This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in (...) science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender. (shrink)

Over the last two decades our understanding of the relationship of gender, politics and the state has been transformed almost beyond recognition by the mutual interrogation of feminism and political science. This volume provides an overview of this dynamic and growing field, which reflects both its expanding empirical scope and the accompanying theoretical development and debate. The first three essays focus primarily on conceptual and theoretical issues: the meaning of 'gender'; the state's role in the construction of (...) gender within the public and private sphere; and the political representation of gender differences within liberal democracy. The remaining six provide analyses of more concrete issues of state policy and participation in differeing national political contexts: abortion politics in Ireland; the local politics of prostitution in Britain, the impact on women's political participation of economic change in China, Latin America and political change in Russia, and the gender impact of state programmes of land reform. (shrink)

What does it mean to practice socially responsible science on controversial issues? In a fresh turn focussing on the neuroscientists’ responsibility in producing knowledge about politically charged subjects, Chalfin et al. (Am J Bioethics 8(1):1–2, 2008) caution neuroscientists to be careful about how they present their findings lest their results be used to support unfounded biases, social stereotypes and prejudices. Weisberg et al. (J Cogn Neurosci 20(3):470–477, 2008) discuss the allure of neuroscience explanations and demonstrate how laypersons easily accept dubious (...) claims as long as (even non-relevant) neuroscientific descriptions are provided. Fine (2010) exposes the use of scientific evidence in propagating outdated gender myths by popular writers and discusses the infiltration of these prejudices into popular belief, folk culture and lifestyle. This paper discusses ways in which the ‘neuroscience of gender difference’ itself inadvertently contributes to normalising socially constructed theories about sex difference in cognitive performance. This unpremeditated effect has evident implications on the structuring of society because gender relations cut across social, political and economic boundaries. We present a theoretical reflection of factors that could interact with the scientists’ attempted objective evaluation of the subject, the methods and some principle problems, and we engage a science studies approach as our methodological tool. Our object of critique is drawn from the research on spatial abilities that articulate the dissention pertaining to sex differences in intellectual capacity. (shrink)

Traits like simplicity and explanatory power have traditionally been treated as values internal to the sciences, constitutive rather than contextual. As such they are cognitive virtues. This essay contrasts a traditional set of such virtues with a set of alternative virtues drawn from feminist writings about the sciences. In certain theoretical contexts, the only reasons for preferring a traditional or an alternative virtue are socio-political. This undermines the notion that the traditional virtues can be considered purely cognitive.

This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have (...) differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence. (shrink)

From the start of the Arab revolutions in late 2010, a connection between the law, state, political economy, gender norms and orientalist ideology has formed the foundation of women's systematic exclusion from politics. By unmasking processes in Egypt that have created the ideological and material conditions of externalising women's revolutionary acts, estranging their political involvement, and exposing them to various forms of violence, this article offers a gendered political reading of the concept of alienation. The article suggests that (...) gender-normative ideology's characterisation of women's images, roles and acts during and after revolutions, corresponds to the most profound form of alienation. The article identifies the externalisation and subjugation of women, and objectification of their revolutionary acts as modes of alienation. Moreover, it proposes that the implementing of these modes of alienation are necessary for creating conditions that allow for the reconfiguration of power dynamics that restore the authoritarian power of the state. This discussion suggests that the sphere of politics not only relates to political activism and conflict between revolutions and counterrevolutions, but that it is also a battlefield for the (re)production of gender-normative knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTranslated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s work to unpack the gender politics of Jankelevitch’s book and the secondary literature on it. I focus on the figure (...) of the feminine in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, which are works we have evidence Jankelevitch read. There, Levinas describes the feminine as a “form of being” that is “inexhaustible, infinite” and thus “refuses thematization positively”. This is nearly identical to Jankelevitch’s definition of musical ineffability as “fertile inexplicability”. Not only is Jankelevitch’s concept of musical ineffability identical to Levinas’s concept of the feminine, it is also couched in gendered terms throughout Music and the Ineffable. “Musical ineffability” in Jankelevitch’s sense is thus a parallel to Levinas’s concept of the feminine. I then read Jankelevitch and his interpreters in musicology through feminist scholarship on Levinas to show how the former two succumb to the same ultimately patriarchal flaws as the latter. For example, just as Levinas prioritizes paternity and the reproduction of patriarchy, muiscologist Carolyn Abbate uses Jankelevitch as the white masculine other in which musicology recognizes itself as both different and the same. (shrink)

