Showing papers in "Feminist Review in 2002"

At your service madam! the globalization of domestic service

Abstract: This article deals with the question of new domestic servants. It sets out to describe a ‘new’ phenomenon manifesting itself all over Europe, that is the comeback of domestic workers and carers for children and the elderly in many households. It then proceeds to explain the establishment of an informal labour market in the private sector, which arises amid today's revolution of information technology.

‘It's easier that you're a girl and that you're Asian’: interactions of ‘race’ and gender between researchers and participants

Abstract: This article is concerned with the ways in which ‘race’ and gender interact between interviewers and participants within the research process and the implications of differences/similarities between researcher and participants for feminist research and analysis. The paper discusses issues of power and representation within a research project conducted by the white female author and two Asian female interviewers with 64 British Muslim young men and women. Based on analysis of discussion group data, it is argued that ‘race’ and gender interact between researchers and participants in highly complex and unpredictable ways to produce particular accounts, but comparative analysis of accounts produced with different interviewers can help reveal ‘hidden’ structures of power within the texts.

celling black bodies: black women in the global prison industrial complex

Abstract: The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed an explosion in the population of women prisoners in Europe, North America and Australasia, accompanied by a boom in prison construction This article argues that this new pattern of women's incarceration has been forged by three overlapping phenomena The first is the fundamental shift in the role of the state that has occurred as a result of neo-liberal globalization The second and related phenomenon is the emergence and subsequent global expansion of what has been labelled a 'prison industrial complex' made up of an intricate web of relations between state penal institutions, politicians and profit-driven prison corporations The third is the emergence of a US-led global war on drugs which is symbiotically related and mutually constituted by the transnational trade in criminalized drugs These new regimes of accumulation and discipline, I argue, build on older systems of racist and patriarchal exploitation to ensure the superexploitation of black women within the global prison industrial complex The article calls for a new anti-racist feminist analysis that explores how the complex matrix of race, class, gender and nationality meshes with contemporary globalized geo-political and economic realities The prison industrial complex plays a critical role in sustaining the viability of the new global economy and black women are increasingly becoming the raw material that fuels its expansion and profitability The article seeks to reveal the profitable synergies between drug enforcement, the prison industry, international financial institutions, media and politicians that are sending women to prison in ever increasing numbers

The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice

Abstract: This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional-structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other 'First World' perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the 'developing' world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of... but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice.

Fashion Culture: Creative Work, Female Individualization:

Abstract: This article explores some of the key dynamics of the UK fashion sector as an example of a post-industrial, urban based, cultural economy comprising of a largely youthful female workforce. It argues that the small scale, independent activities which formed the backbone of the success of British fashion design as an internationally recognized phenomenon from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, represented a form of female self-generated work giving rise to collaborative possibilities and co-operation. However without an effective lobby or association (despite the expansion of the fashion media) and under conditions of rapid individualization and in an increasingly harsh climate of neo-liberalization, this creative economy has been overtaken and virtually demolished by the joint forces of a re-vitalized high street fashion culture and the aggressive presence of corporate fashion (‘Prada-ization’). While the UK government celebrates the growth of the cultural economy, it also overlooks the processes making the livelihoods of its predominantly female workforce either untenable or else requiring de-specialization and ‘multi-tasking’.

‘Ordinary people come through here’: locating the beauty salon in women's lives

Abstract: Beauty therapy is part of a vast multi-national, multi-million pound beauty industry. The beauty salon lies at the heart of a complex set of discourses and practices. Research conducted in the salon sheds light upon a number of key sociological debates including; issues of health and well-being; gendered employment practices; the construction and maintenance of gender identity and sexuality; body practices; and leisure activities. In this sense the salon may be used as a microcosm in which to investigate wider sociological concerns. In this paper, I will draw upon the testimonies of beauty salon clients, and beauty therapists. I describe four areas of treatment: pampering; routine grooming; health treatments; and corrective treatments. These areas are investigated in depth and related to different spheres in the woman's life. In particular, I show how the beauty salon is drawn upon in helping to negotiate the balance between these competing arenas. The ambivalences of achieving an ‘appropriate’ appearance in these differing spheres is investigated. Their implication in the self-surveillance of the client is also discussed.

