Victims and Vamps,Madonnas and Whores

This article explores how the US ‘war on drugs’ depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps – a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.     

A Case Study of State‐Level Policymakers’ Discursive Co‐Constructions of Welfare Drug Testing Policy and Gender,Race, and Class

Welfare provision is distributed based on determinations of recipient worthiness, commonly assessed by racial‐ and gender‐specific characterizations of the poor as constructed through policy discourse. Social constructions of the poor contribute to the construction of welfare policy discourse and subsequently welfare policy. Welfare drug testing policy raises questions of the co‐constructions of race, class, and gender and welfare drug testing discourses. This case study of state legislators’ discourse on welfare drug testing explores these ideas. Using an intersectional perspective, we examine how categories of race, class, and gender give meanings to policy discourses concerning drug testing of welfare recipients, and conversely, how policy discourses concerning welfare drug testing give meanings to categories of race, class, and gender. We find a move away from explicit racialized and gendered discourse, and toward implicit constructions of race and gender, with a predominant explicit focus on constructions of social class in the characterization of an unworthy, suspect, and deviant poor population. The constructions of race, gender, and particularly social class effectively co‐construct welfare drug testing discourse, which justifies welfare drug testing policy in order to manage the derelict poor.     

Muslim Women,Moral Visions: Globalization and Gender Controversies in Indonesia

Since 1998, Indonesia’s democratization has produced contentious public debates, many of which revolve around issues of gender and sexual morality. Yet such controversies not only often focus on women, but also involve women as participants. This article examines how Muslim women activists in two organizations adapt global discourses to participate in important public sphere debates about pornography and polygamy. Indonesia’s moral debates demonstrate an important way in which global discourses are negotiated in national settings. In the debates, some pious women use discourses of feminism and liberal Islam to argue for women’s equality, while others use Islam to call for greater moral regulation of society. My research demonstrates that global discourses of feminism and Islamic revivalism are mediated through national organizations which shape women’s political activism and channel it in different directions. Women’s political subjectivities are thus shaped through their involvement in national organizations that structure the ways they engage with global discourses. The Indonesian case shows not only that the national should not be conflated with the local, but also demonstrates the significance of national contexts and histories for understanding global processes.     

“Who Better to Do It Than Me!:” Race,Gender & the Deciding to Run Accounts of Political Women in Texas

Women remain underrepresented in electoral politics at every level. Much has been written about how dominant gender values shape political women’s decisions to run for office, how the media portrays women on the campaign trail, and how voters respond to women candidates. Yet, research on women in politics has too often assumed a monolithic standard of femininity, overlooking the ways in which gender values are varied and deeply racialized. Drawing from data gathered through 46 interviews I conducted with women leaders and political activists in Texas, I explore the narratives politically active women cultivate to account for their decisions whether or not to run for public office. I illuminate how these “deciding to run” narratives reflect racialized standards of femininity and how these discourses are mediated by the political context and by political and activist organizations.     

The Tightrope of Normalcy: Homosexuality,Developmental Citizenship,and American Adolescence, 1890–1940

In the early twentieth century, American developmental citizenship presumed a gradual extension of rights based upon a naturalized trajectory that would lead individuals toward heterosexuality, gender complimentarity, and increasing social and political investment. Means changed dramatically through which psychological, pedagogical, and political discourses positioned adolescence, sexuality, and gender in relationship to national belonging. Yet compliance with gender and sexual normativity as a marker of successful adjustment into adulthood persisted as a powerful precondition to full citizenship. Figurative “problem youth” were attacked in part because they threatened to expose exclusionary assumptions undergirding supposedly universal ideals in optimistic modern American democracy.     

Gendered Perspectives on Integration Discourses and Measures

This article focuses on gendered discourses in integration policy and the problems immigrants pose in the reproduction of inequalities in a number of European countries. There has been little consideration of how gender categories operate in relation to broader political discourses around the construction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the constitution of national social and political communities and identities. Yet gender issues have become significant in the backlash against multiculturalism and gender and sexual relations have moved to the centre of debates about the necessity to enforce integration, if not assimilation. The first section outlines recent developments in the immigration‐integration nexus in different European states. The second section draws out some of the reasons for the focus on family migration and spouses who are seen as the main importers of the ‘backward’ practices and with ‘doubtful’ parenting practices for future generations of citizens. The third section tackles the shift of current debates about integration of migrant women from the periphery, where they were largely invisible or mere appendages of men, to the centre, where they have acquired in the process a heightened, though not necessarily positive, visibility. Too often, representations of migrant women are based on a homogenised image of uneducated and backward migrants as victims of patriarchal cultures, legitimizing in this way the use of immigration controls to reduce the numbers entering and to tackle broader social issues, as has clearly been the case with forced marriages. Furthermore, the more discourses focus on Muslim women and Islam as inimical to European societies, the more the debate becomes culturalised and marginalises the socio‐economic dimension of integration and the structural inequalities migrants face. Thus pre‐entry tests may have less to do with integration than with a desire to reduce the flow of marriage migrants or to raise their human capital.     

The operation and subversion of gendered war discourses: soldierhood,motherhood and military dissent in the public production of Kimberly Rivera

This article undertakes a discourse analysis of texts concerning a recent high profile case of opposition to war by Kimberly Rivera, a US soldier and a mother of five. Developing on previous research concerning how female soldiers, anti-war women and anti-war soldiers have been made intelligible within understandings of war and gender, the analysis traces the discursive repertoires constituting Rivera as a political subject. The article considers how, when and with what implications for broader discourses of gender and war, and their transformation, the categories of soldierhood and motherhood were invoked to construct and obstruct Rivera as an intelligible dissenting subject. The most common presentation of Rivera centered on her motherhood, understood to be in crisis due to her military role. With motherhood and soldierhood seen to be antithetical this crisis could be “solved” through opposition to war. This limited the extent to which Rivera was intelligible as a “thinking citizen” and reproduced motherhood and soldierhood as stable categories leaving their immanent discourses concerning war and gender untroubled. The article then considers ways in which alternative avenues for transformative interventions could open up if dissenters like Rivera were “written” as other than fundamentally contradictory figures.     

Gender diversity among ‘boys’ in Papua New Guinea: Memories of sameness and difference in early childhood

Childhood is a time when children begin to constitute themselves as gendered subjects largely according to social norms that are rigidly framed within dominant discourses of heteronormative binary gender. This paper is based on the life histories of 42 sexuality and gender diverse adult men and transgender women conducted in PNG. Findings offer insight into the ways in which boys transgressed gender norms through dress, play, work within the home and in dance. We argue that gender transgression in childhood is not a contemporary phenomena and such childhood experiences of boys in PNG should be recognised as part of the country's rich cultural diversity.     

Oral Sex,Young People,and Gendered Narratives of Reciprocity

Young people in many countries report gender differences in giving and receiving oral sex, yet examination of young people’s own perspectives on gender dynamics in oral heterosex are relatively rare. We explored the constructs and discourses 16- to 18-year-old men and women in England used in their accounts of oral sex during in-depth interviews. Two contrasting constructs were in circulation in the accounts: on one hand, oral sex on men and women was narrated as equivalent, while on the other, oral sex on women was seen as “a bigger deal” than oral sex on men. Young men and women used a “give and take” discourse, which constructed the mutual exchange of oral sex as “fair.” Appeals to an ethic of reciprocity in oral sex enabled women to present themselves as demanding equality in their sexual interactions, and men as supporting mutuality. However, we show how these ostensibly positive discourses about equality also worked in narratives to obscure women’s constrained agency and work with respect to giving oral sex.     

Medieval Silence and Modern Transsexuality

Psychoanalysis and science respond to the transsexual claim of wrongful embodiment with radically different models of treatment. Yet both disciplines construct the figure of the transsexual from a heteronormative and patriarchal perspective. The 13th-century text Le Roman de Silence, which deals with the gender transformation of its heroine, Silence, is similarly biased. Moreover, this romance theorizes a relationship between gender and the body that closely parallels the psychoanalytical and scientific discourses about transsexuality. Silence's social isolation confirms the varying levels of dislocation that transsexed individuals, both male and female, attribute to their condition, but her powerlessness to determine her own gender identity is more akin to the modern treatment of intersex children. The ambiguity surrounding Silence's return to femininity at the end of the romance, however, suggests that the medieval author can see beyond the binary system of gender that structures his society and that continues to structure ours.     

The Polish Parliament and the Making of Politics through Abortion: Nation,Gender and Democracy in the 1996 Liberalization Amendment Debate

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive rights in Poland, as evidenced by continuing debate around the legal status of abortion, are in this postcommunist context intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood, identity and citizenship. Focusing on the connections between discourses of Polish nationhood, gender and democracy, this article offers a detailed and critical engagement with debate in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the Polish parliament) during the second reading of the 1996 liberalization of abortion amendment. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the article argues that abortion is a symbolic issue through which anxieties about postcommunist reform are raised, nationalist pasts and futures are imagined and through which political projects are articulated.     

