READING PIERRE BOURDIEU'S MASCULINE DOMINATION : NOTES TOWARDS AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF GENDER,CULTURE AND CLASS

This article analyses Bourdieu's late work on masculine domination, in the context of his wider theory of practice. It assesses the logic of his argument and focuses particularly on the wide-ranging case he makes for women's complicity with such gender domination, alongside their opposition to it. The question of whether Bourdieu's sociology is unacceptably pessimistic about the possibilities for social transformation is then considered, taking up certain key contemporary debates about his work. The final section draws on Bourdieu's rudimentary sketches from various sources for an intersectionalist study of gender and class, deriving ultimately from the uncompromising exposure of economic and social interests in Distinction. Using independent evidence, it traces some of the less-remarked consequences of women's entry into well-paid employment on the labour market: not least, the impact of their work on the class structure and the recomposition of domestic labour on a class basis.     

LA REPUBLIQUE METISSEE: CITIZENSHIP,COLONIALISM, AND THE BORDERS OF FRENCH HISTORY

During the past decades, debates about immigration and racism have raged in France, most recently through the sans-papiers movement through which undocumented immigrants have demanded documentation and the rights that flow from it. The important successes of the sans-papiers movement, I argue, are the result of the way they combined demands phrased through universalist discourse with expressions of cultural identity, bringing together approaches often considered incommensurable in French political culture. Taking as its contemporary point of departure the sans-papiers movement, this paper proposes that in order to better understand these debates we need to place them in the context of French colonial history. In particular, I focus on the ways the history of the French Caribbean have shaped the way race and citizenship are imagined in Republican political culture. I draw on my historical work to highlight the important ways French ‘universalism’ was in fact in many ways produced through the actions of slaves in the Caribbean. The struggles around slave emancipation and political equality in the Caribbean that developed during the French Revolution, I suggest, both produced a Republican tradition of anti-racist egalitarianism, and gave birth to a ‘Republican racism’ through which new practices of exclusion were articulated. To understand the contested meaning of citizenship in France at the end of the twentieth century, I suggest, requires such forays into the history of empire through which the possibilities of citizenship were formed.     

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT: UNIVERSITIES, NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE US SUPREME COURT

The legal context in which universities operate is among the forces shaping the ways in which new information technologies are taken up and used. In the USA, constitutional law - that law which addresses how society is to be structured and what types of processes should be permitted within it - is particularly important in determining what institutions can do. The ultimate arbiter of constitutional law is the US Supreme Court, the decisions of which establish basic principles for the US legal system. This article reviews the entire body of US Supreme Court decisions that deal with higher education and mines them for their implications for the use of new information technologies by universities.     

ON 'MAELSTROMS LARGE AND SMALL,METAPHORICAL AND ACTUAL': 'GRAY ZONES' IN THE WRITINGS OF PRIMO LEVI

This article examines the work of Primo Levi, with a focus on the tensions between ‘witness’ and ‘public intellectual’ in Levi's work. It analyses the notion of ‘gray zones’ in Levi's writings, where it functions as a way of indicating transformations in political action and public discourse in the wake of Auschwitz: most importantly, the Nazi genocide undermined the position of ‘spectator’ crucial to liberal discourse by implicating the spectator as a ‘bystander’. The study goes on to discuss the concepts of ‘work’, ‘science’ and ‘intellect’ in Levi's writing, showing how these categories reflect Levi's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to uncover a mode of political thought and public intervention adequate to the changes in political space of which the ‘gray zone’ is symptomatic, i.e. a condition of universal complicity and powerlessness. It concludes that implicit (and undeveloped) in Levi's thought is a set of ‘aesthetico-political’ presuppositions concerned with the articulation of founding, legitimacy and judgement. These presuppositions challenge the reliance of emancipatory discourses upon subjectivity and the logic of self-determination, indicating the need for a politics based on ‘pedagogical accountability’. Resisting the postmodern logic of ‘testimony’, which emerges in the gap between universal claims and their performance and hence dismantles the ‘outside’ as a space of judgement, i.e. the determination of the legitimacy of actions, the politics of pedagogical accountability grounds such an outside in the conjoining of power, responsibility for the world and boundary thinking. This space ‘outside’ ideology and the circulation of subjectivities emerges via resistance to the specifically ‘anti-political’ violence pervasive in late capitalism, and through the clarification of the distinction between this mode of violence and that (‘pre-political’) violence aimed at ‘subjects’.     

MARGINALITY,ADVOCACY, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF MULTICULTURALISM: NOTES ON ROMANI ACTIVISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also “stigmatized” in the sense that it is popularly associated with standard stereotypical images and negative characteristics. This article identifies this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. It shows how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, this article explores ways of dealing with this ambiguity. It concludes that minority advocacy for the Roma can avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization.     

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

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.