Gender,resistance and land: interlinked struggles over resources and meanings in South Asia

This article examines the nature of women's resistance to gender inequities in resource distribution and ideological representation. It argues that to understand how women perceive these inequities it is necessary to take into account not only their overt protests but also the many covert forms their resistance might take. At the same time, to significantly alter gendered structures of property and power it appears necessary to move beyond 'individual-covert' to 'group-overt' (organized collective) resistance. These issues are examined here especially in the context of women's struggles for land rights and gender equality in South Asia. Although historically South Asian women have been important participants in peasant movements, these movements have not been typified by women demanding independent land rights or contesting iniquitous gender relations within the movements and within their families. Some recent challenges in this direction indicate that attaining gender equality in the distribution of productive resources will require a simultaneous struggle against constraining ideological constructions of gender, including (in many regions) associated social practices such as purdah. And in both types of struggle (namely concerning resources and gender ideologies), group-overt resistance is likely to be of critical importance.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

“She's not really a woman, she's half a man”: Gendered discourses of embodiment in a French farming community

This paper is about constructions of embodiment in farming families in a community of the Aveyron region in Southern France. More particularly, it explores how the discursive representation of women's bodies both reproduces and legitimates unequal gender relations between women and men on the farm and in the local community. It is argued here that gender is constituted through the ways in which individuals live and construct their bodies within a particular social, cultural, and economic context. But because what is constructed as masculine is valued over what is constructed as feminine, women's bodies and abilities are inferiorised and devalued. In the farming context discussed in this paper, farm women are never seen as having bodies which enable them to farm in the same terms as men. Women's work on the farm is seen as only secondary and complementary to that of farmers in the same way that women's bodies are seen to be lacking in masculine attributes which are defined as central to farming. So that even when women show that they can run farms by themselves and do work which is usually defined as masculine, they are either represented as only being able to do so because they have male help, or because their bodies and attributes do not conform to culturally constructed heterosexual norms of femininity.     

劳权本位:劳动法律体系构建的基点和核心--兼论劳动法律体系的几个基本理论问题

劳动法律体系的建构,应以劳权本位作为理论出发点,应以劳权的实现和保障为其基点和核心.本文所提出的劳权概念,是指法律所规定或认可的劳动者在履行劳动义务的同时所应享有的与劳动有关的权益.劳权即劳工权益应是劳动法律的基本范畴和劳动立法起始概念.本文提出和论证了劳动者的概念和法律特征,认为市场经济下的劳动关系中的劳动者应为受雇于他人的以工资收入为基本生活来源的直接生产者.本文还提出了劳权关系的概念,认为劳权关系是劳动法律关系的本质体现,这一关系是相对于产权关系和经营权关系而言的,现代企业制度的经济权利结构是由产权、经营权和劳权的三权关系所构成的.     

The Experience of Parents of Children in Care: The Human Rights Issue

There is a growing body of international literature about birth parents' negative experience of child protection services. This article reviews some of this literature and adds recent Australian materials to it. It is then argued that the over-reliance on “the best interest of the child” construct is the base from which these negative experiences emanate. The argument is that in adopting this construct parents' rights have been removed in favor of children's rights. This violates parents' human rights. Such an approach lacks balance, as human rights are inalienable and cannot be the exclusive property of only one party.     

Biography and the search for women's subjectivity

This paper considers women's biography as an important connecting link between the study of microinteractions of social history and macropolitical structures and transformations. As the search for women's subjectivity requires the fullest possible historical contextualization for the subject of women's biography, identifying the sex-class conditions of women is essential. In studying the structuring of sex classes, it is found that both sexism and racism produce domination by essentializing physical or biological differences. But the dyadic character of gender domination differentiates sexism from all other conditions of exploitation. Because gender power is basically dyadic, interpretative interaction is offered as an appropriate methodological approach to women's biography. Further, when meaning and situation are extended to consciousness and praxis, interpretive interaction can encompass the full range of historical structure which shape sex-class. This theoretical-methodological approach forms the basis for a critique of deconstruction which depoliticized gender research by decentering the subject and dismissing binary oppositions such as gender dyads.     

Capitalism obscured: the limits of law and rights-based approaches to poverty reduction and development

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) was established by the United Nations in 2005 and concluded in 2008. Although inspired by Hernando de Soto's analysis of the role of property rights in economic development, the scope of the Commission was defined as ‘legal empowerment’ in general. This commentary offers a critique of the CLEP report, and argues that its underlying assumptions rest on an idealised version of liberal democratic capitalism in which a dynamic market economy assures ‘win-win’ solutions for all. This implies that there are no tensions between the four ‘pillars’ of legal empowerment identified by CLEP (the rule of law, property rights, labour rights, and business rights). However, in the real world of capitalism, in both democratic and authoritarian versions, there are structural tensions between classes of capital and classes of labour, which result in the economy and its underlying institutional order becoming a key site of contestation. The case of farm labour in rural South Africa is used to illustrate this argument. A focus on legal rights can, however, be ‘empowering’ to a degree, when it helps defend poor people from exploitation and abuse, or is located within broader strategies to eradicate systemic poverty.     

between Pachamama and Mother Earth: gender,political ontology and the rights of nature in contemporary Bolivia

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/Mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts.     

