Why the personal remained political: comparing second and third wave perspectives on everyday feminism

Everyday feminist practices are located in the personal lives of feminists, therefore, third wave feminists frequently use the slogan the personal is political to emphasise the political value of such practices. Often, second wave feminists do not agree with this interpretation of the famous feminist catchphrase, which initially meant to call for collective political responses to personal experiences of gender inequalities. This article investigates this dispute that is symbolic of the broader relationship between second and third wave feminism. It compares both perspectives on everyday feminism by relating arguments for and against the political value of everyday feminism to empirical findings of a qualitative study. Based on 40 interviews with second and third wave feminists in New Zealand, I argue that the dispute is based on a number of misunderstandings between the opposing perspectives. Disentangling those misunderstandings, I conclude that although everyday feminism as a manifestation of ‘the personal’ works towards ‘small’ political aims, it is a political practice.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

BANALITY FOR CULTURAL STUDIES

In her 1990 essay, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies,’ Meaghan Morris raises very serious concerns about the relatively unexamined role that banality plays in cultural studies' work. Taking up her challenge, this essay endeavors to unlock some of the ways that banality might be, as Morris suggests, ‘empowering’ and ‘enabling’ for cultural studies and, thus, not merely banality as something that is left behind after it has been exorcised or redeemed in the movements of cultural analysis itself. Beginning with a few of Morris' own critical coordinates (such as Michel de Certeau and Maurice Blanchot), this essay, then, looks to how banality enters into the triadic philosophical conceptualizations of Henri Lefebvre on ‘everyday life’ particularly through his concept of ‘everydayness’. Most of all, this essay investigates the ways that this often-undertheorized concept from Lefebvre might be brought to ‘life’ (in the widest sense imaginable) in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on ‘the virtual.’ The virtual is, in one sense, a means of grasping what lies beyond the realm of cognition a more diffuse view of the real that would include the incorporeal, the inorganic, and all points in-between (including a more broadly drawn version of consciousness). It will be argued that, through ‘the virtual,’ everyday life becomes available to cultural studies' accounts as a radically ‘open totality’ or Outside and, as such, the movements, as well as the politics, of critique take on a different sort of tone and trajectory.     

Online radio listening as ‘affective publics’? (Closeted) participation in the post-Umbrella Movement everyday

The porosity of the online media space blurs the boundary between the political, the popular and the social. While most media scholarship concentrates on the ‘DIY participation’ that the internet enables, it overlooks the fact that most of the users are just consumers of the array of political platforms. Employing Ranciere’s notion of the aesthetics of the everyday and using the case of online radio listening, the paper re-examines the politics of participatory practices in the politicized everyday, as the audience traverses fan practices and quotidian virtual activism. This paper focuses on elderly and female listener communities, to discuss how the porous social mediascape may foster a ‘participation of the sensible’, where ‘the ordinary’ engages in online radio listening as subversive act against the government, but also calculated political AND social strategy against the harshening political reality and social division. The case of Hong Kong would also hope to articulate the nuanced interplay between media participation and the politically divided juncture.     

Affective politics and reading/writing poetry from the Northeast of India

ABSTRACT

Theorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions ‘affect’ as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere.     

Why ‘Reunion in Democracy’ fails? – the past and the future of a colonial city

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the current political predicament in Hong Kong. However, rather than offering a casual political commentary on the current state of identity politics of Hong Kong, it offers a critical and historical evaluation of the ideas and practices of ‘Reunion in Democracy’ in the past decades.     

Insider-allies: The precarious politics of men in identity-fluid feminism

Academic and activist conversations about the position of men in feminism often operate under the assumption that women are the movement's key beneficiaries and men are privileged outsiders lending their support. I use 59 interviews from a broader project on feminist and LGBTQ+ activism in the United States to illustrate how men's orientation to feminism is shaped by whether social movement organizations adopt what I call woman-centered or identity-fluid politics. While woman-centered politics treat men as allies whose intentions must be vetted by women, identity-fluid feminism imagines men as insiders with their own independent investment in the movement. I argue that the tension between these two models of identity politics gives men a liminal “insider-ally” position within feminism. Although feminist men are given a tentative authority to speak for the movement, the persistence of woman-centered understandings of feminism means men's insider status is contested, especially when they dominate feminist spaces, compromise women's sense of safety, and seek leadership.     

Body,dress and cultural exclusion: Experiences of Pakistani women in ‘global’ Hong Kong

Underneath a veneer of racial harmony and acceptance, racial discrimination is widespread at many different levels of life in Hong Kong, the so-called ‘global city’. For decades, some minority communities have lived with subtle but institutionalized and cultural discrimination permeating their existence. In recent years, social exclusion has been one of the important themes in policy debates in Hong Kong. It is increasingly recognized that there is a close relation between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘social exclusion’. According to our research on the life situation of the South Asian minority in Hong Kong, experiences of exclusion are common. This paper focuses on investigating dress as a form of cultural exclusion among Pakistani women in Hong Kong and how mainstream society constrains the bodies of its members through dress.     

