La première loi envisageant de mobiliser les femmes en cas de guerre est mise en application en 1939 en France et des femmes s’engagent pour la première fois dans l’Armée française au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. De 1939 à 1962, la France est en guerre sans discontinuer et les effectifs militaires féminins ne cessent d’augmenter. Cette présence féminine dans un bastion masculin, par excellence, engendre de nombreux débats et questionnements. Ces femmes doivent affronter de lourdes critiques et briser (...) les préjugés dont elles sont l’objet. Peinant à être reconnues comme militaires à part entière, les pionnières de la féminisation de l’Armée intriguent. Les médecins, les politiques mais aussi la presse et la société portent sur elles un regard très contrasté. Générant mythes et fantasmes, leur identité féminine et sexuelle est souvent remise en question. (shrink)

Masterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj Žižek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory, Charity Scribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal (...) works that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. As Scribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke. Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)

War is a highly gendered experience which is both informed by and informs constructions of masculinity and femininity. The dominant depiction of masculine heroes and feminine victims simplifies the complex intersections of militarism, nationalism and gendered roles and identities. Focusing on a case study of the Anglo-Irish War or War of Independence (1919–1921), this paper examines how violence against women, especially sexual violence, was written about and reported in ways which framed representations of Irish and British masculinity and Irish (...) femininity. In addition, by analysing a range of varied sources including newspapers, autobiographical accounts and recorded testimonies, this paper attempts to assess the extent to which violence against women formed a key aspect of military practice in the war. In conclusion, I engage with some of the difficulties faced by researchers today in exploring evidence of gendered violence in specific historical, cultural and militarized contexts. (shrink)

In this article, which is based on twenty four months of combined online and off-line ethnographic research, I show the way that some Iranian diasporic bloggers use their weblogs as entrepreneurship resources during the ‘war on terror’. Through a discourse analysis of a documentary film about Weblogistan and interviews with diasporic Iranian bloggers in Toronto, I argue that Weblogistan is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a gendered neoliberal homo oeconomicus. The production (...) of knowledge about Iran in transnational encounters between the media, think tanks, policy institutions and the Iranian diasporic self-entrepreneurs, relies on gendered civilizational discourses that are inherently tied to the ‘war on terror’. Following feminist scholars who have theorized militarism and gender, I argue that dominant representations of Weblogistan produce different gendered subject positions for Iranian bloggers. Although the masculine blogger soldier takes freedom to Iran through his active participation in proper politics (enabled by his freedom of speech in North America and Europe), the woman blogger finds freedom of expression in writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex in a confessional mode. It is in this war of representation that women bloggers negotiate their subjectivity while shuttling in and out of local and global politics, as subjects of politics (markers of freedom and oppression) and political abjects (not worthy of political participation). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in ChinaKwai-Cheung LoTheorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China. By Kam Louie. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 239. Hardcover U.S. $60.00.In Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China Kam Louie offers us a very clear and concise analysis of the cultural models of Chinese masculinity from ancient imperial times to the present age of transnational contact. (...) Although academic works on Chinese masculinity are not totally absent, systematic and thorough historical surveys of this topic are still rare. While gender studies of China are predominantly on femininity or other women-related issues, man as a gendered category has long escaped serious academic attention. Louie's book could be considered a pioneering effort to provide a rather comprehensive study of this subject. Besides describing in detail the historical development of the male image from premodern to contemporary times, Louie also focuses on the ways in which Chinese men have been represented under the Western gaze and how these representations have negotiated with the dominant Western culture.The fundamental structure of masculinity in China, according to Louie, operates according to the two poles of wen (literary attainment, cultural knowledge, the mental) and wu (martial valor, martial arts, the physical), which are far more complementary than antagonistic, although the wen polarity has always been prioritized over wu in the conventional Chinese mindset. wen maleness is exemplified by Confucius, the sage of the gentleman-scholar type, whereas Guan Yu, the God of War, represents the wu masculine ideal. These two archetypes of Chinese masculinity [End Page 497] converge in the stern observance of moral demands, self-restraint, and a resistance or even a misogynistic attitude to the faults associated with femininity (i.e., sexual pleasure, comfort, and loss of virility) in order to pursue lofty forms of justice and homosocial binding. The recent popularity of Hong Kong martial arts films in the West may help Western readers become accustomed to the traditional Chinese idea that the ideal balance of wen and wu places emphasis on strategy and learning as a means of avoiding the use of violence. Louie repeatedly asserts that, in the Chinese cultural context, all men by definition have some wen and/or some wu, thus negating a simplified dichotomy.The highest ideal of Chinese maleness is that of a single individual who can demonstrate at the highest level the cultural credentials and physical skills of wen and wu. That is to say, the great man who can hold a brush in his right hand and a sword or some other weapon in his left, demonstrating prowess in both kinds of effort. But in terms of their sex appeal, it is always the softer, cerebral, scholarly men of wen who are more attractive to Chinese women than their macho, brawny opposite. Other than analyzing the heterosexual relationships of Chinese manhood, Louie also provocatively suggests that brotherhood and passions between men are never simply homosocial but can have sexual implications. He supports this claim by making reference to many classical texts that depict men sleeping together, leading to strong emotional attachments and jealousy, as if they were in a romantic or erotic liaison. What distinguishes Louie's wen/wu duality from the conventional yin/yang binary opposition (which is also an artificial difference that defines the Chinese male in relation to Western men and reinforces the stereotype of a feminized Chinese masculinity) is that he believes his dyad of Chinese masculinity to be more resilient, flexible, and adaptable to historical change, hybridizing with Western culture while simultaneously exerting its own global influence on non-Chinese cultures.Covering a vast range of historical and contemporary materials and a variety of genres, from classical philosophy to traditional vernacular fiction (e.g., The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin), through Lao She's early twentieth-century novel The Two Mas, the subversive portrayals of men by modern Chinese women writers, to contemporary Hong Kong action cinema—all in a relatively slim volume—Louie is at his best, for example, when observing and depicting character, but he is not so good at analyzing his texts on a... (shrink)

