Campus Feminisms

Drawing from a long history of feminist writing grounded in personal reflection and informal dialogue between feminist thinkers, Cobb and Godden-Rasul present an email-based conversation with Jess Lishak, the outgoing Women’s Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union (2014–2016). The conversation draws on Cobb and Godden-Rasul’s experience as feminist academics engaged in critical institutional practice through such initiatives as editing the Inherently Human blog, organising the Inspirational Women of Law exhibition, and participating in university working groups on campus-based harassment and violence. In asking Lishak to reflect on her journey to feminism and her experiences of activism, the conversation ranges over such issues as personal influences and experiences, strategies for securing institutional support, encouraging student engagement with feminism, and campaigning tactics. The conversation developed out of a “Campus Feminisms” event in March 2016, which explored the rise of exciting new grassroots single-issue campaigns and political mobilisations by students in higher education, and was organised by Cobb and Godden-Rasul at Newcastle University, UK. Undergraduate and postgraduate students shared their personal struggles and achievements in bringing feminist ideas and campaigns to their university campuses. Lucy Morgan, the Gender Equality Officer at Newcastle University Students’ Union, offered inspiring reflections on her efforts to reinvigorate the ‘F’ word, in the face of simultaneous student apathy and backlash. Many of these campus-based mobilisations have demanded better institutional responses to sexual violence against women. At around the same time, Cobb was beginning a new role as the co-chair of the University of Manchester’s first Task & Finish Group on Sexual Violence and Harassment on Campus. This followed Universities UK’s decision to create a taskforce to consider options for improving institutional responses to student safety. In the process, Cobb crossed paths with Lishak, who had been appointed a member of the UUK Taskforce in light of her path-breaking students’ union work addressing violence against women. Since Lishak was an exemplar of this new feminist wave in higher education, one that was still inadequately understood by feminist academics despite often working side-by-side within the same institutions, the authors embarked on this conversation in order to better understand the relationship between academic and student feminist activism on campus. As Lishak makes clear in her own reflections, there is nothing inevitable about the synergies between these movements, but there is potentially a great deal that could be achieved through their closer engagement.     

The Role of Law in Temporal Reasoning: An Interview with Annelise Riles

On 17 May 2016 Lucy Welsh interviewed Annelise Riles about her work on the relationship between law and time as part of Welsh’s involvement with the AHRC Regulating Time network. Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and is Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work examines the transnational dimensions of laws, markets and culture across the fields of comparative law, conflict of laws, the anthropology of law, public international law and international financial regulation. Most recently Professor Riles has been examining the nature and meaning of the settlement made on the so-called Comfort Women, and what impact that has for locating events in the past. The Comfort Women were Korean women who were essentially captured and forced to work as sexual slaves for the Japanese army during World War Two. In 2015, Japanese and South Korean ministers agreed a settlement (comprising an apology and financial payment to provide for the women) in what they regarded as an irreversible and final settlement of the issue. Welsh and Riles exchange over their mutual interests in time and routinisation in this interview as they discuss what the story of the Comfort Women has to tell us.     

‘neither pure love nor imitating capitalism’: Euro WILD and the invention of Women’s Music distribution in Europe, 1980–1982

Euro Women’s Independent Label Distribution (WILD) was a pan-European network of feminist music distributors active in the early 1980s. They were affiliated to WILD, the US-based Women’s Music distribution network founded in 1979 to disseminate the growing corpus of Women’s Music emerging from the US Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). This article presents an interpretation of archive materials that document Euro WILD’s activities from the Women’s Revolutions Per Minute archive, housed at the Women’s Art Library, London. Constrained and enabled by the archive materials on offer, I revisit some of the practical and political problems the network faced as European distributors of US Women’s Music. Key issues explored include the perception of US cultural imperialism by women based in Europe and the affective politics that circulated transnationally between distributors. Finally, this article explores how the concept and practice of the Women’s Music industry changed when women beyond the borders of the US engaged with it.     

International Law,Social Change and Resistance: A Conversation Between Professor Anna Grear (Cardiff) and Professorial Fellow Dianne Otto (Melbourne)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion.     

