Global Feminism

This pamphlet, written for the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, is the first international treatment of gender-based censorship. It is also an argument for integrating culture and economic development. This was Women's WORLD's first extended treatment of the relationship of gender and censorship. It was written by Meredith Tax with input from a galaxy of international women writers. It has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and ten other Indian languages. It contains descriptions of many censorship cases as well as a taxonomy of the various ways silencing occurs in women's lives.

Debates about commercial sex occupy a prominent place on the agenda of both global and Russian-language feminist communities. Sex wars have a major impact on the organization and political imagination of the feminist movement. On the other hand, some sex workers and their representatives consider some feminists (neo-abolitionists) to be one of the biggest enemies in the struggle for their rights. Trying to understand this contradiction, the article raises issue on how neo-abolitionist discourse is designed and what political impact it produces. The author proceeds under the assumption that the neo-abolitionist discourse about commercial sex is a way to cope with the two fundamental anxieties of the feminist movement: the anxiety of foundation and the anxiety of translation. This hypothesis is tested through an analysis of Russian and English-language feminist texts on commercial sex, as well as through analysis of existing research literature. The author comes to the conclusion that the construction of sex work as a homogeneous situation of patriarchal violence against women allows it to be used as a metaphor. One of its effects is the legitimation of universalist and essentialist constructions of radical feminism/neo-abolitionism. At the same time, this discourse excludes the voices of women engaged in sex work and reduces the diversity and heterogeneity of their experience. As a result, neo-abolitionism becomes problematic if we consider feminism an inclusive and emancipatory project. In conclusion, the author calls for the formation of a more inclusive and polyphonic version of feminism towards people engaged in commercial sex.

Description Islam and feminism are often considered to be contradictory in their essences and objectives. Nevertheless, we now find more than a century of writing by Muslim women who draw their inspiration from their religion, and who seek to reconcile Islam's scriptures and traditions with modern ideals of gender equality and justice. This course explores the idea of Islamic feminism, and surveys its history and key writings. Students will be introduced to some of the practices, doctrines, and texts of Islam that have been considered most problematic from a women/gender perspective, and will read and discuss the writings of several critical figures from the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to reflect on the idea of, and varying definitions of, "Islamic feminism," as well as to develop their own definitions of the term. Required readings will be in English.

The chapter looks at women's engagement with educational reform in colonial India from a trans-regional and intersectional perspective. The first part focuses on the emergence of a colonial discourse on “female education” in the 1820s, which was firmly embedded in what has been termed a “colonial grammar of difference”. While the education of girls aimed to turn them into better (rational, enlightened) mothers, and agents of social improvement and civilization, British female educators used the engagement with the imperial “civilizing mission” as a way to enter the public sphere, to go abroad as teachers of female schools and act as missionaries among women. The second part of the paper contrasts the experiments with girls’ education for the domestic sphere in the early 19th century with new developments in the 1880s. Towards the later nineteenth century, a strong link was formed between feminist activism, the promotion of female education, and the emergence of new professional possibilities for women in the fields of child-care, and health care. While female British travelers to India were still influential in educational reform, the USA became an important provider of international reference models and a point of orientation for Indian reform-minded women. Moreover, Indian women from different caste and class backgrounds became important agents of educational and social change. The paper ends with a comparison of British women's "imperial feminism" to Indian reformers' caste, class and gender politics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Modern Girl emerged in advertisements, cinema and public discourse all over the globe. While she was implicated in nationalist projects of social reform in post-war Britain and Japan, in multicultural, port-city environments such as Penang, the Modern Girl was central to a discourse of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Lively debates about the Modern Girl in Penang's English press wrestled with the tensions between cultural authenticity, diversity and modernity. Male and female readers of the Straits Echo, from different ethnic backgrounds, engaged with each other in a shared public space about issues ranging from education and politics to women's liberality and fashion. The Modern Girl thus represents a new way of looking at the history of colonial Malaya in the interwar period: one not focused on ethnic nationalism and communalism, but on a shared, multi-ethnic mode of belonging rooted in the globalist environment of the late colonial port-city.

