Women,gender and feminism in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This review article, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Australian Journal of Political Science (formerly Politics), analyses articles focusing on women, gender and feminism that were published in the journal. The analysis demonstrates that the study of gender is relevant to a broad range of fields, and methodological approaches used, in political science. It also demonstrates that political science knowledge is itself historically and socially constructed, reflecting both traditional social power relations and the influence of the social movements that challenge them. Consequently, key articles have drawn attention to the ways in which the frameworks of mainstream forms of political science were gender-biased and have sometimes continued to be so, particularly in terms of narrow constructions of the ‘political’. Such narrow constructions may still be contributing to some ongoing gaps in the literature, despite the important contributions made by work published in the journal.     

French feminism: National and international perspectives

During the 1980s, the French media proclaimed the death of feminism, but although the 1970s women's movement had demobilised, feminists were still active in issue-specific groups, in academia, and within the institutions of the state. Paying careful attention to the difficulties associated with defining feminisms and national feminisms in particular, this article situates an analysis of French feminism since the 1980s in a context of growing international feminist dialogue and activism and a renewed debate about the meaning of feminism. It focuses on the question of separatism and on changing relations between theory and practice, asking how feminists can act for change and form effective coalitions with other movements. It argues that feminism is plural and often fragmented and diffuse. Feminism is shaped by local social, economic, political and cultural factors and by exchanges of people and ideas, and any analysis of feminist theory and activism needs to take these into account.     

Quotidian geographies: placing feminism

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's activity patterns that examined gender differences in travel behavior and their origins in men's and women's different household responsibilities. We also review her success peopling the discipline of geography. We conclude that human geography has benefited from the incorporation of feminist theory and methods as Susan predicted.     

Pink truck ads: second-wave feminism and gendered marketing

Second-wave feminist media had a contentious relationship with corporate advertisers. This article uses automotive advertisements to explore the role of gender, class, and race in the construction of consumer markets from the 1970s through the 1980s. It analyzes the struggle of Gloria Steinem and other liberal feminists to navigate the terrain between the women's movement and corporate advertisers. The increased economic power of women, stemming from the Equal Credit Opportunity Act as well as broader social and political shifts, facilitated their efforts. In the 1980s, automobiles continued to be marketed to women, albeit through "feminine" imagery conforming to the era's dominant trends.     

Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan

The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT reviewers. Pseudonyms are used for places and people throughout the text.

• 1. 

  I first lived Chitral as a school-leaver in 1995 and made three subsequent visits before conducting a 20-month period of 'formal' anthropological fieldwork in the region between April 2000 and October 2001. This period of fieldwork was followed up by three further shorter stays.

       
  
  

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

退缩与进取:论新加坡华文知识分子及其角色的演变

本文先论析在特定的历史与现实情境下 ,“新加坡华文知识分子”的语义 ;再从历史发展的角度考察殖民地时代、独立建国时代和踏入二十一世纪后 ,新加坡华文知识分子的出身和特征 ,以及他们所扮演的角色如何从政治、教育和文化舞台上逐步退缩 ,而今后又将会有怎样的转变和突破     

The water question in feminism: water control and gender inequities in a neo-liberal era

The current neo-liberal moment in water policy appears to offer possibilities for realizing feminist ambitions. Several feminist scholars see the individualization and privatization of resource rights as offering possibilities for confronting gender inequalities rooted in, and reproduced by, historic and structural male favoured access to productive resources such as land and water. But we seriously doubt a progressive feminist potential of neo-liberal reforms in the water sector. We focus on water used for agricultural purposes, because neo-liberal water proposals are premised on taking water out of agriculture to uses with higher marginal economic returns. A first set of doubts involves water as a specific resource, largely because of its propensity to flow. Rights to water are less fixed and more prone to be contested at various levels and in different socio-legal domains than rights to other natural resources. The second set stems from our disagreement with the ideological underpinnings of the neo-liberal project. It reflects our concern about how water reforms articulate with wider political-economic structures and historical dynamics characterized by new ways of capitalist expansion. Furthermore, mainstream neo-liberal water policy language and concepts tend to hide precisely those issues that, from a critical feminist perspective, need to be questioned. Feminist reflections about tenure insecurity and social inequities in relation to water clash with the terms of a neo-liberal framework that invisibilizes, naturalizes and objectifies the politics and powers involved in water re-allocation. A feminist response calls for challenging the individualization, marketization and consumer/client focus of the neo-liberal paradigm.     

Reconsidering nationalism and feminism: the Kurdish political movement in Turkey

Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side‐lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender‐based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender‐based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.