Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below’

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led “universal” moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.     

‘Rearranging the ground’:1 public and private space in Belfast,Northern Ireland

This article examines imaginings and uses of place in the city of Belfast which challenge the conventionally gendered and sectarian place discourses dominating politics and society in Northern Ireland. These alternative imaginings are articulated in two artworks, ‘Home’, by Mary McIntyre, and ‘Street Signs’, by Aisling O'Beirn. I present readings of these pieces with reference to concepts of public and private which signify through socio-political, geographical and psychological orderings of space. Focusing on the construction of public and private space allows me to approach the issue of sectarian territorialisation in Belfast obliquely, while recognising its physical and psychological potency and the complexity of its operations; further, it facilitates the exploration of how gender and memory are made to matter spatially, in general and specifically in Belfast. This analytical perspective clarifies certain exclusions and oppressions inherent in the framing of space, but also offers understandings of how these may be destabilised, allowing unorthodox or marginal identities and practices to emerge as co-constituents of space.     

Progress,decline and redemption: understanding war and imagining Europe, 1870s–1890s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration.     

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.     

Of Other Spaces: Women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century in the UK

This article explores the first British university-associated women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucault, the article looks into the dualistic opposition between private and public, as well as women's attempts to transcend this dichotomy. In theorising women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, spaces in the interstices of power relations and dominant social structures, the author focuses on the interplay of contradicting discourses and strong power relations within these women's colleges. In this light, the author considers the ways women resisted, negotiated, but also compromised in their attempt to shape their lives and invent new ways of being in the world.     

‘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.     

Domestic violence,safe space and vicarious abuse: inside a Pennsylvania Exchange and Visitation Center

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the ‘safe space’ of an exchange and visitation center, this article examines center staffs’ experiences of vicarious abuse. Vicarious abuse refers to the emotional effects that occur when someone – other than the victim in the relationship – experiences or witnesses the coercively controlling tactics of a domestic violence abuser. This article examines the limitations of safe space that fails to consider the physical and emotional security needs of all who utilize the space. By tracing the fears of staff who interact with abusers, this article also frames domestic violence as a public safety concern with implications beyond the intimate. With recognition that staff experiences of vicarious abuse differ from the embodied experiences of victims in abusive relationships, this article applies a feminist geographic analytic to examine how the ‘safe space’ of an exchange and visitation center enables fear and normalizes vicarious abuse.     

Heroes and Invaders: Gay and Lesbian pride parades and the public/private distinction in New Zealand media accounts

Public space is constructed as heterosexual space in at least two senses. First, heterosexuality in public is regarded as unproblematic, whereas lesbian and gay identities are policed by subtle or overt means. Second, heterosexuality is not obviously marked in public. In this article these positions are used as a starting point to investigate the complexities of the relationships between heterosexuality, homosexuality and the public and private spheres. Much of the discussion takes as its basis the media coverage of New Zealand's lesbian and gay pride parades. Recent heterosexist discourse in New Zealand implies that gay men and lesbians are leaving the private sphere and are forcing a politicisation of both the public sphere and the metaphorical space of the private, heterosexual mind. A discursive inversion occurs whereby the homosexual subject becomes powerful and tyrannous, and the heterosexual is coerced and oppressed. Crucial to such discourse is a mobilisation of the conservative tendencies of liberalism, and an attendant denial of the privileged position granted to heterosexuality .     

In visibilities: the Groupe du 6 novembre and the production of liberal lesbian identity in contemporary France

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the little-known contributions of a Paris-based activist group of self-identified lesbians of colour, the Groupe du 6 novembre, which formed in 1999. Their self-published anthology, entitled Warriors/Guerrières, contests the racism of French feminist and LGBT community and culture and examines sexual minority visibility through an intersectional lens. This anthology was unfortunately contested and all but censored by organisations that purportedly sought to promote lesbian culture and self-expression. The Groupe du 6 novembre’s erasure is symptomatic of the ways in which the seemingly laudable aim of combating lesbian invisibility—within both scholarship and activism—can actually serve to marginalise racialised lesbians. Through close readings of the Groupe’s poetry and prose and documentation of their history, this article will argue that dominant conceptions of lesbian sexual identity are imbued with liberal racism and Republican universalism. At a time of increasing concern that certain forms of feminist and LGBT politics are being co-opted by the State to racist ends, the Groupe du 6 novembre constitutes an essential chapter in French feminist history and literature.     

Better than Orgasm: Sex,Authenticity and Intimacy in the New Women's Movement in Norway

Authenticity and intimacy have become key expectations in contemporary romantic relationships. At the same time, it is taken for granted that sex forms a part of such relationships. This article explores how the relationship between sex, authenticity and intimacy was written about and negotiated in the Norwegian community of lesbian radical feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. The construction of male sexuality as fundamentally and inherently different from female sexuality in the periodicals of the lesbian movement made thinking and writing about women's sexual desire and genital sex difficult. This article further argues that the concept of genital sex potentially conflicted with the notions of authenticity and intimacy pursued by the lesbian radical feminist community. While authenticity and intimacy were constructed as preferable companions to sex in the New Left and in large parts of the women's movement, the Norwegian lesbian radical feminists often constructed authenticity and intimacy in opposition to genital sex.     

Taking Stands: A feminist perspective on 'other' women's activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island

The author examines alternative and possibly contradictory positions associated with 'other' women's political activism in forestry and land use debates. The article traces research on women's activism, noting that the main focus has been placed on community management and social mothering as sources of motivation, political perspective and activity. The author suggests that these explanations have been imbued with a predetermination of appropriate action (progressiveness) that effectively renders as radical the activism by some women while ignoring the activism by others. This separation and privileging has arisen, in part, because of a theoretical preoccupation by feminist researchers with illustrating women's marginality and an empirical focus on public actions. When feminist perspectives have been applied to women's participation in environmental debates, there has been a narrowing of visibility of women's motivations, perspectives, and actions. It is argued that feminist conceptions need to go beyond maternal/community explanations and advocate that activism be considered in terms of its embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts. The author suggests that embeddedness overcomes the implicit reverse hierarchy of marginalisation discourses and includes both private and public spaces and actions in conceptions of women's activism. Turning to northern Vancouver Island, the author illustrates how embeddedness helps to render visible and intelligible, the multiplicity, consistencies and contradictions in women's positions and activities in support of conventional forestry. For these reasons, the author believes that embeddedness is useful as a means to generate dialogue across current divisions among women, forms of activism, and notions of appropriate relations with non-human nature.     

On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women

This article explores the changing contours of the relationship between gender and the distinction between public and private spaces in western cities. Our account returns to the emergence of a modern understanding of public and private spaces to highlight its class and gender connotations. Then, focusing on middle-class women's experiences of public spaces, we use examples from the mid-nineteenth century and the late-twentieth century to illustrate continuities and changes. We emphasize persistent but evolving exclusions from the category "public," which have been sustained in part by changing delineations of "public space" associated with consumer activities. In developing our argument, we question representations of public spaces invoked in arguments about its decline and argue for a politics sensitive to different experiences of such spaces.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production

This article draws on a case study of bovine life in the US dairy industry to observe the power relations and violent networks of commodification involved. I use the terms gendered commodification and sexualized violence to understand the lives of animals in the industry and the discourses that are employed to reproduce its practices. Focusing on sex and gender, concepts which have long been classic in feminist geography, this article explores the sexually violent commodification of both female and male animals in dairy production. In addition to the ways in which both are exploited for their productive and reproductive capacities, male animals are also discursively conceptualized as perpetrators of the violence against the females. This article engages with geographies of the body and animal geographies in order to extend geographies of the body to other-than-human bodies and in order to feature the body more prevalently in animal geographies. This attention to the animal body ultimately reveals the pervasiveness of sexual violence and the consequences of gendered commodification for both nonhuman and human others.     

A geopolitics of migrant women,mobility and abortion access in the Republic of Ireland

Drawing on three select case studies and feminist engagements with mobility studies, I illustrate the Irish state’s use of a dialectic of gendered and racialized citizenship, and mobility and fixity, in the creation of ‘new geographies of belonging and exclusion’. Using detailed analyses from select cases, I argue for more nuanced feminist engagements with mobility that acknowledge and analyse ‘processes and trajectories’ in relation to a geopolitics of abortion – one that eschews undifferentiated uses of the category migrant and discourses of tourism, in analysing abortion in the Republic of Ireland. I expose how their use constructs limited ideas about gender, nation and Irishness to assure exclusions from Ireland, and from its diaspora.     

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.     

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.     

Kitchenspace: Gendered territory in central Mexico

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research with multiple women and kitchens in two central Mexico communities, this article argues for kitchenspace—indoor and outdoor spaces where food preparation takes place—as gendered territory. Using a feminist political ecology approach, it explores private and semi-public space in the everyday, household kitchen and the fiesta or ‘smoke’ kitchen at the center of community celebrations. Marked as gendered territory by distinct social boundaries and gendered, discursive strategies, kitchenspace is vital to the maintenance of traditional forms of organization and generational transmission of cultural and embodied knowledge. This article questions assumptions about ‘the kitchen’ as a site of social isolation and women's oppression that often characterize feminist approaches. It considers embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts and the importance of everyday life in private and public spaces.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.