FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE: KEEPING THE SUBJECT ALIVE

One of the main purposes of feminist jurisprudence is to create or find better ways of being and living for women through the analysis, critique, and use of law. Rich work has emerged, and continues to emerge, from feminist theorists exploring conceptions of the self, personhood, identity and subjectivity that could be used to form a basic unit in law and politics. In this article, it is argued that a strong sense of human subjectivity needs to be retained to enable the human potentiality of women and men to flourish. This can be done in a way which is not essentialist, yet does not dissolve the subject out of existence, issues pertinent to feminist jurisprudence in recent years.     

FROM PEDAGOGY TO ACTIVISM

Accepted as a pro-woman organisation, Singapore's longest established women's association, the Association for Women's Action and Research (AWARE), has operated for 25 years under the watchful eye of the authorities in Singapore. Despite its systematic interventions on behalf of women, it never enjoyed a high national profile. In March 2009, however, all this changed. A right wing religious group staged a take-over and brought AWARE to the attention of the nation. This article details how a group of current and past students of our feminism module at the National University of Singapore moved from classroom learning to spontaneous active response when AWARE faced this challenge.     

FROM OBAMA TO ABBOTT

Abstract This article analyses how politicians' use of emotion is gendered. Key Australian, US and UK politicians studied include Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Cameron, Rudd, Abbott and Gillard. Emotions analysed range from fear to compassion. A particular focus is placed on issues of masculinity; however, the implications for constructions of both femininity and masculinity will be considered, including arguments that female politicians face particular problems in utilising emotion, for example, in projecting an image of being both tough and compassionate. It will be argued that it is not just that politicians' use of emotion intersects with issues of gender but that particular gendered identities are a key vehicle via which emotion is deployed. Consequently, the analysis contributes new insights to both the literature on the politics of emotion and the literature on masculinity and gender.     

FROM RESCUE MISSIONS TO DISCIPLINE

This paper maps a shift in emphasis in the representation of Muslim women in Western discourse from that of victims in need of Western rescue to that of active participants in Islamism and the ‘Islamisation’ of the West. Muslim women activists have developed an articulate response to representations that depict them as passive victims, emphasising that many women undertake their religious practices (in particular, those relating to dress) by ‘choice’ and play an active role in resisting patriarchal practices imposed in the name of their religion. Their responses to representations of Muslim women as perpetrators of Islamic extremism who must be disciplined into acquiescing to Western/Enlightenment/secular norms, however, are still evolving.     

THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN IN CONVERSATIONS “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”: LAW AND THE OLD POLITICS OF COLONIALISM

Ratna Kapur’s recent book entitled Erotic Justice proposes a new politics of postcolonialism whereby the sexual subaltern disrupts the normative principles of the universal, liberal, legal domain. Kapur traces legal strategies regarding censorship, sex-work, homosexuality, sexual harassment, trafficking and migration which travel a treacherous path, countering allegations of ‘unIndian’ and Western practice with cultural histories of ‘authentic’ sexual legitimacies, towards a new politics of desire. Kapur frames her analysis through postcolonial feminist theory as providing a tool for feminist struggle, yet distinct from and disruptive of a liberal project of global sisterhood. This review deeply values the role of the sexual subaltern which disrupts the tenets of a linear, progressive liberalism. Drawing upon Indian feminist and Western feminist perspectives, the review considers how the distinct position of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject informs the generic role of law as a tool constructing relations of domination regarding gender, sexuality, caste, property and religion. Kapur observes that both the West and the Hindu Right have engaged with liberal legal principles. This engagement, I argue, exposes and informs law as a historical and contemporary tool of gendered legal colonialism, for sisters to disrupt across the Western and Eastern terrains.Review of Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press, 2005, 219 pp., ￡26, ISBN 1-90438-524-9     

THE TERMS ON WHICH CHILD ABUSE IS MADE TO MATTER

In 2007 the Australian mainstream news media extensively covered a child rape case in the Indigenous community of Aurukun. In this coverage, the media positioned themselves as having a moral requirement to report the ‘Aurukun rape case’ in order to bring issues of Indigenous child sexual abuse to the attention of the public. This paper examines the representations of this case made available by mainstream news media, and specifically examines both the depiction of Indigenous communities as dysfunctional and the claim made by the media that Indigenous child sexual abuse is ‘our business’. The paper concludes that the coverage of this case represents a form of ‘war porn’ that became more about white control over Indigenous lives and less an investigation into child sexual abuse.     

LOVING TO STRAIGHTEN OUT DEVELOPMENT: SEXUALITY AND ETHNODEVELOPMENT IN THE WORLD BANK'S ECUADORIAN LENDING

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation.