Race

Citation:

Deb, Basuli. 2016. “Cutting across Imperial Feminisms toward Transnational Feminist Solidarities.” Meridians 13 (2): 164–88. doi: 10.2979/meridians.13.2.09.

Author: Basuli Deb

Abstract:

Photography, not only by imperial men but also by imperial women, has played a significant role in portraying the Muslim woman as the apolitical exotic of orientalist fantasies. The legacy of colonial photography by European women travelers continues to haunt the media of the global North even today. Such imperial feminist discourse on women in Egypt was blatant in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's December 2011 announcement of the National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security at Georgetown University, as well as in the rhetoric of Laura Bush, Cherie Booth, and Condoleezza Rice on the War on Terror and Afghan and Iraqi women. In contrast, this article draws on the photographic counter-narratives, like “the girl in the blue bra,” that transnational feminists circulated through social media during the people's uprising in Egypt beginning in 2011 to evoke powerful images of women from the global south. It also examines the figure of the pan-Arab feminist Huda Shaarawi, who in 1919 organized the largest women's anti-British demonstration, and became in 1935 the vice president of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, and in 1945 the founding president of the Arab Feminist Union. Bringing these figures into conversation with Angela Davis's encounter with women in Egypt in her book Women, Culture, and Politics opens up new spaces for cross-border feminisms that cut across imperial legacies that continue to define relationships between women of the global North and the global South.

Keywords: feminism, race, transnationalism

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Governance, Race, Religion Regions: Africa, MENA, North Africa, Asia, Middle East Countries: Egypt

Year: 2016

Citation:

Pratt, Nicola. “Reconceptualizing Gender, Reinscribing Racial–Sexual Boundaries in International Security: The Case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security.’” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 772–83. doi:10.1111/isqu.12032.

Author: Nicola Pratt

Abstract:

The gendered boundaries of international security, historically identified by feminist scholarship, are being broken down since the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls on member states to mainstream a gender perspective into matters of conflict and peacebuilding. However, we should not read this as a positive step toward the transformation of the lives of women (and men) in conflict zones. Reading 1325 and subsequent resolutions through a postcolonial feminist lens reveals that this reconceptualization of gender occurs through a reinscription of racial–sexual boundaries, evocative of the political economy of imperialism. An examination of the discourses and practices of the “war on terror” exposes a similar configuration of gender, race, and sexuality. I argue that 1325 works in tandem with dominant security practices and discourses in the post-9/11 moment, normalizing the violence of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency measures. Understanding the significance of race and sexuality in the conceptualization of gender has implications for transnational feminist praxis and its ability to construct a counter-hegemonic project to transform the dominant structures of power that give rise to war, conflict, insecurity, and injustice.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Men, Peacebuilding, Political Economies, Race, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325, Sexuality

Year: 2013

Citation:

Kongar, Ebru, Jennifer C. Olmsted, and Elora Shehabuddin. 2014. “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities: A Critical Feminist and Postcolonial Analysis.” Feminist Economics 20 (4): 1–32. doi:10.1080/13545701.2014.982141.

Authors: Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted, Elora Shehabuddin

Abstract:

This contribution seeks to delineate the broad contours of a transnational, anti-imperial feminist perspective on gender and economics in Muslim communities by bringing together feminist analyses of Orientalist tropes, development discourses and policies, and macro- and microeconomic trends. The goal is to facilitate conversations among scholars who have tended to work within their respective disciplinary and methodological silos despite shared interests. This approach pays special attention to intersectionality, historicity, and structural constraints by focusing on the diversity of the experiences of women and men by religion, location, citizenship, class, age, ethnicity, race, marital status, and other factors. It recognizes the complex relationships between the economic, political, cultural, and religious spheres and the role of local and transnational histories, economies, and politics in shaping people's lives. Finally, it emphasizes that openness to different methodological approaches can shed clearer light on the question of how various structural factors shape women's economic realities.

Keywords: Islam, economic development, feminist economics, orientalism, neoliberalism

Topics: Age, Class, Economies, Feminist Economics, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Men, Race, Religion

Year: 2014

Citation:

Author: Sandra Ponzanesi

Annotation:

Topics: Armed Conflict, Citizenship, Class, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Displacement & Migration, Forced Migration, Refugee/IDP Camps, Gender, Globalization, Humanitarian Assistance, Justice, Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Race, Peacekeeping, Religion, Sexuality, Trafficking, Violence Regions: Europe

Year: 2014

Citation:

Hiralal, Kalpana. 2015. “Narratives and Testimonies of Women Detainees in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 29 (4): 34–44. doi:10.1080/10130950.2015.1104883.

