Engendering Global Democracy

The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in terms of their theorisation of power, politics, agency and change. Recent feminist arguments about citizenship and governance go some way to bringing together concerns about gender inequality and globalisation, but they remain centred on states and the states-system as vehicles for democratic representation and participation. This article argues that a more radical reconstructive strategy can be derived from debates about the democratisation of feminism itself. Drawing on the responses of black and third world feminists to racism in the white-dominated feminist movement, and examining their influence on efforts to organise transnationally, the article points to innovative ways of thinking about power, politics, agency and change. Together these amount to a democratic framework which has applicability beyond feminist organising and which confronts the marginalisations of both gender and globalisation.     

Early activism and work arrangements of young feminists in Mexico City

The study investigates the relationship between the activism and later work life of young Mexican feminist activists in the context of social movements’ institutionalization and the precarious employment situation. Using the biographical narratives of fifteen feminists in Mexico City who were core activists during the period of high mobilization of the abortion rights movement from 2007 to 2009, this study aims to answer two questions: How does activism impact contemporary activists’ work life in an era of professionalized and institutionalized social movements? And how do their feminist identities and practices differ according to the workplace? The results reveal that (1) young feminists joined women's movement institutions through their activism, although those employment opportunities were unstable, and (2) they used reflexive strategies to manage their feminist identities amidst the uncertainty and to reconcile their work life conditions and their feminist activist identities.     

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.     

Standpoint Epistemology and the Uses of Self‐Reflection in Feminist Ethnography: Lessons for Rural Sociology*

Abstract We explore how feminist researchers informed by standpoint theoretical frameworks employ the process of self‐reflection to counter the reproduction of inequalities in ethnographic investigation. Although it is not a cure for this dilemma, we argue that researchers can be self‐conscious about the ways in which they reproduce power in the course of their work; furthermore, sustained attention to these dynamics will enrich ethnographic accounts. We begin by outlining the diverse ways in which feminist ethnographers draw on standpoint epistemology to generate strong reflexive methodological strategies. Then we describe challenges posed by postmodern and postcolonial critics, and outline how feminists have contributed to these debates and have responded with innovative methodological strategies, especially in relation to self‐reflexive techniques. In conclusion, we discuss how rural sociologists might incorporate these methodological insights into their ethnographic investigations.     

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 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.     

FEMINISM, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY Learning from the past, imagining the future

This article examines second wave and post-second wave feminist writing about the possibilities of (contemporaneously) new information and communication technologies. A number of texts by key authors, including Shulamith Firestone, Valerie Solanas, Cynthia Cockburn, Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, are examined in light of the social and political context of their time of writing as well as in relation to 'mainstream' information society theorists such as Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells. The main focus is on how these authors understand the transformative potential of technologies, and attention is drawn to the swings between optimism and pessimism about the role of technology for a feminist political agenda. The role and nature of manifestos are also explored, and the question of whether it is time for another feminist technology manifesto is raised. The article concludes by posing some methodological and theoretical challenges of developing an anti-essentialist (in relation to both gender and technology), politically engaged and relevant feminist research agenda that takes seriously both lived experience and structures of power. The footnotes are an experiment in autobiographical writing in which I make explicit my own connection to this literature and the politics of these debates.     

"FRANCE NEEDS CHILDREN":

This article examines debates and discussions surrounding French pronatalist policies enacted in the 1980s. Drawing on data collected from a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including daily newspapers, parliamentary debates, and French feminist publications, I explore the following questions: First, does pronatalism spring from conservative nationalist ideologies that conflict with feminist projects? Second, how have French feminists reacted to the pronatalist agenda? Finally, could women's equity serve as an impetus for instituting policies that would encourage births? My analysis suggests that nationalism in France takes many forms, and a wide spectrum of political actors from both the political left and right have supported pronatalist initiatives in the name of “the nation.”     

FROM WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY TO GENDERED TECHNOSCIENCE

This paper situates current discussions of women's position in ICTs in the wider context of feminist debates on gender and technology. While a common trend among early feminist theorists was a profound pessimism about the inherent masculinity of technology, this was replaced during the 1990s by an unwarranted optimism about the liberating potential of technoscience for women. This article gives an account of both technophobia and technophilia, arguing that recent approaches drawing on the social studies of technology provide a more subtle analysis. Avoiding both technological determinism and gender essentialism, technofeminist approaches emphasize that the gender-technology relationship is fluid and flexible, and that feminist politics and not technology per se is the key to gender equality.     

