Performance anxiety: women’s sexed bodies in Pakistan

The nexus of Islam, gender, race and violence has been keenly revisited in some post-9/11 scholarship. The concern over the racialized Muslim male body is justifiable in cases of rendition, torture and the kind of battlefields that mark the War on Terror. However, the sympathetic analysis of the tortured Muslim male body as a permanent and universally vulnerable imaginary has necessarily challenged the framing of sexual politics for Muslim contexts. This bid to shield the vulnerable Muslim male body from Islamophobia and imperialist violence forecloses the notion that Islamist patriarchy and politics can themselves be fundamentally violent in the post-9/11 moment and within the Muslim community. This obscures the range of routine, domestic and normative violent expressions observed by men in Muslim societies. This essay discusses two cases that illustrate the means and methods by which female bodies have been sexed by the narrative of the War on Terror in Pakistan. These cases highlight how the academic efforts that seek to rescue the racialized Muslim male body complicate the struggle of resisting (lay) female bodies.     

Sikh ethnonationalism and militancy: manifestation and prognosis

ABSTRACT

The study primarily answers the question that whether the movement of Sikh ethnonationalism had been defeated permanently during 1990s or whether it still persists? The study perceives that the movement of Sikh ethnonationalism cannot end till the core pivotal ethnic issues, the moving force of the movement are prevailing. The study eventually predicts that the movement will sooner or later rejuvenate from its previous stage, i.e. militancy, as the sociopolitical circumstances of Punjab have been nourishing microclimate for resurgence of the same. In typical political scenario, the moderate outfit of Sikhs is eager to stimulate the ethnic-regional issues of the Sikhs while the radical factions are also observant to ignite the clinkering Sikh ethnic issues once again. Contrarily, the political aspirations of the BJP controlled by the RSS are opposite to the ethno-political demands of the Sikhs. This contradiction, if aroused systematically, has the potential to rekindle the old spark of militant movement.     

Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks,the Case of Suffragette Militancy

This paper explores the diffusion of a tactical innovation – militancy – within the British Suffrage Movement, 1905–1914. It concentrates upon the influences that arise from personal social networks and which affect ego's decision about whether to adopt the new tactic. UCINET is used to map and visualise the activist networks of two suffragettes who made different adoption decisions. This reveals that ‘weak ties’ to ‘innovation champions’ (i.e. suffragette ‘travelling organisers’) connected both women to opportunities to learn about, observe and adopt militancy. In order to explain why one suffragette adopted the tactic and the other did not, however, there is a need to link structural and cultural analyses of social networks together. Here, I do this by following up empirically what Fuhse [Fuhse, J. (2009). The meaning structure of social networks. Sociological Theory, 27, 51–73] has called the ‘meaning structure of the network’ consisting of interpersonal expectations and network culture. I propose that the ‘meaning structure’ of the network is linked to the structural patterning of social ties – and the subjective meanings of ego – through the communicative interaction in which they both are rooted [Mische, A. (2003). Cross-talk in movements: Rethinking the culture-network link. In M. Diani & D. McAdam (Eds.), Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action (pp. 258–280). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press]. Focusing on communicative interaction and intersubjective meanings indicates that there is value in approaching personal networks as socio-cultural ‘lifeworlds’ [Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, volume 2: System and lifeworld. Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Passy, F., & Giugni, M. (2000). Life-spheres, networks, and sustained participation in social movements: A phenomenological approach to political commitment. Sociological Forum, 15, 117–144.). This approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the construction of a ‘moral point of view’ within networks, which fundamentally shapes the symbolic legitimacy of culturally controversial tactics.     

谭嗣同与近代佛教思想的变迁

佛教在中国近代的发展中逐渐发生了转变,谭嗣同等将消极、避世、涅磐的佛教哲学阐释成彻底的主观唯心主义的,蔑视黑暗现实、奋不顾身、不计功利、“勇猛精进”、和“大无畏”的富有战斗性的思想力量,在一定程度上团结了趋新之士大夫,摇撼了统治意识形态,鼓荡了仁人献身、志士奋笔的时代氛围,对近代中国社会变革产生了深远的影响,同时谭嗣同对佛教思想的阐释也是太虚大师“人间佛教”思想的一个来源。     

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.     

尚武习俗之下的甘肃秦腔

甘肃地处多民族交融地带,自古以来,民风剽悍,形成独特的尚武之风。由于受尚武之风的影响,甘肃秦腔演出时,多战争历史和封神对打等武戏,分配角色注重生净,勾画脸谱有明显的尚武之风,注重做工,穿着特殊,注重铜器、火彩、丽子等的运用。     

Memoirs of Gay Militancy: A Methodological Challenge

Biographical and autobiographical material has long been used by sociologists. What are the specific epistemological and methodological challenges of using memoirs of militancy for social movement sociology? This article analyses four memoirs by militants of the gay movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. To understand the validity of memoirs of militancy as sociological sources, it highlights their constructedness as narrative artefacts: as retrospective discourses on an individual's past, memoirs allow for the self-reflexive deployment of their authors' subjectivity. Their narrativeness is a key to understanding how their narrative voice reflects the very agency that animates mobilizations. Memoirs of militancy are thus an invitation for sociologists to turn to literary and rhetorical scholarship for adequate methodological tools.     

After a Cycle of Contention: Post-Gothenburg Strategies of Left-Libertarian Activists in Sweden

This article considers the strategic choices that radical activists face when a cycle of contention ends. It investigates the reorientation of the autonomous anarchists or left-libertarian activist milieu in Sweden after the riots at the Gothenburg summit in 2001, which ended a cycle of anti-globalization protests in Sweden. The article identifies five strategies by which this activist milieu attempted to reconstruct collective agency, build a new alliance structure, and renew the repertoire of contention: (1) rescaling and targeting of micro-politics; (2) moving from secluded to open communities; (3) rethinking collective agency with the help of a new movement theory; (4) reversing dominant discourses and opening up discursive space; and (5) redefining militancy and shelving of violent confrontation. The study builds on activist interviews and ethnographic research in Stockholm and Malmö.     

Framing the tribal: ethnic violence in Northeast India

This article examines the framing of ‘ethnic conflict’ in Northeast India, focusing on militant groups and insurgency in the hill areas of Assam and a form of political violence known locally as ‘ethnic clashes’. The article argues that ‘ethnic clashes’ have become an institutionalized form of armed violence in the region, while ‘ethnic rivalry’ is a key diagnostic frame for conflict. As enactments and imaginaries of institutionalized violence, ‘ethnic clashes’ are a product of actors who hold stakes in representing armed political violence as a result of ‘ethnic conflict’ between rivaling tribal communities. The article looks at the representation of causes of conflict as well as the framing of acts of violence as key sites of contestation, and thus as integral aspects of the conflict. This raises questions about the feasibility of scholarly efforts to make sense of specific cases of conflict via generic categories such as the ‘ethnic conflict’.     

Resources of origin,investments and expectations of rewards in the militancy of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST)

The problem studied consists of the relations between the interests and militancy and the differences in expectations of rewards in an agrarian reform settlement linked to the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). In this settlement, many ‘leaders’ gathered the ‘socialisation of production’. The situation arising from these circumstances produced the different reasons for engagement and different relations with the militancy. In the transition from the encampment to the settlement, it becomes important for the leaders to reinforce their positions both of ‘leadership’ and as mediators of policies and public resources, while it becomes difficult for those settled to maintain their previous investments in strong engagement. Consequently, these new conditions tend to increase the differences between the expectations of rewards from the militancy. These expectations can be pragmatic, such as viability as a farmer, or have a more symbolic character, which is associated with the struggle to create social organisation models.