Residents living in the vicinity of lead smelters are subjected to particularly high levels of contamination from the toxic process of smelting. Yet, public health strategies currently promoted by state health authorities in Australia do not focus their major attention on stopping the contamination at its source. This article focuses on housecleaning regimes, largely implemented by women, aimed at stopping the toxic material from being ingested by children. Because the residential areas surrounding the smelters are degraded, their property value is (...) low and, by and large, working-class families live there. As this article shows, the recommended cleaning regimes are embedded in social class and gender relations. Analysis of the implementation of the strategy and the historical context within which it is administered provides an example of a state gender regime, the state “doing” gender and class, and a lens through which to view contemporary gender and class relations. (shrink)

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. (...) The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms. (shrink)

This article offers a reconceptualization of “the political” from the standpoint of women working in and for low-income neighborhoods, with special emphasis on the contradictions between their actions as community workers and their understandings of the political aspects of their work. The author also examines how their gender and race identity influenced their political consciousness and practice. The date are drawn from in-depth interviews with forty-two perdominantly African American and Puerto Rican women from New York City and Philadelphia who were (...) hired in community action programs established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relationship between veiled, Islamist, women and modernity in Turkey where the woman question is indeed exemplary of the tension-ridden relations between modernity and Islam. By examining the veiled women's rejection of modernity I argue that it is wrong to read Islamism as an actual questioning of modernity. Traditional Islam is not the key element in understanding the veiled women's identity; rather, at the core of the issue is the reproduction of identity under conditions of (...) modernity. First, I look at the Islamic understanding of women; second, I consider the relation of Kemalism to women, so as to understand oppositions between modernity and Islam on the woman question. Finally, the veiled women's rejection of modernity is analysed by means of taking its self-contradictions into the centre of the argument. (shrink)

This article looks at the role of the European Union in promoting substantive equality for men and women in the European labour market. For this purpose it looks at the assumptions about gender roles and gender divisions of labour enshrined by EU directives on maternity rights and parental leave. The article presents a theoretical discussion of the role of EU policies in protecting women's rights and thus promoting a socioeconomic model that allows men and women to reconcile work and family (...) life. The main policies at the heart of this research are the 1992 Pregnant Worker Directive, the 1996 Parental Leave Directive, the 1992 Childcare Recommendations and the 2000 Council Resolution on Balanced Participation in Work and Family Life. The article thus assesses the gender biases of EU policies and the ensuing implications for the future of gender relations and socioeconomic trends in Europe. (shrink)

This note examines the case of a group of gay men who, having engaged in consensual sexual acts together, became known as the `Bolton Seven' following their conviction in 1998 for offences of buggery and/or gross indecency. More particularly the note scrutinises the implications of the ages of the participants (one of whom, at 17 $\tfrac{1}{2}$ , was unable to give lawful consent to sexual intercourse with a man) in the light of the enactment of Part I of the Sex (...) Offenders Act 1997 which introduces a system of compulsory registration by some convicted and cautioned sex offenders with the police (including men convicted of, or cautioned for, buggery or gross indecency). The note explores the justification for inclusion of these offences within the remit of the1997 Act together with the cultural construction of gay men as predatory and as constituting a risk to younger members of society. It also analyses some of the effects of the registration requirement in terms of it constituting a potential violation of fundamental rights such as equality and respect for private life. This discussion is located particularly within the context of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 in the U.K. (shrink)

Calls to ?build civil society?, ?create active citizenship?, ?empower communities?, or ?widen political participation? are growing by the day. They are heard in academia, the private sector, among NGOs and increasingly in government. In short, the rhetoric of self?government, that ideal dear to republicans, is back on the political agenda. This time, however, it is increasingly tied to the category of civil society. Yet can the programme of ?more power to civil society? really achieve democratic autonomy in the way that (...) many neo?republicans want it to? This article pursues this question, first, by reconstructing an ideal?type model of republican civil society from the writings of Hannah Arendt and Vaclav Havel ? two influential theorists of self?organisation in civil society. Second, it asks, sceptically, where such a civil society will come from, whether it can be fully reconciled with modernity and how ? if at all ? it can meet the charge of voluntarism. These critical interrogations are followed by a further three, focusing on the problematic absence of the market in the republican account of civil society, its under?theorised ? even Utopian ? notion of power and, finally, its likely complicity in the ongoing exclusion of women from the public sphere. The article concludes by calling for a more ambitious, wide?ranging vision of republican autonomy than the narrow emphasis on civil society will allow. (shrink)