active women and ideal refugees: dissecting gender,identity and discourse in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.     

Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation

ABSTRACT

This article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britain's imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.     

‘The perfect equality of all persons before the law’: the Personal Rights Association and the discourse of civil rights in Britain, 1871–1885

The Personal Rights Association was established in 1871 to watch, restrain and influence legislation ‘in matters affecting the personal rights and liberties of the people’. Though initially its remit was to scrutinise legislation for terms that would be prejudicial to women, this soon extended to criticism of increasing incursions into male freedom. The PRA's membership, which comprised both sexes, included a cohort of male parliamentarians and intellectuals who took their commitment to civil liberties into the heart of government. Classified by one critic as ‘fussy busy-bodies [and] fourth-rate politicians’, this article reveals a ‘feminisation’ of these elite men hardly considered in the rhetoric of the middle-class radical.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

On being the ‘gender person’ in an academic department: constructions,configurations and implications

The term ‘gender person’ in an academic department is a colloquial expression which refers to someone who researches and/or teaches about gender, but whose primary affiliation is not to a gender studies department or centre. This role has particularly been discussed in relation to international development organisations, but has been neglected in relation to higher education institutions. The article reapplies Lucy Ferguson’s ‘gender person’ framework to academics working as ‘gender people’ in the conditions of contemporary academia. Three cases of different manifestations of the ‘gender person’ role are explored in detail and analysed for the ways in which occupying the ‘gender person’ role impacts upon academic careers and gender knowledge. The article contributes an elaborated concept of the ‘gender person’ in academia and provides empirical evidence of being the ‘gender person’. The article particularly shows that relying on a ‘gender person’ as a form of gender mainstreaming renders both gender academics and academic departments vulnerable in different ways.     

The Feminisation of Finance

Abstract

This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday ‘calculative agencies’ which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the constitution of ‘women’ as a target group for personal financial products and services, and addresses the various strategies that promote financial inclusion as a means to secure individual responsibility, autonomy and entrepreneurial consumer participation in a financialised ownership society. The article argues that this feminisation of finance suggests a considerable challenge to received understandings of the relationships between gender and economy, production and reproduction, and life and labour.     

A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist

Following the identification of a gap in the literature around reasons for contemporary women’s self-identification as ‘feminist’, this paper discusses an empirical study of an intergenerational group of contemporary Australian female teachers collaboratively designing English curriculum around girls’ media. The paper explores the group’s shared conversations around feminism, over a series of meetings, as we (teachers and researcher) plan curriculum and negotiate broader subject positions possible for girls and women. These contexts include the competing discourses of feminism and postfeminism and how these mediate texts chosen for study, our pedagogical approaches, and the ways we experience our own lives. In this study, we struggle to find a shared language, across generations, with which to work collaboratively in a community of practice committed to the critical study of media, but involving different individual orientations to ‘feminism’. This is a space in which impediments to the feminist study of girls’ media quickly emerge. The paper also serves as a reminder that feminist scholarship takes place in schools, as well as in the academy, and that the gender studies work teachers do in schools is potentially whole population work, worthy of keen attention in the gender studies academic mainstream.     

A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early ‘amateur’ social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower‐status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena.     

Gender,Thrift and Indigenous Adaptations: money and missionary medicine in colonial India

This article examines the skills in money and the management of resources that were developed by women missionaries in India between the 1870s and the 1940s. Focusing on the strategies and initiatives of three physicians—Clara Swain, Anna Kugler and Edith Brown—it argues that women disrupted existing patriarchal arrangements by entering ‘male’ domains of finance and administration. Modest ventures were transformed into state institutions through alliances with stakeholders, including missionary boards and donors at ‘home’ as well as members of indigenous elites who provided valuable land donations. Western institutional models needed to be adapted to function within local economies. Western missionary women used an interesting blend of thrift, innovation and indigenization to stretch their material and human resources. Thus, women physicians used their medical work with overseas missions to carve out new roles, which empowered them socially and professionally.     

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’     

Epistemic Credibility and Women in Philosophy

Abstract

Women in philosophy are disproportionately under-represented at elite institutions, and publishing patterns can be analysed to show that the ‘top’ journals publish articles by women at rates significantly lower than even the levels of women who have made it into tenure at these elite universities. In such journals, the type of epistemology that Lorraine Code describes as ‘immune to feminist critique’ is dominant, assuming that neutrality is the benchmark for knowledge, and that knowers float free of the encumbrances of situation. It is right to worry, as Code does, that feminist and critical race theory hold an increasingly fragile place in disciplinary philosophy and that disciplinary philosophy itself is thereby the loser. The question of how to reinvigorate radical projects of contestation is both urgent and vexing. To align this issue with the under-representation of women in philosophy poses its own problems, as this article explores: for women need not be feminist philosophers, and feminist philosophy can be a project of assimilation into the mainstream as much as it can be a project of radical transformation of disciplinary norms. There may be something to learn, however, both about equity in the academy and the fate of critique by considering the relation between prevailing institutional conditions, disciplinary trajectories and the gendering of prestige in the academic sector.     