Women have historically been prevented from living autonomously by systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression. The lingering effects of these practices have prompted many feminists to view autonomy with suspicion. Here, Marilyn Friedman defends the ideal of feminist autonomy. In her eyes, behavior is autonomous if it accords with the wants, cares, values, or commitments that the actor has reaffirmed and is able to sustain in the face of opposition. By her account, autonomy is socially grounded yet also individualizing and sometimes (...) socially disruptive, qualities that can be ultimately advantageous for women. Friedman applies the concept of autonomy to domains of special interest to women. She defends the importance of autonomy in romantic love, considers how social institutions should respond to women who choose to remain in abusive relationships, and argues that liberal societies should tolerate minority cultural practices that violate women's rights so long as the women in question have chosen autonomously to live according to those practices. (shrink)

Socialization enforces gendered standards of politeness that encourage men to be dominating and women to be deferential in mixed-gender discourse. This gendered dynamic of politeness places women in a double bind. If women are to participate in polite discourse with men, and thus to avail of smooth and fortuitous social interaction, women demote themselves to a lower social ranking. If women wish to rise above such ranking, then they fail to be polite and hence, open themselves to a wellspring (...) of social discord, dissention, and antagonism. The possibility for women’s politeness in mixed-gender conversation threatens more than cooperation, it undermines the possibility for self-respect and autonomy. (shrink)

Zimbabwean literature produced after the attainment of independence has been predominantly engrossed with thematisation of the postcolonial subaltern subjects’ existential conditions, enunciated together with gender politics, religion and socio-economic environment that frame politics of difference, and sites of suffering or resistance. These tropes remain absorbing and critical even in contemporary female-authored novels that also engage with a deeply fractured modern-day Zimbabwe. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body, offers important site to debate the enduring concerns of gender (...) inequalities, politics, and religion. A stylistic approach is adopted to identify the semiotic construction of the text and discuss the different styles that are deployed to foreground central tropes in the novel. The adoption of stylistics as an underlying conceptual model locates this current study in the interdisciplinary research which brings together gender, applied linguistics, poetics, politics, and religion, in order to provoke new ways of reading the dialogic and polyphonic elements of the text. The study contends that the politics of difference is an unsettling subject that profoundly impacts on gender relations and religio-political practices in a milieu where precarity is a major defining feature of the subaltern sections comprising women and the marginalised poor. Thus, the novel’s title figuratively foregrounds the (un)mournable bodies of the people, who are both dehumanised and heavily burdened by surviving at the margin.Contribution: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel, This Mournable Body demonstrates a deep concern with the plight of the subaltern people in a gendered society and how their conditions of the Othered bodies are further amplified by both religion and politics in present-day Zimbabwe. Thus the study contributes to the mounting discourses about politics of fragmentation and binary practices, and the ensuing agony suffered by the sidelined persons. The adopted stylistic reading of the focus novel underscores the interdisciplinary urgency to literary interpretative process. (shrink)

David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key (...) path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things. (shrink)

Introduction to the special cluster of articles by feminists from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

This book focuses on the central party apparatus of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front branches established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jordan in the 1970s, and the most influential and innovative of the DF women's organizations: the Palestinian Federation of Women's Action Committees in the occupied territories. Until now, no study of a Palestinian political organization has so thoroughly engaged with internal gender histories. In addition, no other work attempts to systematically compare (...) branches in different regional locations to explain those differences. Students of gender and Middle East studies, especially those with a specialty in Palestinian studies, will find this work to be of critical importance. This book will also be of great interest to those working on political protest movements and factional ties. (shrink)

Women political participation is understood to be a part of civic rightsbut their participation is hindered by various factors. Numerous researchershave claimed that Islam as a religion, Muslim social culture and traditioninhibit women from political participation in Muslim societies. However, thereare a number of Muslim majority countries where women occupy the highestpublic offices and head ministries. How can this contradiction be explained.This article examines women political participation in Central Asian Muslimrepublics by looking at socioeconomic, parliamentary representation andinformal participation factors. The (...) study argues that socioeconomic factors inthe republics still do not allow much liberal public space for women to takepart in politics; however, in terms of parliamentary representation the republicsmaintains a record that sometimes are better off than many mature democracies.In terms of informal participation the region records better visibility of womenin politics. (shrink)

L’article porte sur un mouchoir décoré par des femmes de l’Armée Républicaine Irlandaise (IRA) pendant leur incarcération à la prison d’Armagh, en 1976. Il s’intéresse aux aspects concrets d’un objet genré et politisé. En effet, le tracé, le remplissage à la couleur, la signature et l’échange de ce tissu prennent place à la fin de la première phase du conflit en Irlande du Nord caractérisée par les emprisonnements politiques. Dans les années 1970, les prisonniers républicains adaptent une activité féminine, la (...) broderie. Illustrant cette pratique, le mouchoir d’Armagh passe pour un exemple de tissu, certes hétérogène et marqué d’emprunts, mais qui conserve ses qualités liées au genre. Cet article s’intéresse donc aussi à la signification même du tissu. (shrink)

Feminist proposals for reforming scientific method often ask that political evaluations be introduced into the context of justification. How might this work in practice? Fausto‐Sterling's alternative conceptualization of biological sex is analyzed and criticized. We then use this case study to comment on recent work on the role of social values in science by Longino and Kitcher.

RésuméEn réponse à l'article de D. C. Matthew, « Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation », j'examine la politique de la beauté physique à l'intersection entre les catégories de race et de genre. J’évalue et je rejette l'affirmation de Matthew selon laquelle être perçu comme physiquement attrayant se traduit à coup sûr soit par un bon traitement, soit par une haute estime de soi. Je soutiens que, au contraire, le genre peut fonctionner comme un moyen de contrôle social, (...) dans lequel le désir du corps des femmes n'apporte aucun bon traitement ni n'améliore leur estime de soi. Ce problème peut persister au sein des communautés raciales intragroupes autoségréguées. (shrink)

Singular they has emerged as a key term in contemporary gender politics, reflecting growing usage of they/them as nonbinary personal pronouns. Drawing on interviews with 54 progressive gender activists, we consider how singular they can be used to resist and redo aspects of the prevailing gender structure. We identify three distinct usages of singular they: as a nonbinary personal pronoun, as a universal gender-neutral pronoun, and as an indefinite pronoun when a person’s self-identified gender (...) is unknown. While previous research on singular they as a gender-inclusive language practice has focused primarily on its usage as a nonbinary personal pronoun, our findings point to the relevance for gender politics of all three usages. Our analysis offers new insight into how nonbinary they challenges dominant gender norms and practices beyond incorporating additional gender categories. Given our findings, we propose further investigation of how using gender-neutral pronouns for everyone in specific contexts can advance progressive activists’ goals. Finally, we argue that the longstanding usage of singular they as an indefinite pronoun has new importance today in affirming gender as a self-determined identity. (shrink)

Friedman presents a well-considered theory of autonomy, usefully elaborating the ways social influence is compatible and incompatible with autonomous action. In its reconciliation of autonomy and gender socialization, Friedman’s account makes important progress in addressing feminist concerns about autonomy. Nonetheless, Friedman could say more about the role of political society, particularly liberal society, in protecting and promoting autonomy.

This article examines the Canadian case, focusing on the ways in which the political rationalities that have informed the Canadian variants of post-war social liberalism and neoliberalism have opened and then closed spaces for the articulation and institutionalization of gender-based equality claims-making. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick field of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node (...) of social liberalism became a critical field of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. The article describes a protracted war of position in which the gendered politics and identities of the 20th century have been displaced and marginalized, but not fully consumed by neoliberal idioms, representations and policy interventions. (shrink)

From seed to table, the food chain is gendered. When seeds and food are in women’s hands, seeds reproduce and multiply freely, food is shared freely and respected. However, women’s seed and food economy has been discounted as “productive work.” Women’s seed and food knowledge has been discounted as knowledge. Globalization has led to the transfer of seed and food from women’s hands to corporate hands. Seed is now patented and genetically engineered. It is treated as the creation and “property” (...) of corporations like Monsanto. Renewable seed becomes nonrenewable. Sharing and saving seed becomes a crime. Diversity, nourished by centuries of women’s breeding, disappears, and with it the culture and natural evolution that is embodied in the diversity is lost forever. Food, too, is transformed in corporate hands. It is no longer our nourishment; it becomes a commodity. And as a commodity it can be manipulated and monopolized. If food grain makes more money as cattle feed than it does as food for human consumption, it becomes cattle feed. If food grain converted to biofuel to run automobiles is more profitable, it becomes ethanol and biodiesel. (shrink)

Feminist science scholars need models of science that allow feminist accounts, not only of the inception and reception of scientific theories, but of their content as well. I argue that a "Network Model," properly modified, makes clear theoretically how race, sex and class considerations can influence the content of scientific theories. The adoption of the "corpuscular philosophy" by Robert Boyle and other Puritan scientists during the English Civil War offers us a good case on which to test such a model. (...) According to these men, the minute corpuscles constituting the physical world are dead, not alive; passive, not active. I argue that they chose the principle that matter is passive in part because its contrary, the principle that matter is alive and self-moving, had a radical social meaning and use to the women and men working for progressive change in mid-seventeenth century England. (shrink)

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the (...) Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women's organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present. (shrink)

This article examines the gender politics of Euro 2012, an international men’s football tournament that took place in Poland and Ukraine, through two cases of female protest. Informed by Cynthia Enloe’s question ‘Where are the women?’, the case studies focus on Polish football fan and model Natalia Siwiec and Ukrainian women’s organisation FEMEN in order to render visible the heteromasculine nation–sport nexus underpinning Euro 2012. The analysis demonstrates how Siwiec emerges as the ‘caretaker’ of the Polish nation-state during (...) the event by exposing how female bodies can be used to recuperate a polluted and emasculated national image. In contrast, FEMEN’s stunts are highly critical of the heteromasculine nation–sport nexus and reveal their position as ‘rebels’; however, a closer analysis of FEMEN’s actions beyond Euro 2012 shows how they can simultaneously operate as ‘enforcers’ of the nation-state. The role of ‘enforcers’ is especially pertinent in relation to the western nation-state’s contemporary ‘othering’ of Islam in the post-9/11 context. Both case studies demonstrate international politics in the making and call for closer scrutiny of the gender politics constitutive of seemingly apolitical and ‘inclusive’ sporting events. (shrink)

Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx, Helene Demuth, Mary Burns, and Lydia Burns. How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels (...) biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions. (shrink)

Some feminist gender sceptics hold that the conditions for satisfying the concept woman cannot be discerned. This has been taken to suggest that (i) the efforts to fix feminism’s scope are undermined because of confusion about the extension of the term ‘woman’, and (ii) this confusion suggests that feminism cannot be organised around women because it is unclear who satisfies woman. Further, this supposedly threatens the effectiveness of feminist politics: feminist goals are said to become unachievable, if feminist (...) politics lacks a clear subject matter. In this paper, I argue that such serious consequences do not follow from the gender sceptic position. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the (...) export-oriented extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om, Luck By Chance, and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries. These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of globalization, directing (...) styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes, filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema. (shrink)

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand and critique the gendered political processes in the search for an athletic director following a merger between men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletic departments in a U.S. university. Semi-structured interviews were used to ask 55 athletic department stakeholders their perceptions of the search process and associated politics. Findings indicated gendered political activities occurred along gender-affiliated departmental lines. Political strategies contributed to gendered processes favoring certain masculinities and male candidates in (...) the search for an athletic director. While gender equity was an important consideration in the search process, because of the controversial nature of the merger and the politics expressed, the belief that hiring a man was essential to the merger’s success was widely accepted by many stakeholder groups. The findings are positioned in the critical management and sport literature. This research contributes to our understanding of the complexity of gender relations and provides insight into the gendered political processes that inform leadership searches. (shrink)