Violated Women,Reason, and Lo Político in the Imaginary of the Guatemalan Nation

Guatemalan newspapers are dappled with the spectre of women's violence and the bodily evidence of the military response that is typical for a woman's transgression of gender roles. Gendered representations of violence – so often repeated in the media – engender particular forms of political agency. This article explores how political violence is imagined with women's bodies and suggests that such violence is always built on pre‐existing cultural practices. It argues that gender categorization is paramount to constructing a modern Guatemalan nation that all too often works to exclude women as knowing participants in Lo Político.     

INCREASING WOMEN's PARTICIPATION IN VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA

In the last three decades in China, few and declining numbers of women have participated in the main grassroots institutions of rural government, the village committee and the village branch of the Chinese Communist Party. This article examines a project aimed at addressing this problem, initiated in 2003 in Heyang county, Shaanxi, by one of China's largest and most influential women's nongovernmental organizations, West Women, together with the state-affiliated Women's Federation. The article discusses the goals, strategies, and short-term results of the Heyang Project. It then discusses the longer-term potential of the Heyang model for achieving greater gender equity and women's empowerment in rural China. Previous studies have critiqued Chinese approaches to the goal of increasing women's participation in village government, but have not questioned the desirability or need for the goal itself. In this article, the author takes the critique one step further, to provoke questions about the very desirability of increasing women's participation in village government. She concludes that when viewed in light of other recent trends, notably large-scale rural out-migration and tax reforms, increasing women's participation in village government may not have as desirable or significant an impact on gender relations as has previously been assumed.     

Explaining Policy Outcomes in Federal Contexts: The Politics of Reproductive Rights in Argentina and Mexico

This article explains the political and institutional factors that affect reproductive rights policies in Argentina and Mexico. Consistent with the comparative literature on gender, politics and institutions, the article reveals that federal arrangements define the arenas in which advocates can challenge governments. The comparative analysis suggests that the content and variations of policy outcomes are not only determined by the legal distribution of such rights. Women's positions towards abortion and contraception was greatly shaped by partisanship and ideology, and this was critical to legislative outcomes, while the number of women legislators was only important to introduce the issues. Important for further research are the effects of institutional and party instability on women's organising in legislatures, and the relevance of links between women's groups outside legislature and political parties for the success of gender equality policies.     

The Gender Deficit: Everyday Practices of Differentiation in the Chilean Labour Market

We focus on the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market, analysing everyday practices of social boundary demarcation that exclude women from accessing resources at work. We argue that women's diminished position in the labour market – or gender deficit – is a result of taken‐for‐granted, day‐to‐day practices, conditioning the distribution of resources. Taking Chilean professional women as a case study, we focus on labour market practices that uphold gendered evaluation criteria, reproduce social classifications, and engender exclusion through social boundary work that limits women's access to labour market benefits and rewards.     

The rise of Femi‐Nazis? Female participation in right‐extremist movements in unified Germany

German feminist scholars have recently come to argue that female involvement in right‐extremist causes is grounded in gender‐specific motives. They have also begun to uncover a troubling link between new patterns of female political engagement (ranging from electoral mobilisation to violent streetfighting) and their own efforts to promote an independent women's consciousness since the 1960s. This article develops a typology of New Right women, characterised here as Femi‐Nazis, evincing different levels of sympathy for, identification with, and participation in radical and extremist movements. It then explores five issue orientations distinguishing New Right women of the 1990s from the Old and New Right men of the 1940s and 1990s, suggesting that these women have developed an independent, self‐assertive political consciousness without internalising feminism's broader aims of diversity and inclusion. The article concludes with reflections on the interplay of ‘feminist’ consciousness and ultra‐nationalist qua xenophobic attitudes, and on the dilemmas Femi‐Nazi thinking poses for feminist identity in united Germany.     

The strong German state and the weak feminist movements

This article examines the causes of the marginalisation of women in political and economic decision‐making processes that are part of the ‘routine’ policy‐making process of the German state. The larger theoretical question is whether there is a ‘gender bias of the German state’ that has made its institutional structures less amenable to women's participation and their political agenda. Given the evidence, the answer is ‘yes’. There are specific exclusionary mechanisms that characterise the German polity, and these are antithetical to women's participation and concerns. These mechanisms act as gatekeepers of both legislation and discursive practices and are constitutive of the German Fraktionstaat and the corporatist system of economic bargaining.     

