between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender,political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.     

Transformations in the age and gender of unfree workers on hybrid cotton seed farms in Andhra Pradesh

The article critically applies the theory of everyday forms of peasant resistance (EFPR) to an analysis of land struggles in the Ecuadorean Andes. It explores the effectiveness of ‘weapons of the weak'used by indigenous peasants in conflicts with the haciendas. The relationship between hidden resistance and the rise of political organisation is also examined. Special attention is paid to the structural context and cultural underpinning of both covert and overt peasant action.     

Hidden transcripts: The micropolitics of gender in Commonwealth universities

The knowledge economy is a globalised policy discourse which relates particularly to higher education. The findings from the empirical data in the five countries, backed up by international literature, suggest that for many women, entry into higher education can be a means of mitigating gender oppression e.g. via social mobility, financial independence, professional identity and academic authority. However, this is accompanied by contradictions and tensions as women experience a range of discriminatory practices, gendered processes and exclusions within higher education itself. Women report male privilege in pedagogical processes, assessment, promotion and research opportunities and management. A repeated theme is how women perceive fewer opportunities to develop academic capital and how women's professional and intellectual capital are devalued and misrecognised in the knowledge economy.All five countries reported that gender has a significant impact on academic and professional identity formation. Gendered power relations symbolically and materially construct and regulate women's everyday experiences of higher education. Similar concerns about women's unequal status are articulated in spite of different socio-economic and national policy contexts. The gendered environment impedes women's progress as staff and has a detrimental effect on the learning environment for students. Gendered differences are relayed and reinforced in classrooms, boardrooms, and via everyday social practices. These practices need to be exposed and challenged in order for the wider aspirations of gender equity policy initiatives to be achieved.

Endnote

¹ This means something below standard, of poor quality.     

Rural industry and uneven development: The significance of gender in the Irish Linen industry

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the Irish linen industry grew on the basis of unequal relations of exchange between spinning and weaving households. This regional division of labour in turn depended on unequal relations of production between women and men within rural industrial households. The ‘proto‐industrialisation’ thesis has tended to obscure this process by focussing on the household as a bounded entity, and by failing to recognise the significance of inequalities within the household production unit. Once gender relations are made central to the thesis, it can be expanded to explain regional differences in rural industrialisation and deindustrialisation.     

The child's awareness of adult beliefs concerning the child: The effects of gender and subculture

Patterns of agreement among mothers' and teachers' beliefs about their children, children's self-beliefs, and children's beliefs about adults' beliefs were investigated among Afro-American inner city matrifocal families. Findings were compared to those previously obtained with Italian-American families. Twenty-four mothers, their 10–12-year-old children, and their children's teachers were administered the Family Belief Interview Schedule assessing adult beliefs about the child and the child's beliefs about adult beliefs. Findings indicated that children were more accurate in predicting teachers' than mothers' beliefs. Among Afro-American children and in the combined Afro-American and Italian-American samples, girls, relative to boys, were more accurate in predicting mothers' beliefs, assumed greater similarity of mothers' beliefs to their own, and assumed greater consistency between mothers' and teachers' beliefs. Among boys, relative to Italian-Americans, Afro-Americans assumed significantly less similarity of mothers' beliefs to their own. These findings are interpreted within a subcultural family socialization framework.Research interests include child and adolescent development within the context of the family, developmental psychopathology, and socialization processes.Research interests include the development of social cognition, family interactional styles and belief systems, and developmental theory.     

The breakdown of the sex/gender distinction in anthropological discourse

This contribution to the ongoing process of questioning the sex/gender distinction in feminist research sets out from two different points of departure. First, from an anthropological perspective, examples are given to help us “rethink” sex as a universal “given”. Second, it is examined how the distinction, when used in feminist analyses, has confused rather than clarified our understanding of sex/gender. Finally, the implications of the breakdown of the sex/gender distinction for feminist research are discussed in brief.     

From dogs' testicles to mares' urine: the origins and contemporary use of hormonal therapy for the menopause

Beauty therapy is part of a vast multi-national, multi-million pound beauty industry. The beauty salon lies at the heart of a complex set of discourses and practices. Research conducted in the salon sheds light upon a number of key sociological debates including; issues of health and well-being; gendered employment practices; the construction and maintenance of gender identity and sexuality; body practices; and leisure activities. In this sense the salon may be used as a microcosm in which to investigate wider sociological concerns. In this paper, I will draw upon the testimonies of beauty salon clients, and beauty therapists. I describe four areas of treatment: pampering; routine grooming; health treatments; and corrective treatments. These areas are investigated in depth and related to different spheres in the woman's life. In particular, I show how the beauty salon is drawn upon in helping to negotiate the balance between these competing arenas. The ambivalences of achieving an ‘appropriate’ appearance in these differing spheres is investigated. Their implication in the self-surveillance of the client is also discussed.     

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist cinema

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre (1998), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.     

the gender politics of political violence: women armed activists in ETA

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.