Shattering the illusion of development: the changing status of women and challenges for the feminist movement in Puerto Rico.

The introduction of this article on the impact of the colonialization of Puerto Rico by the US on gender relations and women's status notes that development strategies facilitated women's integration in the formal sector but recreated gender inequity and inequality by positioning women in low-paying jobs. The next section provides an historical overview of "Operation Bootstrap," an early example of the creation of export processing zones and of initial legislation to improve the status of women in the labor force. Next, the current situation is described as a period characterized by contradictions and industrial restructuring as the economy has moved from labor-intensive manufacturing to provision of high-tech financial services, and the impact of these changes on gender relations is sketched. The population control policies of Operation Bootstrap are then described as seeking to regulate women's reproductive behavior rather than to improve reproductive health or redefine gender relations. The article continues with a look at the still pervasive constraints to the redefinition of gender roles in politics, where male dominance places women in competition with each other for the same positions. After tracing the second wave of feminist organizing and the responses of the state to feminist mobilization, the article concludes by reviewing the challenges feminists face in demanding equal employment opportunities, healthy working conditions for women, child care, and adequate public health in a system that rewards privatization and reductions in social services.     

Help for housewives: domestic service and the reconstruction of domesticity in Britain, 1940-50

This article argues that examining the debates over domestic science that took place in the late 1940s can produce insights into the ways in which gender, class and domesticity were inextricably linked and understood. The article focuses on three specific examples: a social survey of domestic service produced privately, a government report on the domestic organization of private households, and a radio debate broadcast by the BBC Home Service     

Narratives of Irishness and the problem of abortion: the X case 1992.

This article explores the ramifications of the 1992 "X Case" in which an Irish High Court rescinded the constitutional right to travel of a 14-year-old rape victim who intended to obtain an abortion in England. The article opens by noting that this decision made the subordinate role of women in Ireland painfully visible, thus allowing Irish feminists to win a degree of national and international support. The article examines newspaper coverage of the injunction to consider how this abortion issue reconstituted discourses of women's status, sexuality, and national identity in Ireland. The article provides background information on women's role in Ireland, relegated by the Constitution to the domestic sphere, and reviews the origins of the 1983 "pro-life" Constitutional amendment. Next the article considers how the discourse surrounding the child's rape and resulting pregnancy submerged the autonomy of the child in the victimhood of her family. The article continues by looking at the internal and international denouncement of the Irish state for its action and the responding Irish construct of a civilized "us" versus a barbaric "other." This was countered by appeals to "the people's" will and reinterpretations of the 1983 amendment to justify a more pragmatic approach to public policy about rape that would de-emphasize the moral status of the fetus. After showing how feminist protest extended the questions raised to embrace the issue of national identity and women's citizenship rights, the article concludes that the battle for female reproductive and sexual hegemony in Ireland continues.     

The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow

Abstract

It has long been recognised that working-class women in the nineteenth century participated in waged labour, albeit dependent on marital status, stage in family life cycle, and locality. Middle-class women's economic role has been less fully explored, although it has been acknowledged that they played an informal, ‘hidden’ role in the economy. This article examines the extent of middle-class women's economic activity and independence by looking in detail at a residential area of Glasgow in the period 1850-1914. The authors demonstrate that women could negotiate the parameters of a gendered and limited labour market, the legal constraints on their property rights, and social constraints on their economic freedom, in order to achieve considerable economic autonomy and influence     

Remortgaging Women's Lives: The World Bank'sLand Agenda in Africa

In recent months, the World Bank has issued a series of draft policy reports on land relations. This is the first time in over two decades that the Bank has sought to review its policy on lending in the land sector. Access to the draft reports and participation in the consultation process has, however, been severely limited. Nonetheless, the World Bank expects to issue the final Report by the end of this year. This paper presents a gender analysis of the two draft documents that have been made available to date. It assesses their implications for gender relations in Africa. It explores the World Bank's promotion of formal rural credit and challenges the assumption of the availability of women's unpaid agricultural labour. The paper argues that, far from being over, the struggle over land relations which has characterised the last decade in Africa, must continue. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The problem of property in industrial fisheries