Author: Kalpana Hiralal

Abstract:

South Africa's road to democracy was a product of the contributions of both men and women in the freedom struggle. Thousands of women risked their lives and sacrificed their families. In the post-apartheid era the narratives of the nationalist struggle have largely focused on popular and well known men and women, their experiences in exile and their role in the African National Congress (ANC) which led to the under-ground movement. This article seeks to document the lived experiences of women inmates and detainees in the liberation struggle, whose stories have remained in the shadows of dominant nationalist narratives. Thousands of women were arrested, subjected to naked body searches, torture, verbal abuse and sexual harassment. Women experienced both physical and psychological humiliation. This article argues that prison, despite being a "site of humiliation", repression, and subversion, also became a "site of female community and resistance" (Thapar-Bjorkert, 2006:12,25) and that women political prisoners were capable of challenging and negotiating their incarceration. This study challenges dominant narratives of the nationalist struggle by making women inmates and detainees crucial historical subjects and introduces the prison as another terrain of political struggle, resistance, confrontation, and negotiation in the telling of the liberation struggle.

Keywords: gender, prison, apartheid, Narratives, women detainees

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Health, Mental Health, Race, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Torture, Sexual Torture Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: South Africa

Year: 2015

Citation:

Author: Puleng Segalo

Abstract:

There are stories that many people who have experienced a traumatic and oppressive past carry with them, stories that continue to remain untold. In a country such as South Africa, where ‘empowerment’ and ‘equality’ are the order of the day, it becomes crucial to acknowledge people's lived experiences and how these relate to the changes taking place. Drawing from an empirical study I conducted in Gauteng, South Africa, this article interrogates how Black women's private memories of the conflict/apartheid period influence how they make sense of their new-found freedom. It explores how these women use artistic forms such as embroideries to re-stitch their lives, create personal life stories, and make connections between the past and the present.I highlight how the women's narratives demonstrate the importance of acknowledging the intersection of gender, history, and politics when talking about people's experiences. I point to the significance of revisiting history in order to make sense of the present, and show how freedom should be understood within its historical context. The interweaving of the women's experiences highlights the collectiveness of suffering, and their narratives may be perceived as echoes of both collective and individual suffering, and healing. The embroideries they produced externalise their embodied experience, and allow for the weaving in of multiple life experiences. I conclude by discussing how through creating personal embroideries the women draw attention to the inequalities they continuously have to contend with in their everyday lives.

Keywords: embroidery, suffering, healing, memory, Narratives

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Discourses, Post-Conflict, Race Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: South Africa

Year: 2014

Citation:

Basham, Victoria M. 2016. “Gender, Race, Militarism and Remembrance: The Everyday Geopolitics of the Poppy.” Gender, Place & Culture 23 (6): 883–96. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2015.1090406.

Author: Victoria M. Basham

Abstract:

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.

Keywords: Gender, race, everyday militarism, rememberance, emotion

Topics: Gender, Women, Men, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Race Regions: Europe, Northern Europe Countries: United Kingdom

Year: 2016

Citation:

Banerjee, Paula. 2008. Women in Peace Politics. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Author: Paula Banerjee

Annotation:

Topics: Caste, Class, Conflict Prevention, Gender, Women, Gender Balance, Gendered Power Relations, Peacebuilding, Peace Processes, Political Participation, Race, Security, Human Security Regions: Asia, South Asia

Year: 2008

Citation:

Khalili, Laleh. 2011. "Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency." Review of International Studies 37: 1471-91.

Author: Laleh Khalili

Abstract:

Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted – for violence or ‘nation-building’ – on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incendiary form in the seam of encounter between counterinsurgent foot-soldiers and the locals, where sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race. Finally, in the Metropole, new masculinities and femininities are forged in the domain of counterinsurgency policymaking: While new soldier-scholars represent a softened masculinity, counterinsurgent women increasingly become visible in policy circles, with both using ostensibly feminist justifications for their involvement.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Class, Combatants, Development, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Political Participation, Race, Sexuality, Violence Regions: MENA, Americas, North America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, United States of America

Year: 2011

Relevant Links: Access PDF Here

Citation:

Mollett, Sharlene, and Caroline Faria. 2013. “Messing with Gender in Feminist Political Ecology.” Geoforum 45 (March): 116–25.

Authors: Sharlene Mollett , Caroline Faria

Abstract:

Keywords: feminist political ecology, race, whiteness, postcolonial intersectionality

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Environment, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Gender Roles, Femininity/ies, Gendered Power Relations, Race Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Honduras

Year: 2013