On the politics of production: A comment on ‘peasants and politics’ by Eric Hobsbawn

This article examines how poor rural families in India cope with the food insecurity associated with seasonal troughs in the agricultural production cycle, and with calamities such as drought and famine; the effectiveness of the coping mechanisms they adopt; the intra‐household sharing of the burden of coping; and the appropriate state and non‐state interventions that would strengthen the survival mechanisms adopted by the families themselves. The family is seen here as a bargaining unit, the ability of different members to command food (among other resources) depending on their relative bargaining strengths, determined in turn by their ownership endowments (of land, labour, etc.), exchange entitlements, and external social and communal support systems. Gender and age both form the basis of intra‐family inequality in this respect. While seasonality reveals a face of the family which is one of co‐operation, famine mirrors one of disintegration. In both contexts, the burden of coping falls disproportionately on female members within poor households, traceable to women's already weak and further weakened (during calamity) bargaining position within the family. A re‐interpretation of existing facts about the 1943 Bengal famine illustrates the process of family disintegration and the abandonment of wives and children during a severe calamity. State efforts complemented by non‐state interventions therefore need to be directed to programmes that ‘empower’ poor families and the more vulnerable members within them.     

The spectacle of politics: Wendy Davis,abortion, and pink shoes in the Texas ‘fillybuster’

Despite important inroads, women’s marginalization in the public sphere is still very real. From a feminist theoretical perspective, and informed by Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the society of spectacle, this study examines local and national newspaper coverage of Wendy Davis’s filibuster to block an abortion-restricting bill in the Texas State legislature in 2013. Qualitative and quantitative assessments show that gender was particularly encoded and marked in the mediated discourse, with reports focusing on Davis’ personal life and giving her celebrity status. The filibuster became a political spectacle that reified dominant gender values and norms.     

Ephemeral ‘communities’: spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia

In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia’s two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the ‘communities’ they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.     

Old conservatism in ‘new’ clothes

This review article considers two books about development theory and practice informed by what is variously referred to as an ‘impasse'/'post‐impasse'/'post‐Marxist’ framework. The latter, its adherents maintain, is a new approach to development that transcends economic reductionism and instead recognises/celebrates cultural ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’. By contrast, it is argued here that many of the allegedly ‘new’ claims/arguments advanced by the postmodern ‘impasse’ are those traditionally made not just by populism but also by conservatism.

Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, edited by F.J. Schuurman. London: Zed Books, 1993. Pp.ix + 233. £13.95 (paperback). ISBN 1 85649 2109

Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice, edited by D. Booth. Harlow: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1994. Pp.ix + 319. £19.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 582 234972     

‘disparate in voice,sympathetic in direction’: gendered political blackness and the politics of solidarity

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women’s organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present.     

‘The Women's Movement Took the Wrong Turning’: British feminists,pacifism and the politics of appeasement

The history of foreign policy and especially the Munich Crisis of 1938–1939 have been viewed from various angles but never from the points of view of gender and feminism. This has been a significant oversight in the scholarship, especially as there were many prominent women politicians who were heavily invested in the appeasement debate, and because the majority of feminist organisations became increasingly preoccupied with foreign affairs and the specific effect of dictatorship on women. This article explores how British feminists responded to the policy and the fallout of appeasement in the late 1930s; how the British branch of the most prominent transnational feminist pacifist organisation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) made the transition from peace, to Crisis, to war; before focusing on two intertwined biographical case studies of Kathleen Courtney and Maude Royden. There were various responses and dramatic fluctuations in positioning in the years leading to the world war, with many feminists struggling to come to terms with the intellectual, emotional and psychological shift from feminist-informed internationalism and pacifism to a rejection of appeasement and support for the war effort. Both Courtney and Royden had spent the two preceding decades in the forefront of the feminist pacifist movement, and the rise of Nazi Germany, the international crisis and then the Second World War itself forced each to resituate herself and make psychologically and ideologically wrenching decisions.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

Reply to ‘The politics of evidence: a response to Rulli and D'Odorico’

ABSTRACT

Indicators of carbon storage in forests and other land uses have gained much prominence to evaluate and endorse land-based climate change mitigation policies. The outcomes of such assessments can have direct livelihood implications for dwellers living at the forest–agriculture frontier, such as shifting cultivators or subsistence farmers. This contribution critically discusses the methodological relevance of carbon stock indicators to assess long-term emission dynamics of land uses, and furthermore addresses the ‘politics of measurement’ that can be involved in policy practice. From a complex socio-ecological systems perspective, the paper argues that carbon stock indicators provide necessary but not sufficient information to endorse land use policies with mitigation aims. While they may indicate one-off sequestration gains through vegetation and land-use change, they cannot account for permanent hidden emissions that emerge as part of the broader agrarian transitions that accompany land-use change. Over the long term, this may render related mitigation interventions ineffective, if not counterproductive. Furthermore, carbon stock estimates for future land-use scenarios sometimes draw on biased assumptions, or are constructed within histories of discrimination, through which they may further marginalize subaltern groups such as shifting cultivators. A paradigm shift is needed that includes more integrative assessment approaches.     