Motherhood,Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence

By building on theoretical insights from poststructuralist feminism and Roland Barthes' mythology framework, this article is offering a nuanced understanding of female agency in political violence by engaging with the visual and the cultural, by using a broader definition of agency in political violence and by analysing what gendered representations of war mean at the domestic level. In the first part of the article, the Myth of Motherhood is conceptualized as a meta-discourse disciplining representations of female agency in political violence. The article then focuses on two specific discourses within the meta-discourse, the Vacant Womb and the Deviant Womb, that inform understandings of gender, agency and political violence in one particular cultural artefact: the British television drama, Britz. The main argument is that motherhood is ‘everywhere’ in representations of female agency in political violence and that it is useful to think about motherhood as a myth. Only this way can we confront underlying norms, values and ideas believed to be common sense and think differently about gender, agency and political violence.     

Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex,Sexuality, and Gender*

Most sociological research designs assume that each person has one sex. one sexuality, and one gender, congruent with each other and fixed for life. Postmodern feminists and queer theorists have been interrogating bodies, desires, and genders, but sociology has not. Deconstructing sex, sexuality, and gender reveals many possible categories embedded in social experiences and social practices. As researchers, as theorists, and as activists, sociologists have to go beyond paying lip service to the diversity of bodies, sexualities, genders. The sociologist's task should be to deconstruct the conventional categories of sex, sexuality, and gender and build new complex, cross-cutting constructs into research designs. There are revolutionary possibilities inherent in rethinking the categories of gender, sexuality, and physiological sex. Sociological data that challenge conventional knowledge by reframing the questions could provide legitimacy for new ways of thinking. Data that undermine the supposed natural dichotomies on which the social orders of most modern societies are still based could radically alter political discourses that valorize biological causes, essential heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles in families and workplaces.     

Quotas as a ‘fast track’ to equal representation for women

Recent years have witnessed the rapid diffusion of electoral gender quotas. Today, about fourty countries around the world have introduced gender quotas for parliamentary elections, either by constitutional amendment or electoral law. Also, quotas for public election have been laid down in major political parties' statutes in more than fifty countries. This article, which is based on the first worldwide overview of the use of quotas, presents general trends in quota adoption. It identifies two discourses: the incremental track versus the fast track to women's parliamentary representation, and argues that the Scandinavian countries – which represent the incremental track – may no longer be a valid model for ways to improve women's representation. The article also analyses the implementation process, and concludes that, without specifications of quota provisions that match the electoral system in question, and rules about the rank order of candidates as well as sanctions for non-compliance, quota provisions may be merely symbolic.     

Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation

The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of "contentious" political action. Instead, to establish tribes' status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.     

Bathrooms,Boundaries, and Emotional Burdens: Cisgendering Interactions Through the Interpretation of Transgender Experience

Building on findings demonstrating that social institutions may cisgender realities by creating and enforcing binary notions of gender rooted in cisgender experience, this study examines the ways cisgender people reinforce cisnormative gender binaries in their ongoing interactions. Utilizing interviews with 99 cisgender people, I show how respondents react to a vignette about a gender nonconforming person seeking to use a public bathroom by “cisgendering interactions,” which I define as the process whereby people reassert binary understandings of gender to make sense of transgender experience while placing an unequal emotional burden on transgender and gender nonconforming people to mend the interactional disruption of the gender panic. Additionally, my analysis extends transgender scholarship by demonstrating some ways cisgender people make sense of transgender people in public spaces. In conclusion, I draw out insights for understanding (1) the ways people cisgender their realities in the face of conflicting stimuli, (2) the ways in which emotions are a mechanism of inequality reproduction, and (3) the consequences these actions have for the perpetuation of gender inequality.     

Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.     

MODEST CHANGES,BIG REVOLUTIONS

In this paper we propose a psychosociological critical theory, which can be applied modestly in particular contexts such as families, organizations and communities. We use discourse analysis as an empirical action-research method, able to study and see families as protagonists with their own history and local culture. We have developed two methodologies, analysis of dominant and alternative discourses and a dialogue based on naïve questions, which have allowed the creation of a link between individual problems and social issues, and have empowered people to do something for themselves and their community. Our methodologies have led us to create a critical and reflective research to resolve psychological problems in families and, at the same time, change the attitudes of their members to more complex social problems, such as gender discrimination, violence, impunity, asymmetric power relations and racism. We propose that social researchers, in particular in Latin America, will take a reflective, critical and political stance, aimed not only at developing knowledge, but also at promoting socio-cultural changes for the families and their communities as a part of the political transformation of society.