WHAT MAKES THE LOCAL? A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF THE REJUVENATION OF HONG KONG IDENTITY

This paper ascertains what makes the local and why the local is important, in the context of change in Hong Kong due to the political transition to PRC sovereignty.In doing so, I hope to pose a modest polemical challenge to cultural studies' tendency to overlook seemingly simplistic empirical information. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has led to a contraction of the political sphere, as the convergence of political structures curbed the development of local identities. The label or category ‘Hong Kong people’ was then appropriated with a specific meaning for the local to resist encroachment of the national. It was true that the high intensity of dominant national discourses during the political transition created a favourable atmosphere for re-nationalization. However, as soon as the political transition was over, Hong Kongers re-adhered to their own label in their struggle for cultural autonomy.Their strong cultural affect toward various national icons during the transition quickly diminished. This multiyear discourse study (1996–1998), which utilizes social scientific methods in conjunction with cultural theories, illustrates important political and methodological impulses necessary for the formulation of a socio-political approach to cultural studies within the Hong Kong context.     

A mundane voice

This essay offers strategies of speaking and studying ‘the mundane’ as a means to inaugurate an interventionist politics in cultural studies. Using Meaghan Morris’s example of anecdotal and colloquial address, a mundane voice is shown to situate and contextualize our understanding of major concepts circulating in international theory, and broaden the audience for academic debate. Studies of ‘everyday life’ have been hampered by a too-close affinity with hegemonic structures of knowledge production, requiring further gestures of parochialism to hasten a speaking position aware of its own partiality and limitations. Attention to the singularity or ‘this-ness’ of a cultural site humbles the tasks cultural studies can perform, introducing some curiosity to what we think we know about the cultures from which we speak. Reflecting on the fate of Michel de Certeau’s work in the boom period of cultural studies’ expansion, the paper suggests that cultural studies’ radical potential can be expanded if we are not inflected by preconceptions about what defines politics, especially against the fashions of intellectual commodification. Morris creates affective connections between past, present and future political concerns: a different temporality for political investment than the cycles of electoral models, or the dictates of commodity culture, afford, and one that cultural studies might still learn to adopt.     

KUNG FU: NEGOTIATING NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY

‘Kung fu’, as a cultural imaginary consecrated in Hong Kong cinema since the 1970s, was constituted in a flux of nationalism. This paper argues that the kung fu imaginary found in Hong Kong kung fu cinema is imbued with an underlying self-dismantling operation that denies its own effectiveness in modern life, and betrays an ‘originary’ moment of heterogeneity, an origin of itself as already ‘impurely Chinese’. Having been British-colonized, westernized, capitalist-polluted and culturally hybrid, Hong Kong's relation with ‘Chineseness’ is at best an ambivalent one. This ambivalence embodies a critical significance of Hong Kong as a defusing hybrid other within a dominant centralizing Chinese ideology, which is itself showing signs of falling apart through complex changes imposed by global capital. Hong Kong's kung fu imaginary, which operates in a self-negating mode, is instructive when read as a tactic of intervention at the historical turn from colonial modernity to the city's reluctant return to the fatherland. The kung fu imaginary enacts a continuous unveiling of its own incoherence, and registers Hong Kong's anxious process of self-invention. If Hong Kong's colonial history makes the city a troublesome supplement, then the ‘Hong Kong cultural imaginary’ will always be latently subversive, taking to task delusive forms of ‘unitary national imagination’.     

What’s on the Line?: Exploring the Significance of Gendered Everyday Resistance Within the Transnational Call Center Workplace

Abstract

Recent efforts on the part of International Political Economy (IPE) scholars to place an emphasis on the importance of everyday spaces and actors in analyses of the global political economy have largely tended to overlook the significance of gender. However, gender and other intersecting factors serve to inform everyday actions, which—as ‘everyday IPE’ scholars suggest—impact the international. Therefore I present a feminist everyday politics of the global economy (or FEPGE) approach that aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between gender, everyday actions (in particular, resistance), and the international. Drawing on data from interviews with former transnational call center workers in Ontario, Canada, this approach is used to explore the significance of gendered everyday acts of worker resistance. I argue that along with the ‘feminization of labor’ within the industry, it may also be necessary to discuss the ‘feminization of resistance’.     

A glamorous feminism by design?