Interviewer: ‘Are women and girls ever responsible for the domestic violence they encounter?’ Student: ‘No,well, unless they did something really,really bad …’

Research shows the ‘gendered nature’ of domestic violence, with Women’s Aid (a UK-based charity) estimating that 1 in 4 women are affected (2014). This paper reports on a project – funded by Comic Relief, completed by Nottinghamshire Domestic Violence Forum (now known as Equation) and evaluated by Nottingham Trent University. The project adopts a Whole School Approach in seeking to prevent domestic violence. Students at three secondary schools attended between one and five blocks of work, and special events. There is evidence of positive developments – with young people showing understanding of domestic violence as well as the margins between healthy and unhealthy relationships. However, not all students could reply ‘never’ to the question of ‘are women and girls to blame for the domestic violence they experience?’, remarking that if the woman had done something ‘really, really bad’ then violence might be justified. We argue that young people’s uncertainties need to be situated within the gender-unequal socio-contexts of contemporary society, and further call for a WSA to domestic violence prevention to be a compulsory part of the UK national curriculum.     

Compulsory heterosexuality and psych/atrophy: Some thoughts on lesbian feminist theory

The patriarchal features of psychiatric practice have received scant attention by feminists today. This paper presents a critique of psychiatry and places this critique within lesbian feminist theory. Drawing on Mary Daly's ideas as elaborated in her ‘ovular’ work Gyn/Ecology (1979), the methodology I use is an unearthing of feminist meanings and an exposition of feminist practices which are necessary to understand the role of Psych/Atrophy vis à vis lesbianism today. I argue that for lesbians, as for all women, self-healing is a feminist process which exists in opposition to psychiatry's functioning as the primary male, social injunction to heal souls. With a view to challenging this psychiatric conception of healing souls, we are able to create five specific strategies which direct Lesbian energy to a more creative view of ourselves as women. Discarding the sexual label (1); resisting ‘reversal’ (2); erasing the Victim Role (3); working towards social change and not individual solutions (4) and delivering themselves through the ‘Amazonian Asylum’ (5), lesbians will help to work for lesbian liberation. These strategies will help them/us not only to create new images of themselves/ourselves as women, but also to challenge the heterosexist structure of society upon which psychiatric practice is based.     

Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field

The papers in the following section arose from a roundtable discussion organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, titled ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: The Making of a Field’. Participants in the roundtable were asked to reflect on the challenges confronting law, gender and sexuality (LGS) as an area of research and scholarship, and to ask what benefits, possibilities, risks and dangers accompany the establishment of a research terrain. The papers address such questions as ‘what is a field and how is it made?’; ‘has LGS attained the status of a field?’; ‘what does it mean to locate oneself within the field of LGS?’; and ‘what is the relationship between feminism and LGS?’. They also consider possible future directions for the field of LGS. Together, the papers provide a variety of differing, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the developing body of intellectual and political activity that might be labelled ‘law, gender and sexuality’.     

A Nurse and a Soldier: Gender,Class and National Identity in the First World War Adventures of Grace McDougall and Flora Sandes

In this article the author explores the ways Grace McDougall, Commandant of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), and Flora Sandes, Captain and combatant in the Serbian Army, negotiated gender, class and national identity and enhanced women’s claim to personal and collective power during their work at the Front during the First World War. The author analyses Sandes and McDougall’s writings and their accounts of personal heroism and focuses on two aspects: first, their participation in the physical dangers of war and the creation of audacious stories of physical bravery that aligned them with male combatants; and second, their performance of ingenuity, intellect and action that gave them power, status and credibility, and consolidated their leadership and authority. In their different ways, both women modelled resistance to female subordination and made the case for women’s participation in war.     