‘lay experts’: women's social purity groups and the politics of sexuality in Switzerland, 1890–1915

Women's social purity groups were significant participants in the debates of the regulation of sexualities during the unification process of Swiss Criminal Law between the 1890s and the 1930s. Although not yet enfranchised, women claimed political participation through their status as ‘lay experts’ with regard to sexual matters and as an interest group with backing from their male counterparts. The article examines their demands in the reformulation of the regulation of sexualities and investigates their aims and strategies. Their expertise, gained through the experience of and investment in ‘moral guardianship’, is examined here in relation to their interventions on the age of protection, or the age of consent in contemporary terms. As ‘lay experts’ on sexual morality, the women's social purity groups participated in the increased interests and discourses of sexuality between 1890 and 1915 in the midst of legal, medical and political experts.     

‘A Great Politicianess’: Ann Jebb,Rational Dissent and politics in late eighteenth‐century Britain 1

This article discusses the life of Ann Jebb (1735–1812) in light of recent scholarship on gender and politics in late eighteenth‐century Britain. Wife of the Unitarian political activist John Jebb, Ann was one of the most respected women among ‘enlightened’ Rational Dissenters. In the 1770s at Cambridge, and afterwards in London, she held ‘tea parties’ for reformers, and wrote pamphlets and newspaper articles supporting religious, educational and political reform. Her case sheds light on the activities and status of women in reform circles during the ‘age of cultural revolution’, and further complicates the separate spheres model of gender in the late eighteenth century.     

Green multiculturalism: articulations of ethnic and environmental politics in a Colombian ‘black community’

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’. Although these two developments can be read as contradictory – with ‘green grabs’ threatening ethnic groups’ territorial rights and multicultural reforms purportedly safeguarding them – I argue that, together, they produce a unique political articulation which I term ‘green multiculturalism’.

My analysis of oil-palm cultivation in a ‘black community’ in southwestern Colombia reveals three interrelated consequences. First, I suggest that green multiculturalism produces ‘black communities’ as ‘green’ collective subjects charged not only with being wardens of nature, but also bearers of the responsibility to right environmental wrongs. Second, I note that the agrarian practices associated with oil-palm cultivation act as disciplining technologies that seek to transform local rationalities into entrepreneurial ones. Finally, I contend that these initiatives are ‘landscaping projects’ that seek to transform forms of interspecies relating.     

The ‘new traditionalist’ discourse of Indian environmentalism

In this article we identify ‘new traditionalism’ as the discourse that dominates the historiography of the Indian environment. We challenge the new traditionalist equation of ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, their assertion that ‘traditional’ agriculture was ecologically balanced, and was practised by self‐contained communities, and their claims that women, forest dwellers and peasants were primarily the keepers of a special conservationist ethic. We next examine the new traditionalist claim that colonialism, modernity and development were exclusively responsible for the degradation of nature in India. Finally, we examine the new traditionalist interpretations of popular politics around environmental issues, specifically the Chipko movement. We make explicit the assumptions and political implications of new traditionalism and provide an alternative reading of Indian environmental history and politics.     

coloniality,political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.     

‘inebriates’, ‘heathens’, templars and suffragists: Scotland and imperial feminism c. 1870-1914

This article examines the extent to which the British Empire was central to the women's suffrage debate within the Scottish Christian Union. This analysis follows two trends in the historiography of Britain and of women's suffrage: an integration of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘imperial’ in the historiography of Britain; and a recognition of internationalism within women's suffrage. This discussion points to regional diversity within Great Britain and to the influence of imperialism and evangelicalism on women's activism in the so-called Celtic fringe. In so doing, this article aims to contribute to a more complex representation of middle-class women's participation in Britain's temperance and women's suffrage movements.     

sexuality,caste, governmentality: contests over ‘gender’ in India

This article tracks the journeys made by the term ‘gender’ in India. From its beginnings in the 1970s as a feminist contribution to public discourse, destabilizing the biological category of ‘sex’, we find that gender has taken two distinct forms since the 1990s. On the one hand, gender as an analytical category is being used to challenge the notion of ‘woman’ as the subject of feminist politics. This challenge comes from the politics of caste and sexuality. On the other hand, gender is mobilized by the state to perform a role in discourses of development, to achieve exactly the opposite effect; that is, gender becomes a synonym for ‘women’. Thus, the first trend threatens to dissolve, and the second to domesticate, the subject of feminist politics. This article explores the implications of both journeys in terms of a feminist horizon.     

‘The Rape Joke’: censorship,affective activisms,and feeling subjects

Abstract

This paper follows the affective impact of a story on rape culture in a school magazine in a US high school. Immediately following its publication, the school administrative enacted a policy of prior review on all future publications. The event made waves in US national news and online media and was denounced as an act of censorship and infringement on students’ freedom of expression. In concert with other students and faculty at the school, the author of the piece engaged in various forms of protest and on- and off-line activism. This piece tracks the multiple political affects and effects activated by the article through a notion of affectivisms. This case study further explores notions of ‘positive’ school climate and the increasingly imbricated textures of schooling experiences with online media.     

‘ah famous citie’: women,writing, and early modern London

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city.