Women candidates and party nomination trends in India – evidence from the 2009 general election

More women MPs than ever before were elected to the lower house of the national parliament of India in the 2009 general election. Yet, the increase in women's presence in the Lok Sabha cannot necessarily be attributed to the increased willingness of political parties to field more women candidates, despite rhetorical party political support for increasing women's participation in political institutions. This article analyses party political nomination of women as candidates in the 2009 election, and finds significant variations in levels of nomination across parties and across India's states. The article also examines in detail the nomination of female candidates by the two largest political parties, the Indian National Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party, both of which support proposals for introducing reserved seats for women in national and state legislatures. The findings reject the proposition that parties only nominate women in unwinnable seats, but finds support for the proposition that parties are risk averse when it comes to nominating women, and that this can restrict the number of women nominated for election. The article concludes with some further questions for future research on gender and political recruitment in India.     

Women's Labour in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Losers and Survivors

This article examines the changes in the female class structure of the urban work force in post-revolutionary Iran by investigating the rate and pattern of the exclusion and the incorporation of women in the market between 1976 and 2006. We examine the gender marginalization thesis and test it empirically by focusing on the class nature of women's exclusion and incorporation into the labour force. We rely on decennial census data and present our empirical finding in the context of the social hierarchy of work. Moreover, we provide a comparative empirical analysis of the economic marginalization process for urban women's and men's class locations historically.     

La mujer en México: inequidad,pobreza y violencia

This article explores the main problems that Mexican women endure, especially those which arise from the inequality that they face in numerous social milieus. Despite the undeniable progress that has been made with respect to women's rights and equal opportunities, full gender equality still seems like a distant ideal for Mexico. There have even been important setbacks, such as access to healthcare, legislation that has been enacted that does not respect women's decisions over their bodies, or in the persistence of various forms of violence that they bear. This article will begin by exploring the advancement in rights which women have achieved, in order to later describe the problems that Mexican women still face in terms of work, health, social security, education, poverty, politics, and the violence which they still encounter.     

Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations

Indonesia has been haunted by the “spectre of communism” since the putsch by military officers on 1 October 1965. That event saw the country's top brass murdered and the military attributing this putsch to the Communist Party. The genocide that followed was triggered by a campaign of sexual slander. This led to the real coup and the replacement of President Sukarno by General Suharto. Today, accusations about communism continue to play a major role in public life and state control remains shored up by control over women's bodies. This article introduces the putsch and the socialist women's organisation Gerwani, members of which were, at the time, accused of sexual debauchery. The focus is on the question of how Gerwani was portrayed in the aftermath of the putsch and how this affects the contemporary women's movement. It is found that women's political agency has been restricted, being associated with sexual debauchery and social turmoil. State women's organisations were set up and women's organisations forced to help build a “stable” society, based on women's subordination. The more independent women's groups were afraid to be labelled “new Gerwani ” as that would unleash strong state repression. This article assesses the implications of these events for the post-1998 period of Reformasi and reviews some recent analyses of 1965, state terrorism and violence and reveals blind spots in dealing with gender and sexual politics. It is argued that the slander against Gerwani is downplayed in these analyses. In fact, this slander was the spark without which the bloodbath would not have happened and would not have acquired its gruesome significance.     

Between the Dock and a Hard Place: Hazards and Opportunities of Legal Pluralism for Indigenous Women in Ecuador

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.     

Effects of Institutional Reforms on Women's Representation in Colombia, 1960–2014

Starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of women have been implemented in Colombia. However, research on the consequences of these reforms has been inconclusive. This article analyzes the influence of institutional variables on the proportion of nominated and elected women in Colombia between 1962 and 2014, at both the national and local levels of government, in three different institutional environments. Results confirm the influence of institutional change, indicating that decentralizing reforms and the introduction of the gender quota have had a positive impact on the proportion of women's candidacies and elections, but that the adoption of the open list negatively affected the percentage of elected women.     

Contested Institutionalisation: Women's Policy Agencies and Challenges to Gender Equality in Germany

Germany has created one of the world's largest women's policy infrastructures. But the scope as well as the effect of institutionalising women's policy agencies is contested. Even committed proponents of gender equality note the agencies’ limited influence in important policy arenas. Critics of institutionalisation have used the fiscal crisis of the past decade to push efforts to downsize or diversify the mission of women's policy agencies. Building on theories of new institutionalism, this article attributes recent challenges to the institutionalisation of gender politics in Germany to three sets of factors: First, to tensions between strong formal gender equality rules and weak informal equality norms; second, to powerful internal and external veto players who use their leverage to prevent gender equality legislation; and, third, to a shifting policy discourse that has reframed gender equality language in gender mainstreaming terms and might lead to significant changes in the institutional gender equality architecture.     

The feminist movement in Taiwan, 1972–87

Abstract

The definition of the women's movement has caused a certain degree of confusion in the women's studies community in Taiwan. Before 1986 it was debated whether there was or had ever been a women's movement at all on the island, for gender equality had been guaranteed by the 1947 Constitution, and hence some people questioned the desirability and potential impact of such a movement. Afterwards, as social movements collected momentum and popular support, the tendency has been to define the women's movement broadly to include all types of women's group activities.     

