Book reviews: Art and womanhood: From the female imagination to feminine consciousness

The Female Imagination, by Patricia Meyer Spacks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, $10.

Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel, by Sydney Janet Kaplan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975, $7.95.     

Sacred groves,sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization,intensification and neo-nature in South America

Soy has become one of the world's most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. The soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows with social relations deeply embedded in contested ecologies. In this introduction to the collection, we first describe the ‘neo-nature’ of the soy complex and the political economy of the sector in South America, including the new corporate actors and financial mechanisms that produced some of the world's largest agricultural production companies. We then discuss key environmental debates surrounding soy agribusiness in South America, challenging especially the common arguments that agroindustrial intensification ‘spares land’ for conservation while increasing production to ‘feed the world’. We demonstrate that these arguments hinge on limited data from a peculiar portion of the southern Amazon fringe, and obfuscate through neo-Malthusian concerns multiple other political and ecological problems associated with the sector. Thus, discussions of soy production become intertwined with broader debates about agrarian development, industrialization and modernization. Finally, we briefly outline the contributions in this volume, and identify limitations and fruitful directions for further research.     

activism,imagination and writing: Avtar Brah reflects on her life and work with Les Back

Avtar Brah (AB) was interviewed by Les Back (LB) on 3 July 2009 at a colloquium held to mark her retirement where, inter alia, her work was discussed. The interview is a reflection on her politics, activism and scholarship. It touches on some key moments of her life.     

#RepealedThe8th: Translating Travesty,Global Conversation,and the Irish Abortion Referendum

Why does #RepealedThe8th matter for feminist legal studies? The answers seem obvious in one sense. Feminism has long constituted itself through the struggle for sexual and reproductive justice, and Irish feminism has contributed a significant ‘legal win’ with the landslide vote of approval for lifting abortion restrictions in the referendum on the 25th May 2018. That win comes at a global moment when populist legal engagement is doing significant damage in countries that regard themselves as world leaders, and beyond. #RepealedThe8th offers Ireland, and the world, the actuality that the popular vote, and everything that contributes to it, could be something else. Repeal shows how legal tools like the vote may be made into an expression of care for reproductive lives. This expression is important in recognizing pregnant people as knowing agents who are best placed to decide, and in seeking to do justice to those who contribute to everyday reproductive life. But repeal, like the many who brought it into being, has multiple meanings. #RepealedThe8th matters because it is a moving process of socio-legal translation, which draws on a collective energy, ‘repeal energy’, to turn the travesty that was the Eighth Amendment and all it represents into a search for the rest of reproductive life. In opening up the meaning of the vote, much like feminists elsewhere have opened up the meaning of the strike, Irish feminists have turned public mourning over past mistreatment into a series of reproductive connections. This is not a strategy that can be rolled out. Figuring out #RepealedThe8th will take many tellings. Rather we need to give repeal, and repealers, room to breathe and rest. We need to feel our way through repeal’s production of legal change so that this success is not reduced to some generic transferable set of legal instructions. I begin by reflecting on repeal as a process of feminist socio-legal translation, which shows us how legal change comes about through the motivation of collective joy, the mourning of damaged and lost lives, the sharing of legal knowledge, and the claiming of the rest of reproductive life.     

The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice

This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional–structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other ‘First World’ perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the ‘developing’ world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of… but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice.     

Land grabs and primitive accumulation in deltaic Bangladesh: interactions between neoliberal globalization,state interventions,power relations and peasant resistance

This essay provides theoretical and empirical analysis of the interrelationships between land grabs, primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the context of capitalist development. Evidence from a multi-class peasant formation in deltaic Bangladesh indicates that land grabs have been propelled by interactions between neoliberal globalization, state interventions, power relations and peasant resistance. Key roles have been played by illegal violence and de-linking of poor peasants from production organization and clientelist relations providing access to land. Establishment of a shrimp zone for export production has led to systematic eviction of the poor, backed by state power. Poor peasant resistance has shifted towards overt forms involving coalition-building and collective action. It is argued that the concept of primitive accumulation can subsume both market and non-market mechanisms as well as voluntary and involuntary transactions involving different degrees of intentionality, inclusive of deliberate dispossession, unintended consequences and negative externalities. Primitive accumulation and ABD correspond to distinct historical phases of capitalism and are subsumable under a generic concept of ongoing capitalism-facilitating accumulation. The dynamics of ‘actually existing capitalism’ display a two-way and recursive causal relationship in which continuing primitive accumulation is as much a consequence of expanding capitalist production as its precondition.