The use of political motherhood in Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and aftermath

ABSTRACT

Political motherhood, which uses traditional motherhood to mobilize and sustain women’s political participation, is understudied in political science. Women played a significant role in Egypt’s Arab Spring and its aftermath by “bargaining with patriarchy” and strategically using traditional motherhood to access the political sphere. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument based on the work of Gentry, Carreon and Moghadam and Amar. We illustrate it with examples drawn from news articles on women’s political activism and social media posts by Egyptian activists. Our argument explores how women’s agency and the larger political context in which women operate reveals how political motherhood takes the particular shape that it does. In the context of Egypt, we examine how the state’s choice to highlight women as “hypervisible” citizens, worthy of protection, backfired. Through a bottom-up political motherhood, women used their respectability as mothers in need of state protection against the state, thereby legitimizing anti-Mubarak and anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations and challenging these governments.     

ASSERTING THE POLITICAL SELF: Community Activism Among Black Women Who Relocate to the Rural South

In this article, I address the collective process of politicization in a group of urban working-class black women who have departed from large cities in the northeast United States and resettled in small towns and scattered, isolated rural communities in the Southeast. The study examines how newcomes became politically involved in their new environment and particularly, how social constraints and opportunities embedded within local political culture influenced their experiences of becoming activists. I employ a critical feminist approach in which an understanding of political agency is grounded in culturally and geographically specific social relations. I argue that activist politics of returnees are framed and formed by unequal gender, race, and class relations resonant in the political culture of the rural South. Localized social conventions define and normalize allowable political roles, discourses, and actions for working-class black women. As newcomers and outsiders, women activists and their actions become politicized in the process of encountering, questioning, and ultimately, subverting these conventions. As the women returnees engaged local political culture, their practices were interpreted as a violation of established paternalist norms of community activism by both white power holders and local working-class black women. This transgression influenced the formation of their identities as political agents and may potentially disrupt the power relations in the surrounding community as well. The study's findings demonstrate the importance of situating race, class, and gender relations in the analysis of activist politics in general and among black working-class women in particular. The study is based on participant observation and interviews with working-class black women activists in three counties in southeastern North Carolina.     

“We don’t have to talk about how I feel”: emotionality as a tool of resistance in political discourse among Israeli students – a gendered socio-linguistic perspective

This article demonstrates how the gendered patriarchal mechanisms that exclude women from the political sphere are being produced, re-produced, and challenged in interpersonal political conversations by concentrating on the discursive mechanisms that construct the way young Israeli women and men talk about politics. The research is based on a yearlong intra-group dialog process. The group met for weekly sessions during two semesters, in which the group members discussed and expressed their thoughts and feelings regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) demonstrated how the political space is being marked, defined and delimited through gendered discursive practices. We present the different roles participants take in the group, and in particular the different strategies women use in face of disciplinary discursive mechanisms. The process revealed that the development in the group discussion was strongly intertwined with the change in the positioning strategies of the female participants. In particular, we found that women deployed emotionality as a tool of resistance that challenges gender binaries and masculine dominance. Our conclusion highlights the importance of the daily interactions in creating, sustaining and changing the political discourse of a society in conflict.     

Gendered Aspects of Conflict,Displacement and Peace Process in Turkey

The peace process in Turkey, since its inception, has not paid any attention to internal displacement or its gendered aspects. This study analyses how displaced women remember the gendered aspects of displacement and perceive reconciliation and peace. The analysis, based on interviews with 42 internally displaced women, shows that changing domestic and international contexts have substantive impact on how displaced women remember their stories and the meaning they attach to their ethnic identities. Consequently, it suggests that if the peace process is re‐initiated, leaders need to take into consideration that each component of reconciliation (justice, peace, trust towards the state, intergroup relations and truth‐telling) has different difficulties to be overcome when the gendered aspect of displacement is taken into account and consider return not only as a realistic demand but also as a political wish.     

PERSISTENCE OF POLITICIANS AND FIRMS' INNOVATION

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm‐level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political persistence defined as the average length of individual political careers in political institutions of Italian municipalities. Using death of politicians as an exogenous source of variation of political persistence, we find a robust negative relation between political persistence and the probability of process innovation. This finding is consistent with the view that political stability may hinder firms' incentive to innovate to maintain their competitiveness, as long as they can extract rents from long‐term connections with politicians. (JEL D22, D72, O31)     

Ethnic Community and Ethnic Boundaries in a “Sauce‐Scented Neighborhood”1

This article investigates the problem of ethnic boundary making in a changing context. Our case is Boston’s North End, a historically Italian neighborhood undergoing changes to its social and physical environment, making the ethnic definition of neighborhood identity and belonging more difficult though not less salient. Consequently, participants in the workings of the neighborhood—residents, business owners, politicians—face challenges of both boundary placement (who is Italian and who is not?), as well as cultural content (what does it mean to be “Italian”?). Rather than viewing Italian ethnicity as simply weakening over time, we argue that the North End shows ethnicity is in a stage of category divergence, where the still‐dominant ethnic identity is juxtaposed not against another ethnic out‐group, but at various times against boundaries of class and race, commercial and community values, even city political boundaries. Drawing on ethnographic research and in‐depth interviews, we describe three group identity frames that illustrate these processes and reveal how Italian ethnicity continues to animate discourse and action in the neighborhood.     

