coloniality,political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.     

still,nothing: Mammy and black asexual possibility

Although many iterations of the mammy in the last two centuries have received analytical attention, the construction of this figure as asexual or undesiring and undesirable remains to be interrogated. This essay attends to this under-theorised dimension of her image. Resisting a reading of the mammy as fixed in silence, I assert that she might instead ‘say nothing’, and bring into focus a black asexual agency that I call a declarative silence. This strategy of ‘saying nothing’ is then explored in a reading of the withholdings of the character of Mama in Gayl Jones’s neo-slave narrative, Corregidora (1975).     

reflexivity and queer embodiment: some reflections on sexualities research in Ghana

The ‘reflexive turn’ transcended disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Feminist scholars in particular have taken up its core concerns, establishing a wide-ranging literature on reflexivity in feminist theory and practice. In this paper, I contribute to this scholarship by deconstructing the ‘story’ of my own research as a white, genderqueer, masculine-presenting researcher in Ghana. This deconstruction is based on thirteen months of field research exploring LGBT activism in the capital city of Accra. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes, I examine questions of queer subjectivity, embodiment and self/Other dynamics in the research encounter. Specifically, I interrogate what a reflexive concern for power relations means when researchers share moments of commonality and difference with research participants, here in relation to axes of gender, sexuality, race and class. Finally, I explore the challenge of theorising resistance in light of feminist postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation. I conclude that it is only by locating these tensions and dissonances in the foreground of our inquiries that reflexivity becomes meaningful as a way of rendering knowledge production more accountable and transparent, of practising feminist solidarity, and of excavating our own queer research journeys.     

active women and ideal refugees: dissecting gender,identity and discourse in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/Muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home.     

博弈视角下农地流转与农民利益保障机制探析

农地流转制度在巩固存量利益的同时,也带来了可观的增量利益,各个利益主体为分配新增利益势必会展开激烈的竞争和角逐.运用博弈论系统分析利益主体之间的博弈关系,透视现实制度实行中其他利益主体对农民利益的侵害.在策略选择上从宏观、中观和微观角度着力构建三位一体利益保障机制,矫正农地流转利益博弈中的力量失衡状态,促使农民的存量利益能够得到对价支付,确保农民能够公平参与增量利益的分配.     

Developmental Associations Between Adolescent Change in Depressive Symptoms and Menstrual-Cycle-Phase-Specific Negative Affect During Early Adulthood

The causal factors associated with increases in depressive symptoms among adolescent girls remain an area of theoretical debate, and the limited research considering a hormonal influence has provided mixed results. The goal of the present study was to test a set of longitudinal associations, that, if found, would provide support for a hormonal contribution to these changes. Specifically, this study tested the hypotheses that changes in depressive symptoms among adolescent girls would be associated with phase-specific symptoms of the menstrual cycle during early adulthood; that these associations would differ across three phases of the menstrual cycle; and that the pattern of associations would differ for changes in depressive symptoms during early- and late-adolescence. The sample consisted of 47 women with longitudinal data from 12 to 21 years old (approximately 91% European Canadian, 4% Middle Eastern Canadian, 2% Haitian Canadian, and 2% Asian Canadian). Consistent with expectations, results showed that early-adolescent increases in depressive symptoms were negatively associated with menstrual-phase negative affect, and positively associated with mid-cycle negative affect, but not associated with premenstrual negative affect; whereas late-adolescent change in depressive symptoms was only associated with depressive symptoms at 20-21 years. Thus, early-adolescent changes in depressive symptoms are longitudinally associated with later mood change across the menstrual cycle, suggesting a common underlying cause, which is hypothesized to be hormonal. Moreover, results suggest that, with respect to variables that are involved in affective development, important differences exist between early- and late-adolescence. The discussion considers menstrual-cycle-related symptoms (e.g., dysmenorrhea) during adolescence, and the need to study their effects on development. It is suggested that focused intervention and prevention efforts may be indicated to interrupt negative developmental outcomes.     

drones,swarms and becoming-insect: feminist utopias and posthuman politics

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarm-like as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek (1987–1994, 1995–2001, 1996), Alien (1979) and The Fly (1958, 1986) to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist utopia in Gilman’s Herland (2015 [1915]) and Tiptree’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1989 [1976]). Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm.