‘Lovers of liberty’?Prostitution and the Politics of Choice in Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin

This article explores the way in which Emma Donoghue’s novel Slammerkin (2000) reflects long-standing feminist debates surrounding prostitution. We argue that not only does Donoghue’s portrayal of prostitution resist the pro versus anti dichotomy in which feminist perspectives on sex work are so often narrowly situated, but Slammerkin also foregrounds the complexity with which the politics of choice intersects with women’s decision to sell their bodies.     

imagining and living the revolution: an Arendtian reading of Rosa Luxemburg’s letters and writings

In this paper, I look into personal and political entanglements in Rosa Luxemburg’s letters and essays revolving around questions and problems of the revolution. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of revolutions in modernity, as well as her reading of narratives within the political. What is intriguing about the Luxemburg/Arendt encounter is the fact that although both theorists consciously refused to connect themselves with feminist ideas and movements of their times and geographies, their writings have inspired a rich body of feminist theorisations of the political. What I argue is that Luxemburg’s ideas and lived experiences of the revolution largely inspired Arendt’s theorisation of the revolution as a political phenomenon in the pursuit of freedom, and are opening up new vistas in our understanding of gendered dynamics in historical and contemporary revolutionary events.     

Visualising the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’: emotion work and the representation of orgasm in pornography and everyday sexual interactions

Visual representations of orgasm – whether in the flesh or mediated through a screen – are produced in a context of intense uncertainty about whether what is being seen represents an authentically experienced bodily event. Despite detailed scientific scrutiny and close attention to bodily signs, the authenticity of women's orgasm remains a site of cultural anxiety and contested gender politics. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the construction of female orgasm as inherently invisible or un-see-able, and ‘faking’ orgasm as a prevalent social practice. Drawing on existing literature from psychology, sociology and porn studies, this theoretical paper explores the problem of visually representing orgasm in the context of these uncertainties, and examines how the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ is structured by discourses of authenticity. Pornography and everyday sexual interactions provide ideal contexts for exploring the practices of producing and consuming visual representations of embodied experience because both necessitate a see-able orgasm which consumers/lovers can read as ‘real’. This paper demonstrates that considerable interpretative work is necessary to read the female body as authentically orgasmic in the context of cultural uncertainty, and that distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ are continually reworked. Drawing on the contrast between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ acting (Hochschild, 1983), I argue that the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’ cannot be established by recourse to unmediated bodily experience, and instead, researchers should consider how and when this distinction has traction in the world and the implications of this for gendered power relations, subjectivities and practices.     

Misogyny in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan: the changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence

Abstract

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.     

Latifundio and the logic of underdevelopment: the case of Venezuela’s Sur del Lago

Underdevelopment in Venezuela is often understood as a product of oil dependence, weak state capacity or a subordinate position in the international division of labor. Yet all of these should be seen more as consequences of underdevelopment rather than its causes. This contribution posits an alternative explanation for underdevelopment in Venezuela based on rural property relations and their impact on industrialization and the diversification of the local economy. An in-depth case study of one of Venezuela’s most important agricultural regions seeks to uncover the internal productive logic of the region’s large rural estates, and argues that the dominance of these ‘latifundios’ and the resulting rural economy are at the root of underdevelopment in Venezuela.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

transgender identity,sexual versus gender ‘rights’ and the tools of the Indian state

Sexual and gender minorities in contemporary India are formed in the interstices between the neoliberal, Hindutva state; transnational discourses of liberal democracy and sexual ‘rights’; as well as cosmopolitan culture and global LGBT movements. As is evident in recent court judgments and legislation, particularly since 2014, postcolonial Hindu nationalism has created cultural conditions where forms of queer gender are permissible while queer sexuality is generally unacceptable. In recent years, significant developments have focused on transgender communities, complicating activism surrounding sexual and gender identities. By positing some identities as state-sanctioned acceptable citizens and others as not, certain ‘transgender’ individuals are conceptualised as bearers of rights while finding other facets of their identities discriminated against and maintained as illegal. The 2014 Supreme Court NALSA v. Union of India judgment and The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 passed by the Lok Sabha, alongside further judgments and legislation affecting wider LGBT communities, have kept discourses fixed on sexual and gender identities and their relationship to Indian citizenship at the forefront of discussions of gender justices and injustices in India today. Focusing on recent judicial and legislative developments, this paper examines how transgender rights are being granted in the context of the neoliberal, Hindutva state and considers which forms of transgender identity are currently being conceptualised as legitimate and authentic in such discourses, which can serve to bolster larger right-wing visions and ideologies of the nation and its citizens. It contemplates the ways in which gender ‘justices’, framed in relation to both transnational LGBT rights discourses and right-wing agendas, are conceptualised and played out on the bodies of sexual and gender minorities.     

Edith södergran and the sexual discourse of the fin‐de‐siècle

This article focuses on women's business positions in Swedish porn publishing from the 1950s to the 1970s, i.e. when pornography was legalized and when sexually explicit magazines made their commercial breakthrough. The research draws on statistical information on women's entrepreneurial roles in the overall publishing industry, which is then compared with women's agency in porn publishing. According to the findings, women seem to have had a slightly more central role in pornography than within the mainstream publishing industry. The analysis is also expanded with details about a few key female pornography entrepreneurs, tracing their publications and business strategies connected to the Freedom of the Press legislation. It is argued that women's presence in pornographic print and in the overall publishing industry were in fact similar, with a high ratio of family businesses. Women's entrepreneurship in pornography thus followed a more general historical pattern whereby women engaged in small-scale business with relatively low barriers to entry.     

Forests lost and found in tropical Latin America: the woodland ‘green revolution’

Forest dynamics in the Latin American tropics now take directions that no one would have predicted a decade ago. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by over 80 percent, a pattern mimicked elsewhere in Amazonia, and is down by more than a third in Central America. Forest resurgence – increasing forest cover in inhabited landscapes or abandoned lands – is also expanding. In Latin America, woodland cover is increasing, at least for now, more than it is being lost. These dramatic shifts suggest quite profound and rapid transformations of agrarian worlds, and imply that previous models of understanding small-farmer dynamics merit significant review centering less on field agriculture and more on emergent forest regimes, and in many ways a new, increasingly globalized economic and policy landscape that emphasizes woodlands.

This paper analyzes changing deforestation drivers and the implications of forest recovery and wooded landscapes emerging through social pressure, social policy, new government agencies, governance, institutions, ideologies, markets, migration and ‘neo-liberalization’ of nature. These changes include an expanded, but still constrained, arena for new social movements and civil society. These point to significant structural changes, changes in tropical natures, and require reframing of the ‘peasant question’ and the functions of rurality in the twenty-first century in light of forest dynamics.     

‘Flat and fabulous’: women’s breast reconstruction refusals post-mastectomy and the negotiation of normative femininity

The ‘pinkification’ of breast cancer culture in recent years conflates women’s empowerment with the celebration of hyperfemininity. Consistent with this trend, reconstructive surgery post-mastectomy is increasingly normalised: restoring the breasts is to restore ‘lost’ femininity. Contextualised within the pressures of this normalisation, our article explores how women who decide against breast reconstruction negotiate their non-normative ‘flat’ bodies. We examine women’s posts in a breast cancer forum about their refusals of breast reconstruction. Using thematic and feminist post-structuralist analyses, we suggest that although health and body acceptance discourses enable resistance to embodied femininity norms, pressures to conform permeate practices related to appearance. Clothes and prosthetic breasts enabled forum participants to pass as ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, and ‘recovered’. The study’s findings emphasise the limitations to agency and resistance that emanate from the ways constraining gender discourses infiltrate every aspect of a woman’s life. In line with a critical awareness approach to breast cancer education, we discuss the possibilities of resistance afforded by the safe spaces of online communities.     

The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.