Gender,war and militarism: making and questioning the links

Feminist Review - The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of ‘masculinity’ that...     

Women in the shadow war: gender,class and MI5 in the Second World War

During the Second World War, the women employed in Britain’s secret Security Service (MI5) far outnumbered their male colleagues, with a ratio of twelve women for every five men. Their numbers grew rapidly over the course of the war and by 1941 stood at over 800. Despite the vast influx of female labour into the agency, attitudes towards the role of women in intelligence, be it as wartime workers or as secret agents, demonstrated remarkable continuity with those of the interwar period. Women were near universally restricted to subordinate roles; typically of clerical and secretarial nature in the case of office staff. Similarly, internal attitudes regarding those traits which produced the best agents and intelligence officers, shaped by wider understandings of both masculinity and social status, demonstrated considerable resilience. Drawing upon declassified official records, this article argues that MI5’s wartime experiences did little to alter the agency’s attitudes to gender.     

Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy

One of the great insights of second wave feminism was the recognition that “the personal is political.” Many feminist psychologists (both practitioners and researchers) claim a strong commitment to this slogan and attempt to implement it through their theory and practice. This article explores four interpretations of “the personal is political” in feminist psychological writing. It is argued that far from achieving radical feminist goals, psychological interpretations serve: (1) to personalise the political, translating social, economic, and ecological concerns into individual psychological matters; (2) to foster revolution “from within” at the expense of political change in the outside world; (3) that insofar as it aims uncritically to “validate women's experience,” it ignores the social and political factors which shape experience; and (4) that the concept of “empowerment” depends upon a radical split between the “personal” and the “political”. In sum, it is concluded that femenist acknowledgement that the personal really is political means rejecting psychology.     

The making of Nordic "women-friendlyness" and the language of emancipatory politics: A feminist genealogy

What made it possible to develop thinking about Nordic "women-friendlyness"* during the 1980s? What does Nordic "women-friendlyness" have to offer feminist theory today? This study examines and interprets the foundations of Nordic "women-friendlyness" using a feminist genealogical discursive analysis designed as a set of interrelated and overlapping stories. The aim of the study is to analyse the official textual academic formulations of Nordic "women-friendlyness", as well as to interpret the cultural, historical and institutional contexts of Nordic "women-friendlyness" that lie behind these formulations and how these constitute its present formulation.     

sex,work, meat: the feminist politics of veganism

Since the publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat in 1990, activist and writer Carol J. Adams (2000 [1990]) has put forth a feminist defence of veganism based on the argument that meat consumption and violence against animals are structurally related to violence against women, and especially to pornography and prostitution. Adams’ work has been influential in the growing fields of animal studies and posthumanism, where her research is frequently cited as the prime example of vegan feminism. However, her particular radical feminist framework, including her anti-pornography and anti-prostitution arguments, are rarely acknowledged or critiqued. This article challenges the premises of Adams’ argument, demonstrating that her version of vegan feminism is based upon an unsubstantiated comparison between violence against women and violence against other-than-human animals, and on the silencing and exclusion of sex workers as subjects. The article contests the limited reading of Adams, and of feminism, offered in some key works in animal studies and posthumanism, at the same time that it recognises the need to challenge the anthropocentrism evident in much feminist theory. By way of alternative approaches to the sexual politics of veganism, the article highlights the interventions of artist and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross, proposing that her situated and embodied commitment to animal rights brings sex worker agency into the story, while resisting simple comparisons among different forms of violence. The concerns raised by Ross overlap in compelling ways with recent research in performance studies and labour history, bringing the question of work and workers, animal and human, to the fore. These studies point towards a potentially more useful framework than that of Adams for understanding the human violence suffered by different species, including those destined to be eaten by people.     

Emma Brooke: Fabian,feminist and writer

Largely overlooked in Fabian historiography and absent from major works of biographical reference, Emma Brooke (c1844-1926) was an early Fabian and successful novelist whose analysis of ‘the woman question’, and especially the sex question, significantly predates the better known critique by H. G. Wells. This posthumously published article examines Brooke's thinking over time, drawing on personal correspondence and literary representations, and offers further insights into the relationship between feminism and socialism in the 1880s and 1890s.     

crisis,austerity and gendered governance: a feminist perspective

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.     

Liberty, equality, sorority: Contradiction and integrity in feminist thought and practice

This paper provides an analysis of the inherent contradictions in and the essential integrity of feminist thought and practice. It is argued that three of the central concepts in feminist thought are liberty, equality, and sorority. By their very nature, these concepts conflict with each other and it is argued that the divisions within feminist thought and practice have specific roots in the inherent contradictions of these three concepts. It is also argued, paradoxically, that while these concepts tend to contradict each other, they are each necessary for the definition and integrity of the others. They act as limits towards each other. It is suggested that it is the balanced juxtaposition of these three concepts which maintains the integrity of feminism. Finally, it is suggested that the balancing of these three concepts provides the framework for a feminist ethic.     

feminist ‘selves’ and feminism's ‘others’: feminist representations of Jamaat-e-Islami women in Pakistan

In Pakistan, as in many other societies, politico-religious movements or so-called Islamist fundamentalist movements are becoming an important site for women's activism as well as the harnessing of such activism to promote agendas that seem to undermine women's autonomy. This has become a concern for a growing feminist literature which from a variety of political and theoretical positions seeks to understand and explain the subject-position of Muslim women as politico-religious activists. This paper attempts a deconstructive reading of texts by leading Pakistani feminist scholars as they attempt the difficult process of steering between fundamentalism and Orientalism in their accounts of ‘fundamentalist’ women in the political ideological space of Pakistan.