Foetal politics and the birth of an industry

In early Western society, women were considered to have a minor role in the reproductive process. Their social status was, correspondingly, secondary. Since the eighteenth century, women's contribution to procreation has been widely accepted, yet their social status remains. Women's importance in the reproduction of the species has not guaranteed them social prestige and the argument of this paper is that women's social standing is being further assaulted by the legal and economic consequences of innovations in birth technology. Two well-publicized innovations, Artificial Insemination by Donor, and In-Vitro Fertilization (or ‘test-tube babies’) have provoked legal, political and economic considerations which focus upon the possibilities of extensive bioengineering. The significance of this for women is that birth technology is not being fashioned after the interests of its clients but, instead, is becoming a new mercantile frontier in which women's needs may well be eclipsed by commercial and political ambitions.     

making politics visible: discourses on gender and race in the problematisation of sex-selective abortion

This paper examines the problematisation of sex-selective abortion (SSA) in UK parliamentary debates on Fiona Bruce’s Abortion (Sex-Selection) Bill 2014–15 and on the subsequent proposed amendment to the Serious Crime Bill 2014–15. On the basis of close textual analysis, we argue that a discursive framing of SSA as a form of cultural oppression of minority women in need of protection underpinned Bruce’s Bill; in contrast, by highlighting issues more commonly articulated in defence of women’s reproductive rights, the second set of debates displaced this framing in favour of a broader understanding, drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques, of how socio-economic factors constrain all women in this regard. We argue that the problematisation of SSA explains the original cross-party support for, and subsequent defeat of, the policies proposed to restrict SSA. Our analysis also highlights the central role of ideology in the policy process, thus making politics visible in policymaking.     

Relating feminisms,nationalisms and imperialisms: Ireland,India and Margaret Cousins's sexual politics

Abstract

From 1907 to 1913 Margaret Cousins was one of the most prominent leaders of the Irish Women's Franchise League, the most militant of the various Irish suffragist groups. A Theosophist, Cousins left Ireland in 1913 for Theosophical headquarters in Madras, spurred by her commitment to “the cause of womanhood the world over”. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Cousins played a central role in certain forms of Indian feminist and cultural nationalist movements. This article attempts to sketch some of the ways in which Cousins's class and imperial situation provoked and limited her feminist ideology.     

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.     

the politics of conflict and difference or the difference of conflict in politics: the women's movement in Nepal

This article argues that an adequately historicized and politicized understanding of the women's movement in Nepal (or elsewhere) requires a detailed examination of the construction of the gendered subject herself in the complex geo-political space of the emergent (Nepali) nation state. In turn, this unravelling of the gendered subject in Nepal serves to reinforce the premise that the representation of ‘the Nepali Woman’ as a single over-arching category is a contemporary construction, which has been achieved at the expense of consistently effacing the historically prior multiple and contested ethnic/caste identities taken by thrust upon women in what is now the new Nepal. The ‘natural’ goal of the women's movement since post-1990 Nepal to achieve a (single) feminist agenda has become part of the problem, as it can only be achieved at the expense of respecting the radical diversity and difference that is covered over by the ‘theoretical fiction’ of the unified nation of Nepal. The main important players, whether it be the women from mainstream political parties, or the women of the NGO world or the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists), have all contributed to excluding and silencing radical diversity in the name of expediency and elite power brokering. Moreover, it is argued that the contours of this composite discourse continue to be shaped by the international aid industry in Nepal, where ‘development’ is not merely the epistemic link between Nepal and the ‘West’, it is also the locus classicus of generic apolitical consciousness-less Nepali woman whose cause is taken up by scholar and activist alike.     

The politics of the agrarian question in turkey: Review of a debate

This article is a review of the major contributions to a debate between left‐wing Turkish intellectuals and political activists during 1969–71 over the character of Turkish agriculture and rural class structure and over the appropriate political strategy for the left. The crux of the disagreement, as in similar debates taking place at the same period in Latin America and India, was the extent to which feudal’ or ‘capitalist’ relations predominated in the countryside, and the implications for the class struggle ‐ in particular for the strategy of class alliances. On the one hand were those who supported a strategy for a ‘national democratic revolution ‘involving cooperation between peasants and workers and the progressive elements of the bourgeoisie to eliminate feudal relations and structures; on the other were those who argued that the Turkish countryside could in no sense be characterized as predominantly feudal, that the mass of rural producers were subject to essentially capitalist forms of exploitation and that any political strategy for socialists must recognize the predominance of capitalism in contemporary Turkey.     

Elsa Triolet: The politics of a committed writer

Elsa Triolet (1896–1970) was an important literary and political figure on the Left in Europe. The first woman to win the Prix Goncourt, she was also a decorated heroine of the French Resistance and a peace activist in the post-war era. She was a journalist, a biographer, a translator of Russian prose and poetry, a theater critic and, most important, a novelist whose books are a unique blend of political engagement, humor and fantasy.Unfortunately, the politics of the Cold War have obscured Triolet's many achievements. Married to Louis Aragon, member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, she herself was inevitably identified as a communist writer and therefore, could be safely ignored by the non-communist critics. Yet, she never conformed to the dictates of Socialist Realism and was far too intellectually independent to have the approval of the Party. Thus, she was neglected by the Left as well. But today, the radical and feminist themes of many of her novels have sparked a renewed interest in her work.     

Visceral gendering and a politics of connectivity in science

This article contributes to tackling the limited impact of existing gender equality policies in science and their widespread dismissal in countries such as the Czech Republic by conceptualizing and addressing visceral gendering practices by which gender differences are produced and rendered (in)visible. Based on research at a Czech research institution and on theories of viscerality and the co-constitution of gender and science I examine practices that gender and de- and regender subjects and relations in ways that undermine gender equality in science. I then explore scientists’ feelings of belonging and contentment that draw attention to the significance of building and maintaining connectivity to knowledge objects, co-workers and lives. The conclusion outlines what a politics of connectivity would entail for research work and career trajectories that are more livable for a broad range of scientists.     

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.     

The production of a woman in Andrei Tarkovsky's the sacrifice

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfigurations of the infamous “butterfly dress” by multimedia artist groups Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically, the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.     

Gutter politics: women newsies and the suffrage press

The article examines the role of the suffrage news-seller in light of the important role official organs came to play for organisations within the movement and the competing claims the act of selling placed on women unaccustomed to venturing into the streets and facing public hostility. The argument draws on evidence from a variety of newspapers, with a particular emphasis on Votes for Women, to demonstrate the extent to which organisations tried to encourage and reward volunteers to sell papers. These positive appeals and testimonials found in the periodicals are read against the more ambivalent and negative accounts of the experiences of paper-sellers found in suffrage fiction and autobiographies which deal more directly with the personal costs of these attempts to raise the profile of the movement. The conclusion stresses how the contradictions between such sources can offer insights into the dilemmas faced by women activists in these years.