion of ‘postfeminist biologism’, my analysis contributes to feminist interrogations of EP's ongoing popularity in the face of sound, longstanding and widespread criticism of it as scientifically flawed and culturally pernicious.     

‘Gone are the Days’: Bisexual Perspectives on Lesbian/Feminist Literary Theory

In this article I offer a map of recent UK and US lesbian feminist literary theory which highlights the shifting and often paradoxical interpretations of lesbian sexuality as both real and as metaphorical. I focus on two key texts which offer overviews and analysis of the field from different sides of the Atlantic, which are both accessible, in the sense of being written from the perspective of ‘ordinary’ lesbians, rather than structuring lesbian feminist literary criticism around traditional critical concepts, and which also, unusually, offer some (small) comment on bisexuality. These two works are Bonnie Zimmerman's Safe Sea of Women (1992), and Palmer's Contemporary Lesbian Writing (1993). I argue that lesbian/feminist literary theory offers particular constructions of sexuality which, while challenging many of the assumptions of heterosexual feminist literary theory, largely ignores the bisexual content of much lesbian fiction, and consequently glosses over some of the tricky areas of gender and sexuality difference. Through this ‘les/bi’ reading I hope to encourage the figure of the bisexual woman to question both constructions and deconstructions of lesbian sexuality.     

the home,the veil and the world: reading Ismat Chughtai towards a ‘progressive’ history of the Indian women's movement

This paper discusses the work of Ismat Chughtai (1911–1991), a controversial writer whose long literary career extending over four decades roughly corresponds to the formative stages of the Indian women's movement. It interprets Chughtai's novella The Heart Breaks Free (1966) to forward an anti-teleological enquiry of the women's movement in India. This progressive teleology often suggested by a discussion of the ‘waves’, ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ of the Euro-American women's movement and adopted to postcolonial women's movements, such as those in India, Jamaica and South Africa, is belied by the piecemeal legislative gains won by activist efforts. Some of the questions governing my enquiry are: What lessons can a questioning of teleology teach us about the gains and losses of postcolonial women's movements? If the alternative to teleology is, as I suggest, a genealogy, then what constitutes a genealogical enquiry into the women's movement in India? In face of apparent and self-acknowledged losses and ineffectiveness in recent times, would the movement's apparent unity across religious differences be a way of initiating such an inquiry or is another mode of analysis required? The paper directs attention to the Indian women's movement's attempts at bringing together women of different religious persuasions, legislative, and religious edicts related to Muslim women's right to co-habitation and divorce, and ‘cases’ that serve as testing points of the movement's struggle against religious and state authority. It also points to the neglected factor of economic security for women as a way in which a genealogical inquiry can proceed so as to strengthen the legislation and the movement itself.     

The International Labour Organization and the Struggle against Forced Labour from 1919 to the Present

Since its foundation in 1919 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has regarded the worldwide eradication of forced labour as one of its basic aims. This article looks at the ILO's role both as a forum for public discourse on the historically shifting boundaries that separated free labour from coercion, and as an independent actor in the struggle against forced labour throughout the twentieth century. Examining the ILO's efforts in three distinct phases (the inter-war period, the Cold War years and the age of decolonization/postcolonial nation-building) will also shed light and contribute to the discussion on the influence of international organizations in the making of the modern world.     

Why Insanity Is Not Subversive in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Short Story ‘Season of Madness’

Dalya Abudi maintains that in many female Arab texts ‘madness serves as a metaphor for female victimisation on the one hand and for female resistance on the other’. This paper contends that the representation of women as insane in Hanan Al-Shaykh's ‘Season of Madness’ is not subversive. I draw on Camineor-Santangelo's approach to feminist criticism, which argues that a madwoman cannot speak. Camineor-Santangelo explains that madness is complicit with de Lauretis’ technologies of gender because it gives the illusion of power but at the same time the mad (non)-subject is located outside any ‘sphere where power can be exerted’. I illustrate how in this story female madness is mainly represented as witchcraft and evil, stigma, a female malady, a denied subjectivity, social control, illusional power, self-sabotage and a final surrender.     

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.     

Texts in context: Afro-Colombian women's activism in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

This paper speaks across the divide between feminist theorists and praxis-oriented gender experts to argue for a more enabling reading of postcolonial feminist critiques of gender and development. Drawing on the activism of Afro-Colombian women in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia – most especially Matamba y Guasá, a network of black women's organizations from the state of Cauca – it brings attention to the independent ability of women in these locations to reflect and act on their own realities and claims.     

Fathers,adolescent daughters and gender in a low-income South African community

Knowledge about father–adolescent daughter relationships is mostly based on research in North-American and European contexts. Furthermore, it tends to rely on either fathers' or daughters' perspectives, and not on dyadic data. Informed by a social constructionist perspective, this study investigated the fatherhood constructions of fathers and adolescent daughters in a South African low-income community. We used Charmaz' social constructionist grounded theory method. Forty-two interviews were conducted separately with fourteen fathers and their adolescent daughters. Five conceptual categories were identified: (i) Predominance of fathers' provider role; (ii) Fathers and daughters having an ‘understanding’ in which daughters apparently complied with fathers authoritarian positions; (iii) explicit expressions of affection were mostly limited to special occasions; (iv) Fathers wished a better future for their daughters and attempted to keep them on track to such a future and (v) lastly, Fathers' expected daughters to follow their instructions and not their bad examples. Our findings highlight the influential and constricting role of dominant masculine and feminine gender notions in the discourses and practices of the fathers and adolescent daughters in our study. However, some evidence of contestations were present that suggests the potential of a shift towards more equitable gender relations.     