Just Use What You Have: Ethical Fashion Discourse and the Feminisation of Responsibility

ABSTRACT

The rise of fast fashion has meant that young women (even those on relatively low incomes) are able to ‘regularly consume and discard fashionable clothing’ [Buckley, Cheryl, and Hazel Clark. 2012. “Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Lives.” Design Issues 28 (4): 18–28. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00172., 21]. While this development may be aligned with the democratisation of fashion—the fact that the supply chains that deliver fast fashion are not consistent with the principles of global democracy is now also relatively common knowledge in the democratised West. This, along with growing awareness of the ecological harms associated with the fashion industry has contributed to what Elke Gaugele [2014. Aesthetic Politics in Fashion. Vienna: Sternberg Press] has termed the ‘ethical turn’ in fashion. However, despite the fact that young women are often not deemed capable of translating their (ethical) attitudes into (ethical) behaviours [McNeill, Lisa, and Rebecca Moore. 2015. “Sustainable Fashion Consumption and the Fast Fashion Conundrum: Fashionable Consumers and Attitudes to Sustainability in Clothing Choice.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 39 (3): 212–222], nor able to be ‘trusted to consistently make good decisions’ [Brooks, Andrew. 2015. Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. London: Zed Books, 241], they are also increasingly being called to recognise their individual role in the politics of global fashion supply chains. Drawing on examples from scholarly and popular discourses as well as online peer to peer communications, this article explores the historical moment of fast fashion as an instance of both the feminisation of consumption and the feminisation of responsibility.     

Landless but not assetless: female agricultural labour on the road to better status,evidence from India

Women's share of agricultural wage employment is rising across the Indian sub-continent. Studies examining this process of feminisation tend to be divided along the lines of an ideological debate following either the ‘poverty-push’ or the ‘demand-pull’ argument. This debate, however, has largely ignored the institution of patriarchy. In this study we revisit the debate with a focus on gender relations. The study is based on data collected from 291 households in the state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that, despite increased labour market participation, women's household status, her wages and working conditions remain acutely depressed. Women labourers with access to productive assets, however, are effectively expanding their agency within both the household and the labour market. Their experiences, we argue, have implications for transformative policies.     

Feminism in the Social Sciences of Health and Illness

Abstract

When feminism informs and shapes social scientific thinking, it often yields strongly applied perspectives. The business of engaging in the application, however, presents challenges to both feminist practice and the academic disciplines. These issues are further complicated when they are played out in an interdisciplinary setting. I offer a personal reflection on the highly ambiguous situation in a part of what has been called the ‘diaspora’ of social sciences practiced not within any particular ‘home’ discipline, but in a particular sub-field or inter-discipline such as urban studies, criminology or—in this case—population health. The emphasis in this discussion is on the mutual influences of the academic and the applied.     

militarism,conflict and women's activism in the global era: challenges and prospects for women in three West African contexts

This paper deals with the wrought relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, broadly defined. Tracing the trajectory in which psychoanalysis leads feminism from sexuality to sexual difference then to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, the paper takes on these ‘f-words’—femininity and ‘f-allus’, Freud and Foucault—to foreground an unacknowledged challenge of Judith Butler by Toril Moi in 1999. In this paper, I read Freud closely and demonstrate that although Freud's theory of cure is obscured by the turn to the Phallus and the ideology of femininity, its language of fantasy, sexuality, desire and the unconscious remain important concepts for feminism of the new millennium. On the other hand, critiques of ‘empire of the Phallus’ such as the French feminists’ affirmation of femininity and Judith Butler's concept of ‘lesbian Phallus’ only reproduce the master's system. Butler's misreading of Freud's ‘tooth’ and Lacan's ‘eyes’ as the Phallus shows that ‘inversion, subversion and rebellion’ by reversal or negation often leads to repetition without difference. In conclusion, I introduce Joan Copjec's critique of Foucaultian historicism and Toril Moi's turn to ordinary language philosophy to propose a new psychoanalytic feminism that can have sex without the Phallus.     

An Accidental Liberation: Ugandan women on the front lines of Idi Amin's economic war

This article considers one of the most curious outcomes of Idi Amin's military dictatorship—the ‘accidental liberation’ of Ugandan women. By expelling the Asian population in late 1972, Amin inadvertently opened up a new economic space for urban women. Whether they were forced to engage in petty trade out of necessity or because they received a shop ‘abandoned’ by the departing Asians, numerous women fondly remembered Amin as the one who ‘taught us how to work’. For the first time, they gained access to financial resources and decision-making power. Despite the economic windfall, many women continued to suffer the brutal realities of a harsh military dictatorship. Thus, for most women in Uganda, liberation was partial at best.     

‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women's Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one's own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.     

Cooperation and conflict: A case study of a women's research network in Norway

During four years (1978–82), 25–30 Norweigian women social scientists formed a research network of small local groups, studying ‘Women's mutual relations’ in various settings. Women's friendships, their cooperation in factories and local communities and in women's organizations were the focus of our research. This article, however, is not about the results of our research—although some of them are reported in the notes—but we describe the organization of our association, its purposes, structure and positive results, as well as our tendencies to build up conflict, fractionalism and withdrawal. The research network was established in opposition to male social science, both with respect to the choice of its main themes and its organizational form. A supportive work style, a ‘horizontal’ structure and a playing down of conflicts was more or less deliberately chosen by the network members. We discuss here some of the types of conflict that developed in the network, and the ways we dealt with them. Most conflicts were either solved ‘talking through’ or handled by avoidance. We ask the question if deliberate conflict avoidance is functional for a feminist network of organization. The case is made for a ‘horizontal network organization as a positive and fruitful supplement to usual academic organization structure.     

New Dreams of China: The China Novels of Anne Duffield

This article examines the work of a forgotten novelist, Anne Duffield, whose early novels set in China merit re-examination. Utilizing but also subverting the romance novel formula and alert to the utopian appeal of entertainment, Duffield’s The Lacquer Couch and Lantern-Light create a dream of China that invites intercultural connection, friendship and understanding. As China in the 1920s was rocked by anti-foreigner violence, the vision of these two novels was an appealing and hopeful alternative to the resurgent fears of malevolent fiends reminiscent of an earlier ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse. In addition, Duffield’s China, though romanticized, is also a modern and cosmopolitan one—an important counter to a tendency to imagine China as antiquated and entombed in the past.     

food

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women’s narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family’s modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.