Race

Citation:

Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy. 2005. “Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?” Politics & Gender 1 (4): 597-619.

Author: Timothy Kaufman-Osborn

Abstract:

Topics: Combatants, Gender, Men, Masculinity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Race, Sexual Violence, Female Perpetrators, SV against Men

Year: 2005

Citation:

Philipose, Liz. 2007. “The Politics of Pain and the Uses of Torture.” Signs 32 (4): 1047-71.

Author: Liz Philipose

Annotation:

Topics: Gender, Masculinity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Race, Religion, Sexual Violence, SV against Men, Terrorism Regions: Africa, MENA, Asia, Middle East Countries: Iraq

Year: 2007

Citation:

Richter-Montpetit, Melanie. 2007. “Empire, Desire and Violence: A Queer Transnational Feminist Reading of the Prisoner ‘Abuse’ in Abu Ghraib and the Question of ‘Gender Equality.’” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9 (1): 38-59.

Author: Melanie Richter-Montpetit

Abstract:

Dominant discourses in the United States paint the acts of prisoner 'abuse' committed by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib in 2003 as either the obscene but exceptional example of some low-ranking soldiers gone mad, or as the direct result of the suspension of the rule of law in the global 'war on terror'. Alternatively, feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the pictures depicting female soldiers torturing prisoners are both horrifying and a sign of 'gender equality'. This article departs from all three of these positions. I argue that the micro-level violences shown in the Abu Ghraib pictures are neither just aberrations nor a sign of gender equality. Rather they follow a pre-constructed heterosexed, racialized and gendered script that is firmly grounded in the colonial desires and practices of the larger social order and that underpins the hegemonic 'save civilization itself'-fantasy of the 'war on terror'. I explore how the participation of some of the US Empire's internal Others, namely White western women, may disrupt some of the social processes of normalization underpinning this colonial fantasy, but nevertheless serves to re/produce the identity and hegemony of the US Empire and its heterosexed, racialized and classed World (Dis)Order.

Keywords: Abu Ghraib, civilization, colonial, desires, Ehrenreich, empire, fantasy, gender equality, militarized masculinity, orientalism, US, 'Whiteness'

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equity, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Race, Sexual Violence, Female Perpetrators, SV against Men, Violence

Year: 2007

Citation:

Perry, Keisha-Khan Y. 2013. Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author: Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

Abstract:

In Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, black women, especially poor black women, are rarely considered leaders of social movements let alone political theorists. But in the northeastern city of Salvador, Brazil, it is these very women who determine how urban policies are established. Focusing on the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood in Salvador's city center, Black Women against the Land Grab explores how black women's views on development have radicalized local communities to demand justice and social change. In Black Women against the Land Grab, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry describes the key role of local women activists in the citywide movement for land and housing rights. She reveals the importance of geographic location for understanding the gendered aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. How have black women shaped the politics of urban redevelopment, Perry asks, and what does this kind of political intervention tell us about black women's agency? Her work uncovers the ways in which political labor at the neighborhood level is central to the mass mobilization of black people against institutional racism and for citizenship rights and resources in Brazil. Highlighting the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts often represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt, Black Women against the Land Grab offers a valuable corrective to how we think about politics and about black women, particularly poor black women, as a political force.

Topics: Gender, Women, Land Grabbing, Political Participation, Race Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Brazil

Year: 2013

Citation:

Kondo, Michelle C. 2012. “Influences of Gender and Race on Immigrant Political Participation: The Case of the Trusted Advocates: Gender, Race and Immigrant Participation.” International Migration 50 (5): 113–29. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2011.00730.x.

Author: Michelle C. Kondo

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Gender, Women, Political Participation, Race

Year: 2012

Citation:

Muralidharan, Anjana, David Austern, Samantha Hack, and Dawne Vogt. 2016. “Deployment Experiences, Social Support, and Mental Health: Comparison of Black, White, and Hispanic U.S. Veterans Deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 29 (3): 273–78. doi:10.1002/jts.22104.

Authors: David Austern, Samantha Hack, Anjana Muralidharan, Dawne Vogt

Abstract:

Compared to their White counterparts, Black and Hispanic Vietnam-era, male, combat veterans in the United States have experienced discrimination and increased trauma exposure during deployment and exhibited higher rates of postdeployment mental health disorders. The present study examined differences in deployment experiences and postdeployment mental health among male and female Black, Hispanic, and White veterans deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq. Data were drawn from a national survey of veterans (N = 924) who had returned from deployment within the last 2 years. Ethnoracial minority veterans were compared to White veterans of the same gender on deployment experiences and postdeployment mental health. The majority of comparisons did not show significant differences; however, several small group differences did emerge (.02 < η2 < .04). Ethnoracial minority veterans reported greater perceived threat in the warzone and more family-related concerns and stressors during deployment than White veterans of the same gender. Minority female veterans reported higher levels of postdeployment symptoms of anxiety than their White counterparts, which were accounted for by differences in deployment experience. These differences call for ongoing monitoring.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Female Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Gender Analysis, Mental Health, PTSD, Trauma, Race Regions: Africa, MENA, Americas, North America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, United States of America

Year: 2016

Citation:

Siddiqi, Dina M. 2009. “Do Bangladeshi Factory Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood in the Post-Sweatshop Era.” Feminist Review 91 (1): 154–74. doi:10.1057/fr.2008.55.

Author: Dina M. Siddiqi

Abstract:

This article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the ‘sweatshop economy’ have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between ‘global’ and ‘local’ feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above – calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance – can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to ‘save’ women workers.

Keywords: Bangladesh, garment industry, globalization, sweat shops, transnational feminism

Topics: Economies, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Globalization, Livelihoods, Political Economies, Race, Rights, Human Rights, Violence Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2009

Citation:

Boesten, Jelke. 2010. “Analyzing Rape Regimes at the Interface of War and Peace in Peru.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 4 (1): 110–29. doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijp029.

Author: Jelke Boesten

Abstract:

Using the political conflict in Peru as a case study, the author argues that the thesis that rape is a weapon of war obscures other rape regimes during political conflict. These include rape as consumption, opportunistic rape, rape by neighbors or family members, forced prostitution and rape in the aftermath of war. Neglect of forms of sexual violence that do not fit the rape-as-a-weapon-of-war script seriously impedes the transformative potential of processes of transitional justice, as it allows for the continuation of (sexual) violence against women that perpetuates hierarchies based on gender, race and class.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Class, Gender, Justice, Transitional Justice, Race, Sexual Violence, SV against Women Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Peru

Year: 2010

Citation:

Rosser, Emily. 2007. “Depoliticised Speech and Sexed Visibility: Women, Gender and Sexual Violence in the 1999 Guatemalan Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico Report.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 1 (3): 391–410. 

Author: Emily Rosser

Abstract:

This paper analyses how concepts of gender, sexual violence and women functioned within the 1999 Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH). Through a discourse analysis of the text of the CEH report, I argue that because the Commission presents data about sexual violence without a more broadly integrated gender analysis, it fails to recognise indigenous women, or their claims, as political and thus reinforces their marginality. I situate this report in the context of universalising discourses of human rights and democratisation, in which women's participation is held up as evidence of gender correctness while what they say is often of less concern. Amidst calls for gender mainstreaming and ‘women's rights as human rights,’ truth commissions and human rights bodies must work harder at the conceptual level to interrogate how gender, ‘race,’ class, nation and other intersecting oppressions are at work, both during a genocide and afterwards, in the construction of truths and the reconstruction of societies.

Topics: Gender, Women, Indigenous, Justice, TRCs, Post-Conflict, Race, Rights, Indigenous Rights, Sexual Violence Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Guatemala

Year: 2007

Citation:

West, Darrell M., and Marion Orr. 2007. “Race, Gender, and Communications in Natural Disasters.” Policy Studies Journal 35 (4): 569–86.

Authors: Darrell M West, Marion Orr

Abstract:

We examine public attitudes toward vulnerability and evacuation in hurricane natural disasters. Using the results of an opinion survey in a coastal, New England state, we find important differences in how men and women, and Whites and minorities perceive natural disasters. Race, gender, and geographic proximity to the coast affect how vulnerable people believe their residence is to a major hurricane, while government officials and media reporting telling people to evacuate influence evacuation decisions. In order to avoid future breakdowns, governments need to understand the different information processing approaches of various groups of people.

Topics: Environment, Environmental Disasters, Gender, Women, Media, Race Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2007