recasting the role of the intellectual: Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral

The life and work of Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, is examined as an example of how difficult it was for women to win recognition as intellectuals in 20th-century Latin America. Despite an international reputation for erudition and political commitment, Mistral has traditionally been represented in stereotypically gendered terms as the ‘Mother’ and ‘Schoolteacher’ of the Americas, and it has been repeatedly claimed that she was both apolitical and anti-intellectual. This article contests such claims, arguing that she was not only committed to fulfilling the role of an intellectual, but that she also elaborated a critique of the dominant male Latin American view of intellectuality, probing the boundaries of both rationality and nationality as constructed by male Euro-Americans. In so doing, she addressed many of the crucial issues that still confront intellectuals today in Latin America and elsewhere.     

Metaphors of female political ideology: The cases of Chile and Argentina

During the years of authoritarian regimes in several countries of Latin America, women's political participation against these governments has had a distinctive political imagination—a female political imagination that uses scarfs, photographs tied to the bodies of the participants, white handkerchiefs and flowers among other symbolic objects. This paper will study the metaphors of female political ideology in two countries of the Southern Cone: Argentina and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and in Chile Women for life.     

La Vía Campesina: the birth and evolution of a transnational social movement

The origin and evolution of the transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina is analysed through five evolutionary stages. In the 1980s the withdrawal of the state from rural areas simultaneously weakened corporativist and clientelist control over rural organisations, even as conditions worsened in the countryside. This gave rise to a new generation of more autonomous peasant organisations, who saw the origins of their similar problems as largely coming from beyond the national borders of weakened nation-states. A transnational social movement defending peasant life, La Vía Campesina emerged out of these autonomous organisations, first in Latin America, and then at a global scale, during the 1980s and early 1990s (phase 1). Subsequent stages saw leaders of peasant organisations take their place at the table in international debates (1992–1999, phase 2), muscling aside other actors who sought to speak on their behalf; take on a leadership role in global struggles (2000–2003, phase 3); and engage in internal strengthening (2004–2008, phase 4). More recently (late 2008–present, phase 5) the movement has taken on gender issues more squarely and defined itself more clearly in opposition to transnational corporations. Particular emphasis is given to La Vía Campesina's fight to gain legitimacy for the food sovereignty paradigm, to its internal structure, and to the ways in which the (re)construction of a shared peasant identity is a key glue that holds the struggle together despite widely different internal cultures, creating a true peasant internationalism.     

interview with Sarah Waters (CWWN conference,University of Wales,Bangor, 22nd April 2006)

Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in South Wales in 1966. She is the author of four novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2003) and The Night Watch (2006). Among her many awards and nominations one can include the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (2000), Author of the Year at the British Book Awards (2003), and the South Bank Award for Literature (2003). Most recently, The Night Watch has been short-listed for the Orange Prize. It was my great pleasure to have the opportunity to interview her at the inaugural conference of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network (CWWN), ‘For Love or Money? Contemporary Women's Writing in the Marketplace’, which was held at the University of Wales, Bangor, in April 2006.     

Counterinsurgency for wind energy: the Bíi Hioxo wind park in Juchitán,Mexico

Sustainable development and climate change mitigation policies, Dunlap and Fairhead argue, have instigated and renewed old conflicts over land and natural resources, deploying military techniques of counterinsurgency to achieve land control. Wind energy development, a popular tool of climate change mitigation policies, has consequently generated conflict in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Istmo) region in Oaxaca, Mexico. Research is based on participant observation and 20 recorded interviews investigating the Fuerza y Energía Bíi Hioxo Wind Farm on the outskirts of Juchitán de Zaragoza. This paper details the repressive techniques employed by state, private and informal authorities against popular opposition to the construction of the Bíi Hioxo wind park on communal land. Providing background on Juchitán, social property and counterinsurgency in Southern Mexico, this paper analyzes the development of the Bíi Hioxo wind park. It further explores the emergence of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ counterinsurgency techniques used to pacify resistance against the wind park, enabling its completion next to the Lagoon Superior in October 2014. Discussing the ‘greening of counterinsurgency’, this contribution concludes that the Bíi Hioxo wind park has spawned social divisions and violent conflict, and intervened in the sensitive cultural fabric of Istmeño life.     

Resistance,class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.     

