Farming for Walmart: the politics of corporate control and responsibility in the global South

To analyse corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business tool and as a way to promote food security in the global South, this article draws on 65 interviews with supply chain personnel and a 2013 survey of 250 smallholder farmers in Nicaragua. Contrary to private governance literature, Walmart's efforts to control supply chains in Nicaragua are not advancing rural sustainability; feelings of mistrust and unfairness persist among farmers, and many are returning to local markets to regain independence. This analysis extends our understanding of why CSR is failing to help agrarian societies and confirms CSR as principally a business strategy.     

‘We who strive for the foundation of a principle’: feminism and suffrage in the biography of Bessie Parkes Belloc

ABSTRACT

Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc, 1829–1925) was a central figure in British women’s rights activism during the 1850s and 1860s. She was founding editor of the feminist English Woman’s Journal and one of the organisers of the pioneering 1866 petition for women’s suffrage. She lived long enough to witness some women gaining the vote in 1918, by which time her children, Marie Belloc Lowndes and Hilaire Belloc, were themselves public figures who had taken up opposing positions on women’s suffrage. This article takes as its starting point 1866, a pivotal moment in nineteenth-century agitation for women’s suffrage and in Parkes Belloc’s individual biography, before moving to a longer view of her feminist life before and after this date. It demonstrates the value of a biographical approach to exploring the diversity of perspectives and experiences of women within first-wave feminism and the suffrage movement.     

Claiming feminism: commentary,autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession

Feminist academics have grown accustomed to the disparagement and misrepresentation of our intellectual endeavours in a climate of antifeminist postfeminism. Yet, in recent years, the position of public feminism has shifted as it is increasingly invoked by celebrities for whom it often functions as a credential of entrepreneurial self-branding. This article identifies and conducts a preliminary analysis of a set of female-authored print texts published in the wake of the ‘Great Recession’ and marked by a distinctly emergent monetisation/corporatisation of feminism. It suggests that these books respond to and further a sense of fraught female aspirationalism in an era of economic contraction and growing signs of neo-patriarchalism.     

Nicki-aesthetics: the camp performance of Nicki Minaj

In this essay, the author contends that Nicki Minaj practices what he terms nicki-aesthetics, a form of black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style. Nicki-aesthetics shares qualities with the sensibility of camp, as outlined in Susan Sontag's 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp,’” yet challenges camp's assumed association with white gay men as well as its reduction of women to objects (rather than subjects) within the camp universe. Nicki-aesthetics realigns blackness and camp as mutually constitutive (rather than oppositional) forms, while reconfiguring camp as a black female-centered practice. In addition, Nicki Minaj demonstrates her dexterity at performing nicki-aesthetics in an offbeat interview on Elle magazine's website while deploying avatars to play multiple roles. In doing so, nicki-aesthetics' quirky blend of artifice and alterity ultimately rebukes hip-hop's obsession with authenticity.     

Citation and marginalisation: the ethics of feminism in Medieval Studies

This article draws on my experience both as a medievalist and as a feminist working in a UK university today to discuss the challenges facing feminist academia more widely. Using Medieval Studies as a case study, this article argues that in times of austerity the pressure on young feminist academics to conform is greater as it is increasingly important to get one's work published in order to stay competitive. This pressure to publish limits intellectual curiosity and forces research down more conventional paths. This article lays out how this functions in Medieval Studies and attempts to suggest some ways in which it could be overcome. One strategy of resistance I suggest entails what I call an ‘ethics of source study’; a way of looking at and responding to both medieval and modern texts with an awareness of their potential effect on the world. I begin by discussing the pressing need to publish work forced upon us by the Research Excellence Framework, and how this drive towards publication can make our work less radical. I then illustrate this with examples from my own discipline. In Medieval Studies, the publication of more articles means that the production of editions is neglected, and this forces scholars to use out-of-date and misogynist editions. Finally, I suggest some ideas of how we can create alternative networks in which feminist academia can survive and flourish, including an outline of what an ethics of source study might look like.     

Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue on fashion and features an analysis of the current state of the relationship between the fashion system and feminist scholarship. Important points of convergence are identified, including the link between the so-called democratisation of fashion and the recent resurgence of feminism in mass culture, fashion’s introduction of complex models of identity, embodiment and materiality, its foregrounding of class, and its ability to shed light on the relationship between feminism and neoliberal capitalism. Altogether, fashion emerges as an ideal diagnostic tool for the feminist politics of the present.     

Love and the State: Gay Marriage in Spain

On 30 June 2005, the Spanish Parliament approved Law 13/2005, which amends the Civil Code to permit same-sex marriage. This formal equality measure put Spain in the spotlight of the international media. It is the culmination of a series of developments spanning from the last years of the Franco regime (which ended in 1975), through the enactment of anti-discrimination measures in 1995, to the recent fight for kinship recognition. It also follows a recent shift, from 1998 to 2005, towards the enactment of same-sex partnership laws at regional level, the approval of same-sex marriage and finally, the approval of a ‹gender identity law’ (2007). This legislative note assesses the context in which the new law on same-sex marriage has been enacted. I argue that although same-sex marriage has been represented by many activists and politicians in Spain as a gender neutral contract, it has the potential for differential impacts on lesbians and gay men, and further research and debates are needed in this area.     

Reciprocity and rape: Blackness and the paradox of sexual violence

This essay expands Saidiya Hartman's unflinching paradigmatic analysis in Scenes of Subjection of the modes of historical continuity in which Black women are barred from reciprocity, recognition, and incorporation ab initio (Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.). By engaging the works of key Marxist feminist theorist Leopoldina Fortunati, I will demystify the ways in which these three homologies which non-Black women depend upon for the coherence of their complaint are parasitic on the flesh of Black women and men.     

Dancing across difference: Experience and identity in the classroom

This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film's network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment's precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation.     

Gender,ethnicity and feminism: an intersectional analysis of the lived experiences feminist academic women in UK higher education

Studies have begun to explore how those women academics committed to social justice, namely feminist academics, are navigating the increasingly managerial Academy. To understand how these multiple social identities, including gender and ethnicity, interact and intersect, this paper adopts an intersectional approach to understanding the heterogeneity of women’s experiences in academia. Five focus groups with feminist academics (n = 6–10 in each focus group) reveal concerns of hampered career progression as a consequence of being female and openly feminist. Some ethnic minority academics felt that they were forced to choose between a feminist identity or that of their ethnic background. For some women, their feminist identity provided opportunities for challenging dominant practices. The paper concludes that the heterogeneity of feminist academics’ experiences within academia is under-researched and that the lens of intersectionality helps to illuminate this. This paper advances understanding of multiple identities at work, though demonstrating that intersectionality can lead to the accumulation of advantage as well as disadvantage in relation to social identities such as gender and ethnicity, and a political identity such as feminist.     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.     

落实职工董事职工监事制度任重而道远——关于北汽集团职工董事职工监事制度落实情况的调研报告

近年来，北汽集团职工董事职工监事工作取得了长足进步，但在落实过程中也遇到许多障碍和问题。很多国有企业改制后，公司法人治理结构不健全，有的不设立董事会或监事会。一些企业虽然职工代表进入了董事会或监事会，但作用难以充分发挥。建议扩大职工董事的设置范围，对董事会中职工董事所占的比例，公司法应有一个法定规定，对职工董事和监事权利、职责等给予制度和法律上的保障。     

Black organs and optics: gazing at viscera in the work of Doreen Garner

Between Doreen Garner’s performance The Observatory and sculpture Black Ocean/Big Black, a significant divergence in gazes and spaces emerges. On the one hand, The Observatory arguably evokes a metaphorical nexus between body, flesh, organs, and land – a move that integrates archaeological and clinical gazes into a black female optic of pleasure wherein an oppositional gaze disidentifies the theatrical and scopophilic framing of black women’s bodies. The author argues that while Garner’s vitrine-enclosed performances, which elicit several gazes at once, signify a geological position and attempt to exhume the gory archives of black women’s bodies in art and science, her sculptural installation Black Ocean signals a queer liquidation and kinetics of black flesh.     

