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.     

Una mujer desnuda,de Lola Beccaria: Espacios y escrituras del cuerpo

This article discusses the applicability of postfeminist discourse to contemporary Spanish cultural production. Incited by the apparent confrontation with traditional feminist thinking, postfeminist theories are thought to be an obstacle to the rights of women in contemporary societies. Bearing in mind such complications of the term, our essay questions the recent criticism that postfeminism has received in the last few years and tries to elucidate how its implications affect the progressive development of the achievements of previous or simultaneous feminisms. Such discussion is presented in this essay through the study of the narrative texts of Lola Beccaria and La Fura dels Baus, who respectively present in her novel (Una mujer desnuda, 2004) and their film (Fausto 5.0, 2001) features of the feminine subjectivity in collision with the masculine gazes of the discourses that partake in the construction of the feminine characters.     

Hybrid territorialisation: A reconfiguration of rural spaces through gold mining in Upper Guinea

In this article, our aim is to analyse the process of territorialisation in the region of Upper Guinea following the rapid increase in gold mining exploitation since the 2000s. Territorialisation is analysed as a new way of doing space and creating boundaries in an area where boundaries have historically been negotiable and where artisanal and small-scale mining is plurisecular and gives rise to ephemeral spaces. Our first objective is to retrace changes in gold mining activities and spaces over the last decade, and to analyse the expansion of the mining industry as an extractive territorialisation, involving processes that lead to the fixation of the gold diggers’ mobility. Secondly, this article shows how this extractive territorialisation can in fact be analysed as a hybrid one, since it seems to lay the groundwork for state territorial control: first, it formalises spaces linked to and surrounding the exploitation area; second, it seems to correlate to a more general tendency of appropriation under the territorial model by local communities. Territorialisation, understood as both a political and a spatial process, serves thus as a starting point for the analysis of space formalisation in a peripheral region where the state is often seen by locals as mainly absent.     

‘Generation Emigration’: the politics of (trans)national social reproduction in twenty-first-century Ireland

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.     

Eating,serving, and self-realisation: food and modern identities in contemporary Indian women's writing

The ‘new Indian woman’ is often invoked in popular and academic discourse as the embodiment of a modern nation—the ‘new India’. Feminist studies of this figure typically focus on the body of the imagined ‘new woman’ as a site upon which modernity is inscribed, allowing little room for the agency of women who actively contest imposed identities and roles in the quintessentially modern project of self-determination. In this article I argue that narratives of food in contemporary fiction and fictionalised autobiographical writing by Indian women challenge both dominant feminist critiques of the ‘new woman’, and influential accounts of modernity as ‘rupture’ in masculinist theoretical literature. In these texts food, and particularly the practice of serving food to others, is used by women as a tool for gaining independence, as a weapon to combat oppression, and as a means of negotiating migrant identities, among other things. The texts thus demonstrate the importance of appreciating the gendered nature of modernity, recognising women's modernities to be genuinely transformative of the individual, as well as continuous with traditional and conventionally feminine practices rather than necessarily opposed to them.     

White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas,Ancestral Osage (Wah‐Zha‐Zhi) Territories,and the Violence of Forgetting

This article provides a critical analysis of the practices and discourses of white settler “men” in Southeast Kansas (Ancestral Osage Territories) by examining the inextricable links rural masculinity has with settler colonialism. I begin by underscoring how efforts in erasing Indigenous histories have been sanctioned through processes of dispossession, bordering, and nation‐state building. I then explore how hetero‐patriarchal rural hierarchies are assembled via capitalistic desires for private property; conservative Christianity's rhetoric of altruism and good intentions; white supremacist conceptions of race; and masculinist perspectives regarding work and gender. Next, I highlight how the spatial assertion of white settler masculinity reproduces colonial oppressions based upon interlocking subject positions and notions of difference. I continue by suggesting denial and disaffiliation are banal exercises of disavowal employed by white settler societies as attempts to forget colonial violence. I then finish by illustrating how a masculinist status quo might be disrupted, resisted, and transformed.     

Gender (plays) in Tanjung Bara mining camp in Eastern Kalimantan,Indonesia

All mining settlements are heavily gendered, not only because of the masculinity that the industry cultivates and flaunts, but also as a result of the power of capital manifested in the gendered class stratification of labour and space. When global capital penetrates remote resource peripheries in poorer countries, it also ushers mining experts, who are usually expatriate men from older industrialised and/or richer nations, into these areas. The cauldron of race–gender–class within the relatively small geographical space of the mining camp is worth exploring through a postcolonial feminist geographical perspective. This article explores the articulation and enactments of race–gender–class within such a location, the Tanjung Bara mining camp in eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia, where economic opportunities offered by the mining boom have blurred the insider–outsider dichotomy by attracting migrants from across Indonesia as well as from overseas. It analyses the performances of differential power enjoyed by women and men, foreigners and Indonesians within multiple sites in Tanjung Bara. In particular, it illuminates the sites of social interactions: the dining hall, the tennis ground, the golf course, the swimming pool and the poolside bar. The article suggests that place, and how each place is accessed by different actors, is central in shaping how individuals perform gender within mining contexts. But, at the same time it complicates the place-based binary performances of race by exploring how individuals continuously rewrite the strict but unwritten codes of behaviour.     

