Articulating Body,Territory, and the Defence of Life: The Politics of Strategic Equivalencing between Women in Anti-Mining Movements and the Feminist Movement in Peru

In Latin America, rural and indigenous women have mobilised in defence of their territories and built strategic alliances with urban and mestiza feminist movements. This paper focuses on how these processes have played out in Peru, tracing the development of the discourse on ‘body as territory’, which articulates sexual and reproductive rights with territorial autonomy. It discusses the ‘cosmopolitics’ of translating the distinct concerns and worldviews of the women involved, arguing that this discourse has enabled partial recognition and strategic equivalencing but that it has failed to fundamentally transform the underlying asymmetric relations of power and privilege.     

At the Roots of Labour Activism: Chinese and Cambodian Garment Workers in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT

In China extensive, co-ordinated strikes such as those that have taken place in Cambodia in recent years remain rare, with most protests initiated by Chinese workers contained inside single factories or industrial zones. Also, while Cambodian workers often mobilise for their interests and broader policy issues, such as the determination of the minimum wage, Chinese workers largely limit themselves to protests against violations of their legal rights. How can these different patterns of labour activism be explained? Through factory gate surveys and interviews conducted during the summer of 2016 in a sample of Hong Kong-owned garment factories in Dongguan and Phnom Penh, this study provides a comparative analysis of the root causes of labour activism in China and Cambodia. In particular, the article focuses on three elements that play an important role in determining labour activism: the expectations of the workers regarding wages; the workers’ perception of the labour law and the legal system; and trade union pluralism.     

Policing protest in the Australian Capital Territory: the introduction and use of the Public Order Act 1971

This article examines the reaction by the Australian Federal Government to the protest movements of the 1960s–1970s and their attempts to use public order legislation to thwart radical discontent in Australia. It argues that the Public Order (Protection of Persons and Property) Act 1971 was aimed at the threat of “violent” protests, particularly the tactic of the “sit-in”, and that to this end, the legislation was an overreaction to the actual threat posed by the protest movements at the time. It also shows that after a long gestation period, the Act was ill-equipped to deal with the changing nature of demonstrations in the 1970s, such as the problems caused by the erection of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Thus, after an initial flurry of use in mid-1971, the law has been seldom used since.     

Acknowledging the Suffering Caused by State-Mandated Sexual Violence and Crimes: An Assessment of the Iraqi High Tribunal

The Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), as a mechanism of transitional justice, took upon it a pioneering role within the Middle Eastern Region by prosecuting and convicting several high-ranking members of the former suppressive regime in Iraq. As part of this work, the IHT confronted the widespread impunity for and disregard of gender-based crimes, such as rape and other sexual violence, and took steps towards reforming the sector through its progressive statute and the specific acknowledgment of gender crimes within its judgments. It will be the aim of the following article to extend academic writings on Iraq, the IHT and gender, by providing insights into how the tribunal dealt with the issues of rape and sexual violence, the surrounding circumstances and how successful the IHT's recognition of these crimes proved for transitional justice in Iraq.     

Un/clothing African womanhood: colonial statements and postcolonial discourses of the African female body

Using the examples of the partially unclothed African woman in Senegal's controversial African Renaissance Monument (2009) and the 2008 proposed Anti-Nudity bill in Nigeria, this article probes postcolonial African engagements with the female body. The essay proposes that such postcolonial African preoccupations with how the female body is presented and seen should be contextualised in the fray of postcolonial African endeavours to resignify Africa, in response to colonial discourses. The essays bind these preoccupations to an ideologico-discursive continuum that has produced and sustained the African female body as a rhetorical element of colonialism then postcolonialism.     

At Boiling Point: Like Water for Chocolate and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity

Abstract — This article explores the mechanisms of Mexican identity as they are constructed in Alfonso Arau's film Como agua para chocolate (1991) (Like Water for Chocolate). In re-designing the characters of Laura Esquivel's novel, Arau produces a range of filmic stereotypes drawn from both the Hollywood and the Mexican traditions of film-making. Through the careful manipulation of filmic devices such as editing, framing and close-ups, many of the features of Mexican otherness perpetuated by Hollywood throughout the twentieth century are inscribed. I apply the metaphor of boiling, derived from the film's title, to examine certain key concepts of cinematic 'mexicanness' including the tropes of 'revolution', 'border', 'race' and 'sex'. Crucial to this argument is a consideration of the contemporary political climate in which Like Water for Chocolate was both produced and released. In Mexico, it was released halfway through the sexenio (six-year period of rule) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's rule and is clearly one of the most succesful cultural products (and exports) of his government's now infamous rule. In the United States, the climate of anti-immigrant attitudes in 1992 and 1993 and the corresponding political tension provokes new readings of certain stereotypical images of Mexicans and mexicanness. It is the tension that is produced by the collision between these two contexts — cultural, political and ethnic — that forms the principal focus of discussion in this article.     

Czechoslovakia and its Position within the Solidarity Network of Chilean Communism: A Reflection on the Coup and Resistance against Pinochet from a Country with Worn-out Revolutionary Ideals

The article will analyse the development of the Chilean cause in the politics of Eastern Europe countries since 1973, focusing on the Czechoslovak case. On the one hand, it will prove that during the communist government Czechoslovakia played an important role in the international campaign for the resistance against the dictatorship at a worldwide level. On the other hand, it posits that the propaganda aimed at Czechoslovakia, which sought to kindle society's belief in the revolutionary ideals strongly affected after the Soviet invasion in 1968, turned out to be much less effective.