Extraordinary Satisfactions: Lesbian Visibility in Seventeenth–Century Pornography in England

This article analyses seventeenth–century pornographic literature and popular ballads to explore alternative representations, and hence interpretations, of female same–sex desire than those presented by either early modern legal, medical and religious discourse in which the image of the tribade predominates, or the homoerotic prose and poetry of female writers. It argues that early modern culture was not limited to interpreting sexual acts between women as the result of either a physical abnormality (clitoral hypertrophy) or the desire to live as a man, and thence to take on his sexual as well as social role.     

Negotiating In/visibility: The Political Economy of Lesbian Activism and Rights Advocacy

Efforts to address HIV/AIDS have brought new opportunities and resources to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) activism in many parts of the developing world. However, increased attention in terms of both political opportunities and economic resources is uneven across the diverse population of LGBT peoples and activists. Lesbian activists have reaped far fewer benefits than their gay men counterparts. Building on existing approaches to movement visibility and invisibility, we posit a ‘political economy of in/visibility’ to analyse lesbian activism in China and Myanmar, where activists face particularly restrictive political and economic conditions. Rather than focus on visibility as a movement pre‐condition, objective or strategy, we examine the sources of in/visibility and their interactions with activists’ agency; in/visibility emerges from political and economic conditions, but is continuously reshaped by activists who negotiate them. We demonstrate that, despite challenges, lesbian activists respond in ways that help advance LGBT rights advocacy broadly, sometimes even with tactics that their more visible gay counterparts avoid. These interactions subsequently influence the conditions that shape in/visibility. Investigating the political economy of in/visibility, therefore, has significant implications for understanding not only lesbian activism, but also LGBT advocacy and collective mobilization, especially under politically and economically restrictive conditions.     

Staging Politics and Activism in the Kirchner Era: Documentary and Fiction in El estudiante

This article claims that Santiago Mitre's 2011 film El estudiante stages a confrontation regarding the notions of politics and activism that polarize Argentina in the Kirchner era (and arguably Latin America in the so-called New Left in general). The mixture of documentary and fiction and the filmic images' particular combination of indexical and symbolic components unveil a tension between a practical notion that considers politics to be the result of either gestión or emotions, and an ideal notion that sees politics as a series of principles and concepts and sees activism as a morally subordinate sphere. Thus, on the one hand, the article breaks with a monolithic view of politics and activism during Kirchnerismo, unpacking a confrontation that can resignify these concepts. On the other, it helps to further understand how the mixture of documentary and fiction, which is quite typical in new Argentine cinema, can be read ideologically.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades,Affective Politics,and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco

Between 2013 and 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the rise of “Google bus blockades”—a form of protest against gentrification, growing inequality and a housing crisis linked to the economic impacts of the technology sector on the region. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with housing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article argues that the disruptive tactic of “the Google Bus blockade” can be understood as a form of infrastructural activism—a flexible political form that uses the interruption of infrastructure for political ends. The blockades politicised the “Google buses” and transformed them into symbols of gentrification and sites of resistance. Protestors constructed a political analysis that drew connections between struggles for housing, racial and environmental justice and brought together material, affective and political critiques of infrastructure.     

Doing Archaeology as a Feminist: Introduction

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long running “feminist method debate” in the social sciences.     

Playing with Infrastructure like a Carishina: Feminist Cycling in an Era of Democratic Politics

This article discusses transit infrastructure as a site of radical possibility and limitation in an age of participatory democracy across Latin America. I focus on multiple spaces of participation in Quito, Ecuador to elucidate how citizenship and infrastructure are co‐produced through gendered processes. I first analyse city space of Quito from a gendered and infrastructural lens to consider how urban environments are dictated by violence and insecurity. Then, against this backdrop, I explore the spatial strategies of the feminist bicycle collective, Carishina en Bici, which translates from Quechua to “bad housewives that cycle”. Here, I draw on the concept of “deep play” to reveal how public practices in Quito question the equitable impacts of local democratic experimentation. To examine Carishinas’ spatial practices, I focus on an urban alleycat race, the Carishina Race, to show how strategic practices of solidarity reinsert feminist possibilities in urban space.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

How to Queer the Past Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms and the Archaeology of Identity

A queer archaeology is often equated to looking for ancient homosexuality. As a challenge to heteronormative practice, queer theory, instead, provides a framework for engaging with all aspects of identity formation and the processes and behaviors that mediate it. This article examines two primary points: (1) queer theory’s relationship to feminist practice and archaeology and (2) its application to the construction and production of difference among ancient Maya commoners. Through this analysis, I explore how investigations of identity and status can and should be part of a queer analysis. Work at the Northeast Group, part of the site of Chan, Belize illustrates how focus on internal class composition, specifically change through time, “queers” traditional models of ancient Maya class formation.