images within the precarity movement in Italy

The recent cycle of social struggles against precarity in Italy has been characterized by an extensive use of images representing precarious workers. This contribution explores this in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) protest campaign. The subversion of existing popular culture traditions was the main objective of the activists' newly created icons such as San Precario, Serpica Naro and other visual tools. The visual work on gender in the EMP seemed to fill a gap between theoretical work on the feminization of affective and immaterial labour and the less predominant presence of gender. Visual icons seem to have been at least as successful as text messages in publicizing the precarity discourse and their production deserves further attention.     

From peasant to entrepreneur in Italy and Japan

From Peasant to Entrepreneur: the Survival of the Family Farm in Italy, by Anna Bull and Paul Corner. Oxford: Berg, 1993. Pp. ix + 174. £29.95. ISBN 0 85496 309 X.

Bull and Corner's historical study of the development of the ‘pluriactive’ rural household and its impact on the structure of industry in one region of Italy might go unnoticed by those concerned with rural change in other parts of the world. However, the clear similarities between the experience they describe and contemporaneous developments in Japan suggest the possibility of an alternative pattern of agriculture/industry relations over the course of industrialisation in economies where the small‐scale, multi‐functional, rural household prevails.     

中国女研究生教育与婚育选择取向分析——以浙江师范大学女研究生调查结果为例

在当前社会,如何通过高层次的教育平台,寻求更好的生存与发展,并体现自己的价值,是研究生最关注的问题。女研究生是我国高校中特殊的女性群体,作为高学历的优秀知识女性,她们的教育和婚姻是怎样的博弈关系?面对教育和婚育时,女研究生应该如何抉择?从女研究生的教育现状、教育对女性婚育的影响及研究生婚育现状等方面对女研究生的教育与婚育选择进行经济学分析,以期对其提供一个可参考的理论依据。     

Legal Violence Against Syrian Female Refugees in Turkey

Turkey hosts the world’s largest community of Syrians displaced by the ongoing armed conflict. The object of this article is to explore the damaging effects of a hostile legal context on female Syrian refugees in Turkey. I base my analysis on scholarship that theorises immigration legislation as a system of legal violence and I argue that the Temporary Protection Regulation and the Law on Foreigners and International Protection that govern the legal status of refugees in Turkey inflict legal violence on Syrian female refugees. This legislation keeps them in the regime of temporary protection and prevents their access to international protection. The temporary protection regime serves furthermore as the main determinant for other forms of legal violence inflicted by various actors. I explore the effects of the Turkish government’s inaction in terms of preventing and sanctioning the abuse of Syrian female refugees as unpaid sex and household workers. I show that the extended legal limbo on the conditions of employment of Syrian refugees secures female Syrians as the most precarious workforce for Turkey’s various sectors. Finally I claim that the forced confinement of Syrian beggars in refugee camps is instrumentalised for their disciplinary regulation.     

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.     

An ethnography of global labour migration

An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs – dirty, dangerous and degrading – in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers' violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask – who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal.     

建设学习型的女工组织

在急剧变化的知识经济时代,对企业、组织和社会都提出了新的挑战,对女职工更是如此。女工组织必须负担起教育培育四有女职工队伍的职责。     

女性意识与陈染的写作困境

陈染是女性主义写作的代表作家之一。女性意识,就像一把双刃剑,给她的小说带来了一种细腻优雅的空灵之气,但过强的女性意识同时也给她的创作带来了无法解决的困境,使得她的创作缺乏全面性及宽博;在艺术上也呈现出一种焦灼急躁的气息,失之直露,阻碍了小说的审美效果。     

浅议油田企业工会女职工工作

随着油田企业改革与重组的不断深化,原有的体制和机制都发生了根本性的变化,原有单一经济结构发展成为多元化经济结构。经济结构与利益格局的变化,要求工会女工组织和干部必须认清形势,审时度势,迎接挑战,全力做好新时期的女职工工作。