This paper examines the literary representation of the beginnings of the Northern Irish Troubles with regard to a gender variable, in the selected poems by Heaney, Durcan, Boland, Meehan and Morrissey. The reading of Heaney’s “Punishment” will attempt to focus not solely on the poem’s repeatedly criticized misogyny but on analyzing it in a broader, historical context of the North’s conflict. In Durcan’s case, his prominent nationalist descent or his declared contempt for any form of paramilitary terrorism do not (...) seem to prevent him entirely from immortalizing female victims of the Troubles. Boland’s attitude seems the most unequivocal: the clear aversion to the language of death and rendering Irish women’s experiences in this discourse. The article concludes with analysis of Meehan’s “Southern” guilt for the situation of Catholics in the North with the simultaneous critique of perpetrated violence and Morrissey’s complicated standpoint: atheist/neutral/Protestant/communist and her striving for the impossible impartiality in a war-ridden and politically divided country. Trying to avoid systemic victimization of Irish women, the paper intends to analyze the historical and political circumstances which made them more susceptible to various forms of attacks at the beginnings of the Troubles, as reflected in the titular labels. (shrink)

The article focuses on the politics of representation in Kosova since the United Nations took over ‘peace management’ in 1999. It uses UN propaganda posters (political pedagogy) and local nationalist political advertising as a way to read the multiple gendered discourses of representation. It shows how gender is used relationally between competing forces – the ‘international community’ and nationalists – as a tool to ensure UN's imposition of Western policies and norms and as a mechanism for local politicians to (...) consolidate their domination of the domestic/private sphere. Moreover, it discusses the price paid to mimic the West: how Kosovar politicians have sought to ‘undo’ national identity in favour of a Western self-representation through a gendered abnegation of Islam. Thus, as an intrinsic part of the discourse of ‘peace-building’, these images represent the site of power production, domination, negotiation, and rejection, involving the collaboration of different actors, institutions, and individuals. Three specific points will be made: first, the article seeks to show that a Western political modernization discourse has, paradoxically, reinforced patriarchal relations of power and traditional gender roles in Kosova through the subjugation of women. Second, it explains the inability to resolve competing Albanian narratives – one relying on the legacy of peaceful resistance and the other on the armed struggle against Serbian domination during the 1990s. Third, through the intermeshing of international peace-keepers and local nationalist patriarchs, it will show how the militarization of culture is perpetuated through, and in relationship to, gender. (shrink)

The discursive production of the ‘self in the context of mental health care has potential implications for how the subjects of intervention come to understand and experience themselves. Eating disorders provide an illustrative example of the ways in which conceptualizations of the self that structure mental health practices can be gendered, because they are mainly diagnosed in women and dominant explanations of their origins are feminized. This discourse analytic study examines the gendered nature of mental health workers’ constructions of (...) the eating-disordered self through the psychological construct of ‘identity’, examining the dominant discourses implicated in the feminization of deficient identity, and addressing the implications of this construction for mental health practice. (shrink)

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise. From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide (...) bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In _Women as Weapons of War_, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to _bare_ arms is a sign of freedom and progress. Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay analyses the visual representation of melancholy and related themes in the work of American artist Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Its particular focus is Home Scene (1870–1871), an intimate portrait of two of the artist’s sisters in the parlour of their family home in Philadelphia. Through a close examination of Home Scene in relation to later portraits by and of the artist, my analysis sheds new light on how and why Eakins reshaped ideations of melancholy based in European art (...) and intellectual history within the context of nineteenth century American culture. While representing both the appearance and effects of melancholy in Home Scene and many other of his portraits, Eakins also constructed aspects of his own artistic identity in accordance with this theme. Analysing the ideas and practices that impacted these processes, this study shows how the artist’s life-long fascination with the intertwined subjects of melancholy, mental illness, and the trope of the misunderstood artist-genius informed his personal and professional lives as it intersected with prominent discourses on women, gender, and medicine in post-Civil War America. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while (...) its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached, We are on our Own by Miriam Katin, and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with (...) the identity crises caused by war. (shrink)

This chapter examines María Lugones’s germane and insightful attempt to theorize “intermeshed oppressions,” which, she argues, have been (mis)represented in women of color feminisms by the concepts of “interlocking systems of oppression” and, more recently, “intersectionality.” The latter, intersectionality, introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as a metaphor (1989) and as a “provisional concept” (1991), has become the predominant way of referencing the mutual constitution of what have been theorized as multiple systems of oppression, constructing the (...) multiplicity of social identities. But Lugones’s analysis, which maintains subtle but important distinctions among the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions, shows that intersectionality theory often conflates fragmentation with multiplicity, and—by reifying “intersectional identities”—reproduces social-ontological fragmentation at the political and perceptual-cognitive levels of representation. Intersectional accounts redeploy unitary categories (for instance, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) that are defined to the exclusion of each other by privileging the identities of normative group members. Consequently, they remain within what Lugones calls the “logic of purity,” which erases “curdled,” impure, category-transgressive, border-dwelling, mestiza subjects. Although, according to Lugones, intersectionality enables us to discern how the logic of purity produces “women of color” as impossible beings, she argues that the liminal identities of subjects dwelling in categorial interstices can only be made visible by conceptualizing oppressions as fused or “intermeshed.” However, as I interpret her, Lugones is not merely criticizing intersectionality or seeking to transcend its conceptual limitations by proposing an alternate concept. Rather, the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions do significantly different work in her account and illuminate different aspects of the social ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology of resistance to oppression. First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a non-fragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions. (shrink)

This compelling and stimulating book explores the gendered social history of students in modern Britain. From the privileged youth of _Brideshead Revisited_, to the scruffs at 'Scumbag University' in _The Young Ones_, representations of the university undergraduate have been decidedly male. But since the 1970s the proportion of women students in universities in the UK has continued to rise so that female undergraduates now outnumber their male counterparts. Drawing upon wide-ranging original research including documentary and archival sources, newsfilm, press (...) coverage of student life and life histories of men and women who graduated before the Second World War, this text provides rich insights into changes in student identity and experience over the past century. The book examines : men's and women's differing expectations of higher education the sacrifices that families made to send young people to college the effect of equality legislation demography changing patterns of marriage and the impact of the 'sexual revolution' on female students the cultural life of students and the role that gender has played in shaping them. For students of gender studies, cultural studies and history, this book will have meaningful impact on their degree course studies. (shrink)

Drawing on the author’s archival research in Germany and the US, empirical data about US-allied troop sexual violence during post-World War II occupied Germany suggests a complex interplay between gender, security, silence production, and state identity. Through a feminist security studies lens, this article theorizes about an unexplored, obscured form of de-securitization: the unmaking of a security issue or referent object as active silence. De-securitization as silence provides a unique insight into silence production, gender’s normativity, and security. To (...) move beyond de-securitization’s presumed politicization, the argument identifies specific hypervisibilities and new state-self, dominant memory regimes as acts, discursive representations, processes, or incidents of de-securitization – producing and reproducing active silence and facilitating the making of a newly imagined, ‘good’ German state-self. (shrink)

Growing numbers of women in militaries worldwide, coupled with vast segments of women within war-affected populations globally, raise questions about gender as it structures trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder, and other mental health consequences of war. In this study, we investigate the gendered associations between early-life wartime stress exposures and PTSD symptoms in older adulthood using data from the 2018 Vietnam Health and Aging Study, a unique data set documenting multiple dimensions of health and wartime stress exposures (...) within a sample of older adults who occupied diverse roles during the American war in Vietnam. Our results indicate that the severity of recent PTSD symptoms is significantly and positively associated with the severity of wartime stress exposure among both men and women. Vietnamese men’s social positions, particularly their predominance in combat, exposed them to more numerous war-related stressors. However, Vietnamese women experience a greater PTSD penalty associated with some wartime stress exposures, likely due to the burden of protecting family in wartime and incorporation into military and paramilitary roles with lesser preparation, training, and support than men. We conclude that women who survive major wars, both as soldiers and civilians, bear a significant burden of armed conflict’s lasting toll upon mental health. (shrink)

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy (...) civilians while men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars. (shrink)

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war of violating the human right to sexual self determination and of crimes against humanity, it transformed vulnerability from a mark of feminine weakness to a shared human condition. The court's judgment directs us to note the ways in which the exploitation of our bodied vulnerability is an assault on our dignity. It alerts us to the ways in which (...) the body of human rights law is a law of bodies; to the ways in which our desire for intimacy creates communal ties that ground our personal and social identities; to the ways in which the symbolic meanings of our bodies are integral to our sense of integrity and worth; and to the ways in which gender structures which position men as protectors of women make it possible for rape to be used as an effective and criminal weapon of war. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 147 Eric Andrew James The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games Though Stuart Hall defends popular representation as an important terrain of political struggle, he also argues that images of difference are dominated by “racialized regimes of representation” manifest in stereotypes and invisibilities.1 These ensure that marginal identities are reduced, essentialized, and rendered (...) other. One of the most powerful tools for this form of silencing in the popular representation repertoire is the notion of an established genre. In US popular culture, creators and critics alike often position people who experience multiple layers of oppression as constitutively outside the expectations of existing genres. Their absence is attributable not simply to creator racism but also to that genre’s relationships to intersecting categories of difference and domination, such as race and gender. Beginning with the preponderance of representational violence in popular media, this article draws from existing work by feminists of color in order to model a critique of US representational precarity. To illustrate the political tensions in popular US culture, I stage my intervention into a medium whose industry has had particularly fraught struggles with representation: video gaming. There, I focus specifically on 1. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates. (London: Sage, 2001), 325–44. 148 Eric Andrew James recent attempts to represent Black women, whom the gaming industry has held up as emblematic of difference and diversity. 2 These attempts are marred by predictable disasters and pitfalls. In particular, I discuss how the representational politics of Black women in popular zombie dystopia games repeats a similar violence as the previous silencing of Black women in these spaces. The gaming industry’s struggles with representation in the wake of Gamergate are demonstrative of broader tensions in Black women’s representation in popular media. Thus, while I am focused on video games, I also intend this analysis to reflect on feminist studies of the relationship between genre and representation. I advance existing scholarship on video game representations of Blackness by theorizing violence enacted at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in game genres. Specifically, I position this intervention as a point of departure from TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s chapter in Gaming Representation: “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.”3 This chapter provides a compelling critique of the relationship between the dystopian game genre and Black representation, highlighting the lack of self-reflexivity in mass-market representations of Blackness. Expanding this project by taking another look at her objects of study—The Last of Us (2013– 2014) and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012)—I argue that taking Black women’s multiple jeopardy as foundational to the zombie dystopia genre offers a deeper look at the grammars of representational violence. My use of multiple jeopardy refers to Deborah K. King’s theorization of how multiple layers of oppression exponentially multiply individual disadvantages. As King describes, “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative 2. AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, “Representation Matters: Positive Portrayals of Black Women in Video Games,” Medium, February 28, 2017, https:// medium.com/legendary-women/representation-matters-positive-portrayals -of-black-women-in-video-games-c96cf9f66fdf; Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, June 5, 2015, https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/would-you-believethere -have-been-only-14-playable-black-women-in-gaming-7484017. 3. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 109–28. Eric Andrew James 149 relationships among them as well.”4 These layers of oppression are often contradictory and may leave no avenues for action; the expectations placed on one for their race become impossible to fulfill because of the contradictory expectations placed on them for their gender or sexuality. This multiple jeopardy thus introduces... (shrink)

This essay offers a case study in jus in bello in the American Revolutionary War by focusing on responses to sexual violence committed against American women by soldiers in the occupying British army and their Loyalist auxiliaries. Two main bodies of sources are juxtaposed in order to explore the contexts and manner in which jus in bello was adjudicated: British courts-martial and American Congressional investigations documenting British and Loyalist breaches of the codes of war. By putting the fragmentary evidence (...) of instances of rape in the context of contemporary legal and sociocultural practices of sexual violence in peacetime, as well as of the British army's disciplinary regime, we can elucidate the horizon of experiences and expectations against which survivors, assailants and prosecutors acted. The British army disciplined some soldiers for sexual offenses that violated military law and the codes of war, and it executed a few of them at a time when even their home society featured very low prosecu.. (shrink)

Gender Identity Disorder is classified as a mental illness and included in the DSM-IV and ICD-10. It will also be included in the DSM-V. The psychiatric diagnosis, in spite of some apparent advantages, has significant psychological and social adverse implications. This paper discusses some of the main epistemological reasons to consider gender variance as a mental disorder. It will also evaluate whether reasons of other kinds may justify the inclusion of gender variance amongst mental illnesses.

In this paper, I take up the lives of women with persistent vulvar pain for what they can reveal about the enmeshment of gender, (hetero)sexuality and bodily practices. Women with vulvodynia are unable to perform the central heterogendering act of penetrative intercourse with a male partner. They describe this inability as rendering them effectively ‘genderless’, described as being ‘not a real woman’ or a ‘fake woman’. I analyse their perceptions of gender and bodily performance in relation (...) to feminist theorizing about gender and sexuality, and I argue for the centrality of the lived body to the epistemology of feminist efforts to theorize gender. This paper is based on in-person interviews with 20 women and web-based open-ended interactions with 70 women with vulvodynia. (shrink)

This article attends to the transformation of national identity that occurs in the context of ‘the multicultural debate’ in the Netherlands, and unfolds on the terrain of Dutch (secular and sexual) exceptionalism. First, it explores the connections between two topics that are prominent in the ‘multicultural debates’ all over Europe and undergird the civilizational discourse of a post-Cold War geopolitical era: discussions about secularism on the one hand, and gender and sexual politics on the other. Through a mode of (...) ‘secular nostalgia’, which mobilizes the understanding of the Netherlands as a place par excellence of emancipation for both women and sexual minorities, the Dutch secular arrangement is restructured in new exclusionary ways. Second, it explores how dominant discourses on the symbolic and material borders of the nation interpellate young Muslim women who often figure as the central ‘subjects of debate’. I rely on the notion of interpellation (Althusser) to explore the question of subject formation, with a particular attention to the epistemological conditions of ‘talking back’ as a subject whose constituency and agency is always already informed by the terms in which she is addressed. (shrink)

Preventing sexual and gender-based violence—and mitigating its devastating impacts on individuals and societies—is a central challenge of public health. A Woman in Berlin is 34-year-old journalist Marta Hillers’s first-hand account of life during the 1945 Red Army occupation of Berlin at the conclusion of World War II, when Russian soldiers collectively raped 2 million German civilians. Reflecting upon Hillers’s testimony, I argue that historical narratives about large-scale acts of sexual and gender-based violence deserve a more central place in (...) public health discourse. I also question how the ethical challenges of memorializing and studying mass crimes might inform future public health efforts to advance gender equity and mitigate sexual violence globally. (shrink)

During the Asian and Pacific War, the Japanese government mobilized approximately 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these victims were unmarried young women from Korea, Japan’s colony at that time. In the early 1990s, Korean feminist leaders helped more than 200 Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery to come forward to tell the truth, which has further accelerated the redress movement for the women. One major issue in the (...) redress movement and research relating to the so-called “comfort women” issue is whether Japan’s colonization of Korea or gender hierarchy was a more fundamental cause of the Korean women’s suffering. Using an intersectional perspective, this article analyzes how colonial power, gender hierarchy, and class were inseparably tied together to make the victims’ lives miserable. By doing so, it shows that a one-sided emphasis on colonization or gender hierarchy will misrepresent the feminist political issue and misinterpret the “comfort women’s” experiences. (shrink)

In First-World-War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they (...) obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters. (shrink)

Explanations of how identity is constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and social theory. In this important addition to the literature, Beverley Skeggs demonstrates that class needs to be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity, and power. Class has been marginalized in feminist and cultural theory and it has become increasingly difficult to teach, research, or speak about class. Formations of Class and Gender identifies the neglect of class issues in favor of (...) class='Hi'>gender issues, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. In a sustained examination of the production of knowledge, detailed ethnographic research is used to explain how ôrealö women modify and reformulate our understanding of class, subjectivity, and sexuality. A critical examination of cultural representationùinformed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre BourdieuùFormations of Class and Gender is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice. Engaged with theoretical and methodological issues, this will be the standard referenced ethnography on class and gender. It will be required reading for students and researchers in womenÆs studies and sociology. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple (...) oppressions (e.g., women of color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)

"What is sexist oppression?" "What should be done about it?" Organized around these questions, Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader provides an overview of theoretical feminist writing about the quest for gender justice. Incorporating both classic and cutting-edge material, the reader takes into account the full diversity of women, highlighting the effects of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and religion on women's experience. Theorizing Feminisms is organized into four sections and includes fifty-four essays. The first section introduces several basic (...) concepts commonly employed when thinking about sexism--oppression, social construction, essentialism, intersectionality, gender, race, and class--and also raises questions about the perspective and legitimacy of the theorist. The second section surveys three approaches that attempt to characterize in a general way the source of injustice toward women: humanist feminism ("the sameness approach"), gynocentric feminism ("the difference approach"), and dominance feminism. Offering an alternate perspective, the third section introduces two "localizing" approaches, grounded in postmodernism and identity politics, respectively. Skeptical of theories that attempt to analyze social phenomena across history and culture, authors in this section challenge, rather than answer, the text's organizing questions. The final section explores the relationship of feminist theory to three liberatory projects--postcolonialism, neo-materialism, and queer theory--that do not characterize themselves as feminist, yet take gender as a significant category of analysis. Each section opens with an introduction and each essay is followed by helpful study questions. The majority of the essays are presented in their entirety. Theorizing Feminisms underscores the strong connection between feminist theory and practice by including essays that illustrate important political inspirations or applications of each theoretical approach. It also presents versions of the same approach from various points in history, revealing feminist theory to be dynamic and evolving, rather than static. Ideal for interdisciplinary courses in feminist theory, this volume will also serve as an invaluable reference for current and future generations of theorists. (shrink)

The Vatican's Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, issued in 2004 to reinterpret biblical creation accounts, were not as successful as they might have been. Instead of focusing attention on social structures of gender domination, the document criticizes feminist theories, which, supposedly, lead to tensions between sexes or tend to destroy family values. I have tried to reinterpret the same cardinal biblical creation (...) accounts by means of an historical-critical approach, etymological interpretation and hermeneutics, and to show how sexual and gender identities are unintentionally constructed by the authors of these accounts and how structures, appearing in these accounts as `structures of sin' have affected the interpretation of these identities in the same Bible and in the world of formation of the New Testament. The story of `primordial sin' in this case is a metaphor of socialization, for the metaphor of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, is to be understood as the tree of knowledge of opinions, rooted in society, tradition, culture, concerning what is good and what is evil, acceptable and unacceptable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 341 Petrus Liu Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus Originally formulated to dispute biologically deterministic explanations of women’s subordination, the analytical distinction between sex and gender has developed in unexpected ways in transitions from one language to another. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from John Money’s sexological writings to Simone (...) de Beauvoir’s dictum, “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” Anglophone feminists in the 1970s developed the distinction between sex (understood as anatomy) and gender (understood as social identity) to argue that a woman’s biological sex ought not dictate the kind of work she should do or the kind of life she should live.1 In her landmark 1975 essay, “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin coined the phrase “sex/gender system” to examine “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”2 In more recent years, however, the distinction 1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Paris: Gallimard, 1949; New York: Knopf, 1993), 281. Citations refer to the Knopf edition. For an account of feminist reformulations of John Money and Robert Stoller, see Jennifer Germon, Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Gayle S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34. It is worth mentioning that sex in Rubin’s sex/gender system refers to sexual practice rather than the distinction between male and female. This understanding forms the basis of her theoretical disagreements with Judith Butler, who preserves the semantic ambiguity of sex (as 342 Petrus Liu between sex and gender has taken on an entirely different meaning as it comes to inform transgender movements and politics seeking to decouple a person’s sex assignment at birth from their future gender identity. At the same time, theories of intersectionality, women-of-color feminisms, and transnational feminisms have all developed their own theses of gender variability to contest the myth of the universal woman. The life of gender—in academic theory, politics, and social movements— has confounded the original intentions of its American theorists. It is clear that there is no singular or stable account of gender; rather, gender is always in a state of flux, incessantly rethought and reforged by the demands of an increasingly complex and asymmetric world.3 Gender is always a translation—from one discipline, context, or language to another—ineluctably intertwined with the geopolitical problems created by the violences of imperialism, colonialism, and transnational capitalism. The translation of gender into non-European languages, such as Chinese, raises questions about whether spaces previously resistant or exterior to world capitalism are now being assimilated and enfolded into the structure of neoliberal globalization defined by the Washington Consensus. Against this view, some critics maintain that China’s precipitous ascent presents an alternative model of development for the Global South called the Beijing Consensus. Considering how gender has entered different languages, including Chinese, to create new coinages that may at times appear as instruments of an imperial takeover, Judith Butler argues that the translation of gender actually offers a path of linguistic humility for English, a reminder that we cohabit a multilingual world in which no one ever owned the term.4 But how exactly do we describe that complex, multilingual world and how does gender both gender and sexuality) as the point of departure for a different kind of feminist inquiry. See Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 67. 3. See Heather Love, ed. “Rethinking Sex.” Special issue, GLQ 17, no. 2 (2011): 1–221. This collection of essays conveys a sense of how Rubin’s methodological distinction between sex and gender has given rise to new ways of thinking across different disciplines about sex radicalism, crip sexuality, Black feminism, and sex trafficking. 4. Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (Winter 2019). Petrus Liu 343 transform it? How is the translation of gender inflected by the material conditions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) v-vii [Access article in PDF] On Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric Molly Meijer Wertheimer When asked to define his editorial policies in choosing articles to publish in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Henry W. Johnstone Jr. disavowed following any strict editorial guidelines; instead, he gave two examples to show how selection worked as a process. In one case, he agreed to publish an "off the wall (...) article" by a distinguished classicist; in another, he accepted an unusually long article--a "behemoth"--by an eminent rhetorician. These examples demonstrate what was to me one of Henry's most unusual and endearing traits as an editor and scholar: he was willing always to go wherever the argument led. It was probably in this spirit that he agreed to publish a special issue on "Feminizing the Philosophy of Rhetoric." I want to thank him posthumously for that decision. As "guest editor" of the issue, I feel privileged to present four well-written essays and two reviews that lead the readers of Philosophy and Rhetoric to consider some philosophical issues that emerge when we overlap concepts of "gender," "culture," and "rhetoric."The essays in this issue explore tactics women have used to get their messages across to others who would not--even could not--entertain speech seriously if presented by a woman. In the first essay, "Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric," Susan Zaeske reads the Book of Esther as a rhetorical manual of exile and empowerment. She traces features of the narrative that were useful as a model of rhetorical behavior early on, as well as appropriations that were made throughout the Middle Ages, Antebellum South, and even in our own day. Her essay emphasizes the riskiness to the speaker that is often entailed by the act of speaking, especially when the listener is "all-powerful" (199); when "his decisions are based not on careful deliberation, but on who influences him the most, usually by prodding his sense of power and manliness" (200). In the narrative, the speaker, Queen Esther, is depicted as utterly thoughtful, careful, well planned and well timed. She seems very much in control of an "indirect" rhetoric. Says Zaeske, "[T]he book teaches that direct, resistant rhetoric is ineffective, even dangerous, while clever, indirect, noncon- frontational methods will succeed in gaining the desired end--power" (202). [End Page v] This is a "conciliatory strategy wise women are forced to use in the patriarchal world" (qtd. on p. 202). And this kind of strategy is contrasted to the defiant rhetoric of Vashti, the former queen, Esther's predecessor, who was banished for saying no to one of the king's commands. Silence and supplication, according to Zaeske, when adopted self-consciously as strategies, are effective with hostile, neanderthal-type auditors. They are "radical," at least in the sense that they are "extreme."Nan Johnson, in her essay "Reigning in the Court of Silence: Women and Rhetorical Space in Postbellum America," furthers discussion of women's rhetorical options. In Zaeske's essay, women assume positions of supplicants or petitioners, or they stand defiant in the face of an oppressive listener (the king). The former are idolized; the latter are demonized. Centuries later, in the fifty years following the Civil War, similar representations of women appeared in conduct literature. Johnson describes a media blitz of ideas and images in etiquette and other self-help manuals that sought to define rhetorical behaviors and actions appropriate for men and women. Some of the writings idolized the "quiet woman" of the home, who reigned silently as queen stitching together via indirection a rhetoric of nurturance that moved beyond the home only through the actions of husbands and sons. This kind of rhetoric was viewed as a natural consequence of femininity. Other writings demonized the woman who spoke from the public platform as a teacher, preacher, and advocate, and who needed a rhetorical education to do so effectively. Many writings highlighted the negative consequences of rhetorical experience to women (who risked their femininity and the love of their families) and to their families (who risked the true source of... (shrink)

The inclusion of girls and women in sport at all levels depends on single sex categories for most sports from puberty onwards, because of the biological differences between the sexes. Most sport is, by definition, competitive; involving invasion games, teams, leagues, races, competitions and sometimes rankings, from foundation to excellence. Girls and women are underrepresented, particularly in traditional sport, as recognised by the UK Sports Councils and most governing bodies of sport. This paper uses feminist philosophy: Lister on (...) androcentric citizenship, and Fraser on justice as balance, framing, recognition, representation and redistribution. It investigates the impact on the inclusion of girls and women, of eligibility policies adopting ‘self-identification of gender’ guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people in sport, at participation rather than elite levels. It explores fairness and equality as incorporated in law in the 2010 Equality Act in Britain, and contributes to ‘equality evidence’ available to the UK Sports Councils and GBS. These bodies are charged with developing fair and inclusive evidence-based eligibility criteria, in sports participation settings, for both girls and women, and transgender people. (shrink)

Sally Haslanger offers the following concept of “woman”: If one is perceived as being biologically female and, in that context, one is subordinated owing to the background ideology, then one “functions” as a woman (2012b, 235). An implication of this account is that if someone is not regarded by others as their self-identified gender, they do not function as that gender socially. Therefore, one objection to this ascriptive account of gender is that it wrongly undermines the (...) class='Hi'>gender identities of some trans people. In this paper, I will argue that Haslanger’s definition can be defended against this objection and that her account inevitably aids in liberatory efforts not only for cisgender women, but for all sexual and gender minorities. While Katharine Jenkins’s dual account of gender aims to rectify this objection (2016, 407), I will point out two important problems with her argument: “the inclusion dilemma” and “the abolition problem.” Finally, I will argue that Haslanger’s account of gender is preferable to Jenkins’s because it outlines the reality of gender as an oppressive, hierarchical system whose categories ought to be dismantled. (shrink)

The inclusion of girls and women in sport at all levels depends on single sex categories for most sports from puberty onwards, because of the biological differences between the sexes. Most sport is, by definition, competitive; involving invasion games, teams, leagues, races, competitions and sometimes rankings, from foundation to excellence. Girls and women are underrepresented, particularly in traditional sport, as recognised by the UK Sports Councils and most governing bodies of sport. This paper uses feminist philosophy: Lister on (...) androcentric citizenship, and Fraser on justice as balance, framing, recognition, representation and redistribution. It investigates the impact on the inclusion of girls and women, of eligibility policies adopting ‘self-identification of gender’ guidelines for the inclusion of transgender people in sport, at participation rather than elite levels. It explores fairness and equality as incorporated in law in the 2010 Equality Act in Britain, and contributes to ‘equality evidence’ available to the UK Sports Councils and GBS. These bodies are charged with developing fair and inclusive evidence-based eligibility criteria, in sports participation settings, for both girls and women, and transgender people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethics of Surgical Interventions for Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Gender DysphoriaNicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P.IntroductionOn May 20, 2009, Fox News featured a report that described the life of a man named "John" who had spent his life struggling with Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).1 In a phone interview, John admitted that he remembers wanting to amputate his leg when he was between seven and eleven years (...) of age, by sticking his leg under the rear wheel of a bus. He never went through with it but continued to experience an intense desire to amputate his healthy limb for the following fifty-plus years. Described for the first time in 1977 as apotemnophilia, BIID was originally thought to be a psychological disorder characterized by sexual arousal associated with the desire to be an amputee. However, it was renamed when Dr. Michael First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, proposed that the primary motivation behind the condition was an issue of identity rather than of sexual desire.2 This proposal is controversial.3 Despite much [End Page 1003] debate, BIID was not included in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which was published on May 18, 2013.In this essay, we will consider the ethics of surgical interventions for BIID and Gender Dysphoria (GD).4 We begin with a discussion of the principle of totality that distinguishes ethical from unethical modifications of the body. We will refer specifically to the latter category of surgical interventions as "mutilations," though the Catholic moral tradition's use of the term is itself ambiguous.5 This is followed by an extensive moral discussion of (1) amputations of healthy limbs for patients struggling with BIID and (2) sex reassignment surgeries for those who identify themselves as transgender persons. I will propose that an ethical argument can be made to justify the former but not the latter.The Principle of TotalityBecause of the goodness of the human body, its integrity is a good that has to be protected and preserved. The ethical principle that is used to judge the morality of bodily interventions that impinge upon this bodily integrity is the principle of totality.6 It was articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae as follows:Since a member is part of the whole human body, it is for the sake of the whole, as the imperfect for the perfect. Hence a member of the human body is to be disposed of according as it is expedient for the body.... If, however, the member be decayed and therefore a source of corruption to the whole body, then it is lawful with the consent [End Page 1004] of the owner of the member, to cut away the member for the welfare of the whole body.7Over the centuries, Catholic moral theologians appealed to the principle of totality to justify three different scenarios that involved the sacrifice of a bodily organ for the sake of the whole human organism. The first case involves a diseased organ that has to be removed to save the life of the soldier wounded on the battlefield—say a gangrenous, decaying limb as in the example of Aquinas. The second case involves the healthy foot of a man who is trapped on a railroad track that has to be amputated to save his life from a collision with a train, and the third case involves the healthy limb of an individual that has to be amputated in response to a tyrant who orders him to cut off his own hand or lose his head to the executioners instead. In these cases, the sacrifice of the part would be morally permitted as a necessary means of preserving the life of the individual. As Fr. Gerald Kelly, S.J., points out, this final case is particularly significant because it involves a healthy limb whose very presence—and not its diseased or trapped condition—becomes a source of vital harm for the organism.8How does one justify the principle of totality? In 1944, Pope Pius XII explained it this way: "Man's power over his... (shrink)

This article foregrounds the intersection between queer Islamic masculinity and Islamic female identity in Rayda Jacobs’s Confessions of a Gambler, and shows how these two identity categories are subjugated in light of dominant expressions of Islamic masculinity. The novel’s action takes place within a traditional Cape Muslim community and employs, among other literary strategies, the main protagonist’s vice of gambling and her son’s sexuality as tools to illuminate the interstitial and perilous social space occupied by women and gay men (...) in South African Muslim society. The research dissects the poignant picture that Jacobs paints of marginal identities as they exist at the intersection of religion, gender identity and sexual identity, and ultimately exhibits that homophobia and gender inequalities are not necessarily intrinsic to Islam. The article adopts a cultural studies style literary analysis. In light of this theoretical approach, this article evaluates Jacobs’s novel in a manner that goes beyond its literariness and shows how it also acts as a form of social commentary. This article also shows how the novel problematises hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality within Islam by giving voice to women and gay men: identity categories which remain largely voiceless in the dominant representations of Islam. (shrink)

In this article, I trace the politics of shame in the context of the problematization of women’s bodies as markers of sexual immorality in modern Ireland. I argue that the post-Independence project of national identity formation established women as bearers of virtue and purity and that sexual transgression threatening this new identity came to be severely punished. By hiding women, children, and all those deemed to be dangerous to national self-representations of purity, the Irish state, supported by (...) Catholic moral values and teaching, physically removed its embodied instances of national shame through a system of mass institutionalization. Just as shame entails the covering of one’s blemishes, so the shaming of women deemed to be deviant by church and state involved their covering via incarceration in Magdalen laundries, among other institutions. By assessing recent events highlighted by inquiries into Irish institutions—Magdalen laundries, reformatory and industrial schools, and soon mother and baby homes—in terms of the politics of shame, this article aims to shed light on the pervasiveness of institutionalization in Ireland and the complex relationship between said institutions, gender, sexuality, and nation building in the early decades of the Irish state. (shrink)

There has been broad interest in the so-called rise of women farmers in United States (US) agriculture. Researchers have elucidated the diverse ways farmers ‘perform’ gender, while also examining how engaging in a masculine-coded industry like agriculture shapes individuals’ gendered identities as well as their social and mental wellbeing. While illuminating, this work is mostly focused on sustainable or direct-market farmers, with surprisingly little research examining women on conventional row crops operations. This paper works to fill this (...) empirical gap and further theorize gender-agriculture intersections through analyzing interviews with Iowa women row-crop farmers to understand the ways they perceive their gendered identities, and how they see them shaping their farming experience and mental wellbeing. Deploying a conceptual understanding of gender as both discursive and embodied as well as relational and fluid, I find respondents see themselves operating in a somewhat liminal gender identity, where they feel adept at moving between masculinized spaces of agriculture and more feminized domains of homes and office jobs. Critically, while women rarely expressed stress about doing “masculine” coded agricultural labor, they had more complex feelings towards either disliking or imperfectly completing feminized care and reproductive labor. Younger women expressed particular ambivalence about assuming the identity of farmer while also fulfilling gendered norms around (heterosexual) marriage and childbearing. The liminality of women’s gender performance also cut both ways, and while they feel able to access different gendered spaces some feel they are not fully accepted in either. I conclude by reflecting on what these particular forms of gendered subjectivity might mean for women’s mental wellbeing and how agencies might better support gender equity in agriculture. (shrink)

The sexual assault of persons with mental disabilities occurs at alarmingly high rates worldwide. These assaults are a form of gender-based violence intersecting with discrimination based on disability. Our research on the treatment of such cases in the Canadian criminal justice system demonstrates the systemic barriers these victims face at the level of both substantive legal doctrine and trial procedure. Relying on feminist legal theory and disability theory, we argue in this paper that abuses of trust and power underlie (...) most sexual assaults of women with mental disabilities. We argue that existing Criminal Code provisions in Canada are inadequate to address this type of exploitation because courts have consistently failed to recognize that such abuses of power and trust are fundamentally inconsistent with any notion of voluntary consent. (shrink)

Many feminist and queer scholars believe that one way to fight racism, sexism and homophobia is to challenge identity labels---ideas of what it means to be “black,” “gay,” “white,” “woman,” “lesbian.” Biology, however, continues to thwart this political agenda; the Body---the biological reality of skin color and sex chromosomes---makes it difficult to propose the idea that identity labels are merely social constructs, not natural facts. Female bodybuilding is a performance that literalizes the body as a site of artificial construction, of (...) intervention, modification. Furthermore, female bodybuilding is a performance of gender bending---women who construct hypermuscular bodies disrupt social norms of gender, performing a kind of self-styled hermaphroditism that begs the question, “why?” This essay explores how female body builders challenge identity labels of sex and gender because of the fact that their gender transgressions occur at the physiological level of the body. I argue that female bodybuilders parody dominant labeling philosophies of sex, gender, and sexual orientation, challenging our sex/gender paradigm in very unique ways. (shrink)

Korean American women are the foundation of the Korean American church. We are devoted, contributing members in the church, but we are seldom given positions of leadership or power. From our subordinate role in the church and wider society, Korean American women have been perpetually subject to racial and gender injustice. To work toward equal empowerment, it is imperative to reimagine historical Christian teaching about God so that it liberates rather than oppresses. As we engage in theological (...) reform, we can begin to experience the wholeness that comes from a Spirit God who embraces all people regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or social status. As a result, Korean American women can finally feel included and contributive to a society which has historically treated them as “perpetual foreigners.” They can also push for multicultural excellence rather than sustaining the dominant white criterion of value. As hybrid spaces proliferate in diversifying America, Korean American women can be an integral source of reimagining the places we inhabit, something that proves to be increasingly necessary to keep the church accessible and contemporary. (shrink)

Theories of citizenship have largely focused on the provision of rights by law and policy measures, as if rights are universally beneficial and cost-free and the invitations of rights will be accepted once offered. I challenge this assumption and highlight the need to empirically address how people negotiate with the benefit and cost of claiming rights. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article delves into the everyday lives of migrant women in two feminized sectors of migration—cross-border marriage (...) and sexual commerce—to situate the act of claiming rights in relation to the gendered pursuit of moral respect. I show that feminist groups in South Korea relied on the discourse of victimization and trafficking in pressuring the South Korean state to account for the human rights of migrant wives and migrant hostesses, while reinforcing the moral hierarchy that renders problematic migrant women’s work and intimate relationships. I argue that the distinctive material and moral costs that accompanied human rights–based provisions compelled migrant wives and hostesses to pursue divergent paths in seeking alternate bases to citizenship that would support their inclusion as moral equals. (shrink)

Dans cet article, Christelle Taraud revient sur trente ans d’histoire des femmes, du genre et des sexualités au Maghreb à l’époque coloniale (1830-1962). Mettant l’accent sur l’apport fondamental des gender, subaltern & colonial studies, l’article vise aussi à faire un bilan critique des avancées, et au contraire des absences et résistances dans un champ qui, au moins depuis les années 1970, est en voie de constitution. Au cœur de l’article, cinq grandes thématiques – colonisation, peuplement et femmes européennes ; (...) femmes européennes et femmes « indigènes » : une rencontre coloniale? ; l’orientalisme recontextualisé ; sexualités en situation coloniale ; et femmes, hommes et guerre en contexte colonial – permettent d’avoir une vision claire, quoique non exhaustive, de la production historiographique des années 1980-2010. (shrink)

Traditional just war doctrine holds that political leaders are morally responsible for the decision to initiate war, while individual soldiers should be judged solely by their conduct in war. According to this view, soldiers fighting in an unjust war of aggression and soldiers on the opposing side seeking to defend their country are morally equal as long as each obeys the rules of combat. Revisionist scholars, however, maintain that soldiers who fight for an unjust cause bear at least some responsibility (...) for advancing an immoral end, even if they otherwise fight ethically. This article examines the attitudes of the American public regarding the moral equality of combatants. Utilizing an original survey experiment, we find that the public's moral reasoning is generally more consistent with that of the revisionists than with traditional just war theory. Americans in our study judged soldiers who participate in unjust wars as less ethical than soldiers in just wars, even when their battlefield conduct is identical, and a large proportion supported harsh punishments for soldiers simply for participating in unjust wars. We also find, however, that much of the American public is willing to extend the moral license of just cause significantly further than revisionist scholars advocate: half of the Americans in our survey were willing to allow an unambiguous war crime—a massacre of innocent women and children—to go unpunished when the act was committed by soldiers fighting for a just cause. Our findings suggest that incorporation of revisionist principles into the laws of war would reinforce dangerous moral intuitions encouraging the killing of civilians. (shrink)

En más de 100 conflictos bélicos que se han producido en los últimos diez años, más del 80 por ciento de las víctimas son civiles. Se ha producido un desarrollo acelerado en las investigaciones concernientes a las consecuencias psico-sociales de la guerra en la población civil, la cual es el blanco principal de las víctimas en la guerra contemporánea. Este trabajo constituye una revisión bibliográfica sobre la guerra como desastre, acerca de los conceptos “modernos” de “guerra total”, desastre y las (...) consecuencias psicológicas de la guerra en la población civil, la utilización de los niños como soldados lo cual acarrea desórdenes mentales marcados y se aborda el problema de la violencia sexual como arma de guerra. Las mujeres, las jóvenes, e incluso niñas, son a menudo sometidas, violadas, secuestradas y forzadas a la esclavitud sexual o cualquier tipo de abuso sexual; son vejadas, humilladas y dañadas en lo más profundo de sus sentimientos psicológicos, y valores morales, lo que también trasciende al grupo social, comunidad, clase social o etnia a la que pertenecen. El deterioro o la destrucción de la infraestructura económica, social y política de las naciones en conflicto impide la atención de las necesidades básicas de la población. El trastorno por estrés postraumático es la entidad nosológica más frecuente en las víctimas de la guerra, pero existen otros trastornos mentales que hay que tener en cuenta In over 100 war conflicts that have occurred in the last 10 years, m ore than 80 percent of the victims were civilians. The scope of recent studies has been increasingly focused on psychological and social effects among civilians who are the target and main victims of contemporary wars. This article is an explanation of why war is considered a disaster, a revision of modern terms for war, disaster and the psychological effects of war on civilians, the training of children as soldiers, and the resulting mental disorders. It touches upon sexual violence problem as a war weapon. Women, adolescents and young children are often violated and forced into sexual slavery or any other type of sexual abuse, causing humiliation and psychological, ethical and moral damage, which can affect social groups, communities, social classes, or races. The deterioration or destruction of the economic, social and political infrastructure of the countries in conflict hinders the satisfaction of the citizens' basic needs. The most common psychological effect among war victims is posttraumatic stress, but there are also other mental disorders which must be taken into consideration. (shrink)