Debating US Contemporary Feminism

The US women's movement has challenged societal norms, policies, laws, and culture since its inception. However, at the same time, it has inspired debates about its goals, ideology, tactics, and outcomes. These debates emerge from two main sources: the mainstream media as it reflects dominant culture and among feminist activists and/or scholars. I elaborate on three of the most contentious aspects of contemporary feminism through a series of questions: Is the movement still in existence? What is the relationship between generations of feminists? And finally, how have feminists addressed diversity, privilege, and inclusion in the movement, particularly around issues of race‐ethnicity? I conclude that while the movement still exists, feminists continue to struggle with generational relations, and contemporary activists have not created an inclusive and diverse movement. However, I argue that these debates and struggles are evidence of a vibrant movement that continues into the 21st century.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

Gender and Occupation in Market Economies: Change and Restructuring Since the 1980s

This paper compares employment restructuring, gender, and occupationalchange in Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USA, since the 1980s.Its analytical framework is derived from feminist debates aboutthe relative influence of political–economic skill regimesand cultural ideologies of gender on occupational sex segregation.In each country, the shift towards services has further concentratedmen's dominance of employment in extractive and transformativeindustries. Pre-existing patterns of occupational segregationbetween the sexes have not however been universally reinforced.A degree of occupational upgrading has facilitated women's movementinto a growing range of professional and managerial occupations,but the extent of economic opportunity for women is not a simplefunction of labor market economics. The social–democratic,egalitarian values and policies of Sweden, for example, seemto have offered greater economic benefits to women than themore individualized, liberalized labor market policies of theUK. In conclusion, it is argued that gender and markets aremutually constitutive; their evolution is not pre-given butsubject to political choices informed by history and culture.     

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.     

Gendering Global Governance

In this article I map out the major debates on global governance and the feminist critiques of the mainstream interventions in these debates. I argue that the shift from government to governance is a response to the needs of a gendered global capitalist economy and is shaped by struggles, both discursive and material, against the unfolding consequences of globalization. I suggest feminist interrogations of the concept, processes, practices and mechanisms of governance and the insights that develop from them should be centrally incorporated into critical revisionist and radical discourses of and against the concept of global governance. However, I also examine the challenges that the concept of global governance poses for feminist political practice, which are both of scholarship and of activism as feminists struggle to address the possibilities and politics of alternatives to the current regimes of governance. I conclude by suggesting that feminist political practice needs to focus on the politics of redistribution in the context of global governance.     

Interacting with the State: Feminist Strategies and Political Opportunities

In recent years feminists have been engaged in new debates about gender and the state. Instead of adopting either a purely structural or agential approach, the emphasis in these debates is on the interactive relationship between the two. Feminists in political science have not been immune to this trend. Work is emerging in this field which dissaggregates the state to consider the way different political institutions shape and are shaped by engagement with feminist actors. This article contributes to these efforts by providing a detailed comparative analysis of feminist strategies and political opportunities in two similar political systems - Australia and Canada. A number of key points emerge from this study. First, similar institutions in different countries provide varying opportunities for feminists. As a result, it is not possible to make emphatic claims about certain institutions being more or less beneficial for feminists. Second, feminists respond to these opportunities by adopting certain strategies over others. Through these strategies, feminists can have a direct bearing on the opportunity structure open to them. What the experiences of Canadian and Australian feminists tell us is that the relationship between feminists and political institutions changes over both time and place; that it is interactive and dynamic, rather than predictable and permanent.     

Chilean Feminism(s) in the 1990s Paradoxes of an Unfinished Transition

This article discusses the changes experienced by the feminist movement in post- transition Chile from the perspective of two specific issues. First, the fundamental "paradox' facing this movement today, that is, its relative success in "gender mainstreaming' together with feminism's increasing weakness as a political actor. And second, the relevance of external and internal factors in transforming feminism and the role each has played in its current situation. The article attempts to answer some of the queries posed by this two-fold process: What explains the feminist movement's absence from public spheres? Why was the movement's previous creative force not translated into renewed political power in the democratic context? What factors have contributed towards the lack of articulation among actors who had been able to form a visible movement for the rest of society in the past? And, to what extent have structural transformations conditioned the changes experienced by feminism? The article is structured in three sections. The first analyses some of the social and political factors relevant for the reconfiguration of the movement in the 1990s through an analysis of the political system. The second concentrates on the object of study itself, that is, the feminist movement. It seeks to reconstruct its trajectory, origins and development, the changes it has undergone throughout the transition process and, especially, its present characteristics. Finally, some concluding remarks are provided.     

