Jordanian women in education: politics,pedagogy and gender discourses

The ‘epistemic’ violence that has beset gender discourses in education refutes the claim that progress is measured by figures and numbers of Jordanian women in schools and the workplace. While such discourses demand to be contextualized, deconstructed and resisted, they also necessitate creating a link between political praxis and gender politics. My argument centres on the indispensable role critical discourse can play in locating these instances of ‘epistemic’ violence and revealing the manner in which the themes of constructed gender knowledge have been subjugated to the political praxis of each context. Interventions by donors and NGOs have more often than not been emasculated by the political considerations of governments and establishments. The result has been ‘disciplined’ gender politics in education, perpetuating traditional discursive practices, roles and stereotypes instead of acting as an emancipatory power. Human development reports and traditional literature on gender bias in education have failed to account for such discursive/power practices. In this paper, I shed light on the national, the international and the textual ‘knowledge’ that surrounds gender bias in education in a context like Jordan. I conclude by demonstrating the importance of the national and its discursive practices in reformulating approaches based on the international (human development reports) and the textual (literature on gender bias and stereotypes in education).     

Citizenship and social order: gender politics in twentieth-century Norway and Sweden

This article is about the dilemmas embedded in the economic status of married women which have caused some of the main controversies within twentieth-century feminism. In spite of the undoubted success of equal status politics, no final solution to the ambivalent economic position of married women has been found. Even in advanced liberal democracies women are not necessarily included fully in the basic civil right of economic liberty, while their position outside the market economy is either not recognised or is undervalued. These dilemmas are a feature of all industrialised democracies. Nonetheless, the way in which they have been conceived and managed during the twentieth century has differed a great deal between countries. This article uses the case of Norway and Sweden to explore some of these differences.     

Gender, citizenship and human reproduction in contemporary Italy

This article examines how the recently introduced law on assisted reproduction in Italy, which gives symbolic legal recognition to the embryo, came about, and how a referendum, which would have repealed large sections of it, failed. The occupation of the legal space by the embryo is the outcome of a crusade by a well-organised alliance of theo-conservatives. These groups see in reproductive medicine an uncontrolled interference with their notion of the natural order of things. Such a worldview requires a total ban on stem cell research, limitation of access to reproductive technologies and repressive laws to govern the area. This conservative dream scenario has come closer to being realised by the introduction of a law doing all of these things in the name of the protection of “Life”. In the case of this law, the “life” to be protected is the embryo. In the name of “Life”, scientific advances and individual liberty have been curbed. The politics of embryo citizenship is a politics which values the yet to come over the here and now, purgation over pleasure, and the transcendent over the material.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.     

making politics visible: discourses on gender and race in the problematisation of sex-selective abortion

This paper examines the problematisation of sex-selective abortion (SSA) in UK parliamentary debates on Fiona Bruce’s Abortion (Sex-Selection) Bill 2014–15 and on the subsequent proposed amendment to the Serious Crime Bill 2014–15. On the basis of close textual analysis, we argue that a discursive framing of SSA as a form of cultural oppression of minority women in need of protection underpinned Bruce’s Bill; in contrast, by highlighting issues more commonly articulated in defence of women’s reproductive rights, the second set of debates displaced this framing in favour of a broader understanding, drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques, of how socio-economic factors constrain all women in this regard. We argue that the problematisation of SSA explains the original cross-party support for, and subsequent defeat of, the policies proposed to restrict SSA. Our analysis also highlights the central role of ideology in the policy process, thus making politics visible in policymaking.     

Adolescence,embodiment and gender identity in contemporary india: Elite women in a changing society

This article is based on primary research among young middle-class women in school in India. It attempts to understand the processes in families and schools that contribute to the reproduction and creation of a class and gender specific habitus, as well as the factors that lead to the formation of a particular kind of identity that is located in the transitory moment of both reproduction and change in contemporary Indian society. It is argued that recolonization is the most significant social process in the postcolonial culture that constitutes urban, Indian society, and this undoubtedly shapes gender identity in different ways. The family is the ground on which the heterosexual patriarchal ideal is nurtured and sustained. At the same time, the influence of peer group cultures on young women's and men's perceptions of their embodied selves and gender identity is significant. Their perceptions of their identities are grounded in prevailing media images and clearly young women and men consciously create, devise, and formulate their own rules for conduct, appearance, and self-presentation within the complexity that is characteristic of a changing society.     

Socio-economic differentiation and shea globalization in western Burkina Faso: integrating gender politics and agrarian change

In this paper, we examine the way a local manifestation of the globalization process, the boom in the shea trade in western Burkina Faso, has fueled socio-economic differentiation in shea activity as part of a wider differentiation process. We refer to the gender politics and agrarian change literatures to inform both within- and across-household mechanisms of differentiation. We analyze both the mechanisms of change and the resulting inequalities. Our results reveal the interplay between multiple drivers of change, and nuance the analysis of the winners and losers of globalization of shea activity.     

between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender,political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.     

‘Male sexual politics and men's gender practice’

The responses to feminism and women's liberation, which men make when we define ourselves as ‘supportive’ of women's demands, are problematic. There continues to be debate within gender politics around the polarization ‘men's liberation’ and ‘men against sexism’, and critiques made from within various feminist understandings of, in particular, ‘men's liberationist’ preoccupations. The assumptions and contitutuent practices within the discourse of men's sexual politics in general are described and analyzed, rather than such debates reproduced. The assumption of ‘the sexual’ which men bring to our politics, and how our sexual politics is defined through these assumptions, is opened up. In particular, men's sexual politics seems precisely ‘male sexual politics’, in that it is defined through masculinist understanding of the sexual. Men's sexual politics is also male sexual politics, and our assumptions about the political, including the attempt to live from theory to action, are also instrumental in the ‘how’ of men's sexual politics.     

voicing the non-place: precarious theatre in a women's prison

Based on the personal experience of the author, who is involved in theatre projects with women convicts, the article moves across issues of detention, migration, and precarity. Foucault's concept of governmentality is instrumental in describing the arbitrary exercise of power on incarcerated people and their precarious living conditions. Life in jail is especially uncertain for clandestine migrants. In the article, recollections from the rehearsals of the show I racconti del corpo (Tales of the body) alternate with images and quotes from the play, poems by women convicts, and reflections on detention as the ultimate condition of precarity for migrant women.