Showing papers in "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in 2013"

Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis

Abstract: Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens. We propose a template for fusing these three levels of engagement with intersectionality into a field of intersectional studies that emphasizes collaboration and literacy rather than unity. Our objective here is not to offer pat resolutions to all questions about intersectional approaches but to spark further inquiry into the dynamics of intersectionality both as an academic frame and as a practical intervention in a world characterized by extreme inequalities. At the same time, we wish to zero in on some issues that we believ...

Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique

Abstract: This essay grows out of a presentation on a panel called “Lost in Translation” at the Critical Race Studies conference in 2010. It is a reflection on the neoliberal knowledge economy, the traffic in antiracist feminist theory, and the way my work has been read (lost or found in translation) and has crossed geopolitical and racial/cultural borders. The essay comments as well on the development of my intellectual project in relation to my location in the US academy and the intellectual and political communities that have made the work possible. The larger frame I seek to examine using responses to my work in three sites—Sweden, Mexico, and Palestine—is the way feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist theory emerges from a particular geopolitical, intellectual space; the way it enacts crossings; and the way it is trafficked, consumed, and understood in different geographies. Given the global and domestic shifts in social movements and transnational feminist scholarly projects over the past three decade...

From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We've Really Come

Abstract: This article examines the general shift in feminist scholarship from the use of the concept of patriarchy to the concept of intersectionality from a transnational feminist perspective. It first reviews some central critiques of patriarchy (the problems of unidimensionality, universality, and tautology) and then examines intersectional scholarship that emerged in response. Reviewing research applications of intersectionality since the year 2000, it argues that these applications constitute an incomplete shift from the concept of patriarchy. That is, it argues that unrecognized problems with the concept of patriarchy continue to haunt contemporary intersectional applications. Specifically, intersectional scholarship tends to suffer from the ongoing legacy of patriarchy’s reification of nation-state borders and its failure to interrogate the significance of cross-border processes for shaping gender relations and identities. Next, in contrast to such conceptualizations of patriarchy, this article exam...

Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant Women Advocates

Abstract: The history of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) in Oakland and San Jose, California, over nearly three decades provides a vivid illustration of social movement intersectionality in action and illuminates the relationships that link social theory to social movements. Serving the interests and aspirations of low-wage immigrant women workers with limited English-language skills, AIWA confronts diffuse and differential forms of interlocking oppression and deploys intersectionality to help activists change multiple states of subordinated voicelessness and devaluation into an empowered sense of self-representation and self-activity. For AIWA, an intersectional optic on social movement struggles creates insurgent identities that are dynamic and dialogic, more fluid and flexible than single-axis approaches. AIWA does not embrace intersectionality simply because its members have been wounded by racism, sexism, imperialism, class exploitation, and language discrimination but because each realm of thes...

Intersectionality as Method: A Note

Abstract: This brief note clarifies and expands upon the power and implications of intersectionality on the level of method, focusing upon its use in the hands of Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, its originator and premier practitioner.

Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements

Abstract: Taking as its starting point the success of the concept of intersectionality in generating feminist inquiry in Europe, this article explores the disavowal and displacement of race that have accompanied intersectionality as it has traveled across the Atlantic. In a context in which race continues to be a structuring principle in European societies, the article explores some implications for feminist practice. It argues that such disavowal and displacement has several effects: it serves to ghettoize race as meaning-making and a site of knowledge production, it silences and subordinates those identified with the genesis of intersectionality as an analytic, and it occludes whiteness as a racialized and racializing category. Working within a psychodynamics-of-organization and black feminist frame, it argues that this has profound implications for interactions among feminists racialized as white and of color as they encounter each other in spaces of feminist infrastructure.

Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform

Abstract: Critical race theory generally and intersectionality theory in particular have provided scholars and activists with clear accounts of how civil rights reforms centered in the antidiscrimination principle have failed to sufficiently change conditions for those facing the most violent manifestations of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and xenophobia. These interventions have exposed how the discrimination principle’s reliance on individual harm, intentionality, and universalized categories of identity has made it ineffective at eradicating these forms of harm and violence and has obscured the actual operations of systems of meaning and control that produce maldistribution and targeted violence. This essay pushes this line of thinking an additional step to focus on the racialized-gendered distribution schemes that operate at the population level through programs that declare themselves race and gender neutral but are in fact founded on the production and maintenance of...

Identity Categories as Potential Coalitions

Abstract: Kimberle Williams Crenshaw ends her landmark essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” with a normative claim about coalitions. She suggests that we should reconceptualize identity groups as “in fact coalitions,” or at least as “potential coalitions waiting to be formed.” In this essay, I explore this largely overlooked claim by combining philosophical analysis with archival research I conducted at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society Archive in San Francisco about Somos Hermanas, the solidarity project of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, based in the San Francisco Women’s Building (1984–90). I extend my analysis into the present by drawing on the oral history and published works of Carmen Vazquez, a key organizer in both Somos Hermanas and the Women’s Building. I argue that conceptualizing identities as in fact coalitions—as complex, internally heterogeneous unities constituted by their internal differen...

The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay

Abstract: This new directions essay traces the most recent trajectory in the field of hip-hop feminism. To that end, we map the current terrain of hip-hop feminist studies, first by identifying challenges and tensions, then by reviewing current literature and its engagement with these issues, and finally by identifying new and emergent areas for further development of the field. We argue that hip-hop feminism has effectively made space for itself in the broader fields of black and women-of-color feminisms and remains deeply invested in the intersectional approaches developed by earlier black feminists. We also insist that women and girls of color remain central to our analyses, particularly in light of the proliferation of critical masculinity studies within the broader field of hip-hop studies. Furthermore, our discussion of hip-hop feminism contends that within hip-hop feminist studies, hip-hop and feminism act as discrete but constitutive categories that share a dialogic relationship. Rather than treatin...

To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument

Abstract: Intersectionality has become a key concept for social justice advocates and socially conscious scholars in feminist studies, critical race studies, queer studies, sociology, and many other fields. Yet prevailing conventions and habits of argument in scholarship and social life have led to distorted and destructive critiques of intersectionality that are damaging to feminist antisubordination scholarship and activism. These actions at the scene of argument constitute an academic feminist public through articulations that serve as socializing pedagogies. This article examines four rhetorical frameworks and two accompanying tropes that interpellate feminist subjects in ways that are destructive to antisubordination struggles. They allow hegemonic logic to masquerade as radical critique. Feminists cannot escape the use of patterned language, claims, and arguments, but we can insist on looking more closely at the scene of argument in order to determine how conventionalized framing rhetorics and tropes ...

Intersectional and Cross-Movement Politics and Policies: Reflections on Current Practices and Debates

Abstract: The past five years have seen an exponential growth in publications on the topic of intersectionality. This article looks at the less developed subfield of studies on political intersectionality. While until now movements and equality policies have been mainly segregated—dedicated to one axis of inequality—there are a growing number of movement and state initiatives that take intersectionality in particular, and interference between inequalities in general, into account. New practices have developed in movement organizations and in policy making, and there is considerable demand for guides that can point out how to properly build political processes, policies, or programs to fight inequality while acknowledging and addressing interfering inequalities. In this article I draw on academic literature and political and policy practices, categorizing the different ways in which movement and policy strategies address intersectional inequalities and reflecting on their potential and their limitations. I f...

Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org

Abstract: This article examines how the gendering of high-risk financial strategies as masculine relies on and erases feminized reproductive work in the global South. I argue that the daily fallout of risky strategies—what I call peril—is the supplement to risk and that coping with peril constitutes the primary form of reproductive work of the current era. The global success of microfinance, currently cited as the best and most effective path to poverty alleviation, can be seen through this lens as a result of its ability to translate (masculine) risk into (feminine) peril; it is precisely because microfinance funds the work of getting by in the domestic sphere (and not the entrepreneurialism of the poor) that it is embraced by global business and development planners alike. I then show how the most recent trend in microfinance lending—peer-to-peer network lending, as exemplified by the wildly popular San Francisco Bay Area–based website Kiva.org—participates in the translation of risk into peril through vi...

“Like I Was a Man”: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia

Abstract: In 1908, Georgia legislators passed a historic prison reform act that eliminated the convict lease system, replacing it with chain gangs. This article examines black women’s exclusion from the category “female” and white women’s protection from Georgia’s prison regime as a condition of possibility for the passage of this law. Criminalized black women were forced to endure torturous conditions on chain gangs, while white women were protected from violent conditions. In 1908 Georgia also implemented a domestic carceral sphere, forcing black women to work as domestic servants while serving the final portions of their sentences on parole. Georgia’s prison regime operated to reinforce the capitalist logic of Jim Crow, as well as to forestall challenges to racial and gender hierarchy from black women and men and from white women. The exclusion of black female subjects from the categories “female” and “woman” during the consolidation of Jim Crow was central to the process of reinforcing white supremacist...

Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto

Abstract: Conditions in the transit ghetto of Theresienstadt, which existed between 1941 and 1945, generated a system in which female sexual and social favors were deliberately traded for food, protection, and symbolic capital within the inmates’ society. Scholars analyzing the sexuality of Holocaust victims have so far only focused on sexual violence (including forced prostitution) or romantic relationships. Love and sexuality have been understood as either a refuge mechanism or a form of oppression. Using Theresienstadt as a case study, this essay calls a third form into focus: consensual sexual barter. Based on extensive archival material, this study examines the wide range of exchanges: many of the interactions did not include sex acts but rather sexualized or social favors. Suggesting the concept of sexual barter rather than the narrow definition of prostitution points to changes in social practices and patterns: commodification of sexuality and relationships, and sexualization of the ghetto economy. A...

Twenty-First-Century Feminisms under Repression: Gender Regime Change and the Women’s Crisis Center Movement in Russia

Abstract: This article charts the ideology and mobilization of the women’s crisis center movement—the most recognizable example of postcommunist feminist activism until 2011—over the first decade of the twenty-first century as Russia moved toward consolidation and authoritarianism. We draw on our experience in and observation of this movement, a 2008 photoethnography project, and a nationwide survey of crisis centers conducted in 2008–9. By the end of Vladimir Putin’s first presidency, we find that Russia’s semiauthoritarianism was infused with a new masculinism, leaving less room for self-identified feminisms and for feminisms that include critique of male roles. The crisis centers as a phenomenon were etaticized and domesticated: they no longer resembled an autonomous movement, and much of the feminism had been lost. Yet even staff at state agencies frame their work in the language of women’s rights, a shift from their earlier tendency to assert that women provoke the violence against them. Previous studi...

Enforcing Gender: The Constitution of Sex and Gender in Prison Regimes

Abstract: This article examines how gender identities are constituted through contemporary practices of imprisonment in the United States and in England and Wales, with particular attention to transgender prisoners. I draw on recent queer theory, transgender studies, and Michel Foucault’s work, including what he refers to in the 1977–78 College de France lectures as “a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management.” All three of these techniques of power operate within prisons, from the use of violent sovereign power in physical and sexual assaults to the gendered disciplinary norms involved in rules about prisoners’ clothing and appearance. The management of populations through biopower occurs throughout these prison systems, including in the categorization of prisoners by sex or gender, in their placement in a men’s or women’s facility, and in government statistics about prison populations. I present a brief comparison of gender recognition policies in the United Kingdom and the United St...

“Without These Women, the Tribunal Cannot Do Anything”: The Politics of Witness Testimony on Sexual Violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Abstract: The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was established by the UN Security Council to prosecute high-profile organizers of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, including those responsible for systematic sexual violence against Rwandan women Focusing on tribunal cases involving mass rape, I examine how global justice for Rwandan women is produced through the politics of translation and negotiation Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how unspeakable suffering is articulated through witness testimony, translated into the language of international law, and mediated through the tribunal bureaucracy I examine encounters between international tribunal workers and Rwandan witnesses, specifically how ICTR staff investigate sexual violence, gather witness statements, and render individuals’ stories fit for public appearance at the tribunal I also explore the conditions under which witnesses tell their stories in ICTR courtrooms I argue that international justice at

Conceptualizing Feminist Strategies for Russian Reproductive Politics: Abortion, Surrogate Motherhood, and Family Support after Socialism

Abstract: This article explores the conceptual challenges of devising viable feminist strategies for reproductive politics in contemporary Russia. It analyzes three issues—abortion, surrogate motherhood, and family support politics—and the distinct cultural, historical, and institutional politics that make these issues sites of gendered inequality. Inspired by Nanette Funk’s argument that feminist critiques of Anglo-American liberalism cannot be readily exported to Eastern and Central Europe, the article inquires into the value of liberal concepts of individual autonomy and a private sphere for promoting women’s interests on these matters. It also explores the question of how to conceptualize a feminist approach to family support in a context where dependency on the state has been a long-standing source of domination. The article demonstrates how the politics of reproduction reveals the need to link feminism in Russia with both the promotion of women’s autonomy and the strengthening of families and other un...

Feminized Patriarchy? Orthodoxy and Gender in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract: Women who practice patriarchal religions in the postmodern era face a dynamic tension On the one hand, their religion calls on them to subordinate themselves to spiritual principles and to the authorities who represent these principles On the other hand, even in the most patriarchal contexts, women may find ways of negotiating their relationship to religion Women in postcommunist countries encounter additional, specific issues During decades of persecution and state-set limits on religious practice, Russian Orthodox Christianity seemed to have avoided the pressures that moved both Protestantism and post–Vatican II Roman Catholicism toward women’s greater participation in church life After the fall of communism, however, barriers shifted While individuals now face fewer obstacles in practicing Orthodox Christianity, leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church conflate Soviet-era rhetoric and Western liberalism, rejecting both as alien and hostile to Orthodox values; many instead seek to affirm tra

Women in Prison: Victims or Resisters? Representations of Agency in Women’s Prisons in Greece

Abstract: Women in prison have consistently been reconfigured in the literature. The prevailing binary is one that views women as either passive and victims or independent resisters. However, these definitions are exclusionary and do not inform each other. As a result, women in prison are employed as a tool for expressing specific theoretical ideologies and research expectations. Using Greece as a research example, I will attempt to take the debate forward and enable a discussion of the epistemology of theorizing and researching identity in women’s prisons.

The Trouble with “Queerness”: Drag and the Making of Two Cultures

Abstract: Responding to a conference paper on queer psychoanalysis whose examples centered on the lives of gay men, a prominent lesbian feminist asked, “Where are the women?” Alluding to the truism that queer theory is gay male theory cloaked in more inclusive language, this comment reminds us that at the juncture of gender and “queer” sexuality lurks a perpetual question as to what such a nebulous term assumes and what it effaces. But a further question goes unasked in the grammar of “Where are the women?”—a question I propose we take seriously. That is, in any given work of queer theory, why should there necessarily be women (or for that matter gay men, bisexuals, etc.)? This article challenges the efficaciousness of an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to queer theorizing—as well as the paradoxically heteronormative presumption that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transsexuals ought a priori to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise—through a comparison of drag king and qu...

Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination

Abstract: Recent US policy aimed at eliminating prison rape demonstrates the racialized sexual relationship between imprisoned people and the state. While invoking a biopolitical concern for prisoners’ safety from sexual violence, the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act and the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission contribute to operations of necropolitical power against prisoners in two ways: through reinforcing fantasies of sexually violent black and brown bodies and through expanding state-sanctioned sexual violence against those bodies. Prisoners live on a continuum between biopolitics and necropolitics, and racialized constructions of gender and sexuality determine how their bodies slide along the continuum. However, antiviolence advocates have too often failed to strategize against the necropolitical operations of state power, instead acting as if they are only confronting the biopolitical aspects of the state. An examination of the report issued by the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission r...

“We Wear No Pants”: Selling the Crisis of Masculinity in the 2010 Super Bowl Commercials

Abstract: In this article we argue that the commercials aired during the 2010 Super Bowl, a preeminent national advertising showcase, provide a stinging contribution to the contemporary discourse of masculinity in the United States. Using a combination of discourse and semiotic analysis, we draw on and expand Michael A. Messner and Jeffrey Montez de Oca’s 2005 examination of the trope of the happy loser in beer commercials. Conducting a close reading of five illustrative Super Bowl commercials, three from 2010 and two from 2009, we find that the 2010 Super Bowl commercials turn their back on the happy loser. Rather than appearing humorous and endearing, these losers are portrayed as delusional dopes—lost and pathetic figures who are oblivious to the supposed decline in their social standing. We argue that these messages build on broader anxieties about the recent economic recession and the empowerment of social minorities in an attempt to mass-market the discourse of a crisis of masculinity. Men’s bodies ar...

Disjunctive Synthesis: Deleuze and Arab Feminism

Abstract: While feminists in the West have identified in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari cause for serious attention, this has not been the case among Arab feminists. This may be due to a lack of familiarity with their work or a lack of access to their works in translation, but I believe it has more to do with a perceived lack of resonance between Deleuze’s thought and Arab feminist concerns. The first part of this essay examines the state of Arab feminisms today, identifying four main tendencies: Islamic, rights based, Foucauldian, and conservative (the latter specific to feminism in the Persian Gulf states). The second section explores just how viable and productive a disjunctive synthesis of Deleuze and Arab feminism might be at this juncture. Deleuze and Guattari formulate disjunction as the production of differences. A relationship of disjunction can produce alternative ways of perceiving, feeling, and thinking about the world. I contend that a number of Deleuzian’s insights—including his...

Emotions behind Bars: The Regulation of Mothering in Argentine Jails

Abstract: This article considers how the contemporary Argentine nation is produced through the regulation of mothering in the federal penitentiary system. The analysis is based on legal narratives of mothering and on women’s social exchanges with female guards. To explore the emotional dimensions of social justice, this article understands prisons as objects of public feelings and as affective economies where emotions circulate. It argues that, through the regulation of mothering in institutions of social control, the nation-state disciplines particular modes of emotional life to foster gendered illusions of belonging for young migrant women and girls. Penal legislation splits mothering into two periods: Until children are four years old, women are regarded solely as biological reproducers of the nation, and mothering is allowed in prison yet exclusively defined as a biological exchange between the bodies of mother and child. However, after the child reaches age four, the fear of moral contamination incarna...

Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka: Colonial Laws, Postcolonial Practices, and the Social Control of Sex Workers

Abstract: Across time and place, semicarceral institutions extend the arms of the state to control women’s perceived moral and sexual transgressions. In this article, we examine the case of Sri Lanka, where the criminalization of women who participate in transactional sex is a prominent feature of gendered social control. We trace how vestiges of British colonial law intersect with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, militarization, and the gendered liberalization of Sri Lanka’s economy to heighten national anxieties about women’s sexuality and sexual practices, culminating in penal excesses directed at those engaged in commercial sex. Yet processes of carceral control are never seamless: we also trace their unevenness in practice, investigating what they reveal about tensions between Sinhala Buddhist ideals of respectable womanhood, reformation, and the realities of marginalized women’s lives in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Gendering Transnational Criminality: The Case of Women’s Imprisonment in Peru

Abstract: This article presents a sociological and historical analysis of female imprisonment in Peru. The authors show how, from the beginning of the republican era until the twenty-first century, patriarchal cultural models implicating sexual, racial, and social dimensions frame the domestication of female bodies. The article also demonstrates the transnationalization of criminality and mass prison building that characterize the dynamics of women’s imprisonment in Peru. These trends are linked with the growth of neoliberalism, which has significant consequences for the global growth of female marginalization. Such phenomena, which undoubtedly shape women’s criminality worldwide, are reflected in the Peruvian female prison population.

A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy

Abstract: Based on materials excavated from a number of Italian archives, this article traces the early development of women’s prison wards in late medieval Europe and analyzes the female prison experience from an original perspective. In doing so, it addresses key questions in the criminology and penology of women, especially concerning the relations between female deviants’ numeric marginality and their perceived neglect by officialdom.