Women have entered the global political stage in an astonishing array of movements. Sparked by the current capitalist war on the working class as well as the ongoing struggle around patriarchal relations, these movements provide an important arena for socialist-feminist politics. Today, unlike the past, feminist ideas are part of many anti-capitalist movements, although bringing those ideas to the centre of anti-capitalist politics is still an uphill struggle. In this essay we discuss how socialist feminist activists are shaping demands and campaigns, how they organize on the ground, how they build the leadership of working-class, indigenous and rural women, how they work within mixed gender groups and movements.

In order to do justice to the diversity of socialist-feminist strategies, we posed a set of questions to socialist-feminist scholars and activists engaged in different struggles. This essay is based on their insights. As a group, they are diverse in terms of age and political generation, social location and nationality. Susan Dirr and Giselda Gutierrez are activists in the Occupy movement in Chicago and Houston, respectively, and Esther Vivas is an activist in Spain’s Indignado movement, as well as a journalist and sociologist. Martha Ojeda, a former maquiladora worker, has been Executive Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras since 1996. Rosemary Hennessy, a theorist of Marxism and sexuality, also writes on gender and labour struggles in northern Mexico. Eleni Varikas is a political theorist based in Paris and connected to researchers and activists in Greece. Valentine Moghadam is an expert on women in the Middle East and on Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) that provide crucial support and solidarity in struggles against capitalism and patriarchy worldwide. With their collaboration, we have drawn a picture of socialist-feminist strategy that leaps from place to place and hardly presents a comprehensive view. Still, these instances of struggle reveal key aspects of contemporary socialist-feminist organizing.

“Décoloniser Le Féminisme: Intersectionnalités, Assemblages, Co-Formations, Co-Productions” (Decolonizing Feminism: Intersectionalities, Assemblages, Co-Formations, Co-Productions). Cahiers du CEDREF. Special Issue on Intersectionalities and Colonialism. (January 2015).

This article reflects on translation practices engendered by location, disciplinary constraints, and Western hegemonies in the work of cultural studies scholars from the Global South. Focusing on issues of translation beyond language and text, the article tackles cultural translation practices at the levels of theory and analysis, which scholars engage in to render their research legible within academic contexts that continue to pay lip service to stretching the canons of cultural studies curricula and intellectual agendas. How does the labor of cultural translation – often unremarked and invisible – shape the scope and possibilities of cultural studies research that addresses media and technology in the Global South? The article goes behind the frontstage of visible knowledge production to critically examine the directionality and discursive power of specific mechanisms of cultural translation – bridge concept, analogy, and metaphor – which are grounded in historical and geopolitical conditions that constrain the transformational goals of de-Westernizing cultural studies.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.

In Russian. Talk at the seminar at CyberFeminClub, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1998.
Выступление на семинаре в КиберФеминКлубе в Санкт-Петербурге, 1998 год. Сегодня я бы многое поменяла в своем выступлении на эту тему, тем более что многое уже опубликовано и текст устарел по своим ссылкам и по своему тону. Но тема национального вопроса, расового и этнического, никуда естественно не ушла, особенно в современном феминизме. Выбор "русского," а не "российского," феминизма в заглавии тоже был осознанный, самопозиционирующий по отношению к колониальному и имперскому наследию. История, которая тут описана - история местности и государственности - продолжается.

This essay proposes a simple argument about feminist practices in contemporary Iranian art: that the over-politicization of the Iranian feminist artists’ representational strategies by the liberal discourses of Western metropolitan art criticism has rendered these strategies susceptible to reification and assimilation into the narrative spaces of a market-driven art world. To this pervasive overpoliticization is added the inattention of con- temporary Iranian feminist artists to the ways in which representation itself can be implicated in sustaining gender inequality. From the feminist critiques presented in the works of artists such as Shirin Neshat, Newsha Tavakolian, and Parastou Forouhar, an awareness of representation’s complicity in the perpetuation of discriminatory gender politics is surreptitiously excluded. What I will argue in this essay is predicated on a close reading of a series of shifts in artistic strategies in works by the contemporary Iranian artist Ghazaleh Hedayat (b. 1979), which suggest a withdrawal from figurative representation and a gravitation toward what media theorist Laura U. Marks has termed haptic visuality. This move, along with a series of systematic attempts at foregrounding senses peripheral to sight, I propose, offers a new approach to feminism in contemporary Iranian art, relying primarily on an affective economy that enables a feminist subject as the interlocutor of art history while it simultaneously cultivates an alternative to the much-reified representational feminist art in Iran.

After providing a brief account of the evolution of the Indian feminist movement, I move on to analyse the development of the perception of Indian women, first through the lens of scholarly writings, and then through Indian films and TV series. Identifying distinct trends in the academic analyses of Indian women from the 1980s onwards, I collocate these writings within the larger framework of feminist discourses. The pervasive influence that scholars exert on the perceived identities of Indian women, shaping them in accordance with their own theoretical frameworks, becomes thus evident. Earlier studies, mainly adopting a structural paradigm and assuming the image of the Brahmanical woman as point of reference, allude to the dichotomy of ‘woman as goddess/woman as whore’, and can be associated with second-wave feminism; studies from the ‘90s onwards, endorsing an increasingly complex framework, have given voice to those women who do not conform to the Brahmanical value system, and have been correlated to third-wave feminism. While scholarly writings departed from the binary framework within which the image of Indian women is often caught, a similar shift cannot be distinctly observed in the film industry, which responds to the demands of the collective imagery. This poses queries about the extent to which academic discourses are representative of Indian women’s identities or rather of the current Western zeitgeist, and about the power imbalances that are perpetuated by ‘othering’ Indian women through making them repeated objects of study.

Duquet, Valentin (2017) "La femme noire âgée dans le roman francophone: entre mouroir et miroir," Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture: Vol. 2 , Article 8.

Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/vernacular/vol2/iss1/8

The enclosed paper is a submission to the 2017 Annual conference of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World.

In this chapter from Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse, I’ll argue that even in its most convincing incarnation—Herman Daly’s Steady State Economics—“sustainability” has been preempted and bastardized by the objectives of capital. Although Daly offers a persuasive case for treating the global economy as a subset of the planet’s limited ecology, he fails to see that the logic of capital accumulation depends not only on planetary resources but human and nonhuman labor subjugated according to a view of human nature he unwittingly endorses. Human chauvinism assigns all value according to the interests of a well-established subset of beneficiaries whose stake in preserving the status quo makes it imperative that “sustainability” be co-opted and deployed to profit-generation. The results are predictable and catastrophic—accelerating climate change and its attendant misery for human and nonhuman life.

In 1934, feminist and Partido Comunista Mexicano co-founder Consuelo Uranga gave a powerful speech before more than 1 000 activists at the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. As fascism loomed over Europe, she drew attention to U.S. imperialism in Mexico, Cuba, and Central America where, she announced, "the revolutionary spirit grows." Women were uniting "for their liberation and that of all their people." The congress convened women around a new agenda for feminism: one that opposed fascism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism, and that promoted women's political, civil, economic, and social rights, including state-sponsored maternity leave and child care. Uranga brought these goals back to Cuba and Mexico where they helped inspire new mass women's groups, including the Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer that would soon count over 60 000 members in Mexico. By the end of the decade, anti-fascist feminist organizations had multiplied, and

How universally useful are human rights in addressing violence against women? This article addresses this question by looking at the link between gender, ethnicity and human rights to uncover the complexities that underpin current debates about universal justice and multiculturalism. While my discussion of rape in Mexico and Pakistan illustrates significant particularities with respect to how violence against women is constituted in these different cultural contexts, it also shows that culturally specific manifestations of violence against women often share striking similarities in the way that they are allowed to persist, justified and made invisible. As such, they are part of a global mechanism that reproduces gender subordination in a predominantly patriachal world.