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.     

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.     

A Brazilian pandemia/monium: A researcher’s search for a ‘New Normal’

This is the narrative of a Brazilian PhD candidate during the first four months of COVID‐19 in Brazil. Her trajectory and feelings are expressed in evocative autoethnographic format, juxtaposed with the main feminist debates and concerns taking place in Brazil during the pandemic. As scenario, an unprecedented worldwide sanitary crisis and local economic, political and social crises, challenging activists, feminists and the researcher herself in posing new questions to understand the world, her country and herself during/after crises. Her own feminist lenses cannot read ‘New Normal’ comfortably.     

A lesbian-feminist journey through queer nation

This article is an auto-ethnographical review of the political experiences and literary career of one of the early lesbian feminist critics and theorists. It poses the question: what does it mean to be shaped by one theoretical and political discourse (Lesbian Feminism) and then thrust by historical change into another (Queer Theory)? With the author's life and work as a frame and exemplar, it illustrates the development of lesbian feminist thought. Ultimately, it argues that the insights and values of Lesbian Feminism should not be suppressed by those of Queer Theory, and calls upon lesbian feminists to re-insert themselves into current scholarly and theoretical debates.     

The environmental account of obesity: a case for feminist skepticism

There is an emerging consensus among public health advocates that combating obesity is best done by restructuring the environment rather than by stigmatizing individuals. Although feminist scholars have not been major participants in debates over antiobesity policy, recently there has been a move toward adopting the environmental account of obesity as a feminist solution because of its potential to respond to health inequalities along race, class, and gender lines. This article aims to trouble the embrace of the environmental approach by feminist scholars, however, and to resurrect and redirect feminist criticism toward attendant problems of moralism, backlash, and the surveillance and rehabilitation of poor women of color. Despite its overwhelming popularity among policy elites and health researchers, I argue that the environmental account of obesity is not likely to promote structural change and broad redistributions. Rather it makes problematic assumptions about the relationship between health and fat and about the efficacy of intervention strategies, masks moralism with health discourse, and legitimizes punitive, ineffective, and patronizing interventions.     

Citizen Bodies: embodying citizens – a feminist analysis

The starting point for this paper is that bodies give substance to citizenship and that citizenship matters for bodies. However, the growing literatures on the body and on citizenship rarely 'speak to each other' in any straightforward sense. Feminist theory has made a significant contribution to both fields of thought,but once again the connections between these fields tend to be passing and underdeveloped. Feminist literature on citizenship – for example in discussions of participation – increasingly offers a critique of the model of the disembodied (supposedly universal) citizen as exclusionary and advocates taking bodies seriously (Lister; Yuval-Davis). Yet bodies appear in such discussions in quite limited ways and remain instrumentally conceived. On the other hand,the growing work on the body fromcontemporary feminist theorists has designated the body a political site par excellence (Grosz). Nevertheless, these writings are typically relatively abstract and philosophical, tend to perceive corporeal politics in circumscribed ways, and are positioned at a distance from political theorizing about implications for citizenship. We intend to consider how to flesh out the bodily element in feminist citizenship literature and how to interrogate the contextual sociality of the political in recent feminist theorizing of the body, in order to suggest ways of thinking about citizen bodies and related future directions for policy-making.     

Determinants of Latin American Activism: Domestic and Transnational Political Opportunities and Threats

For decades Latin America has been and continues to be a vibrant source of activism as democracies emerge, civil societies strengthen, and movements turn an outward eye towards international forces. Social movements, organizations, and activists in Latin America mobilize around a diverse set of issues from neoliberalism to women’s rights and more. Yet, all groups must successfully navigate ever‐shifting domestic and transnational political opportunities and threats. This review first defines the political opportunity approach and discusses debates surrounding its utility and applicability at different phases of social movement activity, as well as growing debates about the importance of domestic versus transnational opportunities and threats for predicting movement mobilization, protests, and outcomes. Next the article discusses changing domestic and transnational political opportunities and threats throughout Latin America. It then turns to empirical application of the political opportunity model to various social movements, organizations, and activist groups working in Central and South America. This paper concludes with a brief revisit of the debate and points to future lines of inquiry. Additionally, it provides an interactive Google Map, which locates the prominent actors involved in Latin American activism, the international institutions that influence them, and Internet links for more information.     