Global mobilities, local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination

Abstract: Analysing some of the key discourses of ‘globalization’ and their relationship to global/local processes of gender, the article makes a distinction between the ‘global’ and ‘globalization’, such that the latter is seen as only one dimension of the ‘global’. Globalization is understood as comprising complex and contradictory phenomena with diverse and differential impact across distinct categories of people, localities, regions and hemispheres. Hence, the notion of being straightforwardly ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization is problematized. The essay explores media response to a major global event – the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September – in terms of the ‘agenda setting’ role of the US's ‘mainstream’ national television news coverage in the aftermath of the first two weeks. A subsequent peace rally, the ‘International Day Against War and Racism’, held in Washington DC, is analysed as the site for the emergence of a new oppositional political subject in the current context. The article underscores the importance of addressing ‘intersectionality’ to a critical imagination.

Multicultural fashion… stirrings of another sense of aesthetics and memory

Abstract: This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to 'know' the ethnic 'other' is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with 'ethnic' items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction.

Remotely sensed: a topography of the global sex trade

Abstract: Voluntarily or not, women are moved in great numbers from Manila to Nigeria, from Burma to Thailand, and from post-socialist countries to Western Europe: female geobodies in the flow of global capitalism. The recently released 53-minute video essay Remote Sensing by the Swiss artist and video director Ursula Biemann traces the routes and reasons of women who migrate into the global sex industry. Taking a geographical approach to trafficking, the video develops a particular visual language generated by new media and satellite technologies, which traces the migration of women in the age of digital images.

‘First in Man’: The Politics and Ethics of Women in Clinical Drug Trials:

Abstract: Within the world of pharmacology, the male body has traditionally been taken as the biological norm. Coupled with this, concern about danger to the unborn foetus has meant that, until very recently, ‘women of childbearing potential’ were routinely excluded from most of the early phases of clinical drug testing. Consequently, most drugs tested during Phase I trials were initially carried out on healthy male volunteers. During subsequent phases when drugs were tested on patients, women remained largely under-represented. As a result, some drugs prescribed for women have later been discovered to be lacking in efficacy, and women are more likely to suffer adverse drug reactions than men. The exclusion of women during the early phases of clinical drug trials has now been lifted and drugs are currently being more widely tested on women. This paper examines the differing political and ethical positions adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, drug regulators, pharmacologists, women's groups and patient activists in relation to the exclusion and inclusion of women in clinical drug trials.

Visibly pregnant: toward a placental body

Abstract: In recent years, feminist theorists have examined the use of visual technologies in pregnancy and argued that these technologies are reconstructing the meaning of pregnancy. The imaged body of gestation can be deployed to distinguish and separate maternal and foetal interests. Drawing on this work, ‘Visibly Pregnant: Toward a placental body’ argues that the use of visual technology also obfuscates that which it purports to make clear. The images produced by these technologies in particular do not locate and acknowledge the significance of the placenta as a point of connection and distinction for the gestating body. The possibilities suggested by a concentration on the placenta show how the morphology of the pregnant body itself rejects the distinction outlined in the technologically produced images of pregnancy and offers some new possibilities for thinking subjectivity.

Judi Bari and ‘the feminization of Earth First!’: the convergence of class, gender and radical environmentalism

Abstract: This paper addresses feminist materialism as political practice through a case study of IWW-Earth First! Local 1, the late Judi Bari's organization of a radical ecology/timber workers' union in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California. Rejecting the Earth First! mythology of timber workers as ‘enemies’ of nature, Bari sought to unite workers and environmentalists in pursuit of sustainable forestry practices against the devastating approaches favoured by multinational logging corporations. In so doing, she brought a working-class feminist perspective to the radical ecology of Earth First! Bari's work provided a significant instance of community organizing in opposition to the masculinist, exclusionary practices and misanthropic posturing of Earth First!'s self-proclaimed ‘eco-warriors’ and ‘rednecks for nature’. What is perhaps most interesting about the development of Local 1 is the articulation of feminist, environmentalist and labour discourses through a series of political actions.

Sex-working drug users: out of the shadows at last

Abstract: As I sat trying to get comfortable surrounded by so many strange faces, I listened hard to a group of attractive and eloquent women who were speaking as panellists in this session. They waxed Iyrical about all the money they had accrued selling sex, how much fun it was and how great their wardrobes were as a result of all the money they had made shagging men who were willing to pay them. They implied the job gave them power in their world; they were not chased by tax-collectors anyway!