Glamour is often understood as a capitalist technology of allure and as a device with which women are objectified. The consumption glamour has also been theorized as representing a refusal to be imprisoned by the norms of gender, class, and race, as well as a form of escape from everyday life. In this article, I explore the attractiveness of glamour both as a technique of feminine performance and as a technique of capitalism. By defining and historicizing the aesthetic, I consider if, and how, glamour could be utilized to strengthen a feminist politics. I argue that glamour has become more salient in a contemporary context in which the myth of natural beauty has generally been debunked, and in which the performance of femininity constantly refers to its own artifice. Through analysis of examples of the material practices of glamour, such as putting on lipstick, wearing high-heel shoes, and drinking cocktails, I suggest that glamour works as an imaginative resource by both triggering a sense of the already enjoyed and provoking idealized visions of the future. I document how everyday experiences of glamour involve the acknowledgement of artifice, fantasies of ‘the good life’, and inevitable failure. I argue that these qualities make glamour a powerful existing resource that can be used to explore how femininity functions and to speculate about the future of feminism. Just as feminist discourses have been incorporated and reterritorialized by capitalism, I suggest that feminism could incorporate and reterritorialize the material practices of glamour in order to counter capitalist neoliberal imperatives. I explore how speculative design could allow feminists to use existing optimistic attachments, such as glamour, to think beyond capitalism.     

Making worlds: epistemological, ontological and political dimensions of technoscience

This paper outlines some of the new epistemological and ontological assumptions of contemporary technoscience thereby reframing the question of an epochal break. Important aspects are the question of a new techno-rationality, but also the constitution of a ‘New World Order Inc.’, with its new ‘politics of life itself’, the reconfiguration of categories such as race, class and gender in technoscience, as well as the amalgamation of everyday life, technoscience and culture. Given the difficulties of ‘proving’ a new episteme (or even epoch), I change perspective by reflecting on the epistemological vantage point from which the interpretation of technoscience as a new episteme or epoch becomes (im)plausible—confronting traditional approaches of philosophy and history of science and technology assessment (TA) with interventional approaches, such as postcolonial and feminist cultural studies of technoscience.     

Everyday politics,social practices and movement networks: daily life in Barcelona's social centres

The relations between everyday life and political participation are of interest for much contemporary social science. Yet studies of social movement protest still pay disproportionate attention to moments of mobilization, and to movements with clear organizational boundaries, tactics and goals. Exceptions have explored collective identity, ‘free spaces’ and prefigurative politics, but such processes are framed as important only in accounting for movements in abeyance, or in explaining movement persistence. This article focuses on the social practices taking place in and around social movement spaces, showing that political meanings, knowledge and alternative forms of social organization are continually being developed and cultivated. Social centres in Barcelona, Spain, autonomous political spaces hosting cultural and educational events, protest campaigns and alternative living arrangements, are used as empirical case studies. Daily practices of food provisioning, distributing space and dividing labour are politicized and politicizing as they unfold and develop over time and through diverse networks around social centres. Following Melucci, such latent processes set the conditions for social movements and mobilization to occur. However, they not only underpin mobilization, but are themselves politically expressive and prefigurative, with multiple layers of latency and visibility identifiable in performances of practices. The variety of political forms – adversarial, expressive, theoretical, and routinized everyday practices, allow diverse identities, materialities and meanings to overlap in movement spaces, and help explain networks of mutual support between loosely knit networks of activists and non‐activists. An approach which focuses on practices and networks rather than mobilization and collective actors, it is argued, helps show how everyday life and political protest are mutually constitutive.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

Exploring racial identities through participatory visual and ethnographic methods: (Re)presenting the identities of ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong

There is increasing research attention to the integration of ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong. Within this attention lies an interest in how these young people make sense of their identities in relation to their schooling experiences. From a qualitative methodological viewpoint, researchers’ positionalities, including their cultural background and scholarly motivations, have implications on the ways in which they (re)present their findings. Using the axes of insider and outsider, we reflect on and compare how we have approached two studies with ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong. We discuss the potential affordances and tensions of cultural insider and outsider roles in our research to highlight the cultural dynamics in our interactions with our participants. As we advance dialogue on how researchers approach their work through their own cultural positionalities, we offer a nuanced account of the complexities surrounding the ‘making’ of ethnic minority young people’s identities in Hong Kong.     

Discursive opportunity structures in post-handover Hong Kong localism: the China factor and beyond

The discourses of localism have been redefining the political spectrum, cultural practices, and identity politics of Hong Kong. A growing body of literature considers how China’s domination has fueled the rise of localism in Hong Kong. Drawing on the content and textual analyses of news media and other empirical evidence, this article scrutinizes the opportunity structure in post-handover Hong Kong to show that it facilitates the formation of localist discourses. It situates the localism of Hong Kong as the response to the social changes and China’s encroachment on the city in the post-handover years. Specifically, it focuses on the emergence of progressive localism prior to the recent deterioration of the China–Hong Kong relationship, the radicalization of social movements, and the continuing effects of critical post-handover events in Hong Kong. The study re-conceptualizes the localism of Hong Kong from the central–peripheral tension arising from China’s hegemony to the dynamic discursive formation of an evolving post-colonial city.