‘Blair's children’: young women as ‘aspirational subjects’ in the psychic landscape of class

This paper engages with the subjective experience of ‘doing’ aspiration, teasing out the psychic and social costs that accompany this as a classed process. It draws on a qualitative study of young women located in further education and contemplating their futures under New Labour, locating how the political rhetoric of aspiration gets institutionalized within school practices; how it intersects with maternal expectations and practices of involvement; and how these are lived and managed by subjects located in different positions in class‐inflected social space. In attending to the tangled web of institutional, intergenerational and affective practices which shape young women's aspirations, the paper seeks to interrupt the celebratory and simplistic rhetoric of aspiration that characterizes the contemporary socio‐political register of neoliberalism. As these ideals become further entrenched by the current Coalition government, there is an even greater urgency for such sociological enquiries.     

In memoriam: L. H. M. Ling

In the early phase of its rule in Turkey (2002–4), the pro-Islamic government of the AKP (Justice and Development party) and various branches of the state collaborated in a series of political and economic reforms. The democratization process has gradually moderated and integrated Islamic actors into the secular Turkish Republic. However, it has also had polarizing effects on social groups. Among many, the polarization of two groups of women, ‘pious’ and ‘secularist’, deserves particular attention. Instead of bringing Turkish women together, gender reforms, particularly the lifting of the headscarf ban in universities, have divided women and created disarray and confrontation in society. This article reveals and compares the two dramatically different patterns of political engagement by pious and secularist women in leadership positions in contemporary Turkey. On the one hand, it reveals the increasingly radical backlash of secularist women against the increasing visibility in public spaces of pious women who veil. On the other hand, it examines how pious women, who see the tumult their religious observance in the public space is creating, are increasingly turning to a non-confrontational mode of non-response. What is the prognosis for the future of a democratic Turkey?     

‘Putting an ocean between them’: Gender relations among Italian immigrant families in twentieth‐century Argentina

The article starts from the premise that dominant research paradigms of both ‘melting pot’ and ‘multiculturalism’ have concentrated almost exclusively on the institutions of ethnic groups in the study of one of the twentieth century's principal immigrant nations, Argentina. The article makes a case for refocusing the study of immigration in more individual categories. It takes as its example gender, and analyses the role of women in two Italian family networks who emigrated to Argentina. The findings demonstrate that women's roles changed significantly in the migratory process and that women were, in fact, crucial in offering the prospect of social mobility for newly immigrated men. The article concludes by advancing a view beyond the issues of gender on the continuities and discontinuities of political ideologies in the new society.     

Off the record: Margaret van Kleffens and the gendered history of Dutch World War II diplomacy

This article makes the case for recovering women’s roles from the forgotten corners of diplomatic history, and for considering the consequences of the gap between feminist and non-feminist research. It shows how ignorance of the gendered nature of diplomatic norms and practices impacts our understanding of diplomatic history, and how specific biographies are hampered by gender blindness in particular. Using the history of Margaret van Kleffens and Dutch World War II diplomacy as an example, the article demonstrates how historians’ continued neglect of the role of women and gender norms has influenced representations of twentieth-century diplomacy. To dismiss the history of gender and of women as by definition irrelevant to the actions of states and of male statespersons is not simply part of a self-appointed focus on the political at the expense of the personal; rather, it omits much of the political history too, reproducing stereotypes and resulting in a skewed understanding of diplomatic history and foreign policy decisions. The article argues that both historians and feminist scholars need to historicize gender in order to recognize women’s roles in diplomacy, and so gain a better understanding of the history of international politics as a whole.     

Techno-sovereignism: the political rationality of contemporary Italian populism

This article provides an original exploration of the self-identified populist coalition leading the Italian government between 2018 and 2019. The analysis, informed by a governmentality approach, starts by scrutinising the economic, social, and cultural issues framed as political “problems” by the coalition, also highlighting the tensions underlying such constructions. The second step charts how this political subject sought to address those problems by deploying an array of political technologies. From examining these two dimensions, the article then can discern the composite rationality—techno-sovereignism—that drove precariously the coalition’s art of government. Finally, the article sketches out some forms of contestation against the techno-sovereignist operations, whose significance may stretch beyond the Italian borders. Overall, although the Italian populist coalition turned out to be ephemeral, the dynamics that characterized its emergence and functioning could still be used heuristically to understand the interactions and reciprocal adjustments possibly used by right-wing and technocratic populist groups to exert political power conjointly.

     

What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.     