How the Global Pandemic Intensifies Vulnerabilities for Colombia's Women Social Leaders

Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control. This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease; (b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased; and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited.     

Representing Women in Chinese Village Self-Government: A New Perspective on Gender,Representation, and Democracy

ABSTRACT

Recent feminist debate about how to achieve the substantive representation of women in government has been conducted largely in relation to national parliaments in democratic states. This article brings a new perspective by examining grassroots rural government in contemporary China – an authoritarian state, which, however, began implementing village “self-government,” including elections, in 1987. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Yunnan. The authors went into this fieldwork with an understanding that women's substantive representation, democracy, and gender equality are mutually constituted and with an expectation that village self-government might make a much-needed contribution to the achievement of all three. However, we ran into trouble with this analytical framework. First, there were marked variations in villagers’ practices and understandings of “representation.” Second, we found that democracy was not a prerequisite for substantive representation. Third, most villagers we talked with claimed that “men and women are equal” and there was little conception of villagers’ interests diverging by gender. This article explores our analytical “trouble,” with a view to advancing scholarship on constraints to democracy in authoritarian states and suggesting fruitful directions for feminist theorists interested in the relationship between gender, representation and democracy.     

Explaining Domestic Violence Policy Outcomes in Chile and Argentina

This article explains why Chile has outperformed Argentina in policy responses to the problem of domestic violence. It argues that policy variation is due to both macro‐level institutional features (state capacity and centralization) and to more contingent political factors that shape the structure, role, and resources of the women's policy agencies that coordinate and implement domestic violence policies. The initial design of Chile's National Women's Service has allowed it to act as a crucial “insider” ally to advocacy groups. In contrast, Argentina's National Women's Council has suffered repeated downgrading and loss of resources due to ideological conflicts and changes in government, rendering it unable to coordinate policy responses to domestic violence effectively or to act as an ally to advocates inside and outside the state seeking increased resources and more effective policy responses to violence against women.     

Recent Publications on Baltic History

This article explores different geographies of tourism, femininities and livelihood in post-socialist rural Latvia, with a focus on women's entrepreneurship within rural tourism. Based on a case study in the Cēsis district, its aim is to analyze women's livelihood strategies, including both economic and lifestyle-oriented motives behind entrepreneurship within tourism. The study illustrates women's day-to-day livelihood practices and how they organize their lives in time and space. The article reveals how women negotiate their ‘livelihood action space’, which includes a number of paradoxes between the quest for independence while facing both economic and social restrictions.     

STILL PLAYING WITH FIRE

This coauthored article is part of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan's (SKMS) efforts to participate in the coproduction of dialogical/dialectical relationships between theory and practice, the lettered and the unlettered, academia and activism, and the fields inhabited by members of SKMS, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academic scholars.We narrate two intertwined tales based on dialogues among four members of SKMS in the context of producing the first four issues of SKMS's community newspaper, Hamara Safar. The first tale focuses on the political transformation of Sangtin, an organization that was conceptualized in 1998 as an NGO for rural women's empowerment based on the mainstream donor-based model of social change. A three-year–long process of critical reflection and writing by nine women on the politics of caste, class, religion, and gender in the context of rural development and women's empowerment programs — as well as on the global politics of knowledge production — paved the way for the emergence of SKMS, an organization that today consists of over five thousand poor farmers, manual laborers, and their families, most of them dalit. SKMS believes that definitions and processes of empowerment must evolve from rural people's struggles and active participation, instead of emerging from donor institutions, NGO headquarters, university-based experts, or think tanks—and then being applied to the rural people. The second story focuses on some of the hurdles in the path of SKMS as it remains grounded in feminist principles, but refuses to work exclusively with women. Together, the two intertwined stories map the archaeology of the shift from Sangtin to SKMS and some of the larger questions pertaining to “women's issues,” “feminist politics,” and “transnational collaborations” that this shift has opened up.     

Şemseddin Sami,Women, and Social Conscience in the Late Ottoman Empire

In championing women's rights, ?emseddin Sami (1850–1904) sought to remould Ottoman social conscience along an egalitarian ethic based on gender equality in intelligence. In his novel Taa??uk-? Talat ve Fitnat, his treatise Women, and his six-volume encyclopaedia Kamus al-A'lam, he offered the ideal of monogamous marriage based on love and forgiveness, underscored the imperative of female education and job opportunities, and demonstrated the wide range of women's achievements throughout Islamic and Western history. The remaking of men needed to complement the remaking of women. Detailed studies of individual writers and magazines are necessary to gain an appreciation of the struggle to redefine the dignity of women in the late Ottoman Empire.