Showing papers in "International Feminist Journal of Politics in 2007"

Agency, Militarized Femininity and Enemy Others: Observations From The War In Iraq

Abstract: In this era of the increasing importance of gender, many conflicting images of women populate news headlines and political discourses. In the 2003 war in Iraq, Americans saw images of a teenage woman as a war hero, of a female general in charge of a military prison where torture took place, of women who committed those abuses, of male victims of wartime sexual abuse and of the absence of gender in official government reactions to the torture at Abu Ghraib. I contend that several gendered stories from the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrate three major developments in militarized femininity in the United States: increasing sophistication of the ideal image of the woman soldier; stories of militarized femininity constructed in opposition to the gendered enemy; and evident tension between popular ideas of femininity and women's agency in violence. I use the publicized stories of American women prisoners of war and American women prison guards to substantiate these observed developments.

The Imperative of Male Inclusion: How Institutional Context Influences World Bank Gender Policy

Abstract: This article examines the role of institutional context in shaping policy agendas through a case study of the World Bank's gender lending in Ecuador. Using interviews with employees and analysis of policy texts I explore the complex institutional location of Bank gender policymakers, identifying two key constraints on their policy output: (1) the pressure to frame gender policy as increasing productivity and efficiency; and (2) the pressure to frame gender policy as producing complementary sharing between men and women. Given that the efficiency constraint has been much debated in feminist Bank scholarship I explicate the complementarity constraint in more detail. Specifically, I argue that the institutional pressure to define gender policy through a complementary focus on couples led poor men to become hyper-visible as irresponsible partners, and as the crux of the gender policy problem. In turn Bank gender policy was focused on efforts to change them, by encouraging their loving attachment to f...

Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner ‘Abuse’ in Abu Ghraib and the Question of ‘Gender Equality’

Abstract: Dominant discourses in the United States paint the acts of prisoner ‘abuse’ committed by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib in 2003 as either the obscene but exceptional example of some low-ranking soldiers gone mad, or as the direct result of the suspension of the rule of law in the global ‘war on terror’. Alternatively, feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the pictures depicting female soldiers torturing prisoners are both horrifying and a sign of ‘gender equality’. This article departs from all three of these positions. I argue that the micro-level violences shown in the Abu Ghraib pictures are neither just aberrations nor a sign of gender equality. Rather they follow a pre-constructed heterosexed, racialized and gendered script that is firmly grounded in the colonial desires and practices of the larger social order and that underpins the hegemonic ‘save civilization itself’-fantasy of the ‘war on terror’. I explore how the participation of some of the US Empire's internal Others, namely ...

Mapping Strategic Engagements: WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND THE STATE

Abstract: Given that all women's movements share a unique relationship to the State – their exclusion from political power, often legally and occasionally constitutionally underpinned, has this exclusion shaped women's movements' strategies, which have had as their general goal women's political inclusion? Some similarities are evident across types of women's movements and across nations. In this article, I discuss the ‘strategic dilemmas’ that women's movements are likely to face, and I attempt to identify the range of strategic responses employed by feminist movements. I begin with a definitional distinction between women's movements and feminist movements, followed by a discussion of women's relationship to the State. I identify similarities across feminist movements in four strategic dimensions: (1) movement autonomy vs state involvement; (2) insider vs outsider positioning; (3) separatist vs coalitional stances; and (4) discursive and influence-seeking politics. These strategic dimensions shape differ...

Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink: Pani Politics (Water Politics) in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract: This article looks at the nature of water politics (pani politics) in the context of arsenic contamination of drinking water in rural Bangladesh. Pani politics is found to be a product of intersecting similarities and differences among women and men, where water comes to have material and symbolic power that people can exercise, which can lead to conflicts, marginalization and suffering vis-a-vis water. Gendered location makes a difference in arsenic contaminated areas, where gender differentiated impacts are being observed, in terms of water access, control and ramifications of water poisoning. However, gender has to be understood as intersecting with other axes of differentiation such as social class, age and geographical location, to understand the nuances and multiple ways that arsenic poisoning and water hardship affect lives of men and women in different ways. Attention to such differences highlights the variations in gendered hardships, labor, rights and resources vis-a-vis water, and the ...

The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire

Abstract: This article is a discussion of the role of feeling and emotion, and particularly the experience of pain, in contemporary global political events. In placing pain at the center of an analysis of a lived experience of global politics, the aim is to forge strategies to resist neoliberal imperialism and to create emotionally literate political communities. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, the article situates the concept of emotions in a modern colonial landscape that is both racialized and gendered, complicated by neoliberalism as a subjectivity that contains the scope for emotions. As a case study, the article considers the emotions of viewing the deliberate infliction of pain through the circulation of the ‘Abu Ghraib photos’, particularly in the form of recent museum exhibitions in the USA.

The Public and Private Domain of the Everyday Politics of Water : the constructions of gender and water power in the Andes of Peru

Abstract: This essay presents a detailed ethnographic account of the struggles of two Peruvian women to gain access and control over water and land after having separated from their husbands. From these acco...

‘National Machineries’ and Authoritarian Politics: The Case of Cameroon

Abstract: Why do authoritarian states adopt ‘state feminist’ policies, and what are the effects of these initiatives? This article expands our understanding of state feminist institutions in non-democracies by examining the development of a women's national machinery in Cameroon. It argues that the Cameroonian state has adopted a national machinery because: (1) it provides low-cost international legitimacy; (2) it attracts international assistance; (3) this assistance fuels domestic patronage networks; and (4) the national machinery channels women's activism toward state-delineated projects and goals. These motives undercut its ability to promote women's advancement. National machineries in authoritarian contexts are not just plagued by technical problems and funding shortages but also by competing agendas within the state apparatus and a lack of a commitment by high-level government officials to improving women's status in society.

Women, Equity and Participatory Water Management in Brazil

Abstract: Public participation in resource management is regarded as a central pillar of sustainable development. Water management is a foremost example, and women globally are prime users and protectors of water. Yet the effectiveness of participatory water management practices is seldom examined from a feminist perspective. This article establishes a methodological framework for such an inquiry, drawing on ecofeminist theory and the Brazilian concept of ‘feminist transformative leadership’ to consider gender, race and class aspects of participatory water management in Brazil.

Children Born of Wartime Rape: Rights and Representations

Abstract: The ongoing conflict in Darfur has once again served to highlight the threat of sexual violence that women face during times of war. Yet, although sexual violence in wartime has existed probably for as long as war itself, it is only in more recent times that its recognition as a crime under international humanitarian law has taken place. Moreover, although it is recognized that women may conceive as a result of such wartime rape, largely missing from the international rights framework, and from the discourse that surrounds it, is a consideration of the children – or ‘war babies’ – who are born as a result. This article places the focus upon ‘war babies’ by considering the reasons for their current marginalization as a category in international discourse. In addition to examining such marginalization within existing theoretical analyses, this article also analyses the potential for their incorporation within the wider rights framework: first, in terms of international legal practice and; second, i...

When Women are Right: THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER, WORK AND VALUES ON EUROPEAN FAR-RIGHT PARTY SUPPORT

Abstract: Far-right political party support in Western Europe has been examined primarily in terms of the men who constitute the majority of party membership. However, few have examined why women are less likely than men to be drawn to these movements. This article attempts to bridge the quantitative–qualitative divide and assess what brings women to support the far right. Looking at five European countries using the 1999–2002 World Values Survey, results indicate that men have a slightly higher propensity to vote for the far right. This gender gap cannot be explained by value differences, but is partially a result of differences in men's and women's occupational location. Thus, this article provides some support to Mayer's contention that women's support of the far right is largely to do with their being less likely than men to be employed in blue-collar work.

Canadian Gender-Based Analysis Training in South Africa

Abstract: Attempts to engender post-apartheid South Africa using a Canadian model of gender-based analysis training occurred through agreements between Status of Women Canada and the Office of the Status of Women in South Africa. Using a retrospective lens, I explore how my experience of delivering and evaluating such gender-based analysis training in South Africa holds moments of hope and solidarity yet, is also restricted by issues of power, representation and agency. Throughout this lived experience, the multi-faceted issues surrounding privilege and power as they are situated within race, gender, identity, place and location are explored. I question the state practices of gender mainstreaming, and whether or not transnational feminism can challenge and create changes within such a practice. The article includes data from a gender-based analysis training session and its subsequent evaluation, along with anecdotes, suggestions and a critique. With the push by national and international machineries to mai...

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

Abstract: The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.

Women and the Politics of Water: An Introduction

Abstract: In my introduction, I seek to provide a theoretical framework for reading the critical essays, narratives and poetry depicting women's struggles over water I use theories about capital accumulation, the commodification of natural resources and women's bodies, biopolitical state power, the state of exception, the bare life and the new imperialism I believe that these theories illustrate the multiple yet specific ways in which the gendered politics of water plays out in different contexts I invite readers to understand this layered perspective in relation to another kind of layering – the intertexual generic expectations that get built into the act of reading the various kinds of texts included in this issue

Rural Women Knowing All: Globalization and Rural Women's Organizing in China

Abstract: Rural women in China are located on the periphery of that country's processes of globalization and modernization. They also, in the 1990s, acquired a voice of their own through the magazine Rural Women Knowing All. This magazine, founded through the intersection of Chinese and transnational feminisms, provided rural women with connections, knowledge and a venue for their own aspirations. Through examining the dichotomies presented by urbanization, the ‘global economy’, ‘culture’ and education, and activism and organizing, this article discusses the ways that Rural Women Knowing All transformed the meanings of globalization for contemporary Chinese rural women, and in the process granted them agency to shape rural identities and existences in alternative ways.

Boundaries of Violence: Water, Gender and Globalization at the US Borders

Abstract: This essay examines cultural and literary representations of women and water along the US borders. I analyze Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Kem Nunn's Tijuana Straits (2004) to examine how conflicts over water and pollution are gendered in the context of globalization. Through a close textual reading of these novels in their social, political and historical contexts, I argue that water functions as a metaphor for border environmental and justice issues and their gendered dimensions in North America. Water landscapes and the struggles over water provide the backdrop for these texts because of the unique properties of water and environmental pollution to cross boundaries. In crossing political boundaries, water symbolizes the contested politics and the geographic and cultural spaces between nations and communities that hold unequal power. Water also represents complex forms of violence as a result of large-scale economic development, the cultural changes this development ushers in and their ...

Immorality, Hurt or Choice: How Indian Feminists Engage with Prostitution

Abstract: This article examines key trends within Indian feminist analysis on prostitution, and is based on primary fieldwork around feminist organizations in India and on research conducted on prostitution in the states of Maharashtra, Delhi, West Bengal and Orissa. The article argues that there are at least three ways in which Indian feminists have addressed the issue of prostitution – as silence, as hurt and violence and as potential choice and liberation. I suggest that all these perspectives are limited in that they do not necessarily take in the wide range of experiences encountered by women in prostitution, and may well feed into mainstream patriarchal views on prostitution. The first trope looks at the ways in which ‘mainstream’ Indian feminists did not raise issues of sexuality, thereby relegating questions of prostitute rights to the margins. The second approach is based on radical feminist critiques of prostitution as violence and hurt, and legitimizes itself by drawing on the articulations of t...

Interrogating Privilege/Challenging the ‘Greening of Hate’

Abstract: Some time ago, I walked into one of my classes and overheard someone reject the examination of mainstream Environmental Security (ES) discourse on ‘overpopulation’ and ‘mass immigration’1 through t...

News from the Coalface

Abstract: There is much theoretical and strategic discussion of the State as a player in gender reform, but there is still a need to understand how gender reform processes work within public sector agencies. Evidence on this question is drawn from a field study of NSW (Australia) government agencies. Knowledge of gender equity measures is widespread among public sector workers but it is very uneven in depth. Participation in programmes is also very uneven, though more common among women. Programmes that appear ‘family-friendly’ are more widely accepted than ‘enhancement’ programmes directed to women, which are often thought unfair to men. Men are more likely to be cool towards gender equity measures though significant numbers now support gender equality, and overt ‘backlash’ attitudes are uncommon. Opinions about feminism as a movement are strongly divided. Feminist programmes are becoming routinized, a key process in large-scale change. Consequences of these patterns for gender equity strategy can be iden...

Challenging the Mullahs

Abstract: Malaysian feminist Zainah Anwar of Sisters in Islam (SIS) is an outspoken critic of Malaysia’s Islamist opposition, of the Islamist arms of the State, and of Muslim conservatives worldwide. She is also a significant voice in the global Muslim feminist movement. Her advocacy work has spanned nearly two decades stirred by a deep-seated ‘outrage’ over what she sees as misrepresentations of Koranic teachings on the role and status of Muslim women in Malaysia. Her stance has earned the ire of those advocating an Islamic state in Malaysia, whose constitution is presently grounded in secular principles. However, she is equally passionate about the misrepresentations of Islam and Muslim women in the West and the inability of many non-Muslims to grasp the heterogeneity of the religion and its adherents. As head of SIS, which began as an informal study group of eight Malaysian Muslim women who got together in 1988 to study the impact of legislation on women’s lives, Zainah has enjoyed a highly visible and public position. SIS is today an active participant in Malaysia’s non-governmental movement and a well-known Muslim women’s organization around the world, in no small measure due to its outspokenness and activism on behalf of Muslim women’s rights and the personality and passion of Zainah, its co-founder and executive director. SIS has intervened in political discourse in critical ways in Malaysia. It petitions the Government, writes letters to the editor, runs a legal clinic and organizes and participates in national and transnational conferences and workshops on women’s rights. Zainah also writes a regular column for the Malaysian daily, the New Straits Times, which expresses her views on key issues of the day. Together with other women’s organizations in Malaysia, SIS has pushed for changes to national legislation including Malaysia’s Domestic Violence Act, and continues to struggle against ‘injustice and discrimination’ faced by women under Islamic family law. In this interview with Sheila Nair, Zainah elucidates what it means to be a Muslim feminist and the many challenges she and her organization face.

Jumbled Women's Activism: Subnational And International Influences On Galician Equality Politics

Abstract: International perspectives regarding gender equality have materialized in Galicia, the most northwestern region of Spain. This article examines how international and subnational factors have affected Galician nationalist feminists, rural women's associations and bureaucrats working in women's policy machineries. The article explains how these equality actors similarly base their activism on local and international themes, yet maintain different stances on the meaning of equality. I uncover how the subnational manifestation of women's policy machineries – themselves an international phenomenon – hastened diversity and even discontent among local equality actors. I conclude that subnational efforts at equality promotion do not always produce a bold version of feminism within local societies.

(Un)Natural Selection: The Drainage Of The Hula Wetlands, An Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract: Ecofeminist philosophy demonstrates and criticizes the interconnections between the domination of Woman, Native and Nature. These ‘Others’ have been represented in western thought as close to each other and as inferior. By the conceived virtue of being wild and unpredictable, unreasonable, passionate and lustful, they threaten Man, Civilization and Culture. A ‘natural’ and logical response to this threat has been the need to tame, possess and control, and even eradicate these inferior ‘Others’. I have used the ecofeminist approach to examine two geography books describing the Hula Valley, Israel, and the drainage of its wetlands in the 1950s. I have analyzed the two narratives by exploring the inter-connected attitudes toward Nature and ‘Native’ – the local Palestinians – in the specific historical context of place and time. The two texts exhibit divergent narratives, yet one emerged as the dominant (hi)story: the western discourse of modernity, of technical and scientific triumph over cultural b...

Governing Women's Capabilities in China's Urban Expansion

Abstract: By the middle of the twenty-first century, China's urban population is likely to have grown by about 500 million, to more than 1.1 billion people. This article applies Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities to explore how the government of urban expansion is affecting the generation of rural women whose villages currently are being enclosed by cities and towns. Drawing on interviews, press reports and government and Women's Federation documents from Zhejiang province, it illustrates how local governments' economic growth strategies hinge, in part, on reconstructing gendered relations in the spatial organization, civic management, production and social reproduction in new metropolitan sites. The article concludes, first, that unless China's leaders commit to involving rural women's representatives in urban planning and management, enforcing women's rights to property and enabling women to decide whether and when to work and retire, the capabilities of this generation of rural women will expand litt...

Water, Women and International Law

Abstract: I grew up on an island in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. Water was close to me when I took the bus to school, had Sunday lunch with my family, and during summer holidays when I crossed the Simeto and San Leonardo rivers to get to my house by the sea. As a child, I perceived them as two enormous rivers, but when I started to travel, I realized they are quite small. Moreover, when I took a plane, I also understood that my Sicily was arid: a big yellow area was in the middle of my wonderful island. It seemed to me that green areas were progressively disappearing. Discussions with my family and my travels contributed to my passion for water. Since 2000, I have lived in Geneva and water is still close to me as Geneva is situated on the shore of Lac Léman, the largest lake in Western Europe. In this city, I started to study water through a legal prism: first with a master’s thesis on water in the Middle East and then with a PhD thesis on the relationship between water and wars. During these years, my love for water has meant analyzing the international laws governing issues of water quality and quantity and how women often suffer the most. Women make up 70 percent of the world’s population living in poverty. In southern countries, traditionally women and girls are the members of the families responsible for supplying, collecting and transporting water for household needs. They often have to walk hours to begin the search for drinking water and are exposed to waterborne diseases when washing laundry and utensils in contaminated water. Another concern is their lack of participation in water-related decisions since they are often unable to make their concerns heard within their community. Though in the developmental stage, international law recognizes the link between women and water. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms

Nepali Women and Their Struggles over Water during Pregnancy

Abstract: As per tradition, women in Nepal are responsible for providing food and water for their families. Many in rural areas start during childhood and walk several miles for hours to fetch drinking water...

The Changing Politics of Gender : A Social Constructionist Approach to Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract: The major aim of this doctoral project has been to investigate how the Bosnian war rapes affect individual victims and their communities after the war has ended. In order to answer this question, researcher Inger Skjelsbaek at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) has traveled to Bosnia to do interviews with health workers, people who work in volunteer organizations, rape-victims and focus groups. What she has found through this work is that rape is indeed an effective weapon of war, but it may not have the consequences the perpetrators might have anticipated. The political significance of the rapes affected both how people talked about the rapes and how the individual war-rape sufferers perceived their experiences. For individual war-rape sufferers the harm and trauma inflicted is indisputable, but the ways in which these individuals live with their war-rape experiences varied. The major reason for this variation is that the war-rapes attracted enormous attention both within Bosnia and from the outside world. This attention brought a new thinking about women´s roles in society to Bosnia which made it possible for women to talk about rape in ways that had not been possible before the war. While it is true that the war-rape experiences have rendered many women silent and ostracized by their families, there is at the same time a great number of women who have support from their families, and who want to testify before international and national courts to see their perpetrators punished. Compared to what we know about rape in previous wars this is a significant change.