Amorcées dès la conquête d’Alger en 1830, les migrations européennes s’amplifient quand Louis-Philippe décide en décembre 1840, après dix ans d’atermoiements, de conquérir l’ensemble du territoire algérien en y installant une colonie de peuplement. Or, bien que la présence de femmes européennes en Algérie soit avérée dès les premiers recensements démographiques, les nombreuses études concernant les migrations européennes sont pour l’essentiel asexuées. Cet article revisite ces flux migratoires au regard du genre. L’analyse de données quantitatives fournies par l’administration française tant (...) en métropole qu’en Algérie (relevés de dossiers de départ déposés en préfecture, recensements démographiques des Européens établis en Algérie, mortuaires des étrangers) permet de mettre en évidence des comportements migratoires plus ou moins familiaux et des sex-ratios différents selon les nationalités et les périodes. Ces constatations sont confirmées et explicitées par des sources qualitatives (récits/témoignages et historiographie migratoire). (shrink)

Within Western European countries the number of women and girls already genitally mutilated or at risk, is rising due to increasing rates of migration of Africans. The article compares legislative and ethical practices within the medical profession concerning female genital mutilation (FGM) in these countries. There are considerable differences in the number of affected women and in legislation and guidelines. For example, in France, Great Britain and Austria FGM is included in the criminal code as elements of crime, whereas (...) in Germany and Switzerland FGM is brought to trial as bodily injury. So far trials only in France and Switzerland in connection with FGM resulted in convictions. France and Great Britain as former Colonial countries serve as an example of countries with a comparably great number of African immigrants. These countries have the best possibilities to intervene preventatively, due to legislation and detailed medical guidelines. For instance, an obligation exists in France to inform administrative and medical authorities if FGM is suspected. FGM so far is not explicitly part of the curriculum for medical training in any of the examined countries. (shrink)

This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of (...) ‘white’ migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a ‘flexible’ resource. (shrink)

En se concentrant sur la route transatlantique entre la France et Cuba, cet article explore les débats du début du xxe siècle sur la « traite des femmes » à travers les lunettes de l’histoire des migrations. Diverses sources attestent de la prédominance des prostituées, des proxénètes et des trafiquants français dans l’industrie du sexe à Cuba. La question de savoir si les Françaises étaient des migrantes entreprenantes ou des victimes de la traite reste cependant ouverte pour les contemporains. L’article (...) examine la migration prostitutionnelle comme une stratégie de survie pour les Françaises pauvres. Il envisage les options possibles pour traverser l’Atlantique et les types de pratiques sexuelles qu’elles vendent dans les bordels de La Havane. Il étudie le rôle des intermédiaires masculins dans la facilitation de la migration de la France vers les Amériques. Il présente in fine la façon dont se croisent, au milieu des années 1920, les efforts de lutte contre la traite et la législation cubaine sur l’immigration. (shrink)

European prostitutes occupied an important intermediary status in colonial Bombay’s racially stratified sexual order. In this article, the author offers a transnational feminist analysis of how the colonial state managed its racial and spatial location. The colonial state individuated, fostered, and monitored European prostitutes much more closely than others involved in the sex trade, and “coercive protection” by the police and brothel mistresses kept European brothel workers within their assigned spaces. Paradoxically, international antitrafficking efforts (...) in colonial Bombay consolidated, rather than undermined, these relations of coercive protection. The League of Nations’ antitrafficking measures in the 1920s encouraged the police to focus on cross-nationalcases andthird-partyprocurers andto overlook women who were deemed insufficiently pure. Comparing police, missionary, and social workers’ records, the author offers a critique of both international antitrafficking discourses and the Indian colonial state’s interests in sustaining the sex trade. (shrink)

This book is the first to ask whether there is a specifically European dimension to certain major issues in Women's Studies. It strives to create a synergetic debate among different disciplines and cultural traditions in Europe, and, in doing so, fills some gaps in our knowledge about women and enriches debates hitherto dominated by Anglo-American influences. Among the new areas of enquiry opened up in this book by the specificities of European Women's Studies are: * The fact that (...) Europe has repeatedly experienced warfare on its own territory which has impacted significantly on women. Hence the focus in this volume on women and militarism, and on ethnic cleansing as an attack on the family. * The abidingly problematic relationship between feminism and anti-semitism, and issues of migration and 'whiteness' in a context where racism reflects the colonial histories of particular European countries. * The importance of passion and the emotions, as well as psychoanalytical theory, for politics particularly in Southern and Eastern European countries. * Current problems facing Europe, including the decline of the welfare state, the phenomenon of the 'single' woman, and the relationship between women's rights and human rights. * The diverse faces of feminist movements in particular European countries. Reading feminism from a European perspective will enable readers to reflect upon the ways in which changes in political, social and cultural positions and practices over the past century in Europe have impacted on feminist thinking and theorizing. The volume raises important issues about the transfer of feminist concepts across cultures and languages. And to English-speaking audiences the volume also offers fresh viewpoints on some of the key debates in Women's Studies. (shrink)

This article, based on original research from 57 villages in four provinces from North and East India, sheds light on a hitherto unexplored gendered impact of colorism in facilitating noncustomary cross-region marriage migrations in India. Within socioeconomically marginalized groups from India’s development peripheries, the hegemonic construct of fairness as “capital” conjoins with both regressive patriarchal gender norms governing marriage and female sexuality and the monetization of social relations, through dowry, to foreclose local marriage options for darker-hued women. This dispossession of (...) matrimonial choice forces women to “voluntarily” accept marriage proposals from North Indian bachelors, who are themselves faced with a bride shortage in their own regions due to skewed sex ratios. These marriages condemn cross-region brides to new forms of gender subordination and skin-tone discrimination within the intimacy of their marriages, and in everyday relations with conjugal families, kin, and rural communities. Because of colorism, cross-region brides are exposed to caste-discriminatory exclusions and ethnocentric prejudice. Dark-skin shaming is a strategic ideological weapon employed to extract more labor from them. The article extends global scholarly discussion on the role of colorism in articulating new forms of gendered violence in dark-complexioned, poor rural women’s lives. (shrink)

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the main (...) focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

The paper examines the shift of the veil from a religious and traditional symbol to a political metaphor during French colonized Algeria (1830–1962). It dis- cusses the significance of veiling for both the coloniz- ers and the colonists. For France, unveiled women would have been the proof of colonial power. For Algeria, veiling represented resistance to assimilation. Caught in between, the veil can be considered a metaphor for the Algerian colonization. The first part of the paper explores the religious (...) and traditional meanings associated with the veil. The second part analyses the political importance of the veil during colonization and its use as a tool for misleading the French authorities. (shrink)

This article examines changes and continuities in the epistemic and methodological presence of “race” in British imperial demography from 1920 to 1960. It does so in relation to population-level interventions aimed at improving reproduction in the New Hebrides. Through an examination of the sex ratio in relation to debates about demographic decline, the article describes aspects of how sexual selection was connected to race thinking. Taking a balanced sex ratio as a marker of well-adapted, healthy populations—biologically and culturally—the (...) British authorities in the New Hebrides attempted to regulate the bride price in an attempt to level the imbalanced sex ratio. They believed that this intervention would reduce the marriage age of men while also appeasing missionary agendas of changing marriage and kinship practices. I use the metaphor of a “watermark” to think through the conceptual and methodological absent/presence of race in colonial demography and colonial administrators’ attitudes toward and interventions in local reproductive practices. (shrink)

Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded (...) thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers, whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial CultureSpencer Hawkins (bio)Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton UP, NJ: Princeton, 2007. xv + 325 pp.Mufti’s comparison of the Jewish question and the Indian Partition invites readers to join building projects that delineate and then endanger minorities within nations. Literature about minorities speaks a language deliberately (...) distant from the national one. Minority status has little to do with population numbers for Aamir Mufti; instead it signifies [End Page 61] tential victimization through disproportional rights, since “minority is always potentially exile” (Mufti 13). This definition of minority suits his two examples—Jews in Germany and Muslims in India—since in the twentieth century both fledgling nations adopted forms of nationalism that regarded the lives of these minorities as contaminants to the purity of the emergent national body. The prologue catalogues the brutality in India that prompted Mufti to write this book. Among the horrors listed were the destruction of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the videotaped gang rapes of Muslim women that became a widespread form of entertainment in India. While Mufti reads violence toward minorities as correlative with the rise of nationstates, he considers similarities and differences between nation building in the West and in the subcontinent. In both cases, the new establishment of political equality for citizens came along with the desire to pare down the number of officially recognized citizens. Muslim and Jewish minorities migrated to “minority” nations in the collapsing British Empire, in present-day Pakistan and Israel, respectively, during the respective formations of India and Germany. By founding nations on formerly British-occupied territory, minorities potentially would enjoy the role of nationalist majorities. This solution strikes Mufti as spreading the nationalist contagion onto the minority.The whole book lets literature mark broad cultural attitudes and phenomena. The first chapter observes incipient Jewish nationalism in a work by a British author, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, who spent time in Germany and grew fascinated with the Jewish question while abroad. Her Britishness reinforces a pattern in Mufti’s schema: British powers facilitate the rise of nationalism among minorities in India and in Germany. Daniel Deronda comes at the tail end of a long discourse on Jews’ relation to Europe. The first of Mufti’s cases within canonical literature is the hope for tolerance and a dialogue of cultures, which G. E. Lessing allegorizes through a drama about Saladin, the Muslim sultan of Egypt and Syria, who learns to trust the eponymous Jewish merchant in Nathan the Wise. “Muslim” stands in for “Christian” since Nathan’s alienation is allegorical for the alienation of Jews in Lutheran Germany. Heinrich Heine weighs in on the advantages to assimilation in this period with his fragmentary novel The Rabbi from Bacherach, where religiously raised Jewish children feel comforted when they hear the Tale of the Nibelungen from Father Rhein, the personification of a river that figures generally for German national myth and, in Heine’s story, as a possible source of comfort for partially assimilated minorities. If we read literature as a barometer of cultural pressures, then the appeal of assimilation for European Jews declines in the late colonial nineteenth century when George Eliot inscribed religion into the “secular” discourse of national citizenship.Since the Israeli state is outside of the range of his argument, we leave the Jewish Question with George Eliot’s philo-Semitism in Daniel Deronda, where the only hope for European Jews is to become a nation and to occupy the Palestinian territory. Mufti compares the concerns of early Zionism and Pakistani nationalism side by side in chapter 2. Pakistani issues dominate chapters 3 to 5. In chapter 2, he launches the comparison with the parallel between Hebrew’s development as a national language to identify [End Page 62] Jews secularly and culturally, not just religiously, and Urdu’s transition from a vernacular language to a national language with the secular goal of creating a Pakistani culture freed from Hindi’s erstwhile predominance. When he depicts language choice as mimetic of specific cultural trends, Mufti indicates the shape of... (shrink)

Secular change in sex ratios is examined in relation to experience in the family. Two theoretical perspectives are outlined: Guttentag and Secord’s (1983) adaptation of social exchange theory, and sexual selection theory. Because of large-scale change in number of births and typical age differentials between men and women at marriage, low sex ratios at couple formation ages existed in the U.S. between 1965 and the early 1980s. The currently high sex ratios, however, will persist until the end of the century. (...) High sex ratios appear to be associated with lower divorce rates, male commitment to careers that promise economic rewards, male willingness to engage in child care, higher fertility, and higher rates of sexual violence. Sexual selection theory calls attention to intrasexual competition in the numerically larger sex. (shrink)

Independent samples of women were surveyed to test Trivers and Willard’s hypothesis that the mother’s condition and her ability to invest in her offspring affect the (secondary) sex ratio of her offspring. Patterns of sex ratios (number of males per 100 females) were analyzed in conjunction with four attributes of a mother’s microenvironment: level of health in her community, family structure, relative access to resources, and her birthing history. The results inferentially support the hypothesis that the microenvironment of the (...) woman would act to bias the sex ratio of her offspring. These specific data lend support to Trivers and Willard’s general hypothesis. (shrink)

During the Algerian struggle, Fanon warned us about the influence on politics of ‘the few European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who have at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats, blocked every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of democracy into Algeria’. Is this remark still pertinent? How does Frantz Fanon help us understand current reactionary politics in France? Is his analysis of the French Left still pertinent? How does colonial discourse weigh on (...) the postcolonial present? In this article, I explore current expressions of French postcolonial reactionary politics focusing on an event in Reunion Island, a French postcolonial territory. I argue that it is important to observe what is happening in French postcolonial territories because they remain laboratories for repressive policies and discourses. What I call the discourse of ‘French Algeria’, a mix of revisionist history, resentment, wounded narcissism and racism, embodies a political trend that seeks to counter the small progress made in rewriting history from the point of view of the colony in France. (shrink)

This essay addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizesnhip by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, it points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals. A close analysis of female bodies dispayed in the campaigns indicates that the use of victimizing images goes hand in hand with the erotization of women's bodies. Wounded and (...) dead women's bodies are read as attempts to stabilize the current political and social transformations in Europe by capturing women within the highly immobile boundaries of the sign ‘Woman’. The essay suggests that the representation of violence is thus violent itself since it confirms the stereotypes about eastern European women, equates the feminine with the passive object, severs the body from its materiality and from the historical context in which trafficking occurs, and finally confines women within the highly disabling symbolic register of ‘Woman’ as to maintain an imaginary social order in Europe. (shrink)

Antoinette Fouque cofounded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes in France in 1968 and spearheaded its celebrated Psychanalyse et Politique, a research group that informed the cultural and intellectual heart of French feminism. Rather than reject Freud's discoveries on the pretext of their phallocentrism, Fouque sought to enrich his thought by more clearly defining the difference between the sexes and affirming the existence of a female libido. By recognizing women's contribution to humanity, Fouque hoped "uterus envy," which she saw as (...) the mainspring of misogyny, could finally give way to gratitude and by associating procreation with women's liberation she advanced the goal of a parity-based society in which men and women could write a new human contract. The essays, lectures, and dialogues in this volume finally allow English-speaking readers to access the breadth of Fouque's creativity and activism. Touching on issues in history and biography, politics and psychoanalysis, Fouque recounts her experiences running the first women's publishing house in Europe; supporting women under threat, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Taslima Nasrin, and Nawal El Saadaoui; and serving as deputy in the European Parliament. Her theoretical explorations discuss the ongoing development of _feminology_, a field she initiated, and, while she celebrates the progress women have made over the past four decades, she also warns against the trends of counterliberation: the feminization of poverty, the persistence of sexual violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century imperialist discourses constructed European colonisation of indigenous inhabitants as an inevitable and necessary process for the progress of the colonies and the extension of the British Empire. Within this construct, imperialist and patriarchal discourses intersected to construct ‘white women’ in a manner that denied them legitimacy as autonomous individuals but simultaneously positioned them as actors within the imperial endeavour. Recent feminist scholarship has extended this historiography by considering how some women in nineteenth-century New Zealand were complexly positioned as (...) both agents and critics of colonisation, involved in imperial strategies and yet disruptive of practices of cultural assimilation of Maori. This article furthers this scholarship through an illustrative case study of one woman who embodied this complex positioning within patriarchal and imperialist discourses. English-born wife of the first Chief Justice of New Zealand, and outspoken critic of colonial policies associated with government appropriation of Maori land, Mary Ann Martin was actively involved in establishing Anglican training institutions for young Maori men and women, and in dispensing medical assistance to Maori. Examination of her positioning on the margins of imperial discourses offers an opportunity to consider the operation of colonialism as a discourse implicated by gendered, racialised identities. Detailed textual analyses of selected extracts of her reminiscences of her 34-year residence in New Zealand, which focus on her positioning as a member of the ‘inferior’ sex in the dominant race, offer an opportunity to examine the ways in which she simultaneously challenged and reinforced Victorian prescriptions of respectable womanhood; how her views on and interactions with Maori may have destabilised accepted notions of women's appropriate spheres of influence; and the extent to which her challenges to dominant views on race relations may have been inflected by her positioning within gendered discourses of femininity. (shrink)

The contribution of women to China’s economic growth and development cannot be overemphasized. Women play important social, economic, and productive roles in any economy. China remains one of the countries in the world with severe gender inequality and sex ratio at birth (SRB) imbalance. Severe gender inequality and disenfranchisement of girls with abnormally high sex ratios at birth reflect deep-rooted sexism and adversely affect girls’ development. For China to achieve economic growth, women should not be ignored and marginalized so (...) that they can contribute to the country’s growth, but the sex ratio at birth needs to be lowered because only women can contribute to growth. Thus, this study empirically predicts an asymmetric relationship between gender inequality, sex ratio at birth and economic growth, using NARDL model over the period 1980–2020. The NARDL results show that increases in gender inequality and sex ratio at birth significantly reduce economic growth in both the short and long term, while reductions in gender inequality and sex ratio at birth significantly boost economic growth in both the short and long term. Moreover, the results show the significant contribution of female labor force participation and female education (secondary and higher education) to economic growth. However, infant mortality rate significantly reduced economic growth. Strategically, the study recommends equal opportunities for women in employment, education, health, economics, and politics to reduce gender disparities and thereby promote sustainable economic growth in China. Moreover, policymakers should introduce new population policy to stabilize the sex ratio at birth, thereby promoting China’s long-term economic growth. (shrink)

This article investigates the portrayal of Spanish women in a rarely discussed work by the German popular philosopher Christoph Meiners (1747–1810). Between 1788 and 1800 Meiners wrote four substantial volumes titled History of the Female Sex: Comprising a View of the Habits, Manners, and Influence of Women, Among all Nations, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time, which sought to give an account of the physical and moral qualities of women, and their treatment at the hands of men “at (...) all times in all lands” (Vol. 1, p. III). This article explores the two chapters of this work that address the qualities and status of Spanish women, in order to shed light on perceptions of Spain in northern Europe in the eighteenth century. The decline of the Iberian Peninsula as a seat of European imperial power from the seventeenth century, and the emergence of northern European countries such as France, the British Isles, and even the German provinces, as centres of Enlightenment thinking ushered in a new era of geographical dualism in Europe. This article will build upon recent critiques of the “Orientalisation” of Spain by northern Europeans, showing how the marginalisation of Spain served the nationalist strivings of this provincial German scholar. ☆ Heather Merle Benbow would like to thank the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, for support towards this research. (shrink)

This article explores how certain feminine voices are adapted or ‘naturalized’ in audiovisual translation in order to conform to the intended audience’s assumed gender beliefs and values. Using purposefully selected examples from the American series Sex and the City, the author analyses elements pertaining to American feminism and how they are rendered in the French dubbing and subtitles. While the subtitles retain most references, the dubbing reveals a marked tendency to delete, weaken and transform allusions to American feminist culture as (...) well as female achievements in the public sphere and feminist ideology. These findings are discussed in relation to the history, place and representation of women and feminism in France. The case study suggests that integrating a feminist approach in audiovisual translation research could help women’s studies detect the unspoken gender values of the cultures for which audiovisual translation is produced. (shrink)

Historical demographic research shows that the factors influencing mortality risk are labile across time and space. This is particularly true for datasets that span societal transitions. Here, we seek to understand how marriage, migration, and the local economy influenced mortality dynamics in a rapidly changing environment characterized by high in-migration and male-biased sex ratios. Mortality records were extracted from a compendium of historical vital records for the Baja California peninsula (Mexico). Our sample consists of 1,201 mortality records spanning AD 1835–1900. (...) Findings from Cox proportional hazard models indicate that (1) marriage was associated with a protective effect for both sexes; (2) residing in a mining town was associated with higher mortality for men, but not women; (3) migration was associated with decreased mortality risk for women, but not men; and (4) the risk of mortality increased in the face of infectious disease, but decreased over time. Despite the early initiation of reproduction for women, marriage had a protective effect, likely because marriage linked women to resources. Although mining boomtowns were associated with elevated risk factors generally, only men experienced greater mortality risk, likely due to dangerous working conditions that women did not experience. Last, female, but not male, migrants experienced greater longevity, possibly because exposure to harsh labor conditions eroded the protective effect of selection bias for men. Together, these results shed light on an understudied historical population and broaden our understanding of demographic dynamics in preindustrial settings. (shrink)

This is an analysis of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, first written in the early eighteenth century when she travelled to the Ottoman Empire, and finally ‘published’ in 1763. As well as producing ‘the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient’, Montagu is a pioneer in introducing the Turkish women's practice of inoculation against smallpox into England. This article sets out the long-standing critical debate over the rights and wrongs of the (...) Letters, particularly focusing on the period since the 1970s when feminist and post-colonial readings have presented or questioned Montagu's credentials with respect to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, religion and class. It concludes that Montagu describes how she is received with considerable, if conditional, hospitality by Turkish women in their bagnio and ‘harems’, and that her writing is, in turn, conditionally hospitable towards them. She is explicitly concerned not to fall into the Orientalizing clichés of Early Modern men's travel writing, which typically represents Muslim women as imprisoned in harems, enslaved, starved of sex and sexually voracious. By careful consideration of the historical, political and social context of the societies which Montagu knew, and could make comparison between, a modern reader too can act hospitably in taking Montagu's narrative into her own. (shrink)

In recent years Vietnam has experienced a high sex ratio at birth SRB) amidst rapid socioeconomic and demographic changes. However, little is known about the differentials in SRB between maternal socioeconomic and demographic groups. The paper uses data from the annual Population Change Survey (PCS) in 2006 to examine the relationship of the sex ratio of the most recent birth with maternal socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and the number of previous female births. The SRB of Vietnam was significantly (...) high at 111.4 (95% CI 109.7–113.1) for the period 1st April 2000 to 31st March 2006. Multivariate analysis reveals that sex of the most recent birth is strongly related with the number of previous female births. This association is consistent across different socioeconomic and demographic groups of women. Given the high SRB in Vietnam, further research into the reasons for high SRB in these groups is required, as are intervention programmes such as those raising the public awareness of its negative consequences. © Cambridge University Press, 2010. (shrink)

This study examines the hypothesis that the stopping rule-a traditional postnatal sex selection method where couples decide to cease childbearing once they bear a son-plays a role in high sex ratio of last births (SRLB). The study develops a theoretical framework to demonstrate the operation of the stopping rule in a context of son preference. This framework was used to demonstrate the impact of the stopping rule on the SRLB in Vietnam, using data from the Population Change Survey 2006. (...) The SRLB of Vietnam was high at the level of 130 in the period 1970-2006, and particularly in the period 1986-1995, when sex-selective abortion was not available. Women were 21% more likely to stop childbearing after a male birth compared with a female birth. The SRLB was highest at parity 2 (138.7), particularly in rural areas (153.5), and extremely high (181.9) when the previous birth was female. Given the declining fertility, the stopping rule has a potential synergistic effect with sex-selective abortion to accentuate a trend of one-son families in the population. (shrink)

Over fifty years after Algerian independence from France, Franco-Algerian relationships and the complexities of the colonial legacy remain a key concern for many citizens in both countries. In Contesting Views, Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle explore the significant role visual culture has had in mitigating this fraught relationship. They trace the circulation of and connections between a diverse range of still and moving images from both sides of the Mediterranean, offering a new understanding of the postcolonial experience in Europe (...) and North Africa and wider contemporary geopolitics as they play out in visual culture. (shrink)

Les séjours d’étude à l’étranger se sont développés après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Plus que d’autres formes de voyage, ils permettent aux jeunes adultes de s’immerger dans la culture et le quotidien d’un autre pays. Les jeunes femmes américaines qui ont étudié en France entre la fin des années 1940 et les années 1960 ont été marquées par les stéréotypes de genre et les pratiques sociales et sexuelles auxquels elles ont été confrontées. S’appuyant sur des entretiens oraux avec d’anciennes étudiantes (...) et sur des lettres envoyées alors aux familles, cet article examine la manière dont ces Américaines ont négocié les différences culturelles, pour évaluer certains aspects de la culture française et se forger une identité individuelle plus indépendante et plus assurée. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall, women and girls have been trafficked from central and eastern Europe to work as prostitutes in the European Union. This paper looks at the response of the international community to the problem of sex trafficking as it impacts on the EU. The focus is on criminal justice intervention with respect to protection of and assistance to ‘victims’, and a specially witness protection, in the light of the following: the tensions and promises between (...) treatment of trafficked women as ‘victims’ of crime and criminal justice informants; and the need to re-focus on a ‘woman-centred’ approach to criminal justice intervention for trafficked women. Given the diverse nature of law and criminal justice practice between EU Member States, the paper necessarily presents a generic critique of current EU and international ‘best practice’ recommendations, with some commentary on practice based on the author's research, with respect to what ‘gold standards’ of practice offer in theory and what is delivered in reality. The question of ‘victim-centred’ justice and/or ‘woman-centred’ justice is raised in an effort to promote effective policy recommendations. (shrink)

This article makes a conceptual contribution to the broader literature on unfree labour by challenging the separate treatment of sexual and industrial labour exploitation both by researchers and in law and policy. This article argues that the prevailing focus of the supply chain literature on industrial labour has inadvertently posited sexual labour as the ‘other’ of industrial labour thus obfuscating how the legal blurring of boundaries between industrial and service labour is engendering new modalities of the erosion of workers’ rights (...) that are increasingly resembling those typical of sex work. This article advances the debate on unfree labour both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it highlights the relevance of social reproduction in understanding forms of labour unfreedom. Empirically, it demonstrates the similarities in forms of control and exploitation between sex work and industrial work by illustrating how debt and housing operate in both settings. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class women deemed grotesque for not presenting themselves with (...) sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)

Despite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ‘human rights penality,’ by analysing features of the Western-colonial register vis-a-vis more relational worldviews. Separateness, abstraction, and transcendence broadly underpin the (...) exclusion of embodied experience, context, and material reality from the juridical field. In the second part, through discourse analysis of Inter-American and European case law, the author shows the deployment of human rights penality, the displacement of experience, and the disregard of context in IHR discourse. VAW is construed as a procedural and penal matter: it is the absence of a penal process that courts regard as failure to protect women, rather than the state’s inability/unwillingness to address structural subordination. Moreover, the ‘virtues’ attributed to the penal system justify its expansion, which facilitates the continuity of penal violence and debilitates alternative approaches to justice. Finally, the author posits penal abolition as an anticolonial praxis, pointing at examples of anti-carceral feminist work. (shrink)

Have invisible barriers for women been broken in 2007, or do we still have to break through medicine's glass ceiling? Data from two of the most prestigious university hospitals in Barcelona with 700-800 beds, Hospital Clínic (HC) and Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (HSCSP) address this issue. In the HSCSP, 87% of the department chairs are men and 85% of the department unit chiefs are also men. With respect to women, only 5 (13%) are in the top (...) position (department chair) and 4 (15%) are department unit chiefs. Similar statistics are also found at the HC: 87% of the department chairs and 89% of the department unit chiefs are men. Currently, only 6 women (13%) are in the top position and 6 (11%) are department unit chiefs. Analysis of the 2002 data of internal promotions in HC showed that for the first level (senior specialist) sex distribution was similar. Nevertheless, for the second level (consultant) only 25% were women, and for the top level (senior consultant) only 8% were women. These proportions have not changed in 2007 in spite of a 10% increase in leadership positions during this period. Similar proportions were found in HSCSP where 68% of the top promotions were held by men. The data obtained from these two different medical institutions in Barcelona are probably representative of other hospitals in Spain. It would be ethically desirable to have males and females in leadership positions in the medical profession. (shrink)

The decolonization of France is not over yet. Blind to what was coming , France is now badly hit by the boomerang : linguistic isolation, postcolonial studies in slumber, deafness towards the boys and girls of the suburbs : words are cruelly lacking for institutions to make sense of what’s happening. At a loss, the media can only multiply distortions in media coverage and the authorities produce repression/selection at the borders. In this paper, the author develops the apparent differences between (...) English and French as colonial and postcolonial languages, as well as the difference between the language and politics of young boys and girls from the suburbia in France. (shrink)

This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated (...) alongside their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorities’). Thus, these discourses of ‘immigration’ manifest a distinctly post-colonial cancer coursing restlessly through the larger social formation of ‘the West’. (shrink)

Dans le cadre des luttes pour l’indépendance en Inde (1890-1940) et du renouvellement des normes de la mode féminine en Europe, des Anglaises telles Annie Besant, Margaret Noble, Madeleine Slade quittent à leur arrivée en Inde leurs robes traditionnelles pour des habits qui réélaborent des éléments empruntés à la culture indienne. Les pratiques vestimentaires témoignent, particulièrement dans le contexte anticolonial, d’un enjeu crucial tant pour les autorités britanniques que pour les Indiens. Tandis qu’Indiens et Indiennes modifient leurs habits en réponse (...) aux pressions des codes vestimentaires coloniaux, ces « saris européanisés » affirment publiquement à la fois leur sentiment politique anti-impérialiste et un programme national et social pour les Indiens sous-tendu par une forte dimension féminine. Ils fonctionnent comme un lieu de négociation des relations coloniales par la contestation ouverte des notions impérialistes de domesticité et l’introduction de nouvelles formes de sociabilités politiques. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices (...) challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views. (shrink)

This book provides a fresh examination of the cosmopolitan project of post-war Europe from a variety of perspectives. It explores the ways in which European cosmopolitanism can be theorized differently if we take into account histories which have rarely been at the forefront of such understandings. It also uses neglected historical resources to draw out new and unexpected entanglements and connections between understandings of European cosmopolitanism both in Europe and elsewhere. The final part of the book places (...) class='Hi'>European cosmopolitanism in tension with contemporary postcolonial configurations around diaspora, migration, and austerity. Overall, it seeks to draw attention to the ways in which Europe s posited others have always been very much a part of Europe s colonial histories and its postcolonial present. ". (shrink)

This book examines the contributions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women philosophers and intellectuals to moralist writing. Moralist writing, a distinctively French genre, draws on philosophical and literary traditions extending back to classical antiquity. Closely connected to salon culture and influenced by Augustinianism, it engages social and political questions, epistemology, moral psychology, and virtue ethics. The first half of the book analyzes women’s use of moralist forms such as the essay, maxim, and “character” or portrait to explore classical topics: self-knowledge (...) and knowledge of the self, the ethics and obligations of friendship, the relation of the passions to happiness. The second half focuses on topics that relate directly to women’s lifeworld: the critique of the institution of marriage, the status of older women, and the question of women’s nature and capabilities. Each chapter traces the evolution of women’s moralist thought from the late seventeenth century to the Enlightenment and the decades immediately following the French Revolution, a period of tremendous change in the horizon of possibilities for women as public figures and intellectuals. (shrink)

In Latin America, institutionalized feminist philosophy is a recent phenomenon, dating for the most part since the 1980s. Historically, the gifted writer/philosopher/poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico, Colonial Period) and the utopian socialist activist Flora Tristán (France and Peru) are especially recognized for their original feminist contributions. The Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira wrote the moderately pro‐feminist treatise Sobre feminismo in 1918, during the suffragist phase of the movement. Contemporary feminist philosophy has followed the general theoretical trends (...) established since the 1970s in Western European and Anglo‐American feminist philosophy and theory. Feminist philosophers have challenged traditional androcentric readings of the canon and have pursued alliances with colleagues in Women's Studies programs. As of the mid‐1990s, a firm tradition of feminist studies has been established in several countries. Important feminist journals and publications include Debate feminista (Mexico), Estudos feministas (Brazil), Isis Internacional (Chile), and Feminaria (Argentina); Hiparquía (Argentina) currently publishes feminist and non‐feminist articles by women philosophers. (shrink)

On July 2021, the UK High Court of Justice heard the Case CO/2066/2020 on the application of Heidi Crowter who lives with Down’s syndrome, and Máire Lea-Wilson whose son Aidan has Down’s syndrome. Crowter and Lea-Wilson, with the support of the disability rights campaign, ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’, have been taking legal action against the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the UK Government) for a review of the 1967 Abortion Act: the removal of section 1(1)(d) making termination (...) of pregnancy lawful for ‘severe’ fetal indications detected after 24 weeks' gestation. On 23 September 2021, the High Court dismissed the claim. This action came at a time when non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) was introduced into the NHS England Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme for the trisomies 21, 13 and 18. The implementation of NIPT has been heavily criticised, in particular by ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’ campaigners, for increasing fetal selection and discrimination of people living with disabilities. The case of Crowter and Lea-Wilson echoes debates in other European countries such as in France and Germany, where the introduction of NIPT in the public healthcare system has provoked equally vehement public reactions and discussions. The comparison between these three countries allows contextualising the public discourses around NIPT and the ground for termination of pregnancy in relation to different socio-cultural and political contexts. We examine how each country, and particularly England, deals with the conflict between the principles of promoting the rights of people living with disabilities and preserving women’s reproductive autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay I develop a feminist anti-colonial critique by reading two eighteenth-century literary texts that discuss Middle Eastern and Indigenous gender and sexual practices at length: Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) and Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772). While Montesquieu and Diderot are often heralded as anti-imperial European Enlightenment thinkers, the specific ways in which Montesquieu and Diderot use gender and non-European women's bodies to construct their political-theoretical arguments show us two distinct colonial logics, (...) one imperial and the other settler-colonial. I show that whereas Montesquieu uses Persian and Muslim sexual and gender practices to put forward an imperial vision premised on the superiority of French political order over a despotic ‘oriental’ order, Diderot uses Indigenous sexual practices to denote a settler-colonial logic premised on the erasure of conquest and pacification of Indigenous women's bodies. In doing so I build on existing feminist and post/anti-colonial scholarship to develop gender and sexuality as central analytics of imperial and settler-colonial politics. (shrink)

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write in the characters of women? What happens when philosophers take sexuality seriously and the sex-writers present their outrageous fantasies as an educational, philosophical quest? Schooling Sex is the first full history of early modern libertine literature and its reception, from Aretino and Tullia d'Aragona in 16th century Italy to Pepys, Rochester, and Behn in late 17th century England. James Turner explores the idea of sexual education, from the (...) simple instructional dialogue to the advanced experiments of the philosophical libertine, analysing the hard-core curiculum that defined sexuality centuries before the Marquis de Sade. He shows how close, nuanced readings of neglected but compelling texts - like the searingly explicit Alcibiade fanciullo, L'escole des filles, and Aloisia Sigea - link them to larger issues of gender politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, sexual history, medical science, mind-body philosophy, and the educational revolution. (shrink)

France’s agreements on the joint management of migration flows figure centrally within studies of bilateral migration agreements. With their origins in friendship and navigation treaties of the late 19th century, the AJMs are successors to the postcolonial, circular mobility conventions of the 1960s, and are uniquely positioned for periodizing the evolution of bilaterally negotiated labor mobilities. Nonetheless, due to the European Union’s reluctance to embrace mass regularization and the EU Member States’ legislative powers over labor markets, they have time (...) and again scotched France’s ambition to leverage preferential labor market entries in exchange for more cooperation over irregular migration. Through documents and statistical data analysis, this Article studies the case of Senegal’s negotiation of additional pathways to France for its lower-skilled workers. At the center is France’s administrative court of appeals, which has confirmed the broad margin of discretion over Art. 42 in the AJM between France and Senegal. This jurisprudence has decoupled the automatic linkage between a job listed under duress in France under the Annex to the AJM and the entitlement to exceptional admission. We argue that France’s courts have removed a privilege of Senegalese workers, which has re-politicized France’s migration diplomacy with Senegal. At the same time, retention of the prefectorial discretionary power has levelled the playing field among West and North African countries that have concluded similar bilateral agreements with France. This Article adds to the research on bilateral migration agreements by proposing a multilevel legal analysis, which studies AJMs in the context of France’s common law, EU labor and return directives, and the multilateral of WTO/gats liberalization. (shrink)