职工董事、监事进入公司治理结构的思考

公司制是现代企业制度的一种有效组织形式。公司法人治理结构是公司制的核心。职工董事、监事进入公司治理结构 ,是推进国有企业改革和发展 ,贯彻落实党的“全心全意依靠工人阶级”方针的重大举措 ,是建立现代企业制度 ,对国有企业实行公司制改革 ,完善和规范法人治理结构的必然要求。在理论上和实践上探索职工董事、监事进入国有独资公司和国有控股公司的法人治理结构问题具有重要的现实意义     

Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

The defiant still worker: Ramiro Gomez and the expressionism of abstract labor

This essay looks at a selection of paintings by Los Angeles-based visual artist Ramiro Gomez. Departing from the traditions of ethnic studies and Marxist criticism that focus on workers’ resistance as action, I turn to the domestic worker, who remains still and perpetually at work, in his paintings. I propose that stillness is both an abstract aesthetic form and a racialized and feminized mode of being abstract and not fully knowable to both spectators and employers. Stillness, I argue, is the limit to following the worker’s subsequent actions, movements, thoughts, and expressions. While, for Marx, abstraction is the very effect and violence of the capitalist production, I ask what possibilities emerge from a mode of stillness that further abstracts, displaces, and obscures the worker within the scene of domestic labor. Bringing together Marx’s analysis of abstract labor, the tradition of abstract expressionism, and Chicana/o aesthetic practices in Gomez’s paintings, I offer a theory of stillness, and by extension abstraction, as a subtle yet defiant refusal to be concrete and graspable.     

工会组织参与企业文化建设的探索与思考

随着改革开放和社会主义现代化建设的深入发展,企业文化作为一种现代化管理模式和思想政治工作的重要载体纳入了企业管理之中,成为提高职工素质和促进企业发展的重要精神动力。企业工会组织作为工人阶级的一个群众性组织,具有广泛的代表性,企业文化的构建离不开工会组织的支持和拥护。     

Approaching the socialist factory and its workforce: considerations from fieldwork in (former) Yugoslavia

The socialist factory, as the ‘incubator’ of the new socialist (wo)man, is a productive entry point for the study of socialist modernization and its contradictions. By outlining some theoretical and methodological insights gathered through field-research in factories in former Yugoslavia, we seek to connect the state of labour history in the Balkans to recent breakthroughs made by labour historians of other socialist countries. The first part of this article sketches some of the specificities of the Yugoslav self-managed factory and its heterogeneous workforce. It presents the ambiguous relationship between workers and the factory and demonstrates the variety of life trajectories for workers in Yugoslav state-socialism (from model communists to alienated workers). The second part engages with the available sources for conducting research inside and outside the factory advocating an approach which combines factory and local archives, print media and oral history.     

Primum Mobile: Women and Auto/mobility in the Era of the Great War

Abstract: This article explores the construction of Andrea Dworkin as a public persona, or a ‘feminist icon’, revered by some and demonized by others. It argues that in both her fiction and non-fiction, Dworkin engaged in a process of writing herself as an exceptional woman, a ‘feminist militant’ as she describes herself in the subheading of her 2002 memoir, Heartbreak. The article illustrates Dworkin's autobiographical logic of exceptionalism by comparing the story told in Heartbreak to the story of Dworkin's major novel, Mercy, which features a heroine, Andrea, who shares Dworkin's name and significant biographical details. While Dworkin has insisted that Mercy is not an autobiographical novel, the author undertakes a reading here of Mercy as the story of Dworkin if she had not become the feminist icon of her own and others' construction. In Mercy, Andrea unsuccessfully attempts to escape the silent, victimized status that Dworkin has insistently argued is imposed upon women. In her repeated victimization, Andrea functions for Dworkin as an ‘everywoman’ who both embodies Dworkin's world-view and highlights how Dworkin's own biography exists in tension with some of her central assumptions about women, gender and contemporary society.