Reclaiming democracy? the anti-globalization movement in South Asia

Abstract: This article studies anti-globalization activities in South Asia, and specifically the Indian subcontinent, and discovers that the common people have begun a new form of civil disobedience in the country, to counter the machinations of multinational corporations. Many of the eminent writers and activists at the forefront of the movement are Indian women, a fact that may come as a surprise to some, but is part and parcel of the movement's basis in sustainable development and resistance to patriarchal hegemony.

'Vials, ampoules and a bucketful of syringes': the experience of the self-administration of hormonal drugs in IVF

Abstract: During the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF), hormonal drugs are used to stimulate the woman's ovaries to produce multiple eggs. The injecting of the drugs is often performed by the women themselves outside of the clinical context, constituting a gendered burden of work that is rendered invisible by the dominant representations of treatment as undergone by couples and performed by doctors. Based on a series of interviews with women and couples who have undergone IVF unsuccessfully and who have ended treatment at least two years previously, this paper focuses on two aspects of the self-injection of hormonal drugs that emerged from the participants accounts: firstly, the gendered ways in which the drug regimen was experienced as compromising privacy and secondly, the strategic use of images of both illicit and medical drug use in the accounts. The paper argues that in spite of the dominant representation of IVF as a couples' technology, the IVF process is profoundly gendered, both in terms of bodily intervention and in the distribution of labour in the implementation of treatment; that the invisibility of the drug regimens from dominant representations of IVF can leave those undergoing treatment unprepared for some of the problems that the self-administration of the drugs can raise, particularly in terms of maintaining privacy; and finally, that images of the drug injection are mobilized strategically in the accounts to locate themselves within normative social reproductive standards. This highlights the extent to which the enduring ideological construction of proper womanhood as defined by motherhood continues to pose a dilemma for those who are involuntarily childless.

Patent rights vs patient rights : Intellectual property, pharmaceutical companies and access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Cet article se penche sur le principal obstacle a l'acces au traitement par medicaments antiretroviraux pour des millions de personnes seropositives ou atteintes du SIDA en Afrique subsaharienne : le prix des medicaments, proteges par des brevets internationaux detenus par six grandes compagnies pharmaceutiques. L'article relate le bras de fer juridique opposant differents gouvernements Africains aux groupes pharmaceutiques a propos des medicaments generiques

Trousers and Tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, A Woman's Star:

Abstract: Audrey Hepburn is one of cinema's most stylish and enduring icons, and has embodied an ideal of femininity for generations of women. Using textual analysis, archival research and audience accounts of ‘Doing the Hepburn Look’, I argue that Audrey Hepburn, as a star clearly addressing a female audience, offered a flexible image which was enabling to young women through dress in relation to exigencies of gender, class and national identity. The paper draws on research conducted as part of a larger project investigating Hepburn's ongoing appeal for young British women from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Fashion and beauty

Abstract: 'Ordinary People Come Through Here': Locating the Beauty Salon in Women's Lives Paula Black Classy Lingerie Merl Storr Trousers and Tiaras: Audrey Hepburn, a Woman's Star Rachel Moseley Multicultural Fashion...Stirrings of Another Sense of Aesthetic and Memory Nirmal Puwar Dialogue Section Indian Beauty Parlours Rita Rupal Production as Participation: A Case Study of Heba: An 'Alternative' Mode of Production in the UK Fashion Industry Juliet Ash A Review of 'Stitched Up': Towards an Analysis of Production and Consumption Sumati Nagrath and Nirmal Puwar Review: Radical Fashion at The Victoria and Albert Museum 2001 Elizabeth Wilson Reviews Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset Merl Storr Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan Catherine Atherton Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture Lynette Turner Loving Protection? Australian Feminists and Aboriginal Women's Rights 1919-1938 Allison Holland Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England Ana Lopes

Thinking globally, acting locally: women activists' accounts

Abstract: This paper intends to describe the range of forms women’s resistance to globalisation takes, emphasising diverse strategies from everyday acts, the development of practical alternative resources, organising in women’s groups or trades unions, mass demonstrations and symbolic defiance Recognising that it is the women of the South, in particular, who bear the brunt of the impact of neoliberal ‘free market’ economic policies, it hoped to be sensitive to the struggles for survival that might frame the urgency of resistance amongst women of the South, and make links with some of the strategies of activist women in the more privileged North