Cultural Imperialism and Women’s Movements: Thinking Globally

This essay appeals to feminists everywhere to find ways to fight imperialist forces all over the globe by creating linkages and bridges between women who are in similar predicaments which are created by multinational corporations. Women’s movements are complex phenomena, and there is no fixed, ‘sacred’ theory or path to follow, because women develop consciousness of themselves differently in every place depending upon their social, political, economic, cultural and historical context. But the goal of creating a humane, free and just society should be the guiding principle in making theory, not just talking of individual ‘identities’ and ‘differences’.     

Women’s History in France: An Ill-Defined Subject

As a new approach and subject, women’s history in France is ill-defined as an academic category and remains on the margins of mainstream history. The concept of gender, a necessary analytical tool, cannot in itself suffice; the historicity of the tensions between men and women must be restored. At stake is the tension between a continuous linear history and the historical discontinuities which arise in its gaps and flaws, the tension between female individuals [individues] who, as objects of representation, are taken to be representative of their sex, and critical subjects who confront representation as a form of power.     

Alternative Cartographies of the British Women’s Movement

Books reviewed in this article: Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 Peter Gordon and David Doughan, with a foreword by Sheila Rowbotham, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations 1825–1960 Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography of Women in Britain, 1550–1900: A Select Annotated Bibliography     

Women’s Costume and Feminine Civic Morality in Augustan Rome

Augustus claimed that the moral decay of the Roman Republic was especially due to Roman women who had forsaken their traditional role of custos domi (‘preserver of the house/hold’). In reforming feminine morality, Augustus created a new pictorial language that troped the feminine body as a ‘moral sign’ of civic morality and authorized a distinctive costume for women. Sebesta investigates the relationship between women’s garments, the female body and the Roman concept of feminine civic morality.     

The Pantheon of Feminist Culture: Women’s Movements and the Organization of Memory

The collective memory of feminist movements, like that of nation-states, is comprised of ‘invented traditions’ and embodied in ‘lieu de mémoire’ (sites of memory). This essay considers national and international examples of collective memory, including International Women’s Day, showing how celebrations of historical events and commemorations of the past were used to cement group cohesion and define boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The essay proposes a typology of collective memory and examines the implications of the attenuation of memory in contemporary society.     

Economic Policy and Women’s Informal Work in South Africa

This article examines the gender dimensions of the growth in informal and flexible work in South Africa and the government’s policy response to this. It outlines the growth in informal and flexible work practices and, as illustrative examples, analyses how trade and industrial policies and labour market policies are impacting on the growth of informal and flexible work. It is argued that the South African government’s trade and industrial policies are shifting the economy onto a path of capital intensification. Allied to this, firms are undergoing a process of extensive restructuring. These developments are further promoting the growth of flexibilization and informalization, and thereby disadvantaging women. The article demonstrates that whilst the government offers a vast package of support measures to big business, its policy is largely irrelevant to the survivalist segment of small business, where most women in the informal economy are to be found. The picture for labour policy is more diverse. Aspects of the labour legislation are promoting the growth of a dual labour market, whilst there seems to be some tightening up of practices aimed at bypassing aspects of the protection provided to workers.     

Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth

This study examines the recollections of medieval English men, found in proof–of–age inquests, regarding their participation in the rite of the purification of women after childbirth. Because the rite of purification was reserved to women, scant attention has been paid to how this rite and the customs surrounding it played in the lives of medieval men. These men’s recollections situate postpartum purification within the festivities celebrating the birth of a man’s heir. For them, it is a public event celebrating paternity and lineage, and a forum for the negotiation of social relationships.     

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village‐based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over‐representation of better‐off and higher‐status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.     

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Women’s movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage‐based women’s wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women’s organizations with more far‐reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening‐up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women’s organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women’s relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women’s movements in a position to challenge various state‐linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges.     

Unequal Knowledges in Jharkhand,India: De‐Romanticizing Women’s Agroecological Expertise

Taking the Jharkhand region of India as a case study, this article uses empirical data to intervene in ‘women, environment and development’ and ecofeminist debates regarding women’s environmental knowledge. The article first outlines the adoption of gender/environmental issues into development planning and considers the dangers of overestimating women’s agroecological knowledges and assuming that they can easily participate in development projects. It then highlights the local complexities of environmental knowledge possession and control with reference to gender and other variations in agricultural participation, decision‐making and knowledge transfers between villagers’ natal and marital places. Particular emphasis is placed on the economic, socio‐cultural and ‘actor’ related factors that supplement gender as an influence on task allocation, decision‐making, knowledge distribution and knowledge articulation. The article concludes that given the socio‐cultural constraints women face in accumulating and vocalizing environmental knowledge, simplistic participatory approaches are unlikely to empower them. Instead, more flexible, site‐specific development initiatives (coupled with wider structural change) are required if opportunities are to be created for women to develop and use their agroecological knowledges.     

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

This paper draws on ethnographic research in Chennai to unpack the pre‐emptive logic that shapes anti‐suicide interventions at hostels—dormitories—for college‐going women in this city. Its central contention is that a concern for the production of a presumed future becomes, in hostels, a governmental technology that is used to limit young women’s lifeworlds in the present. These regimes of intervention reinforce the unliveability of attachments, intimacies and affects that popular discourse and scaled‐up demographic narrative associate with the potential for suicide. Building from this, the paper also shows that such regimes engender feelings of suffocation and attrition among the young women who live in hostels. “Being slowly killed”, as they call it, draws attention to suicide not as a spectacular event but as a site where the terms of everyday life are remade.     

Tackling the Down Side: Social Capital,Women’s Empowerment and Micro‐Finance in Cameroon

Micro‐finance programmes are currently dominated by the ‘financial self‐sustainability paradigm’ where women’s participation in groups is promoted as a key means of increasing financial sustainability while at the same time assumed to automatically empower them. This article examines the experience of seven micro‐finance programmes in Cameroon. The evidence indicates that micro‐finance programmes which build social capital can indeed make a significant contribution to women’s empowerment. However, serious questions need to be asked about what sorts of norms, networks and associations are to be promoted, in whose interests, and how they can best contribute to empowerment, particularly for the poorest women. Where the complexities of power relations and inequality are ignored, reliance on social capital as a mechanism for reducing programme costs may undermine programme aims not only of empowerment but also of financial sustainability and poverty targeting.     

Poverty,Dependence and ‘Women’: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand

This essay explores the construction of ‘women’ in New Zealand during the 1930s, when the social legislation of the First Labour Government was being formulated and enacted. It examines the documentation produced by the legislative process in relation to the autobiographical texts of John A. Lee and Mary Isabella Lee, arguing that there are parallel conflicts in each set of texts. There is a series of double movements: the offer of the state’s protection to women is at the same moment a gesture of defence; ‘women’ are simultaneously constructed as ‘helpless’ and—not so overtly—as needing to be controlled.     

Post‐9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war‐promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post‐9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self‐appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”     

‘The Law is to Blame’: The Vulnerable Status of Common Property Rights in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The context of this article is the surge in large‐scale land acquisitions of African lands by local and foreign investors for commercial food, livestock, oil palm and carbon trading purposes. Involuntary loss of rural lands at scale is not new to Africa's majority rural poor, nor is it driven by a single factor. Historically inequitable land relations within communities, compounded by a century of capitalist transformation, take their toll. This study argues, however, that the weak legal status of communal rights is the most pernicious enabler in their demise, allowing governments to take undue liberties with their citizens’ lands, and particularly those which are unfarmed and by tradition held in common. While international acquiescence to abusive domestic law helps entrench the diminishment of majority land rights, the domestic laws themselves are principally at fault and necessarily the target for change. This legal vulnerability is explored here through an examination of more than twenty African land laws.     

Orphans’ Land Rights in Post‐War Rwanda: The Problem of Guardianship

In 1994, the Rwandan civil war and genocide produced thousands of orphans. Alongside the war, the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in Rwanda has produced a current population of about 300,000 orphans — many of whom are compelled to head households. These orphans urgently require land use rights, but many find that their rights to their deceased parents’ customary land holdings are denied or restricted by their guardians and others. Despite the legal protections for children that are guaranteed within Rwanda's laws, the reality is that many guardians do not respect orphans’ land rights and few orphans have sufficient access to administrative and legal forums to assert and defend these rights. In contrast to most accounts in the literature that discuss more generally the issue of African orphans’ land rights in the context of adults’ land rights, this article focuses on specific cases in which Rwandan orphans independently pursued their land rights. Ultimately, the article concludes that in Rwanda — and elsewhere in Africa — government officials should re‐examine their ideas about guardianship and grant orphans urgent attention as individuals and as a special interest group.