Traveling from Feminism to Mainstream Sociology and Back: One Woman's Tale of Tenure and the Politics of Backlash

Within disciplines, the 1980s were an especially heady intellectual time for feminist graduate students. Not only did second wave scholarship prove to be inspirational for dissertation projects, but new books and articles published by women of color, lesbian feminists, postcolonial theorists and poststructuralists posed serious challenges to the ethnocentric assumptions of white, middle-class and Western feminism. Yet, despite over a decade of social movement activism and the creation of feminist institutions and organizations, this generation of feminist scholars worked against a cultural backdrop marked by a dramatic move to the political right. My personal narrative begins in this historical moment charting my political and intellectual trajectory from graduate school to the present. My positioning as a queer feminist between the second and third waves of feminist scholarship carried with it a rewarding intellectual legacy as well as a number of painful contradictions.¹ Further, I argue that these contradictions arose as a consequence of the uneven diffusion and reception of feminist scholarship, particularly the politics of backlash, within institutions and academic departments across the country from the 1980s to the present.     

Gender and the state

The article argues from a Nordic, feminist and poststructuralist position that feminist state theories need to be developed methodologically. This claim is based on both theoretical arguments as well as empirical arguments arising from a case study on care politics in Denmark. In contrast to answering questions about the essence of the state, the aim of the article is to provide some analytical tools for studying the state. First, it focuses on two paradigms of feminist analyses of the state: differences between states (Nordic feminists), and differences within states (poststructural feminists). The article argues that each of the approaches has its merits and problems in terms of feminist engagements with the state. The second part explores an empirical case study on care politics in Denmark. The study illustrates the inadequacies of feminist approaches to the state to date. State discourses and policies on home-helpers are shown to have both empowering and disempowering effects on the women concerned. The third part of the article suggests a framework of three concepts believed to be helpful when analysing gender and the state: hegemony, contradictory effects and boundaries. The concepts are generated from the case study.     

'The downright torture of women': moral lobby women, feminists and pornography

Apparent alliances between moral campaigners and certain feminists in opposition to pornography have been the subject of discussion both in the United States and in Britain. Drawing on a wider study of the views of women in British moral and pro-family organisations, this article examines the attitudes of such women to pornography. It then compares these views with those of anti-pornography feminists, commenting in particular on the moral reasoning underlining different perspectives. Attention to moral reasoning, it is argued, helps to further explicate the charges of 'alliance' between the moral lobby and anti-pornography feminists, even where such alliance is neither sought or desired. The potential difficulties and uses of an assessment of pornography as 'moral' concern for the development of feminist ethics are then considered. Finally, the apparent willingness of moral lobby women to express support for anti-pornography feminists is examined. The article concludes by suggesting that this support reflects both complexities of gender identification amongst moral lobby women, and, crucially, power imbalances between anti-pornography feminists and the moral lobby rooted in the institutionalisation of heterosexuality. The implications of these findings for sociologists and for feminist theory and activism are outlined.     

Mapping Strategic Engagements: WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND THE STATE

Abstract

Given that all women's movements share a unique relationship to the State – their exclusion from political power, often legally and occasionally constitutionally underpinned, has this exclusion shaped women's movements' strategies, which have had as their general goal women's political inclusion? Some similarities are evident across types of women's movements and across nations. In this article, I discuss the ‘strategic dilemmas’ that women's movements are likely to face, and I attempt to identify the range of strategic responses employed by feminist movements. I begin with a definitional distinction between women's movements and feminist movements, followed by a discussion of women's relationship to the State. I identify similarities across feminist movements in four strategic dimensions: (1) movement autonomy vs state involvement; (2) insider vs outsider positioning; (3) separatist vs coalitional stances; and (4) discursive and influence-seeking politics. These strategic dimensions shape different opportunities for women's movements across different state configurations, offering openings for some types of women's movements that may be unrecognized or unexploited by others. The article concludes with speculations concerning women's movements' strategic action in the context of state reconfiguration.