Social Identity and its Influence on Women's Roles in East-Central Europe

An apparent drop in women's presence in the political sphere has spawned debates in the feminist literature over the need and cultural appropriateness of women's political office-holding in East-Central Europe. The author discusses the nature of political participation in light of women's self-definition, social identity, and loci of commitments in these transforming states. Taking their own value orientations and the societal processes they experience as a baseline from which to appraise political and social change, women in East-Central Europe feel disillusioned with the transition to a market economy and the ideological framework out of which it functions. They have, after all, disproportionately borne the ill-effects of the new ideology of efficiency and productivity in the workforce and they perceive the political arena as a narrowly defined arena of partisan rancoring that does not address their needs. Pointing to Dahl's work on moral civic virtue, the author argues that the orientation and values of women in East-Central Europe – i.e. a commitment to justice and preference for localized, pragmatic (not ideological) and particularistic action – are especially conducive to developing the moral civic infrastructure so badly needed in these transitioning countries. The author discusses the merits and drawbacks of three possible scenarios for action for the women of this region: maintaining the status quo; using women's traditional and preferred forms of action to effect change 'from the bottom'; and taking frontal action at the national level against inequities and discriminatory policies.     

Linking Disconnected Spaces or Venue Shopping? Trade-Offs in Participatory Opportunities in the EU

This article discusses why national civil society organisations (CSOs) use or abstain to use the participatory opportunities that the EU has developed in the last years. This is done by analysing the role of French and Spanish civil society groups in the debates on participatory democracy during the drafting and the referendum debates of the European Constitution (2002–2005). The paper departs from existing assessments of the role of national civil society in the Convention and demonstrates that national organisations built on their expertise on certain EU policies, on access to EU-level political actors and on contacts and alliances with other CSOs. It also differs from previous studies in finding that participation does not entail sharing the interpretive frame promoted by the EU. The finding that access opportunities do not fundamentally influence the frames of the organisations is related to their ability to strategically choose to participate in European and national venues. The paper finds that because of their scepticism on the constitution's participatory framing, French organisations preferred a stronger role at the national level, whereas Spanish organisations did not have real incentives to develop a campaign at the national level. While it is expected that dialogue with CSOs can contribute to bridging the gap between the EU and its citizens, this paper finds that the institutional setting provided incentives for national organisations to get involved only in one of the levels rather than to link them.     

Feminist methods in a “post-truth” political climate: objectives,strategies, and divisions

Abstract

The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by critically examining the themes that have hitherto organized FM as a category of efforts to reverse WPC’s historical dispossession in the academy. This article identifies three thematic objectives of FM (symbolic, social, and economic empowerment of WPC to reverse their historical dispossession), three thematic strategies of FM to accomplish these objectives in research design (centering WPC in the research agenda, designing more inclusive methods, innovating new theoretical concepts to analyze findings), and two thematic debates that continue to divide FM (styles of intersectionality and identity in the feminist movement as an analytical approach and political effort at large). This article concludes by situating these thematic distinctions in Lamont and Swidler’s broader articulation of methodological tribalism, opening dialogue on the political and analytical advantages of and need for superior methodological pluralism in FM.     

“A bulletin board of dreams”: corporate empowerment promotion and feminist implications

This article examines the premises of corporate solutions to gender inequality in the Global South. In feminist debates, businesses’ increasing emphasis on women’s empowerment has been discussed both in terms of increasing feminist impact and the co-optation of feminist demands. To explore the ideological effects of corporate gender practices, focus is placed on the Coca-Cola Company’s global “5by20” campaign, which has the stated aim to empower five million women as small-scale entrepreneurs around the world and, in a “win–win” fashion, to double sales by 2020. Based on interviews and participatory observations in Mexico, this article traces a particular narrative of empowerment, envisioned as a transition from dependency to self-sufficiency and threatened by psychological and cultural restraints rather than material conditions. It shows that self-help and positive thinking are essential affective drives, thus reinforcing market-based, individualized development strategies. In response to feminist debates, the article concludes that corporate gender practices can be seen as part of a neoliberal transposition of equality concerns from a political to an economic domain. In effect, when initiatives such as 5by20 promote the accumulation of “human capital” to enhance gender equality, they simultaneously work to legitimize the inequalities that are necessarily entailed in competitive capitalism.     

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.     

Maternal struggles and the politics of childlessness under pronatalist Caribbean slavery

ABSTRACT

This article considers the relationship of enslaved and apprenticed women in the Anglophone Caribbean to the embodied experience of childbearing, motherhood, and childlessness. It places this analysis in the context of a discussion of the development and implementation of pronatalist policies in the Anglophone Caribbean during the late period of slavery. It examines the experience of pronatalist policies by enslaved women, using as a case study a microhistory from Jamaica during the apprenticeship period (1834–1848). Although the existence of pronatalist policies gave some women (mothers with large numbers of children) a position from which to claim reduced workloads and other ‘rights’, they made the situation of childless women more difficult. In historians' attention to the struggles of mothers, we have sometimes paid insufficient attention to the perspective of childless and bereaved women.     

Young Women in the Australian Women’s Movement

This article explores and documents the role of young women in the contemporary Australian women’s movement. Through case studies of two very different groups of young women, working in submerged networks in the community and on university campuses, it aims to suggest the diversity of contemporary young feminist praxis. Further, it argues that the work that these young women are doing in discursively creating and maintaining a feminist political space is crucial to the future of the movement. Based in constructivist ‘new’ social movement theory this article suggests a way forward from the so-called ‘generational debates’ of the 1990s and argues that, through their own unique processes of collective identity, young women who are active in the Australian women’s movement are dealing with the conflicts that are essential to the movement’s survival.     

