Gender and the Australian Parliament: Putting the Political Scientist into the Picture

This paper draws on a study of gender and politics in the Australian parliament in order to make a contribution to methodological debates in feminist political science. The paper begins by outlining the different dimensions of feminist political science methodology that have been identified in the literature. According to this literature five key principles can be seen to constitute feminist approaches to political science. These are: a focus on gender, a deconstruction of the public/private divide, giving voice to women, using research as a basis for transformation, and using reflexivity to critique researcher positionality. The next part of the paper focuses more specifically on reflexivity tracing arguments about its definition, usefulness and the criticisms it has attracted from researchers. Following this, I explore how my background as a member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1987 to 1996 provided an important academic resource in my doctoral study of gender and politics in the national parliament. Through this process I highlight the value of a reflexive approach to research.     

Searching for feminist geographies: mappings outside the discipline in Poland

Abstract

Feminist geography in Poland does not exist as a sub-discipline of geography. While there are individual Polish geographers pushing for feminist perspectives, most feminist analyses of issues relating to place, space and politics of location can be found within gender studies or feminist sociology. In this sense, feminist geography in Poland cannot compare to Anglophone feminist geography and attempts to incorporate it within such an established field risks being reductive. Instead, in this report, we shift the focus to the scholarship and activism that does exist in Poland, outside of geography. This contribution focuses on shedding light on geographical questions such as the body, the city and gendered geopolitics that have been recurring themes in gender studies, feminist sociology and feminist activism in Poland. We conclude by pointing to the need to mobilise broadly, and internationally, between disciplines with the intention of de-centering dominant knowledges. For feminist scholarship this is particularly important in the context of recent political successes of right-wing forces.     

The impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science

The discipline of political science has remained male dominated in most parts of the world. Women have organised within political science associations both to raise the status of women in the profession and to try to transform the discipline. This article is a personal account of the 25‐year history of the Women's Caucus of the Australasian Political Studies Association and its successes and failures. While the status of women in the profession has improved and the journal has become more gender inclusive, the impact of feminist scholarship on political science curriculum remains patchy. Space has been made for gender scholarship and a chapter added to textbooks and disciplinary histories, but the approach is additive rather than transformative. One contributing factor may be increased fragmentation of the discipline.     

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.     

'Are we there yet?' feminist political geographies

Our purpose in this paper is to chart the increasing and diffuse importance of feminist scholarship to political geography. We argue that feminist geographers have spatialized multiple forms of the political, rather than simply offering a singular feminist perspective to the literature. To canvas that breadth we suggest three distinct (albeit obviously related) takes on the political in feminist political geography: the distributive, the antagonistic, and the constitutive. This framework showcases the impressive breadth of feminist political geography and perhaps works against a sense of marginality that stems from such diffuseness. We illustrate our argument with particular reference to research that has appeared in Gender, Place and Culture over the past decade.     

Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural,social and political moments

Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.     

Towards a feminist geopolitics

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. 'Feminist' in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.     

Pepperoni or Broccoli? On the Cutting Wedge of Feminist Environmentalism

Feminist environmentalism has become a significant intellectual and social policy force across fields as diverse as public health, political economy, philosophy, science, and ecology. Feminist environmental theory and activism together are challenging and redefining foundational principles, from animal rights to the environmental economy of illness and well-being, from global political economy to the role of Big Science as the primary arbiter of the state of the environment. Animal rights is one of the most intellectually challenging and innovative areas of intellectual activity and social activism, and within feminist environmentalism is one of the most radical subfields. This paper provides an overview of activity in this subfield, starting from the observation that feminist environmental scholarship and grassroots activism on animal rights pivot around three concerns: elucidating the commonalities in structures of oppressions across gender, race, class, and species; developing feminist-informed theories of the basis for allocating "rights" to animals; and exposing the gendered assumptions and perceptions that underlie human relationships to nonhuman animals. At the same time, the serious contemplation of animal rights makes a considerable contribution to destabilizing identity categories and adds new dimensions to theorizing the mutability of identity.     

The "Trial" of Lee Benson: Communism, White Chauvinism, and The Foundations of the "New Political History" in the United States

Lee Benson was one of the first American political historians to suggest a “systematic” revision of traditional political history with its emphasis on narrow economic class analysis, narrative arguments, and over‐reliance on qualitative research methodologies. This essay presents Benson's contributions to the “new political history”—an attempt to apply social‐science methods, concepts, and theories to American political history—as a social, cultural, and political narrative of Cold War‐era American history. Benson belonged to a generation of ex‐Communist American historians and political scientists whose scholarship and intellectual projects flowed—in part—out of Marxist social and political debates, agendas, and paradigmatic frameworks, even as they rejected and revised them. The main focus of the essay is the genesis of Benson's pioneering study of nineteenth‐century New York state political culture, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, with its emphasis on intra‐class versus inter‐class conflict, sensitivity to ethnocultural determinants of political and social behavior, and reliance on explicit social‐science theory and methodology. In what follows, I argue that The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy has its roots in Benson's Popular Front Marxist beliefs, and his decade‐long engagement and subsequent disenchantment with American left‐wing politics. Benson's growing alienation from Progressive historical paradigms and traditional Marxist analysis, and his attempts to formulate a neo‐Marxism attentive to unique American class and political realities, are linked to his involvement with 1940s radical factional politics and his disturbing encounter with internal Communist party racial and ideological tensions in the late 1940s at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.     

Emplacing Current Trends in Feminist Historical Geography

In this article, the authors assess some of the major trends within anglophonic feminist historical geography appearing in the decade since Rose & Ogborn called for the development of an explicitly feminist approach to the subfield. In examining the 'geography' of feminist historical geographies, three main categories of scholarship are evident: a 'new' historical geography of North America, portions of which are informed by feminist theories and methods; a British school of feminist historical geography with a focus on the discipline of geography, geographical knowledges and colonialism/imperialism; and feminist historical geography interventions in cultural politics of space and place. A diversity of feminist methods and epistemologies appears across the literature. In an attempt to avoid a reading of these trends as better or worse approximations of historical 'progress', the authors conceptualize them as emplaced within a number of specific social and spatial contexts. Most recent work is concerned with the production of gender differences as they are worked through economic, political, cultural and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. The continued need simply to write women into historical narratives and geographies, however, is also evident. The work of feminist historical geography questions and challenges geography's masculinist historical record.     

Feminist digital geographies

At a moment when disciplinary attentions are turning to the digital as a subject and object of geographic inquiry, we consider enduring contours and new directions in feminist digital geographies scholarship. We revisit the centrality of feminist critiques of Science to critical digital geographies and their predecessors, identifying axes of scholarly engagement that have emerged from feminist theory and praxis. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the resounding whiteness and heteronormativity of these theoretical origins. In the second half of the article, we trace new horizons of contemporary digital geographies scholarship that engage queer and critical race theory, postcolonial feminism, and black and queer code studies. These theoretical moves give voice to longstanding silences and are indispensable to a political and ethical digital geographic scholarship and praxis, as well as to re-making our technologies and ourselves as digital subjects.     

Intervention: Engaging post-foundational political theory requires an ‘enmeshed’ approach

This intervention argues for renewed engagements with post-foundational political theory (PFPT) within political geography. We feel that post-foundational political geography may be on the cusp of becoming consolidated as a distinct and expansive approach to political geographic scholarship, but we argue that reductionist and binary caricatures of its central distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ must be avoided for it to reach its full potential. To this end, we suggest that ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ need to be considered as more ‘enmeshed’ than they have often been represented. We write as four political geographers and will, each in our own ways, highlight how an ‘enmeshed’ approach to PFPT can better translate its conceptual interventions into political geographic research whilst facilitating productive encounters with the broader worlds of critical geographic inquiry.     

The intimate politics of secularism and the headscarf: the mall,the neighborhood,and the public square in Istanbul

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Bü?ra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.     

Theorising 'Difference' in Aotearoa/New Zealand {1}

This paper discusses theoretical and political tensions that emerged for me as a result of exploring the implications of 'positionality'. The discussion is set in debates about the differences within and between women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Many New Zealand feminists, both Maori and Pakeha, have become concerned with the task of establishing an autonomous existence premised on unique identities. While recognising the political imperative that informs this politics and theorising, my own work has led me to theoretical understandings about the constitution of identities that could easily be construed as antagonistic to local aspirations. My dilemma, therefore, is how to produce feminist theory that compromises neither political or intellectual credibility. Positionality, I argue, involves not just positioning in a theoretical and ideological place, but also in a geographical location and, by implication, the politics of that place.     

Theory and Practice As Responsibility

Abstract

Ralph Hancock's felicitous term “the responsibility of reason” opens a significant revision within political theory. It places primacy in practical reason and reminds us that theory is itself a mode of practice. He finds the deepest affirmation of this insight in Tocqueville's elevation of the art of association into the first principle of the science by which politics is comprehended. There is no science of politics apart from the exercise of responsibility itself.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

The imperative of struggle: feminist and gender geographies in the United States

Abstract

The groundbreaking work of feminist and gender geographies has substantially advanced the nature of inquiry in the United States. In centering gendered ways of knowing, geographers have reframed disciplinary analyses of landscape, place, and space by troubling the normativities associated with lives, politics, and location. Though undoubtedly thriving, the visibility and impact of feminist and gender geographies have been confronted by history and changing political contexts. This essay extracts challenges to conceptualizing and doing feminist and gender geographies in the United States. By linking national freedom struggles to the current political climate and by reviewing the landscape of U.S. higher education, the essay asserts that scholars engaged with feminist and gender geographies can find utility in reflection, and by doing so, can resist contemporary disciplinary challenges to theory and practice.     

Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’

An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation thought conscientiously can also be a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward. We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation as a geographical practice that is mindful of how citational practices can be a tool for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge production. We offer practical and conceptual reasons for carefully thinking through the role of citation as a performative embodiment of the reproduction of geographical thought.     

Saving and fearing Muslim women in ‘post-communist’ Poland: troubling Catholic and secular Islamophobia

Sexual politics play a key role in anti-Muslim narratives. This has been observed by scholarship problematising liberal feminist approaches towards ‘non-Western’ subjects focusing on countries such as France, the USA and the Netherlands. Yet interrogations into how these debates play out in European national contexts that are located outside of the European ‘West’ have attracted significantly less scholarly attention. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Poland this article aims to begin to fill this gap by analysing the centrality of feminist discourses within Islamophobic agendas in Poland. The article asks how discourses around women’s rights are mobilised simultaneously, and paradoxically, by both secular and Catholic groups in ‘post-communist’ Poland. By showcasing how feminist sentiments are employed by ideologically opposing groups, we sketch out some of the complexities in the ways Islamophobia operates in a Central and Eastern European context.