The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature,ensuring food sovereignty and empowering peasants

This paper provides an overview of what we call ‘agroecological revolution’ in Latin America. As the expansion of agroexports and biofuels continues unfolding in Latin America and warming the planet, the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecology-based agricultural production gain increasing attention. New approaches and technologies involving the application of blended agroecological science and indigenous knowledge systems are being spearheaded by a significant number of peasants, NGOs and some government and academic institutions, and they are proving to enhance food security while conserving natural resources, and empowering local, regional and national peasant organizations and movements. An assessment of various grassroots initiatives in Latin America reveals that the application of the agroecological paradigm can bring significant environmental, economic and political benefits to small farmers and rural communities as well as urban populations in the region. The trajectory of the agroecological movements in Brazil, the Andean region, Mexico, Central America and Cuba and their potential to promote broad-based and sustainable agrarian and social change is briefly presented and examined. We argue that an emerging threefold ‘agroecological revolution’, namely, epistemological, technical and social, is creating new and unexpected changes directed at restoring local self-reliance, conserving and regenerating natural resource agrobiodiversity, producing healthy foods with low inputs, and empowering peasant organizations. These changes directly challenge neoliberal modernization policies based on agribusiness and agroexports while opening new political roads for Latin American agrarian societies.     

The ‘private plot’ in Soviet agriculture

The paper examines the main components of Mexican agrarian populism, and the attractions of the populist position in the light of the current crisis within the Mexican agricultural sector. It is suggested that the ‘campesinistas’ (agrarian populists) have incorporated various aspects of marxist analysis, but have nevertheless emphasised ways in which their approach pans company with that of most marxists in Latin America. According to writers like Gustavo Esteva, perhaps the leading ‘campesinista’, the peasant economy in the process of developing can co‐exist with capitalism for a protracted period, and considerable doubt exists as to whether the peasant economy is ‘ultimately’ inconsistent with capitalist development. The agrarian populists look to the peasantry in Mexico as a vehicle for rural development, believing that a better understanding of the internal logic of peasant production might facilitate an alternative series of policy measures. The weaknesses of the ‘campesinista’ position are explored, and doubts expressed about the viability of the populist stance as long as Mexico has the option of importing basic foodcrops.     

New social movements in Latin America: The dynamics of class and identity

This essay provides a counterpoint to the postmodern interpretations of social movements in Latin America. Its purpose is to argue for the necessity of a class analysis of these movements. The main focus of this argument is on the emergence of what has been labelled ‘new peasant movements’, which, it is argued, constitute the most dynamic forces of resistance to neoliberal capitalism in Latin America. Postmodernism in this context is viewed as a deficient intellectual approach, premised as it is on an idealist conception of reality.     

Hélène Cixous's Autre Bisexualité and the Eternal Feminine in the Works of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

This article analyses the creative engagement of the Irish-language poet Ní Dhomhnaill with Hélène Cixous's écriture féminine. Ní Dhomhnaill translates Cixousian images and concepts into her texts, returning on several occasions to the concept of l'autre bisexualité (‘the other bisexuality’). Cixous uses this concept to rehabilitate—and celebrate—what she designates as ‘the feminine’, the alterity within and outside the self. For both writers, this alterity comprehends marginalized cultures as well as femininity. Both bring anti-essentialist convictions to their views of gender and cultural identity, but their respective poetics are born of shared preoccupations with biblical and mythological figures, and narratives often implicated in essentialism. Ní Dhomhnaill connects these archetypal figures with the cultural realities of post-colonial Ireland. The author argues that she draws on the works of Cixous to connect the indigenous Irish language and culture with the rehabilitation of femininity. But whereas, in Cixousian texts, ‘femininity’ eludes concrete definitions and stable meanings, in the works of Ní Dhomhnaill, it often signifies an authentic pre-colonial culture that is ripe for rediscovery in post-colonial Ireland. Ní Dhomhnaill simultaneously celebrates this culture and acknowledges its embeddedness in a Celtic patriarchy that her Cixousian tropes work to undercut.     

Fatal Women of Romanticism. Adriana Craciun. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

The fatal woman, or femme fatale, is a familiar archetype: an aggressive seductress who lures her enemies into compromising situations. Literature is full of vivid characterizations of this type: Eve, Pandora, Cleopatra, Salome, Lady MacBeth. Film noir has rendered indelible images of fast-talking dames in pencil skirts and seamed stockings, exhaling cigarette smoke as they misdirect our heroes. In this incarnation, the fatal woman is often celebrated, as in film reviewer Mick LaSalle's recently published Complicated Women, and can be seen, in the right smoky light, as a protofeminist. Academics such as Virginia Allen and Bram Dijkstra have dissected the history of the femme fatale as a male fantasy, an "erotic and fatal muse" (Allen) and an "idol of perversity" (Dijkstra). What interests Adriana Craciun in Fatal Women of Romanticism is not the issues or intentions of male authors who invoke the archetype, but the appearance of femmes fatales in the works of several women writers of the Romantic period.     

Cernoises and Horrible Cernettes: a history of women at CERN 1954–2017

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) was founded in 1954 by a group of men seeking to explore the fundamental building blocks of our Universe. Since then, they and a host of international scholars have succeeded, exemplified by the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 and numerous Nobel Prize awards. But running parallel to the ‘great men’ of high-energy physics, is the untold story of the women of CERN. The organisation is an elite institution, and can thus provide insight into why numbers of women remain low in all facets of its work (except professional administrative). This viewpoint explores the role of women at CERN, both scientists and non-scientists, drawing on archival research from the organisation’s collection in Geneva and interviews, providing an analysis of why gender diversity is still one of the puzzles left for this elite space to solve.     

Are Latin American peasant movements still a force for change? Some new paradigms revisited

This article is a critique of structuralist and postmodern approaches to the study of agrarian reform and the viability, nature and significance of peasant and landless movements in Latin America. Contrary to the dominant structuralist view, we argue that peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are not anachronistic but dynamic modern classes, which in many contexts play a major role in opposing the dominant neoliberal agenda. Against postmodern interpretations of such grassroots agrarian movements, we also argue that in terms of action and programme, peasant and landless workers’ movements have raised fundamental class issues, in some instances combining them with ethnic demands. Deploying a reconstituted class analysis, we examine four cases of peasant/landless workers movements currently challenging state power: the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. Our conclusion is that in the current context, peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are engaged in a modern form of struggle, combining traditional forms of solidarity not only with the acceptance/adaptation of modern goals and techniques, but also with a strategic understanding of the levers of power in the national and international system.     

Bedtime

In a review of the responses to British artist Tracey Emin's exhibition of her own bed as an artwork nominated for the 1999 Turner Prize, Merck considers it as a figure of the personal trauma said to be constitutive of subjectivity in the decade. Reviewing theorists of the period including Hal Foster, Marc Augé and Wendy Brown, she considers the artist's work as an illustration of individual isolation assuaged by narcissism. Must the woman artist function as the victim of her own cult of celebrity? In the ensuing months since her nomination, Emin's changing circumstances suggest that other fates- and other histories- may be possible.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Feminist Review</Emphasis>: 25 years and beyond

The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourse of Simón Bolívar by means of a close critical reading of his seminal writings made public between 1812 and 1820. The historical and political processes known as Latin American independence constitute a moment of radical transformation. It was during this period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the category woman is constructed ambiguously in Independence/anti-colonial discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchical systems of social organization to legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in order to reinforce gender hegemonies. It will be shown that in Bolívar's writings colonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and masculine domination.     

UN decade and women's studies in Latin America

Women's Studies programs developed rapidly in the 70s especially in the United States, which did not happen in other countries. The Simone de Beauvoir Institute, at Concordia University, in Canada, is an exception. Even in Europe, very few universities have been including such programs for more than ten years, at the beginning of the 80s. By that time, in Central and South America, Women's Studies were still in their early stages and few regular programs had been really implemented. One of these was the Center for Women's Studies created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, in early 1981, with an offer of special courses and seminars and conducting research projects.A Regional Seminar on Women's Studies in South America and the Caribbean was held at that University in November 1981 with the financial support of UNESCO, to evaluate the situation of teaching and research in 11 countries: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, México, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Chile and concluded that much still needed to be done in that field.Nonetheless, the feminist movement, in its struggle for equal rights, against sex discrimination, for better opportunities for all women and their effective integration into national development and political participation, has been supported by thousands of women and gained a great momentum in the 70s.The Women's International Year (1975), The World Plan of Action (1976–1985) and the Copenhagen Conference (1980) have been concrete expressions of the effort initiated by the UN to call the attention of all nations and governments to the need of definitively eliminating all forms of discrimination against women and to adopt measures to ensure that the capacities of women will be utilized in a more fruitful way, aimed to national development. The Decade played an important role in the implementation of Women's Studies programs in Latin American.     

The image of women in Hinduism

Lively discussions on the nature of women went on for a very long time in ancient India. Women were so virtuous that they outnumbered men in heaven. God therefore spread vices among women to make heaven secure for men alone. Mythically conceived, as it is, the concept of dependence of women on men and their faithfulness and servility to husbands was deeply implanted in society. Legendary characters like Sita, Savitri and Parvati, all noted for their devotion to and dependence on husbands were eulogised and kept alive not only by the media but also by the national leaders. Although there were reputable women philosophers, teachers, poets and thinkers, none of them is a model for Hindu women. From the time a male heir became essential for the inheritance and concentration of personal property, and also for the continuance of the lineage, women served only as a means through which these were to be achieved: it is ideal wifehood and not ideal womanhood that Hindus upheld through the ages. In spite of recent legislation in India recognising women's independent entity, the over-all economic conditions of the country makes the dependent image of women still relevant today.     

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.     

the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women's literature in early Jamaican nationalism

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.