‘Being in the Spaces where Decisions are Made’: Reproductive Rights Advocacy and Policy Influence in Two Regions of Peru

In the 1990s, some segments of Latin American feminist movements shifted to advocacy strategies to influence government policies. Long-standing social movement theories predict that this tactical change to institutional means has two possible consequences for a movement: either it gains greater influence over policy arenas and becomes more effective in achieving outcomes, or it loses capacity to carry out protest tactics and becomes less effective in achieving outcomes. However, empirical studies on Latin American feminist organizations intervening in policies, and recent social movement theorizing, indicate that the relationship between social movements and policy influence is more complex. Moreover, these theories have been formulated based on empirical studies in contexts with established democratic frameworks and institutions. The study presented here employed Grounded Theory to examine inductively the research questions of how reproductive rights organizations carry out advocacy to influence government policies in Peru. Data was collected through participant observation and focus group discussions among two reproductive rights coalitions in the regions of Arequipa and Cusco. The findings indicate that the reproductive rights coalitions develop a multiplicity of interactions with government officials, as a means to influence policies through various channels and handle constraints on their ability to act as independent pressure groups. In addition, the findings show that the coalitions deal with a wide range of factors to influence policies: organizational capacity, advocacy strategies, issue frames, relationships with other policy actors as well as political and social aspects that facilitate or hinder advocacy. The study concludes that the relationship between social movements and policy influence is more complex than portrayed by long-standing theories. Instead, the findings are consistent with, and enhance the scholarship on Latin American feminist organizations involved in policies, as well as recent social movement theorizing that takes into account how various factors affect social movement influence on policies.     

MYTHOLOGIES REVISITED: ROLAND BARTHES AND THE LEFT

This essay arises from the author's scepticism about the received notion, prevalent both in literary and cultural studies, that Roland Barthes's work of the 1960s constituted an abandonment of the previous decade's social critique. The paper develops the argument that, to the contrary, understanding Barthes's socio-cultural development following World War II and in the French cultural context helps to situate the political engagement of his writings in the 1950s and to clarify the continued political commitment of this work from the 1960s onward. This essay addresses a series of questions: what was Barthes's relationship to the 1950s French intelligentsia that prepared his active participation in the heterodoxical Marxist journal, Arguments, a forum for many of the urgent intellectual debates between 1956-62? What is the relationship of this activity to his writings of the early 1950s, developed into Mythologies in 1957, as well as to the shift toward semiology and structuralism and to the purported abandonment of social critique betokened by this shift? How do these phases inform the different readings of Barthes's work developed in more recent interpretations of his writing? It is argued that we would do better to view the structuralist phase and especially the ‘later’ Barthes (from the late 1960s onward) more fully and deliberately in relation to the early, explicitly political period. This revised perspective, one not limiting Barthes to works such as Mythologies, will help us better comprehend Barthes's continuing legacy for sociosemiotic critique both in literary criticism and in cultural studies and to create new ground for interdisciplinary dialogue that is very much needed in an era of questioning the limits and borders of this field.     

NATION-STATES CONFRONT THE GLOBAL: Discourses of Indigenous Rights in Fiji and Tanzania

How do global issue constructions serve as resources for actors engaged in domestic political contention, and what does the appropriation of global ideas by domestic actors imply about the spread of global culture? To contribute to knowledge about conflict‐based diffusion of global ideas, we examine the histories of global constructions of indigenous rights and national debates about indigenous rights in Fiji and Tanzania. While global models of indigenous rights emphasize self‐determination for nondominant, culturally distinct groups at risk from the nation‐state, advocates for indigenization policies in Fiji and Tanzania have argued for state policies to entrench political and economic rights for majority or near‐majority groups that were well integrated into the nation‐state. Although transnationally connected indigenous rights organizations have a greater presence in Tanzania than in Fiji, actors in Fiji remain more engaged with changes in international indigenous rights discourse than their counterparts in Tanzania. This difference reflects variations in the leverage global culture offered in the two cases because of its externality to national political debates. In Fiji, actors appropriated global culture as a means to internationalize a domestic dispute, while in Tanzania the impetus for indigenization came from global economic pressures. Our findings imply that conflict‐based diffusion concentrates agency with respect to the use of global legal discourses in domestic actors rather than the globally connected actors and experts who carry global culture in consensus‐based diffusion.     

Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and Polish Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state,empire, race,and political reason 1926–39

This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others' debates about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of Jews' own choices in determining their situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il'ya Dizhur, the Zionist sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer Pollner.     

Feminism and the New Women in Public Office

This paper addresses the question of why the ever-increasing numbers of women elected to state and local office give such low priority to issues related to the status of women. The paper surveys the sociology and political science literature to identify key variables which might account for so little change in the demographic characteristics and political priorities of women public officals. This review suggests that an increasing minority of women elected officials are feminist in the broadest sense and will support feminist policies as their numbers increase. These women are characterized by a newly legitimated ambition but dicriminated against by the political opportunity structure. The combination of ambition and thwarted opportunities considerably increases the probability of support for feminist policies.     

Affective virtuosity: Challenges for governance feminism in the context of the economic crisis

This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.