Contending regionalisms: hubs and challengers in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific

As regions become more institutionalized, they are characterized by two competing trends. First, key regional institutions can become hub institutions that act as transmitters of a comprehensive set of norms. Second, as regional institutions increase in number, regions themselves are liable to become more fragmented. How these trends have played out is explored in two key regions, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific. It is concluded that regions are not static entities but are ever-changing structural arrangements. Hub institutions can be challenged and the consequences can be significant as regions gain in importance on the international stage.     

Advancing LGBT Rights in Turkey: Tolerance or Protection?

Tolerance is treated as a virtue and a key principle in liberal theories of the state and human rights. Critics of liberalism have already addressed limitations of tolerance, and the United Nations (UN) introduced broader and more inclusive human rights and non-discrimination norms. Yet, tolerance is still invoked in human rights advocacy, and the UN promotes teaching tolerance as a means to protect human rights. However, there is an asymmetrical relationship between the “tolerant” and the “tolerated,” which must be questioned for its human rights implications. The paper contends that tolerance does not ensure non-discrimination, freedom from persecution, or ending violence. Instead, it can be complicit in violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons. As an illustrative case, it examines Turkey—a country that has pursued the liberal policy of tolerance by not criminalizing homosexuality—during a reform period that involved further liberalization of law but not the protection of LGBT rights.     

Gender diversity in aircraft maintenance: a cross-sectional triangulation of male perspectives

Certified aircraft mechanics represent the largest gender-based demographic disparity in aviation with a 49-to-1 male-to-female ratio. Recent research into women’s perspective on the aircraft mechanic career field revealed that a large majority of women felt unsure or negatively about their potential promotion opportunities and social acceptance. The purpose of this follow-on mixed-methods concurrent triangulation study was to explore the perspectives of men regarding the aforementioned topics to see if they differ from previously published research on women perceptions. A total of 587 men and 431 women completed an eight-question survey containing 5-point Likert-type and open-ended questions. The quantitative comparison consisted of the total 1018 responses, while only the survey responses from the 587 men were analysed for correlations and qualitative codes. Results indicated that there was a significant difference between the perceptions of men from those of the women regarding work environment safety and social acceptance. Additional correlation analysis revealed social acceptance to be a key variable when predicting career appropriateness, advancement opportunity and work environment safety. The 587 qualitative responses yielded results that differed from those of women, citing an assumption that women have the same advancement opportunities or be as socially accepted as men entering the field.     

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).     

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.