Women,poverty and agricultural growth in India

This article explores the interlinkages between gender, poverty and agricultural growth in India. It shows how women and female children of poor rural households bear a disproportionately high share of the burden of poverty. This is manifest especially in a systematic bias against females in the intra‐household distribution of food and health care. However, there are significant cross‐regional differences in the extent of the bias which is much higher in the north‐western states relative to the southern. Some of the likely factors ‐ economic, social, historical ‐ underlying these differences are discussed here. The specific problems of female‐headed households are separately considered. Also, the on‐going debate on the relationship between rural poverty and agricultural growth is critically examined. In addition, a detailed quantitative analysis is undertaken of the differential effects of the new agricultural technology, and associated growth, on the employment and earnings of female and male agricultural labourers (who constitute the bulk of the rural poor). The association between changes in these economic variables and others, such as in the incidence and pattern of dowry payments, is also examined, as are the implications of both these aspects for the situation of rural women in poverty in different geographic regions.     

Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh

This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.     

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.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

Women and citizenship

Barbara Sullivan and Gillian Whitehouse (eds), Gender, Politics & Citizenship in the 1990s (University of New South Wales Press) Sydney, 1996.

Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1996.     

Women and War

Susan Hill's novel The Woman in Black (1983) is a radical example of women's Gothic horror. It is a popular ghost story that has been successfully adapted for the London stage. In addition, it offers a social critique of motherhood and contemporary rhetoric surrounding the family. Scullion interprets the novel from several critical perspectives: feminist, psychological, biographical, generic and intertextual. Principally, however, she offers a reading of the novel that engages with its immediate historical context. The contention is that Hill's novel mediates women's anxieties about motherhood and autonomy during the early 1980s when the institution of the family in Britain was an ideological battleground. Set primarily during the 1860s, The Woman in Black exposes Victorian hypocrisy towards the unmarried mother, and indirectly probes the quasi-Victorian values promulgated in the 1980s, during the first term of a Conservative right-wing government. The protagonist of the novel, the eponymous woman in black, resists the lot of the so-called fallen woman. In her physical form, she refuses to submit to Victorian patriarchal values by attempting to reclaim her illegitimate child. In spectral form, she repeatedly inflicts suffering on families by causing the death of their children. Her excessive revenge knows no compassion, and recognizes no boundaries of place and time. Her ghost is never laid to rest. Neither is order restored by the closing pages. Thus the novel, as well as being a popular ghost story, challenges assumptions about women's 'natural' acquiescence and their unconditionally generous responses to husbands, partners and children. Shaped by the social climate in which it was written, The Woman in Black suggests that mothers under extreme pressure have the potential, like any other members of the family, for cruelty to children. Through its forceful rejection of either idealized or derogatory stereotypes of women, this novel belongs to the genre of radical Gothic horror.