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.     

Embodying modernity: reading narratives of Indian women's sexual autonomy and violation

References are often made in contemporary Indian discourse, both popular and academic, to the ‘new Indian woman’, a subject position that is seen as coterminous with the emerging identity of the Indian nation as modern – the ‘new India’. This article unpacks key discourses that construct the ‘new woman’ in the public imagination and suggests that the modernity of this imagined figure is founded upon a notion of autonomy that is deeply embodied. While the characteristics of this embodied modernity challenge influential feminist arguments as to the ‘shallow’ modernity of the ‘new Indian woman’, it nonetheless has problematic implications from a feminist perspective. The narrative shaped by these discourses around the question of what it means to be modern not only perpetuates an historically pervasive reductionism in which woman is seen to be defined and determined by the corporeal but also, and more problematically, constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes women whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault. This narrative exclusion is perpetrated in at least three ways: through a discursive rendering of the woman as passive, the objectification of the woman, and a narrative structure that mimics the act of violation. Such erasure of the autonomy of sexually violated women is not inevitable, however, and an analysis of two ‘counter-narratives’ demonstrates how discourses of rape may both reinscribe the autonomy of such women and re-orient the reader to a position of empathy rather than opposition.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

Reframing autonomy in political geography: A feminist geopolitics of autonomous resistance

Autonomy is often universally defined and undertheorized, making invisible ways of knowing and understanding autonomy that are embodied and practiced. Alternate theorizations have drawn on anti-capitalist and alter-globalization movements and discourses to provide accounts of struggles for autonomy as they relate to self-determination, identity politics, and oppositional action, however, in many cases these accounts are still grounded in universal understandings. In this paper I use a feminist geopolitical perspective to re-read autonomy for difference within, alongside and outside of contemporary political geographies of autonomy. Empirical work in self-declared autonomous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, demonstrates that current political geographies of autonomy do not sufficiently explain the ongoing struggle for indigenous farmers in the highlands. In the article, I examine how autonomy is understood and practiced by subsistence corn and coffee farmers who have declared themselves autonomous and in resistance. I argue that in the case of farmers in resistance, autonomy is not just a political act, but also an embodied practice deployed through agricultural production and consumption. A feminist geopolitics assists with reframing autonomy and identifying different ways that it is understood and practiced. In examining the practices that farmers view as contributing to autonomy, different understandings and ways of knowing autonomy emerge.     

‘The white woman's burden’ – the racialized,gendered politics of volunteer tourism

Talking about race in volunteer tourism is like breaking a taboo. By critically exploring the racialized and gendered politics of volunteer tourism from the perspective of the ‘white savior complex,’ we seek to open new avenues of discussion to break this silence. We employ a postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze volunteer tourism. The meanings, practices, and policies of volunteer tourism development are informed by the racialized, gendered logics of colonial thought. If older colonial logics were predominantly masculinist, it considers the largely (white) women participants in contemporary volunteer tourism as a window onto current transformations in historic racialized and gendered logics. Colonial logics and discourses have shifted over time, from the erstwhile ‘civilizing mission’ to the subsequent mandate for development to contemporary depoliticized social causes such as ‘saving the environment.’ Volunteer tourism is an exemplar of this third discourse, as global North volunteer tourists, through their depoliticized logic of ‘saving’ and ‘helping’ the less fortunate others in the global South, inherits such distinctions and reproduces them further. Given the predominance of young white women in contemporary volunteer tourism, beyond these continuities, we also point to compelling shifts in this logic from the masculinism of historic colonial processes. We also highlight the religious dimension, how Christian ideologies which were so central to formal colonial processes continue to play an important role in volunteer tourism today. Future studies on volunteer tourism need to examine its emergence, growth, and popularity (with young white women in particular) from the perspective of historic and ongoing power relations having to do with race and racialized gender, which will enable a critical conversation on volunteer tourism that adds significantly to our knowledge of contemporary neo-colonial processes and their gendered dynamics.     

There's No‐Place Like Home: emotional geographies of researching ‘race’ and refuge provision in Britain

In this article we draw on feminist and psychodynamic theory to discuss processes of researching service provision for minoritised women escaping domestic violence. Our aim is to take seriously the ways particular contexts, in this case as produced by the process of researching this topic, elicit specific responses. In particular we offer some conceptual tools for analysing the emotions generated in these geographies. Taking the ‘space’ of the research team as our focus, we analyse how culturally defined meanings of ‘home’, community and refuge that were the focus of our research topic also functioned as a lens through which tensions and dynamics within the project team could be understood. Just as secrecy, silence and shame figured in our participants' accounts, so they circulated between the team. Drawing on the motifs of the intersection of ‘space’ and ‘place’ (as they occur within discourses and practices around domestic violence and minoritisation) as well as the psychodynamic notions of ‘mirroring’ and ‘parallel process’, we consider the extent to which the combined racialised, gendered and institutional relationships structuring the research team constituted it as a ‘non‐place’. This is because it was a space produced by the research process which, other than this, had no acknowledged tradition of history or memory to anchor it. We discuss how this space functioned paradoxically to foster creativity and innovation in generating discourses and practices working across difference, as well as inevitably at times recapitulating prevailing power (including racialised) relationships. We end by evaluating the usefulness of such concepts for wider analyses of intercultural and antiracist feminist practice.     

The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality,security, and territorialization

In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popularly known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. Using the frameworks of feminist geopolitics, femonationalism, and feminist geolegality, we analyze the debates around the Shah Bano and Triple Talaq judgments, looking at how the state employs and often usurps the narrative of gender equality and women's rights for its own purposes. We highlight how laws ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women (and the discourses that surround them) have the effect of strengthening the Hindu nationalist state, and furthering masculinist state building and territory making. By focusing debates on the categories of Muslim men and women, the law becomes a means to resolve the “problem” of Muslims in India.     

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.     

‘Stuffed if I know!’: Reflections on post‐modern feminist social research

This paper tells the tale of a social research project which has been situated within and shaped by the flux of current feminist debates. In particular it addresses the challenges posed by post‐modern theory to feminist social research which hinge on the status of women as an identity. If we are to accept that there is no unity, centre or actuality to discover for women, what is feminist research about? What might be the effects of researching women in mining towns as though such a group were a natural, self‐evident and coherent category? In this paper I explore the politics of situating a research project on women with respect to the discursive terrain already mapped out. I rethink action research methods in the light of post‐modern politics and research practice, and I argue that social research can play a role in discursive destabilisation and in the creation and promotion of alternative discourses of gendered subjects.     

Destabilizing homonormativity and the public/private dichotomy in North American lesbian domestic violence discourses

Developing and circulating community-based educational materials and offering workshops are common feminist approaches to addressing violence in lesbian relationships. This article explores the racialized exclusions in the public/private dichotomy in community-based educational discourses about ‘lesbian domestic violence’. An examination of community-based educational materials and interviews with lesbian and queer feminist educators illustrates how the public/private dichotomy produces exclusions and makes certain forms of violence enacted on certain bodies unthinkable and unintelligible. While these discourses challenge heteronormative constructions of violence, they have relied on a simple conceptual framework that has had the effect of promoting a dominant narrative or regime of truth privileging white, middle-class lesbian experiences. This article seeks to destabilize homonormative constructions by arguing for an anti-colonial feminist spatial analysis of violence in same-sex/gender relationships.     

Nineteenth-century British psychiatric writing about homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: the missing story

Recent accounts of the emergence of sexology have addressed the role played by homosexuals and sexual radicals in framing the questions posed by psychiatrists. This work has focused largely upon American and Continental psychiatry (with regard to homosexuality), with attention to British sexologists sometimes being tied to contemporary feminist concerns with the sexual double standard. In both cases, psychiatrists are shown to be following other social movements. In the existing work, British psychiatrists of the nineteenth century who wrote about homosexuality have been largely ignored because it appears to have been assumed that very little material existed prior to Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion (1897). In this article, I demonstrate that there were a number of British psychiatric discussions of sexual perversions, and that these discourses show an engagement on the part of British psychiatrists with the theoretical issues that occupied their (mostly) Teutonic colleagues, rather than evidence of any other external driving force behind the production of sexological discourses. These sexological texts are either original papers, or reviews of Continental sources, both of which illustrate the importation of sexological ideas into Britain before the writing of Havelock Ellis.     

‘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.     

Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on exploration, ethnography and representation (2000), it argues that contemporary Norwegian discourses on the Congo are steeped in the tradition of travelogues. Secondly, also drawing on Fabian, it argues that by representing the DRC as a topos ‐ a space without a place ‐ these discourses uncritically reproduce notions of decontextualised radical alterity.