Transsexuality in Contemporary Iran: Legal and Social Misrecognition

Sex change surgery has been practised in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1982. Therefore, a medical and judicial process of transition has been regulated accordingly. However, this has not resulted in either the legalization of sex change surgery, nor in the recognition of transsexual identity within Iranian substantive law. Sex change surgery is allowed through Islamic law, rather than substantive law, in response to the existing social facts and norms, on the one hand, and structural cooperation with medical system, on the other. In this article, I argue that the Iranian heteronormative law’s understanding of transsexuality has amounted to the misrecognition of trans persons’ status within law and society. Using semi structured interviews, intersectional content analysis, and feminist methodologies, the findings indicate that transsexual bodies have gained meaning through religious and medical discourses within a framework of power relations, and that Iranian transsexual persons have reconstructed and redefined gender and gender relations in a way that informs their understanding of gender and sexuality beyond the existing Islamic legal and social norms. Moreover, intersectional analysis of the interviews demonstrates how the legal misrecognition of transsexuality creates space for a discourse which in itself leads to the misrecognition of other gendered identities, such as homosexuals and transwomen.     

Sacred groves,sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization,intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.     

Sacred Belonging: Writing,Religion and Community in H.D.'s Second World War Novels

Abstract: This article considers two works from H.D.'s Second World War writing: The Gift and The Sword Went Out to Sea. In these texts, H.D. situates herself in the context of diverse intimate communities: her spiritualist circle, her partnership with Bryher, her family and previous generations of Moravians. These communities ground her personal vision of writing as a spiritual exercise that will bring healing to both the individual psyche and the wider society ravaged by war. The significance of community is such that when she becomes isolated, desolation and breakdown follow. The restoration of communication and community through vision and writing leads to healing and a particular understanding of religious modernism as a unity of spiritual and material, transcendent and ordinary.     

Real and unreal masculinities: the celebrity image in anti-trafficking campaigns

Numerous scholars note the highly gendered nature of anti-trafficking responses. Much of the literature exploring anti-trafficking campaigns, however, focuses on the objectification of women and their placement as abject bodies, objects of violence, in pain and to be pitied. Nevertheless, few scholars explore how these campaigns portray men and shape masculinities. Using as example a highly publicised online anti-trafficking campaign, ‘Real Men Don't Buy Girls’, this article responds to this gap in the literature by exploring depictions of masculinities through this prominent anti-trafficking public service announcement. The article observes that this announcement serves not to reshape gender performance around trafficking, but instead further reproduces existing gender structures and power relations underpinning trafficking and child exploitation. It observes that the campaign re-instantiates hegemonic masculinities – framing men enacting this masculine form as ‘real men’ – while encouraging men to embody a virile, successful, consumerist, controlling, and patriarchal manliness. We observe that these characteristics are notably assigned to celebrity men. Meanwhile, it is noted that men who buy girls are set in binary opposition to these real men, being shaped as faceless, un-described, deviant, and ‘unreal’. The result is that the campaign not only patterns masculinities, but also objectifies the objectifier as well as women, recreating a gender ordering in which women and girls remain disempowered, and buyers of girls are ultimately denied subjecthood and thus the ability to change. This article, therefore, uses this one case study to call for anti-traffickers, researchers, and scholars to urgently consider, research, and reshape portrayals of masculinities in anti-trafficking literatures. It calls for greater diversity and fuller account for a broader spectrum of gender representations in the visual representations of those involved in, and responding to, human and child trafficking, in both our scholarly work and public action.     

Catherine Cl ment and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001

And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory, by Anneke Smelik. London: Macmillan Press, 1998.

Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, edited by Elizabeth Fallaize. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, edited by Barbara Newman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, by Anna Battigelli. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood, by Philip Green. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

The Women and War Reader, edited by Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

The Knotted Subjed: Hysteria and its Discontents, by Elisabeth Bronfen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity, by U.C. Knoepfimacher. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.     

关于我国劳务派遣行业存在的问题及建议探讨

劳务派遣是伴随着经济社会发展产生的一种新的就业组织方式,它不仅为企业提供了灵活用工的新途径和有效服务,也对缓解我国严峻的就业压力作出了有益贡献。但是,由于目前劳务派遣中大量存在的不规范行为,特别是适用范围的无序扩大,导致了劳务派遣人员的合法权益受损,企业培训员工的积极性缺失,职工队伍建设受到严重影响,制约了我国产业升级和产业转型,成为加快转变经济增长方式的重要影响因素。     

Transition to a New Country: Acculturative and Developmental Predictors for Changes in Self-Efficacy among Adolescent Immigrants

Self-efficacy is a key personal resource in individual development and successful adaptation, and it can serve innumerable purposes. Our study investigated levels and change rates in self-efficacy among newcomer and more experienced immigrant adolescents and tested whether acculturation-related and developmental variables explained inter-individual differences in self-efficacy in both groups. The sample comprised 480 newcomer (59% female, 15.8 years old) and 483 experienced (55% female, 15.9 years old) immigrant adolescents, assessed in four annual waves. Latent growth curve models showed newcomers to have lower levels and more pronounced increases of self-efficacy as compared to experienced immigrant adolescents. Both acculturation-related and developmental variables predicted self-efficacy. The results highlight the need for focusing on immigration stages and support the notion of combining developmental and acculturative factors in the study of immigrant adolescents.     

Manhood Deprived and (Re)constructed during Conflicts and International Prosecutions: The Curious Case of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta et al.</Emphasis>

Recent case law on sexual violence crimes heard before the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and courts, that interpret them in connection with ethnic conflict, raises the question of which acts can be defined as sexual violence. The International Criminal Court (ICC), in the situation of Kenya, does not regard acts of forced nudity, forcible circumcision and penile amputation as sexual violence when they are motivated by ethnic prejudice and intended to demonstrate the cultural superiority of one tribe over another. The Court argues that not every act of violence that targets parts of the body commonly associated with sexuality should be considered an act of sexual violence. This recent interpretation of what counts as sexual violence provides another example of the complicity of international criminal law institutions in the ongoing construction process of female subordination. The ICC, in the Kenya situation, implicitly confirms the mutilation of female agency by interpreting penile amputation as a kind of power game between males, and by instrumentalizing the male sexual organ as an indicator of masculinity and manhood.     

论程序正义理论对我国劳动争议诉讼的借鉴价值

建立社会主义市场经济体制和加入WTO引起了我国劳动关系的深刻变化.在协调劳动关系,处理劳动争议过程中,必须引进和推广程序正义理论,以利尽快完善我国的劳动法制,在劳动争议诉讼程序设计及劳动争议诉讼中更好地维护劳动者的合法权益.