The Impersonal Strategy: Re-visiting Virginia Woolf's Position in The Common Reader Essays

The concept of impersonality as a writer's strategy has been exposed to misinterpretations that either fail to exhaust its full meaning and deposit an unequal amount of attention on all components of the term or, in the worst case, tend to distort its true elements. In relation to Virginia Woolf's criticism, in particular, it is a critical commonplace that the author employed an impersonal position in order not to fully materialise her feminist vision, but to shy away from explicitly expressing her feminist convictions and openly supporting women's rights. Indicative of this is the criticism that suggests disapproval of Woolf's reluctance to side with her own gender and declare the power of female personality.

The aim here is to challenge such critical views, separate the discussion of impersonality from its association with that of androgyny, and re-visit the issue of Woolf's employment of the impersonal strategy. I examine two of Woolf's essays on nineteenth-century women writers included in her first volume of The Common Reader and offer an analysis from both a gender-oriented and a genderless angle. Woolf's strong affinity with female conditions of oppression, her modernist convictions, her need to compromise with the male-dominated context of the time and her concurrent urge to co-operate with the common reader of an unspecified sex for the sake of artistic creation reveal more complex reasons behind her intentions than those examined by critics so far.     

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.     

DAMNED IF YOU DO AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

In contemporary Western societies women are often thought to have overcome inequality, become autonomous and resistant to social pressures, and in so doing gained the freedoms to make their own choices. However, this ‘post-feminist sensibility’ can arguably be seen as a double-bind as some types of ‘choices’ cannot always be recognised as freely chosen if they are taken as an indication of failing to resist social (appearance) pressures. We argue that one such example is the ‘choice’ to have cosmetic breast surgery, a practice that has received both criticism and celebration from different feminist angles. In this paper we analyse how women who have had breast augmentation are constructed by readers of an internet blog in which they are largely vilified and pathologised for not valuing their ‘natural’ (yet ‘deficient’) breasts. We demonstrate how the same discursive constructions that appear to value women's ‘natural’ bodies simultaneously (re)produce the conditions in which women may feel the need to have breast augmentation.     

Gender constructions and gender relations in cotton and chain-making in England: a contested and varied terrain

Abstract

While scholars have emphasised the positioning of women as wives and mothers in working-class culture in late nineteenth-century England, their position in the workforce remained significant, even in such disparate industries as cotton and chain-making. In the former, while excluded from spinning, women's employment in powerloom weaving brought them into the heart of the production process, encouraging their participation in workplace struggles and ultimately influencing a transformation in the working-class family in terms of fertility control. In chain-making, while some male workers attempted to position women in the domestic sphere, others were dependent on their labour. Cultural constructions of gender were thus undermined, as the struggle for the minimum wage superseded attempts to remove women from the workforce. In neither industry was equality between men and women realised, while antagonism on the basis of gender persisted. Yet women's identification with their work remained evident while mutuality across gender lines was also apparent, as women themselves played an active role in the shaping of gender relations. Conceptions of gender, as they intersected with particular labour market structures, thus came under duress. Consequently, a more complex picture of gender in working-class life emerges than an analysis which privileges cultural constructions would allow.     

Bridging cross-cultural feminisms: annie besant and women's rights in England and India, 1874-1933

Abstract

Annie Besant was a Victorian radical whose outspoken views included advocacy of women's rights and opposition to British imperial policies. In her mid-forties she went to live in India. Contesting British attempts to Westernize Indian society, Besant found herself in the seemingly anomalous position of defending traditional Indian patriarchy and resisting efforts to reform the status of Indian women. Such conservatism brought on Besant criticism not only from Western liberals and Christian missionaries, but also from many Indian social reformers. When she gradually shifted her views and voiced her support for Indian women's rights, Indian nationalists condemned her as a British imperialist. The conflict between loyalty to national heritage and opposition to traditional patriarchy is one that colonized women have commonly experienced. By examining how an anti-imperialist British feminist responded to the question of women's reform in India, this paper offers another perspective on the complexities of this dilemma.     

racialisation,relationality and riots: intersections and interpellations

This paper takes up Avtar Brah's (1999) invitation to write back to the issues she raises in her mapping of the production of gendered, classed and racialised subjectivities in west London. It addresses two topics that, together, illuminate racialised and gendered interpellation and psychosocial processes. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first draws on empirical research on the transition to motherhood conducted in east London to consider one mother's experience of giving birth in the local maternity hospital. The maternity ward constituted a site where racialised difference became salient, leading her to construct her maternal identity by asserting her difference from Bangladeshi mothers and so self-racialising, as well as ‘othering’ Bangladeshi mothers. The paper analyses the ways in which her biography may help to explain why her experience of the maternity hospital interpellates her into racialised positioning. The second section focuses on media responses to the riots in various English cities in August 2011. It examines the ways in which some media punditry racialised the riots and inclusion in the British postcolonial nation. The paper analyses three sets of commentaries and illuminates the ways in which they racialise the debate in essentialising ways, reproducing themes that were identified in the 1980s as ‘new racism’ and apportioning blame for the riots to ‘black gangster culture’. While these media pronouncements focus on racialisation, they are intersectional in implicitly also invoking gender and social class. The paper argues that the understanding of the mother's self-racialisation is deepened by a consideration of the racialised discourses that can be evoked (and are contested) in periods of social unrest. The paper thus draws on part of the methodology of ‘The Scent of Memory’ in layering media readings and biographical narratives to analyse the contemporary psychosocial space of racialisation.