“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 manifestations of politics in evaluation: An exploratory study across the evaluation process

Evaluation has been described as a political act. Programs and policies are generated from a political process, and the decision to evaluate and how to use the evaluation are manifestations of the political dynamic. This exploratory study was conducted with practicing evaluators to understand what they view as political situations in the evaluation process and how they responded to these situations. Findings suggest that, in relation to the potential evaluation phases in which each respondent has been involved, evaluations are susceptible to politics when initially attempting to identify stakeholders and when it’s time to report the evaluation findings. Evaluators have also developed multiple strategies for dealing with these situations, including finding allies for the evaluation and working to explain the evaluation process and its implications. We hope that this study will help to inform novice and expert evaluators about the various political situations they may encounter in their practice.     

Women in Politics in Norway

This paper attempts to explain how and why women in Norway have achieved unusually high political representation. The study, based on forty-three personal interviews with female politicians and persons familiar with Norwegian political culture, found that certain favorable social and political preconditions existed in Norway that encouraged women's entry into politics. However, it was the strong and effectively organized women's movement which was responsible for the significant increase of women in politics. A number of environmental opportunities and threats facilitated the formation of a successful coalition between establishment and new feminist factions of the women's movement. This coalition then used effective strategies to get more women into politics.     

Ignoring rights is wrong: re-politicizing gender equality and development with the rights-based approach

Corporate sponsors and humanitarian organizations have joined popular authors and international institutions in bringing attention to gender inequality though “smart economics” and “investing in women.” These social marketing messages and donor strategies mimic arguments for gender equality from the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than building on the rights-based development and best practices of the 1990s, they ignore the critical roles of political capacity and participation that the past forty years and feminist analysis of development achievements and failures have taught us are essential to taking on gender and economic inequality. Certain trends in foreign aid accountability share this silence on the importance of political capacity. In contrast, the rights-based approach to gender equality and development (RBA) is a political approach to development. We reconcile the need for aid accountability with the need for a focus on politics by outlining key political processes of the rights-based approach. The RBA is a way of doing development that is attentive to process and power. We can use the RBA not just as a guide for how to do development, but also as a way to think about processes as outcome measures. The processes that the RBA requires are processes that build capacity for marginalized women and people.     

The Role of Social Networks in Immigrant Women’s Political Incorporation

This article examines how immigrant women’s social networks affect their propensity to vote and to participate in unconventional political activities, as well as their knowledge of politics and government services and programs. Our primary source of data is a telephone survey of women living in Canada’s two largest metropolitan areas. Our findings show that contrary to the social capital literature, bonding ties do not exert strong negative effects on political incorporation, while bridging ties are not as helpful as hypothesized. What is important for immigrant women are the resources that are embedded in their social networks.     

Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union: The Manipulative Rewriting of Howard Fast's Novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Abstract

Although translated literature was widely consumed in the Soviet Union, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how translators negotiated the ideological and political forces present in the Soviet literary field. Defining censorship as a manipulative rewriting of discourses, the process under which texts are censored in the process of translation is examined using, as a case study, Howard Fast's novel The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Howard Fast, an American writer, was a committed Communist until 1957, and wrote several left-wing novels. The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti recounts the true story of two Italian radicals whose wrongful execution for murder caused protests around the world in the nineteen-twenties. Close comparison of the source and target texts demonstrates a large number of small shifts which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly affect the ideological positioning of the Russian target text. The overall result of these shifts, motivated by the unification of the linguistic field, is to create intertextuality with Soviet Socialist Realist discourse.     

Political trials and the social construction of deviance

In the 1960s and early 1970s deviance research, especially in the labeling perspective, was concerned with the question of how individuals or groups become defined as deviant. Since then, the political analysis of deviance has come to ask the more fundamental question of how deviance becomes constructed through political processes. A political trial is one particularly transparent situation in which narrower political processes for imputing deviance elicit more fundamental interpretations of political modes of deviance construction. In order to explore the workings of the deviance construction process, the present study examines the two defense strategies employed on behalf of the defendants in the trial of the Chicago 15, a group of thirteen men and two women who destroyed selective service files on the south side of Chicago in May, 1969. The first strategy is the previously studied “motivation defense,” wherein the moral righteousness of the defendants' purpose is pleaded as cause for their exculpation. The second is the unique “cultural insanity defense,” which asserts that the defendants were so profoundly deluded in their moral indictment of the government that the jury should return a verdict of culturally insane rather than criminally guilty. The first section of the paper summarizes the circumstances of the trial. The second and third sections analyze each of the two defense strategies, focusing on their legal and political logic and on the prosecution counter-strategies they engendered. The final section indicates a number of theoretical implications for the further development of the political model of political trials and of deviance construction in society at large.     

Gender disparities in the Italian regions from a human development perspective

The aim of this paper is to analyse, which is the current situation of gender disparities in Italy and how such disparities are distributed among Italian regions. In order to quantify such disparities a comprehensive framework for assessment is required by using a human development approach. A gender-oriented investigation of effective available capabilities for men and women in the Italian regions reveals that gender inequality in Italy seems to be a persistent phenomenon. Finally, the gender disparities in the empowerment dimension and in the other social dimensions seem to be mutually reinforcing with the economic dimensions, especially in the labour market.