ambiguities and ambivalences in making the nation: women and politics in 20th-century Mexico

By comparing two time periods, the early and late 20th century, this article examines the ambiguities and ambivalences in the state promotion of women in the nation-building projects of Mexico. I argue that in both cases, the state was keen to promote itself as modern and progressive and used women's status in society to these ends. Despite the explicit focus on women, there were many ambiguities and ambivalences resulting from the competing state projects in the political, socio-economic and cultural arenas offering women both privileged spaces and constraints in the development of gendered citizenship. The contradictions arise from simultaneously promoting women's rights, extolling traditional gender roles and fearing women's political activism – both conservative and more radical. Although these ambivalences and ambiguities remain a constant feature, there is a key difference in the two time periods: in one the regime is inward looking, economically protectionist and corporatist, while in the other a new vision of Mexico has attempted to dismantle the corporatist structures and state development project with private economic initiatives and political individualism. In both periods, women gained important rights but romanticized imagery of the self-sacrificing mother was mobilized to underpin change: women were expected both to change and remain the same.     

Mainstream Sexualization and the Potential for Nordic New Feminism

Processes of sexualization mark a wide range of popular and high‐cultural representations in media and culture. This trend has led to academic and public feminist debate. In this article I argue that the common polarization between the repressive and the subversive potential of sexualized representations fails to understand processes of sexualization as forms of mainstream cultural experimentation. Since the mid‐90s we have witnessed the emergence of a new feminist cultural wave in the Nordic countries, embracing post‐feminist modes and popular culture that re‐politicizes feminist questions in controversial ways. I argue that this development and the Nordic context of state feminism and gender equality ideals pose a challenge to analyses of sexualization as exclusively part of commercial colonization, anti‐feminist backlash and de‐politicization. I will present a case that exemplifies the discussion of sexualization by the critical reception of the Norwegian young feminist anthology with the title Rosa Prosa. Om jenter og kåthet [Pink Prose. On girls and horniness] (2006). The ideological and aesthetic hybridity of the texts poses a problem for the critics who denounce the book's feminist potentials.     

Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the Colombian coffee industry, 1928–92

The concept of subsumption had a short life within Marxist analysis of family farming because analysts using the concept failed to appreciate the centrality of class relations in Marx's analysis of capitalist development. I argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as a theorisation of the subtle cultural and historical processes through which labour is incorporated into capitalist development projects. I reinforce this theoretical discussion with an analysis of capitalist development in the Colombian coffee industry. This case demonstrates that capitalist development is as much project as process, as much the reformation of cultural identity as the restructuring of relations of production.     

Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this introductory paper, we synthesize the literature on agrarian resistance in Brazil and situate recent struggles in Brazil within the Latin American context more broadly. We highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Latin American resistance, which include: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. We argue that by analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this collection increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context.     

resistance at the limits: feminist activism and conscientious objection in Israel

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.     

What are we fighting for? Rethinking resistance in a Pewenche community in Chile

The contradictory reactions by members of an indigenous group in southern Chile to the prospect of their displacement by a hydroelectric dam presents an opportunity to reconceptualize ‘resistance’, studies of which have come under increasing attack in recent years. Using this case, I explore contemporary perspectives on ‘subaltern’ struggle and propose an alternative framework for the interpretation of this phenomenon that seeks to salvage a viable conception of ‘resistance’ for future study. I argue that resistance studies’ current critique finds the bulk of its substance in deficiencies of the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ paradigm presently dominating the field and offer a tentative outline of ways in which the field might be reconceived so as to transcend this paradigm and direct the study of resistance into more productive arenas.     

the <Emphasis Type="Italic">conditions</Emphasis> of politics: low-caste women's political agency in contemporary north Indian society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Zina</Emphasis> and the moral regulation of Pakistani women

From 1998 to 1999, I interviewed women who had been incarcerated under the Zina Ordinance (zina means illicit sex) in Pakistan. This led me to an examination of women's moral regulation by their families, a process in which I maintain the state is complicit. I argue against relativist explanations of this process, which view Pakistani culture or notions of timeless Islam as the reason for women's incarceration. Instead, I examine the interconnection of morality with the legal/judicial structures, the relationship between the state and patriarchy within families, and the plight of impoverished women in Pakistan within an era of globalization. In my analysis, I link economic development and human rights to globalization and the continuing costs of militarization. Such connections allow feminists to target the structural conditions that sustain the laws in Pakistan and help create an environment that will bring about the repeal of the laws while contributing to trans-national feminist solidarity.     

Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory

In this article I outline an Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory. I argue that an Indigenous women's standpoint generates problematics informed by our knowledges and experiences. Acknowledging that Indigenous women's individual experiences will differ due to intersecting oppressions produced under social, political, historical and material conditions that we share consciously or unconsciously. These conditions and the sets of complex relations that discursively constitute us in the everyday are also complicated by our respective cultural differences and the simultaneity of our compliance and resistance as Indigenous sovereign female subjects.     