red girls’ revolutionary tales: antifascist women’s autobiographies in Italy

This essay focuses on recent autobiographies written by Italian women born in the 1920s who engaged in revolutionary politics during and after the Second World War: Luciana Castellina (La scoperta del mondo, 2011), Bianca Guidetti Serra (Bianca la rossa, 2009), Marisa Ombra (La bella politica, 2010), Marisa Rodano (Del mutare dei tempi, 2008) and Rossana Rossanda (La ragazza del secolo scorso, 2005). In these autobiographies, personal narratives of passionate engagement are entangled with the urgency of antifascist resistance, and with the social and political conflicts that traversed Cold War Italy. Women’s multiple forms of political engagement within the Italian Communist Party are analysed, as well as the contradictory, ambivalent connection between Western European communist activists and Eastern European socialist regimes. The intersections between antifascist, communist and women’s rights politics are also explored, since some of the authors were leaders of the nation-wide left-wing Union of Italian Women. The autobiographies tell the story of an antifascist, left-wing ‘middle wave’ that fought pioneering battles for women’s political and social rights, and narrate its complex, conflictual encounter with second-wave feminism in the 1970s. These writings, therefore, allow us to reflect on changes in gendered subjectivities and revolutionary politics across time and generations.     

关于工会社会公信力研究——坚持“中国特色社会主义工会发展道路”的实践要求

工会社会公信力是指工会组织信守承诺而对社会产生的广泛而深远的影响,是工会组织通过开展活动、履行社会职能及其取得的实际效果而体现出的、并被社会积极认同和信赖的、维护公平正义的组织能力和社会影响。工会组织社会公信力的形成是以劳动者结社所体现的契约精神为基础,是通过工会对会员维权承诺及其实现而形成的一种社会价值判断,因而具有强烈的契约精神和社会伦理意义。提高工会社会公信力作为中国特色社会主义工会发展道路的实践要求,其实现路径就是要遵循中国特色社会主义工会发展道路所提出的基本原则和基本理念,坚持中国特色社会主义工会发展的基本方向,按照工会工作规律创造性地开展工作,维护好和实现好职工的切身利益与合法权益,以实际作为在社会上树立起工会组织的崭新形象。     

Parallels and Intersections: the International Federation for Research in Women’s History in Comparative Historical Perspective: a plenary address presented at the twentieth anniversary conference,Sofia, Bulgaria,August 2007

This article is a plenary address presented at the twentieth anniversary conference, titled ‘Women, Gender and the Cultural Production of Knowledge’, of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH), Sofia, Bulgaria, 8–12 August 2007. It places the IFRWH within a broad comparative historical context, namely that of the growth of civil society and of women’s international associations, networks and publications.     

special guest contribution: violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of human rights and the effective exercise of citizenship

This article focuses on violence against women as a barrier to the realisation of women’s civil, political, economic, social, cultural and developmental rights, as well as the consequences of this for the effective exercise of citizenship. The value of adopting a citizenship lens, identifying the nexus between violence against women and human rights, and adopting an approach that acknowledges the multiplicity, intersectionality and continuity of violence across the public and private spheres serves to assist in identifying and providing an analysis of the continuing challenges in the quest to eliminate violence against women. Owing to the scarcity of literature that explicitly highlights the link between human rights, citizenship and violence against women, the current analysis highlights some of the existing literature on a situated understanding of citizenship through a women’s human rights lens, while the discussion on violence against women as a barrier to realising all human rights that enable the exercise of effective citizenship is largely underpinned by the work of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences.     

Networked Struggles: Placards at Pakistan’s Aurat March

Feminist Legal Studies - Aurat March [Women’s March] is an annual event organised in various cities across Pakistan to observe International Women’s Day. Since its inception in 2018,...     

‘A career in christian charity’: women's benevolence and the public sphere in a mid-nineteenth-century Canadian city

This article investigates the relationship between women's charitable work and the public sphere, focusing on the Hamilton Ladies Benevolent Society which operated in nineteenth-century Ontario. It argues that although women were barred from participation in the public sphere by patriarchal notions of ‘reason' and ‘independence,’ charitable associations offered political schooling wherein women internalized and problematized ‘publicness.’ An investigation of the annual reports of the Hamilton Ladies Benevolent Society and Orphan Asylum reveals that charitable women used particular discursive tactics and techniques of display to make claims upon the public sphere. In their attempt to appear public – universal, rational, and in pursuit of an objective, common good – these women rejected the tropes of true womanhood and evoked Christian metaphors to justify their activities. For these women, Christianity provided the language with which they claimed universality, rationality and even citizenship     

