Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century

This article recounts the stories told about Véronique Eugénie Allix‐Luce and her school for Muslim girls founded in Algiers in 1845. Drawing on English feminist writings, including correspondence and travel narratives, it explores how women, such as Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes, constructed this French schoolteacher as a modern day heroine. French colonial authorities and women's travel narratives provide a more complicated portrait and reveal the weight of cultural and gender politics within the French ‘civilising mission’ that ultimately erased the memory of this initiative. By retelling the story of Mme Luce's school through the double perspective of British and French contemporaries, the article offers insight into the disappearance of women's roles in the French story of Algerian colonisation.     

Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India

Contemporary historiography, especially in North American, European and Australian history, now includes a fairly respectable body of literature on men and masculinity. While this literature has produced important contributions to the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis, there has also been some wariness within feminist scholarship on the grounds that the issue of the gendered organisation may be evaded. Reflecting on the question ‘what is involved in writing a history of masculinity?’, this article considers the potential contribution that the historiography of colonial India offers to the study of masculinity     

‘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.     

(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts a gendered analysis of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in India, particularly focused on women’s position within the movement, the continuum of gender based violence that they experience and the potential for transformative politics. The contemporary Maoist movement in India has been informed by a stated commitment to ‘progressive’ gender politics and social transformations; in that it marks a departure from the Naxalite movement of the 60s and 70s. Yet women remain concentrated in the group’s lower ranks and are absent from leadership positions. In addition, sexual and gender based violence and discrimination within the movement further undermine the commitment of the revolution to create opportunities for transformative politics including gender justice and equality. We consider it important that women’s lived experiences of the conflict - as combatants, supporters as well as civilians affected by it - are brought to the foreground. Drawing from postcolonial feminist approaches, we reflect on the challenges and possibilities for feminist politics and ethics within the Indian Maoist movement. We conclude that the rhetoric and reality of gender equality within the Maoist movement provides a unique opportunity to further investigate and analyze the ways in which feminist activism and the women’s movement in India have alienated the concerns of marginalized women from dalit and adivasi communities.     

Decolonization in the Heart of Empire: Some Fanonian Echoes in France Today

Abstract: This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post‐colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re‐articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post‐colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of “autonomy” and “mixity”. “Autonomy” (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio‐politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter‐colonial than post‐colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique “live” in France today.     

Mapping women in Tehran's public spaces: a geo-visualization perspective

Functioning public spaces, as ‘public’ political, social, and cultural arenas of citizen discourse, affect not only the citizen's quality of life, but are also indispensable infrastructure in democratic societies. This article offers a nuanced understanding of Iranian women's usage, feelings, and preferences in public spaces in present-day Tehran by not simply importing Western theories that sustain distinctions between traditional and modern women, but instead by hearing women's stories. This article raises concerns related to the gender identities, the politics of space, and design of these places. Meidan-e-Tajrish, Sabz-e-Meidan, and Marvi Meidancheh in Tehran accommodate an ethnographic visualization of gendering space. The process by which Iranian women attach symbolic meanings to those public spaces offers insight into the mutual construction of gender identities and space politics. The contrasting urban locations, different design styles, and distinct social activities provide an excellent comparison between the selected public spaces. Findings suggest caution in using gender as an essential category in feminist geography research to better represent the diversity of experiences in public spaces. Binary categorization of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, public versus private, and male versus female in urban studies should be carefully validated as Iranian women's lived experiences challenge the homogenizing Western theories, particularly the predominant critics of modern public spaces in North America. The research process also highlights the benefits of geo-visualization in understanding the complex interaction between gender identities and the built environment.     

Women,Communities, Neighbourhoods: Approaching Gender and Feminism within UK Urban Policy

In recent years some commentators have looked at successive waves of UK urban policy from the perspective of gender, although these commentaries have been somewhat marginal within wider discussions of urban policy and politics. This article seeks to make the case for a renewed emphasis on gender, which moves beyond tracing the role of men and women in relation to urban policy programmes, in two particular ways. First it is argued that a more sophisticated analysis of the gendered nature of urban governance is needed, in other words how forms of gendered labour, subjectivity and power work through and within policy projects; and second that there should be a wider consideration of what feminist visions of cities and politics, both past and present, might contribute to the project of a critical, and hopeful, analysis of urban policy and politics. The paper seeks to make a practical as well as theoretical intervention in relation to gender and feminist perspectives on UK urban policy. It is argued that there has been a silence around such issues in recent years, both in analysis and in policy discourses, and that this silence has masked how gendered labour and power has often been woven into urban governance. For example, forms of women‐centred organising have been relied on in a range of government projects seeking to build community and participation within poor neighbourhoods. Such reliance may be increasing in a context of austerity. As well as this critical analysis of current policy, the paper argues for the reinvigoration of feminist visions of cities that suggest different framings of aspects of urban life. For example, rethinking the lines between public and private spheres might result in different forms of housing or sites of civic participation. Through engaging anew with such perspectives cities might become more just, caring, and equal for all.     

Proceeding through Colonial Past-Presents in Fieldwork: Methodological Lessons on Accountability,Refusal, and Autonomy

This article examines how the colonial past manifests within the present through an analysis of ethnographic and archival fieldwork. Drawing on feminist geographic scholarship for decolonising knowledge production, I argue that geographers have a responsibility to the people they work with and the places where they conduct research to know what came before. Through an analysis of how the colonial past surfaced in everyday and ongoing experiences of negotiating consent during fieldwork, I show how reflecting on the colonial past-present offers insights into the colonial power geometries of knowledge production. Proceeding through the colonial past-present offers useful lessons on being accountable to people and lands, recognising refusal, and making autonomy. While this article is focused on my experiences as a white settler scholar from the USA who did research in a Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico, proceeding through colonial past-presents offers lessons to any and all geographers who struggle to unsettle the persistent colonial power geometries of knowledge production.     

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.     

Hearing girls’ silences: thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion

Many contemporary feminist research methods employed in the interest of realizing social justice advocate ‘listening’ to subordinated others, groups variously categorized and marginalized by gender, sexuality, race, age, and so on, in order to examine the sources and workings of knowledge construction and social power. Increasingly, feminist scholars are using group discussion or focus groups, in an effort to give subordinated others ‘a voice.’ Group discussions are seen as potentially empowering in exploring and enabling group members’ social agency and knowledge production while at the same time diminishing the unequal power relations between the researched and researcher. In this article, I argue that the attention given to ‘voices’ in group discussions (dis)misses meaning‐ful silences thereby limiting its political potential. There exists an ‘epistemological messiness’ inherent in a feminist group discussion method that makes it difficult to hear meaning‐ful silences. Through reflection on my own research into the spaces of adolescent Latina gender identities, this article offers some insights into this messiness and recommends that a feminist group discussion method be guided by a politics of voice which includes ‘silence within voice.’     

Feminism and the Spaces of Transformation

Feminist political theory draws on particular spatial imaginations in elaborating a politics of transformation. This paper establishes this in relation to two familiar accounts of feminist transformation – those of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Respectively I read their work as suggesting that transformation of gender relations takes the form of ubiquitous revolution, taking place everywhere, or a distant dream of an (im)possible future – elsewhere. The paper then turns to discuss the work of Julia Kristeva, often dismissed as not feminist and conservative. I read her work politically, within the frame of feminist theory. She offers a different, heterogeneous account of transformation, as both possible in the present and also limited by the existence and need for social and symbolic orders. In exploring the heterogeneous spatial imagination of her work, the paper suggests that the spatialities of abjection are diverse and productive. Abjection is not simply about devising territories and borders. Moreover, dominant spatialities cannot be described as simply masculine. Finally, drawing links with Lefebvre's account of representational spaces, I argue that Kristeva's work can be extended to inform our understanding of how spaces themselves can be transformed.     

Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

Gender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth‐making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.     

‘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.     

‘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.     

Feminist Theorizing of Patriarchal Colonialism,Power Dynamics,and Social Agency Materialized in Colonial Institutions

In the twenty-first century historical archaeologists have increasingly drawn on post-colonial theory to analyze the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, Australasia, and Africa. However, few have employed feminist theories to gain insights into the patriarchal power dynamics that were fundamental to institutionalized colonial ideologies and practices. This paper provides feminist theorizing of new concepts and a heterarchical model of multiple interacting powers that increase understanding of complex gender and sexual power dynamics between colonizers and colonized.     

Social structure,psychoanalysis, and collective aggression

This article considers Kierkegaard's contribution to our understanding of the political. Building on previous scholarship exploring the social dimensions of Kierkegaard's thought, I argue that for Kierkegaard the modern understanding and practice of politics should be understood as ‘despair’. Thus, whilst Kierkegaard's criticisms of politics might have been produced in an ad hoc fashion, this article argues that there is an underlying principle which guides these criticisms: that politics is subordinate to, and must be grounded in, spiritual or religious selfhood. In this way the modern phenomena of democracy, liberalism, the press, and the crowd can all be seen as representative of a form of community which falls far short of the potential that human beings can and should achieve. Such a community would see individuals recognising themselves and each other as spiritual beings, and taking responsibility for themselves and others. That modern politics fails to understand the human being as an essentially spiritual entity related to others through God can only lead us to conclude that, from Kierkegaard's point of view, modern politics suffers from the sickness of despair. Whilst Kierkegaard might be criticised for failing to provide us with a more detailed picture of a polity shaped by the religious contours he promotes, he clearly offers an intriguing and suggestive contribution to our understanding not only of the limitations of politics, but also the relationship between a normative human and political ontology, with the former providing the basis for the latter.     

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.     

Féministes tant qu’il le faudra! The multiple possibilities of francophone feminist geographies au Québec/Canada

Abstract

This article offers a brief overview of the development of francophone feminist geography in Canada. We begin by situating the review geographically, in order to explain our focus on francophone feminist geography produced in Québec. We then discuss the origins of feminist francophone geography in the 1980s, highlighting the central role of the student reading group, the Collectif de lecture sur l’espace et les femmes, that was formed during that period at l’Université Laval. Tracing the research trajectories of feminist geographical research since then, we argue that feminist geography has become more diverse, but ironically less visible. We conclude by highlighting the central role that graduate and undergraduate students play in pushing forward a feminist geography agenda as they demonstrate the importance of feminist politics era through their research and activism.     

Colonial Matriarchs: Garveyism,Maternalism, and Belize's Black Cross Nurses, 1920–1952

This article analyses the politics of Belize's Black Cross Nurses in their heyday in order to bring into dialogue the historiography on gender in the transnational Garveyite movement to which the middle‐class Nurses belonged, and the historiography on maternalism. It complicates the claim that Garveyite women were subordinated within the movement and resisted its gender norms, and addresses the lack of attention to maternalist politics among non‐white women in colonised settings, where racial anxieties strengthened middle‐class attachment to bourgeois respectability. By analysing the Nurses's relations with the colonial state, poor urban mothers and middle‐class men, the article concludes that their maternalism served to reproduce class and race hierarchies, and colonial rule, even as it strengthened middle‐class women's political autonomy and legitimacy.     

Gender and feminist geographies in the Middle East

This article aimed to review the research carried out in the Middle East primarily on gender and feminist geography and also on place formation, urban space, movement and mobility in the social and political sciences. This aim turned out to be challenging primarily because of the colonial and post-colonial history of the region that continues to have a profound effect on the development of academic knowledge among Middle Eastern scholars as well as a restricted accessibility to material published inside the Middle East. Despite this, the article primarily focuses on feminist research on Middle Eastern women done by Middle Eastern scholars and published in Middle Eastern journals and books primarily in Arabic (and Hebrew in Israel). However, during the process of reviewing a large variety of articles, book chapters and books that exist on Middle Eastern women, we realized that it is sometimes difficult and rather artificial to review the material with only this division in mind. In the end, we reviewed the literature on gender and feminism in the Middle East mainly highlighting local published research and also briefly referring to research published in the West by both Westerners and local researchers. The article begins with presenting its research methodology. It then analyzes the website and literature review that we carried out on the contexts, frameworks and themes of gender and feminist geography and spatial research in the Middle East with particular attention on the research carried out in Israel/Palestine. We focus on the private–public spheres; migration and diaspora and the veil as key concepts in analyzing the literature in this section. In the last section, we explain the reasons for the limitations on gender and feminist research in geography inside the Middle East and mention some general conclusions.