Leaving home: Irish press debates on female employment,domesticity and emigration to Britain in the 1930s

Although Ireland has had a long history of female emigration, the 1930s saw an important shift in emigration patterns. In the context of southern Irish nation-building, the emigration of tens of thousands of young Irish women to Britain raised serious questions about the opportunities and roles of women in the Irish Free State. This article analyses the Irish print media of the 1930s as discursive spaces within which female emigration was repeatedly highlighted and debated. Discussions of female emigration were usually related to issues of female education, female employment and the duties of women within the home. These issues need to be located within the specific context of Irish Free State economics and politics. The Conditions of Employment Act (1936) and the Constitution of 1937 were legislative measures that attempted to define and regulate the role of Irish women. But that is not to imply a simple ideological hegemony in the Free State; I argue that the media debates reveal the competing discourses surrounding women's roles in the newly established nation state. For example, one view was that young women and girls should be given training and preparation for emigration, another view was that plenty of jobs were available at home, while a third view was that women should be content to remain within the domestic sphere. The much-repeated view that women would be better off (at home) illustrates the overlapping constructions of home – domestic sphere – and home – the nation. The overlapping and interconnecting of these home spaces signified a blurring of boundaries that meant Irish women were expected to carry the responsibility for national as well as domestic well-being.     

Vacant wombs: feminist challenges to psychoanalytic theories of childless women

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.     

Ordenamento Territorial: Neo-developmentalism and the struggle for territory in the lower Brazilian Amazon

In this paper, I explore the tensions and conflicts arising from the territorial re-organization of western Pará state in the Brazilian Amazon associated with the paving of the Santarém–Cuiaba highway (BR-163). I argue that the set of forces, techniques and devices that constitute Ordenamento Territorial, or Territorial Ordering, re-territorialize the region with the spatialized logic of sustainable development, constituting a ‘green grab’, or a new strategy of governance over not only territory but also territoriality – the ways of life of Amazonia's inhabitants. Analyzing the formation of the Movement in Defense of Life and Culture of the Arapiuns River, I explore how social movements are shifting their strategies in relation to these new technologies of ordering.     

Reserve labor,unreserved politics: dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act

The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in force since 2005. I locate the program against the backdrop of neoliberal transformations in India. I then examine the ways in which the rural proletariat engage with the program, even when other opportunities in the agricultural sector are available. Based on these examinations, I argue that the practices spawned by the program are to be understood as ‘encroachments’ into the extant social customs, norms and habits of rural India. This perspective, I contend, is more fruitful than locating the rural proletariat's engagement with the NREGA as a coping strategy or a tactic of resistance against rural elites. The data which this paper draws on include official sources, in-depth interviews with workers in rural Bihar and West Bengal and ethnographic observations.     

Model villages in the neoliberal era: the Millennium Development Goals and the colonization of everyday life

What explains the recent re-emergence of ‘model village’-style social experiments, and what does this tell us about the contradictions of neoliberal development? This paper focuses on two experiments of this kind – the Millennium Villages Project in sub-Saharan Africa and the Rural Cities Project in southern Mexico – both of which aim to achieve the Millennium Development Goals through an integrated set of interventions at the village level. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's work on the colonization of everyday life, I argue that the Millennium Development Goals function in these cases to facilitate and legitimate the production of social reality based on a naturalised vision of market society. These utopian projects embody the paradoxical character of neoliberalization, demonstrating the necessarily social production of the supposedly natural order on which neoliberalism is discursively premised, while reproducing the strategies of social engineering that the neoliberal project is rhetorically oriented against.     

Lula's assault on rural patronage: Zero Hunger,ethnic mobilization and the deployment of pilgrimage

This paper explores the Workers’ Party government's attempt to use anti-poverty policy to disrupt rural patronage, and the implications of this effort for theories of patronage. I argue that state officials and race-based activists implementing President Lula's flagship ‘Zero Hunger Program’ (2003–2005) turned mundane program exercises into pilgrimage rites in an effort to build lateral solidarities among Afro-Brazilians and undermine their vertical patronage alliances. The partial success of such efforts suggests that there are circumstances in which vertical and horizontal alliances are compatible, and that investigating this compatibility entails consideration of local categories of exchange.     

Staging incapacitation: the corporeal politics of hunger striking

This essay examines the ongoing hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Through an analysis of news media compiled by journalists reporting on the timelines of the strikes, and various prisoner testimonials, I contextualize how hunger striking has been historically understood to be grounds for emancipation from, and resistance to, state violence and carceral techniques. I further present an analysis of the 1981 Irish death fast to consider how prisoners’ resistance to corporeal wholeness comes to function as a viable form of political self-expression. Focusing on both the state’s suppression of embodied protest as well as the weaponization of the prisoner’s body, I argue that although geopolitically different, in both the Guantánamo and Irish strikes, forms of corporeal incapacitation function as the mechanisms through which protest and discipline register.     

Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST's cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization

Dominant conceptions of social movements consider their constitutive feature the disruption of order, not practices around building it. In this paper, I challenge this notion by analyzing the Landless Workers' Movement (MST)'s relatively successful efforts to institutionalize the practices of agricultural production developed by its members in cooperatives and agroecology. Through this analysis, I show that the movement's administration of a democratically managed form of agricultural production exemplifies a unique form of social movement resistance – namely, what I call self-governmental resistance. Rather than reformist or revolutionary contention, self-governmental resistance – performed by movements like the MST – redevelops state policies by vying for and often taking control over the design and implementation of agricultural production.     

Women Educators and Transnational Networking in the Twentieth-Century Nursery School Movement

In this article I argue that women educators' personal and professional networks underpinned the growth of nursery school education into a transnational movement in the interwar years. Edna Noble White, Lillian de Lissa, Mary Gutteridge and Gwendolyn Watkins' interlocking networks facilitated and connected the nursery school movements in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia. Although these women educators were at the centre of a feminised domain, I also show that their work and the movement were impacted by gender relations in the broader fields of education and child development research. Just as nursery school education transcended national boundaries and was reconfigured in each national context, so too the priorities and tensions in education and developmental psychology.