The Subversive Potential of Women’s Relation to Work*

This article makes the hypothesis that it is the relation to work, and not work itself, that holds subversive, or even liberating, potential for women. We begin by showing the theoretical convergence between this hypothesis and feminist epistemology. In order to test the hypothesis empirically, we then look at the paradoxical ways in which many women relate to paid work. In order to understand this paradox, we argue that it is necessary to go back to a feminist definition of work by calling into question the separation between professional and domestic work. Finally, we attempt to make suggestions to transform this subversive potential into collective emancipatory practices. We insist on the necessity for the feminist movement to put domestic work back at the center of its reflection on work and on the emancipation of women.     

Leaderisation in foreign policy: performing the role of EU High Representative

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the mediatised context of foreign policy provides new opportunities for political leaders to both frame and project their own leadership role to new audiences. The past ten years have witnessed a sharp rise in political leaders’ use of new social media to communicate on a range of foreign policy issues. We argue that this new media context of foreign policy, combined with a bolstered leadership mandate, has been central to the construction of a more visible public leadership role for the EU High Representative in the post-Lisbon era. Departing from recent scholarship on performative leadership and new media in International Relations theory, we develop an original theoretical framework drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy of impression management. We employ the concept of “leaderisation” to analyse how mediatisation shapes the leadership process in terms of personification and drama to enable new forms of interaction with followers. We apply this framework in an illustrative case study focusing on the process of negotiating the EU Global Strategy. This diplomatic process provided the High Representative Mogherini with a stage on which she could frame herself in a central leadership position vis-à-vis European citizens to mobilise greater legitimacy for the EU as a global actor.     

Volunteering and the state

Volunteering participation rates vary greatly across countries even when the potential volunteers’ individual characteristics are controlled. We therefore analyze the volunteers’ motives against the backdrop of the predominant political and economic environment in different countries, focusing on the state’s role in influencing an individual’s decision to volunteer. Combining individual-level data from the European and World Values Survey with macroeconomic and political variables for OECD countries, we identify three channels through which governmental activities influence voluntary labor: size of the state (i.e., amount of public social expenditure), political consensus between voters and the government, and government support for democratization.     

Das Bundes-Gleichbehandlungsgesetz in Theorie und Praxis

Politische Ma?nahmen scheinen sich in ?sterreich vielfach in der Verabschiedung eines Gesetzes zu ersch?pfen. Der Frage, wie ein Gesetz implementiert wird und ob es seine Ziele erreicht, wird kaum nachgegangen. Der vorliegende Beitrag widmet sich dieser Frage anhand des Bundes-Gleichbehandlungsgesetzes-B-GlBG und diskutiert inwieweit das Gesetz, wie es vorsieht, den Aufstieg von Frauen in Führungspositionen bef?rderte.     

Struggling for food sovereignty in the World March of Women

This contribution focuses on how food sovereignty is being re-signified as a feminist issue by a non-peasant transnational feminist network, the World March of Women. First, we review the feminist literature on women, gender and food sovereignty and make suggestions regarding how to conceptualize the latter to better analyze women’s and feminist struggles on this terrain. Second, we highlight the variety of discourses and practices through which food sovereignty is appropriated in the different spaces and scales of the March. Third, we identify the political dynamics that underlie the uneven deployment of the project of food sovereignty among the national coordinating bodies of the March. Our conclusion stresses the role of discursive articulations and of internal and external alliances as processes through which food sovereignty is both diffused and transformed, and draws some implications for the larger scholarship on food sovereignty.