Religion and modernity: Gender and identity politics in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh as in other Muslim majority societies, Islamist forces have emphasized the importance of women adopting traditional religious practices, such as wearing “the veil”, as a cultural symbol and a weapon in the movement of Islamization against Western Modernization. On the question of modernity although some Islamic groups hold extreme attitudes of imagining it as ‘immoral’ and ‘dangerous’, there are other activists who negotiate to engage modernity by controlling its negative impacts through reinventing Islamic tradition. The discursive shift is mainly towards establishing modern civil society based, middle class led and urban organizations. In reaction to the image of commodification of the woman's body in Western modernity, they construct women wearing hijab in the public space as an image of “Modern Muslim Women”. This article explores how women negotiate modernist and Islamist discourses and thereby engage in the politics of everyday living. It argues that woman's agency moves beyond analysis of women as mere victims of ideological constructions.     

Gender and personhood: Turkish Jewish proverbs and the politics of reputation

Because of the traditional separation between male and female domains in Middle Eastern society, the study of gender role is critical in defining personhood. This case study of Turkish Jewish culture focuses on the dialectic between ideal person and real, everyday behavior. The contrast between behavior is encoded in proverbs and is manifest in the manipulation of gossip and reputation.     

Gender politics in conservative men's movements: Beyond complexity,ambiguity and pragmatism

The article examines different attempts to analyse the Christian men's movement, Promise Keepers, and the fatherhood responsibility movement. Complexity used as an argument to abandon the search for a gender ideology in the movements is criticized. Despite the presence of complex features, for example, regarding Promise Keepers' view on gender roles in the family, there are common assumptions of gender. These assumptions are found in the very conception of the movements: in the "society-in-a-moral-crisis" argument. Here, men are actors and women are passively dependent on men. Promise Keepers' "soft" pragmatism and use of feminist rhetoric disguise this gender politics within the movement.     

Writing stri dharma: international feminism,nationalist politics,and women's press advocacy in late colonial India

This article contributes to recent historical debates regarding the shared connections between the colony and the metropole in British-ruled India through the examination of Stri Dharma, a widely known journal started in India in 1918 by British feminists. Neither completely British nor Indian in character, this women-run journal emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as an international feminist news medium targeted at Anglo-Indian, Indian, and British women readers. This broad-ranging audience participated in a complex political dialogue determined by both class and race tensions that created a sometimes uneven forum for the exchange of ideas. Through a close examination of this title and other primary source materials related to the context of women's suffrage and Indian nationalism, this article engages with contemporary feminist scholarship in order to trace the underlying cultural and political factors that motivated British and Indian women writers to create a periodical based on universalist principles of gender solidarity and international cooperation during the late colonial period.     

Family law,family law politics and family politics

The analysis of state institutions where the state is geared towards the patriarchal family shows that it aims—in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, at least—at abandoning women to a civic freedom where they lack protection and real rights. Women are ‘emancipated’ in the true sense of the word by the liberalisation of divorce laws, which is accompanied by drastically reducing maintenance claims of divorced women.This development which—at first glance—seems to be in men's interests only, at the same time assists in the development of conditions where women, historically placed in the position of object, can gain the position of subject and lead a fight for equal changes in a society that guarantees to them (though only on paper) legal equality. These conditions will make women fight to gain effective equality.Every effort is made through family politics and the application of patriarchal family ideology to force women to retire rather than fight. However, all these legal and ideological efforts will finally be in vain, because a family ideology that pretends protection and security, while the law systematically cuts down this protection, cannot be sufficiently strong to fool the female half of the population.     

Peasants and politics

This paper discusses the political relations of ‘traditional’ peasants to groups and institutions outside their local community, with special reference to situations in which they encounter the political movements and problems of the twentieth century. It stresses the separation of peasants from non‐peasants, the general subalternity of the peasant world, but also the explicit confrontation of power which is the framework of their politics. The relative isolation of local communities, and their consequent ignorance, does not confine peasant politics only to parish pump or undefined millennial universality. However, it makes certain forms of nation‐wide peasant action without outside leadership and organisation difficult and some, like a general ‘peasant revolution’, probably impossible. The political problems of a ‘modern’ peasantry are briefly touched upon in conclusion.     

Perverse politics

‘Perverse Politics: Lesbian Issues’, Feminist Review No 34 Spring 1990; Monika Kehoe Lesbians Over 60 Speak for Themselves (Haworth Press) New York 1988; Esther D. Rothblum & Ellen Cole (eds) Lesbianism Affirming Nontraditional Roles (Haworth Press) New York 1989.     

Evolution and Gender

Dupre´ considers recent attempts to explain gendered difference in human behaviour by an appeal to evolutionary theory, particularly in the context of the recent programme of 'evolutionary psychology'. It argues that the fundamental assumptions of this programme are unsupported and implausible, and the attempt it offers of providing a universal account of human behaviour does little or nothing to counter the prima facie diversity of gender difference. A more sophisticated understanding of evolutionary theory suggests that we should see gender as developing out of a complex and variable cascade of interactions between biology and environment, rather than as the expression of species-wide biological universals.     

affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

性别歧视与性别人力资本投资差异的纠结--知识女性"玻璃天花板"现象的深层解释

长久以来,我国企业知识女性在高职升迁时面临着“玻璃天花板”现象,很少有女性可以升上总经理的高阶职位。从经济学角度,再加上社会学和心理学的帮助来探究其原因,主要是由性别歧视和性别人力资本投资的差异造成的。两者纠结,使问题变得更为复杂。