Here Versus There: Creating British Sexual Politics Elsewhere

This reflection draws upon two recent ‘moments’ in British sexuality politics—a series of Parliamentary debates on Global LGBT rights and Brighton Pride’s campaign to ‘Highlight Global LGBT Communities’. It contrasts these two moments in order to demonstrate how, at a time when LGBT rights have ostensibly been ‘won’ in the UK, there is an increasing tendency to shift focus to the persecution of SOGI minorities elsewhere in the world. This shift in focus sets up a binary of here versus there that is politically persuasive but ultimately limited and limiting. By reflecting on the way that this growing trend of creating sexual politics elsewhere occurs in two very different locations in British politics and activism, we seek to begin a conversation about the relational affects of placing sexual politics ‘elsewhere’.     

Women United for the United Nations: US women advocating for collective security in the cold war

This article details the creation of Women United for the United Nations (WUUN), a coalition of US women's non-governmental organizations created in the wake of the Second World War to advocate for the United Nations and the efficacy of collective security. The article illuminates the strategies the organization used to flourish in the 1950s, an era characterized by suspicion of political activism and conformity for US women. It describes WUUN's initiatives and documents the way the organization clashed with a more radical women's peace group, WOMAN. The article places the discussion of WUUN in the context of work done by other historians on the fate of other US women's organizations in the 1950s and provides a detailed account of the measures WUUN took to navigate the complexities that confronted women activists in the Cold War.     

Performing blackness in the “Rainbow Nation”: Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania

This article applies Saidiya Hartman’s framework of performing blackness to South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s performance series, The Future White Women of Azania, to consider the ways in which the performances index the convoluted imbrications of colonialism, specifically Apartheid policy in South Africa, and postcolonialism, specifically the anti-Apartheid struggle(s) and the current political and economic structure of South African democracy. It argues that Ruga’s performance makes evident political and economic systems that tout black and queer liberation while perpetuating black queer death. Ruga’s work also relocates Hartman’s framework to a transnational, postcolonial context, expanding the notion of performing blackness (and the entangled processes of domination and subordination that it maps) beyond the trans-Atlantic paradigm, suggesting that performing blackness could be used to understand the correlation between broader spatial and temporal phenomena that shape blackness. Finally, situating The Future White Women of Azania as not only a performance of blackness, but of queerness as well, postulates that layering sexuality onto Hartman’s model reveals that the dynamics articulated under performing blackness are evident between oppressors and oppressed and between members of each of these groups as Hartman notes, but also between the contingent axes of subjectivity within an individual’s experience.     

One hundred years of women in universities — A confidence trick?

Gabrielle Baldwin, Women at Monash (Monash University) Clayton, Victoria, 1985; Bettina Cass, Madge Dawson, Diana Temple, Sue Willis, Anne Winkler, Why So Few? Women Academics in Australian Universities (Sydney University Press) Sydney, 1983; Madge Dawson and Heather Radi (eds), Against the Odds. Fifteen professional women reflect on their lives and careers (Hale & Iremonger) Sydney, 1984; Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan (eds), The Half Open Door. Sixteen modern Australian women look at professional life and achievements (Hale & Iremonger) Sydney, 1982; Farley Kelly, Degrees of Liberation. A short history of women in the University of Melbourne, Women Graduates’ Centenary Committee of the University of Melbourne, 1985; Alison Mackinnon, The New Women. Adelaide's early women graduates, Wakefield Press in association with the University of Adelaide Foundation, 1986.     

‘Think of the Children!’ Desire and Innocence in British Queer Fiction of the Early Twentieth Century

Nearly all relationships have power imbalances, none more so than age-dissimilar ones. Women writers of the early twentieth century addressed the issues of sexual innocence and ignorance in literary same-sex relationships with differing levels of perception and tangents of criticism. This article examines how innocence is portrayed, deployed and perceived in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1917), Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and how the idea of queerness complicates the issue of childhood innocence. It explores to what extent characters cast as innocent become vehicles for their female authors to express sexually and socially transgressive desires at a time when feminism was publicly and scientifically linked to lesbianism.