Forms of Difference in Sorcières

Abstract

Art practice and organizing occupied a significant but precarious place in the groups and networks that made up the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) in France during the 1970s. This was reflected in the relatively small amount of space allocated to analyzing the relationships between visual production and feminist politics in the art press and activist publications alike. There was, however, one significant exception to this general rule: the journal Sorcières (1975–1982) which, although a predominantly literary initiative, regularly featured original contributions by contemporary women artists working in the context of the MLF, as well as reviews of exhibitions and statements by practitioners. Sorcières was particularly invested in exploring notions of women’s difference and alternative expression, notably through écriture féminine. Yet the publication did not adopt an exclusively essentialist position, or focus on embodiment to the outright dismissal of materialist concerns. This openness is especially apparent in the journal’s engagement with visual art, resulting partly from the key contribution made by members of the Collectif Femmes/Art. Visual production, this article contends, thus played a key role in the exploration of various forms of difference across the pages of Sorcières.     

State of the Field

Although scholars of West European politics have long debated whether the region's highly institutionalised party systems were becoming de‐aligned and electorally unstable, the political fallout from the post‐2008 financial crisis has lent a new sense of urgency to the debate. The threats posed to party systems by economic crises are hardly unique to Europe, however. The Latin American experience with the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s suggests that party system upheaval was not simply a function of retrospective economic voting during the period of crisis. It was also attributable to programmatically de‐aligning policy responses to crises – namely the ‘bait‐and‐switch’ imposition of austerity and adjustment measures by labour‐based, left‐leaning parties that were traditional champions of statist and redistributive policies. Such patterns of reform made it difficult for party systems to channel societal resistance to market orthodoxy in the post‐adjustment era, setting the stage for convulsive ‘reactive sequences’ when such resistance arose outside and against mainstream parties through varied forms of social and electoral protest, typically on the left flank. This article explores the political fallout from the European and Latin American economic crises from a comparative perspective, arguing that it is essential to think beyond the short‐term political dynamics of crisis management to consider the longer‐term institutional legacies and fragilities of the different political alignments forged around crisis‐induced policy reforms.     

Urban Reforms,Cultural Goods and the Valongo Wharf Circle: Understanding Intervention in Rio de Janeiro's Port Area

Between 2012 and 2016, the Valongo Wharf Circle employed capoeira to make sense of the complex and enduring legacies of the Valongo Wharf, namely, the impact and intersection of racial discrimination and cycles of redevelopment that have remade Rio and marked the history of the site. This article uses ‘products’ that record the project to consider the vicissitudes and contingency of how it both used and reconfigured the selective valorisation of the everyday to probe and disrupt the quotidian dynamics of Rio's port area.     

对劳动合同制度若干问题的探讨

我国《劳动法》及有关劳动合同制度的法律法规是在1994年、1995年制订的,本身具有一定的局限性,加上我国市场经济体制日渐完善和加入世贸组织,现行的劳动法律法规已经不适应市场经济的发展要求。本文通过对劳动合同制度中常见的若干问题进行分析和探讨,指出现行劳动法律规定的一些缺陷,并对其修改提出一些建议。     

Quelles mobilités pour quelles ressources?

In West Africa, where the available natural and financial resources are not always sufficient to support a family for a whole year, mobility has become a strategy for accessing the resources of the region as a whole. Daily life is based on a mixed sedentary and mobile logic which responds to opportunities at greater or lesser distances, for longer or shorter periods of time, and with greater or lesser regularity of movement, and which enables survival or a better livelihood to be secured. Mobility requires mobilisation – of social networks, individual capacities and sociabilities, elements we can also refer to as resources, only this time social resources. This article explores the notion of resources and its connotations to show how populations in the West African Sahelian space seek a balance of survival and livelihood through mobility.     

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.     

Technocrats and Tortured Bodies: Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images

Through an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's final novel Les Belles Images (1966), this article examines how a 1960s French technocratic class dealt with individual and collective traumas, particularly how they placed their faith in an undying hope in the future while simultaneously ignoring the horrors of wartime violence. The article contends that Beauvoir's novel is a story of not remembering—or, more specifically, attempting to forget—Algeria and all the conflict signified to the average French citizen, including decolonization, torture, racial difference and political tumult. Analysis rests on the novel's representation of its protagonist Laurence, who had been shaken to the core after reading a newspaper article about a (likely Algerian) woman tortured to death, ultimately causing a nervous breakdown that forever altered her interactions with her family and fellow technocrats. Gender and nationality also figure centrally in this examination of the broader role that images—not only belles images—played in the construction of French national identity at this historical moment.