Gendered bodies in academia — an analytic approach to social meaning‐making among students

This article presents an analytic approach to the study of gender meaning in an academic context. In the presentation empirical material from an interview study among 29 Danish male and female university students is applied. The analytic approach is based on the conception of gender meaning as a culturally constructed phenomenon in continuous process. Current gender meaning is seen as a construction based on the idea of coherence between the gendered sign on the body and a variety of components including sexual and professionally related aspects. The connections between body sign and the components as well as among the components themselves are a continuous goal of negotiation processes among the male and female students.     

Women's political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations

Abstract

This article analyses women's participation in public lifewithin the framework of the democratic-parliamentarian Polish state (Poland's Second Republic), rebuilt in the wake of the First World War. It examines the activity of women in parliamentary elections in connection with obtaining political rights equal to those enjoyed by men, as well as the role of women's representation in the two male-dominated chambers of Parliament (the Sejm and the Senate). The minimal presence of women in the state apparatus and in political parties and professional organisations is explained in relation to male hostility towards women's active participation in political life, religious opposition (especially from the Catholic Church) and the unwillingness of women themselves to become engaged in ‘pure politics’. Finally, it examines the rapid growth of women's associations (cultural, educational, cooperative, and professional) which, whilst weakly linked to feminism, bonded with competing political parties and blocks. The associations were divided along the lines of national allegiances within the multiethnic state and, during the 1930s in particular (the era of the authoritarian rule of Pi?sudski and the socalled sanacja camp), succumbed to nationalistic tendencies. Nevertheless, it is possible to see women's growing involvement in education and professional careers as a form of participation in public life.     

The Missing Democratic Revolution and Serbia's Anti-European Choice: 1989–2008

In 1989, as the countries of the Soviet bloc took a turn toward democracy and Europe, Yugoslavia and Serbia plunged into a bloody war and moved in the opposite direction. This article argues that the legacy of that era is still strongly felt in postwar and post-Milosevic Serbia. Now, like then, the choice is not simply for or against Europe. By holding on to the nationalism of the Kosovo myth, which territorializes both the Serbian ethnos and the opposition between Christianity and Islam, Serbia is tracing a tortuous path toward democratization and European integration. In the contemporary context, the Kosovo myth impedes Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo as an independent state; it continues to fuel the rhetoric of fractious elites that never cease to tap its capacity for rallying the public; and it provides room for “pro-European” leaders to negotiate EU integration, straddling the fence between Europe’s Atlantic propensities and the resurgent power of Russia. This nationalist myth thus plays a normative and an instrumental role, both domestically and internationally. Outside Serbia, it also engages with a narrow and “thick” notion of Europe, which gained traction within Europe itself in the post-9/11 climate of heightened fear of Islam, where cultural identity trumps the values of liberal democracy.     

Market-based incentives and residential municipal solid waste

Coalitions of free-marketeers, politicians, and environmentalists increasingly are turning to the use of market-based incentives in formulating environmental policy. One promising application of market-based incentives is in the management of residential municipal solid waste. This article focuses on unit-based pricing programs established in conjunction with community recycling programs. Using data gathered through telephone and mail surveys of 21 cities, we demonstrate the strong potential for unit pricing to improve the efficiency of residential solid waste management.     

Book reviews

Islamic homeland, soviet section

Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup, The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State. London & Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983, 170 pp. Cloth, £12.95. ISBN 0–7099–0619–6.

Islam Today: the USSR

T. S. Saidbaev, Islam: istoriia i sovremennost. Moscow: Znanie, 1985, 64 pp., 47,290 copies. Series Nauchnyi Ateizm, No. 11, 1985.     

Does Sex Matter to Democracy?

In order to isolate, theoretically, the vital mechanisms that constrain women as citizens in Western, democratic societies, it is necessary to go beyond explanations in terms of work, into sexuality However, it is not the practice of sexual coercion which, though a serious wrong, is fundamental in subordinating women in the formally free society; it is rather the freely given—and taken—love. Furthermore, if scrutinizing pre-democratic, anti-feminist arguments can help to reveal the situation today, it is the utilitarian view of women's sexual resources, rather than arguments about sexually differentiated—and inferior female— nature , which is crucial. Secondly, the concept of 'difference', now so popular among feminist writers, is important, especially when used empirically to avoid oversimplifying unity thinking about each of the sex/gender groups. But it is not tit for conceiving the power transactions going on in the socio-sexual process Furthermore. I suppose that one of the most important tasks of feminism is to balance the weights of (different) individuality and collectivity to mutually developmental values. Thirdly, women want more than 'equal chances', something other than 'equal results', and the 'different but equally valuable' must, to be women-worthy, be defined by women themselves. In a democratic society, if women are to be full and equal members, as leaders and led, then women and men have to be openly accepted as two fundamental, interested parties in society Finally, women should not claim this citizen status first and foremost as mothers, but simply as women. i e. as female, social 'incarnate subjects'.