Cet article revisite le récit Victoire, les saveurs et les mots de Maryse Condé (2006) à la lumière de son autobiographie La Vie sans fards (2012). Victoire est l’histoire de sa grand-mère qu’elle n’a pas connue, une cuisinière illettrée à partir de laquelle Condé situe ses origines. Or, mon analyse textuelle comparative révèle que plusieurs éléments et traits de caractère présents dans Victoire étaient inspirés directement d’évènements de la vie de Condé, ce que La Vie sans fards révèle lorsque l’on juxtapose les deux œuvres. Je démontre que le personnage de Dernier Argilius (le premier amant de Victoire) est un avatar de Jean Dominique, le père Haïtien du premier fils de Condé, Denis Boucolon, qui l’abandonna. Dans ma deuxième partie, j’explique que la personnalité de Denis influença le portrait de la propre mère de Condé, Jeanne Quidal, étant enfant. Mon analyse permet d’affirmer que certains choix et pensées de la grand-mère Victoire étaient transposés directement à partir de ceux de Condé. À chaque fois, le thème central est la relation mère-enfant chaotique et fracturée. À partir de l’autobiographie de 2012, les précédents récits auto-fictifs de Condé peuvent désormais être défardés en analysant à quel point l’écrivaine puisait dans son propre vécu.

Gayle Kimball. Brave: Young Women’s Global Revolution (in two volumes, Vol. 1: Global Themes & Vol. 2: Regional Activism). [Equality Press], 2017. With introduction, b/w photographs and notes. x, 373 pp & xiv, 643 pp.
Morgan Brynnan
Finally, we hear the authentic voices of girls and young women from around the globe, from the traditional to the radical. Encompassing interviews and fieldwork from 88 countries, sociologist Gayle Kimball brings together over a decade of original research on female youth. Such research is sorely lacking, as most other works of this kind are regional and/or discuss youth without including their voices. Kimball goes beyond standardized internet surveys of middle-class youth, with in-depth video interviews available on the companion blog, https://globalyouthbook.wordpress.com, of young women from the favelas of Brazil to the upper-class in Saudi Arabia. Some of the interviews and contacts went on for over a decade as the young women moved into adulthood, and Kimball traveled for much of the research.
A monumental piece of research and analysis from Feminist Standpoint Theory, Kimball includes and compares other notable surveys of youth and women’s issues in the two volumes

""Rethinking Gendered Regulations and Resistances in Education highlights key debates on the theme of ‘regulation and resistance’, focusing on some of the most pressing contemporary issues in the field of gender and education today. It underlines the need for educational research to attend to historical and psychosocial specificity, chart local complexity and global disparity, de-colonise our Euro-western-centered gender analysis, and consistently engage with the economic and policy domains of education as researchers and practitioners, if we are to effectively tackle the diversity and complexity of gender equality issues in education.

Chapters in this collection showcase some of the varied and wide-ranging theoretical approaches at play in current gender and education scholarship, and raise questions about the types of research methods that can open up new ways of documenting processes of social and subjective struggle and transformation in education. It stimulates important thinking about what has been, what is and what can be, as we face the future of gender and educational engagement, struggle and debate.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.""

This past Sunday night, midwife Robin Lim was named CNN Hero of the Year at a formal award ceremony in Los Angeles, California. The award, which was given after eleven weeks of public voting on CNN.com, came with $250,000 to support Lim’s quest to provide quality prenatal, labor, birth, and postpartum care for the poor and underserved in Indonesia.  She accepted the award amidst a standing ovation, and closed her words of acceptance by simply saying: “Every mother counts. And health care is a human right.” (Read on)