Fisheries systems are widely considered to be ‘in crisis’ in both economic and ecological terms, a considerable concern given their global significance to food security, international trade and employment. The most common explanation for the crisis suggests that it is caused by weak and illiberal property regimes. It follows that correcting the crisis involves the creation of private property rights that will restore equilibrium between the profitable, productive function of fishing firms and fish stocks in order to maximize ‘rent’. In this approach, coastal states are seen as passive, weak, failed and/or corrupted observers and facilitators of the fisheries crisis, unless they institute private property relations. This paper offers an alternative analysis by using the perspective of historical materialism to re-examine longstanding debates over the problem of property and its relation to ground-rent in industrial fisheries. It identifies coastal states as modern landed property, enabling an exploration of the existence of and struggles over surplus value, and drawing attention to the role of the state and the significance of the environmental conditions of production in understanding political-ecological conditions in fisheries. As on land, property in the sea is a site of social struggle and will always remain so under capitalism, no matter which juridical interest holds the property rights.     

Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Women's Rights,Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu

There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western character of human rights which focus on the individual and civil and political rights is often contrasted with the non-western stress on collectivities and the rights to economic development and self-determination. These sorts of ideological oppositions in international politics reverberate in domestic politics as well, and especially in those which situate women and men as subjects in conflict, as they are in many domestic disputes.     

beyond emancipation: subjectivities and ethics among women in Europe's Islamic revival communities

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain ‘traditionalist’ positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves.     

Childbearers as rights-bearers: feminist discourse on the rights of aboriginal and non-aboriginal mothers in Australia, 1920–50

Abstract

In the post-suffrage era in Australia, feminists invoked maternalist arguments in support of the idea that mothers were political subjects with rights and they extended their campaigns to press for recognition of the rights of Aboriginal women. This article examines the claim made by post-suffrage feminists that ‘the common status of motherhood’ entailed a range of social, economic and civil rights. They argued in Royal Commissions, election campaigns, and the press that all mothers, working class and middle class, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who wished to retain the custody of their children should have the legal right and economic ability to do so. In New South Wales the campaign culminated in the staging of a play called Whose Child? This article explores some of the tensions between Women's claims as mothers and as independent citizens and the difficulties encountered when feminists attempted to have mothers' rights defined as human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.     

Fighting for the ‘Privileges of Citizenship’: the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), feminism and the women's movement, 1928–1945

In 1928 the YWCA welcomed the introduction of the universal suffrage by declaring that women in Britain were now entitled to the full political privileges of citizenship. This article will explore the way in which the YWCA, previously omitted from histories of the British women's movement, sought to educate and inform its members about the rights and duties of democratic citizenship. The involvement of the YWCA in citizenship education and its role in campaigning for the citizenship rights of women will be assessed, with a particular focus on workers’ rights and the appointment of women police. Despite its reluctance to be identified as overtly feminist, the YWCA was determined to ensure that women had access to social and economic rights within a democratic society. The article therefore argues that a new definition of the women's movement is required in order to uncover the full extent of female engagement in politics and public debate in the aftermath of the suffrage.     

Wild property and its boundaries – on wildlife policy and rural consequences in South Africa

Against the backdrop of post-Apartheid neoliberal reform, South African landowners have gained the option to acquire full ownership over wild animals on their land. Corresponding with this, approximately one sixth of South Africa's total land has been ‘game-fenced’ and converted for wildlife-based production (i.e. hunting, ecotourism, live trade and venison production). This article analyzes the institutional process in which authority concerning access to wildlife is being restructured, and argues that the unfolding property regime leads to an intensified form of green grabbing. To demonstrate this, the article singles out three particular wildlife policy institutions which make clear (a) how private property rights to wildlife are negotiated and implemented, (b) how wildlife ownership is firmly interlocked with land ownership, (c) how natural entities are being converted to robust political and economical assets, and (d) what social consequences this has for rural South Africa.     

Feeling Gender. A Generational and Psychosocial Approach

The article focuses on female same-sex intimacy, specifically so-called “mummy–baby” relationships among schoolgirls in contemporary South Africa. The underlying negotiations with colonial but also post-colonial discourses of sexuality, identity, and gender, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) rights, and the problem of naming, are examined here. While post-apartheid South Africa was the first country in the world to explicitly incorporate lesbian and gay rights within the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, the surrounding countries chose to exclude lesbians and gay men from citizenship rights by proclaiming, in a populist way, the idea of homosexuality as un-African, a discourse also forming within South Africa itself. The term “homosexuality”, as defined through more than three decades of feminism and gay liberation, however, does not describe the complexities of same-sex practices throughout history. “Mummy–baby” relationships as a culturally specific form of female same-sex intimacy, especially in relation to homosociality as a form of gender intimacy and the sexuality apparatus, are analysed here. The article looks at girls' relationships as spaces in which homosociality, same-sex intimacy, and erotic practices can join together; however, the latter is increasingly joined by homophobia. I argue that the “closet” violently jars with some same-sex relationships, such as “mummy–baby” relationships, because they have never been closeted as such.