Intersectionality

Trade, Gender and Post-War Recovery, Part One: Exploring the Intersections

Dr. Michelle Maziwisa

Liepollo Lebohang Pheko

Fatimah Kelleher

Dr. Azra Talat Sayeed

April 20, 2022

Online via Zoom

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This webinar series is co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Department; Asian Studies Department; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance; Economics Department; History Department; The Honors College; Latino Studies Program; School for Global Inclusion and Social Development; School for the Environment; Sociology Department; and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor.

Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production

Citation:

Banks, Nina. 2020. “Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production.” The Review of Black Political Economy 47 (4): 343–62.

Author: Nina Banks

Abstract:

This analysis discusses the lived experiences of Black American women as the basis for a new theoretical framework for understanding women’s unpaid work. Feminist economists have called attention to the invisibility of women’s unpaid work within the private household but have not adequately considered the unpaid, nonmarket work that women perform collectively to address urgent community needs that arise out of racial and ethnic group disparities. As such, racialized women’s unpaid, nonmarket work continues to be subject to invisibility. This analysis reconceptualizes Black women’s community activism as unpaid, nonmarket “work” and illustrates that the community is a primary site of nonmarket production by Black women and other racialized women. The community is an important site where racialized women perform unpaid, nonmarket collective work to improve the welfare of community members and address community needs not met by the public and private sectors. The analysis elevates the community to a site of production on par with the household, thereby calling for a paradigm shift in feminist economic conceptualizations of unpaid work. This new framework enables us to examine intersectional linkages across different sites of production—firms, households, and communities—where multiple forms of oppression operate in structuring peoples’ lives. Compared with additive models of gender and race, this intersectional approach more fully captures the magnitude of racialized women's oppression.

Keywords: African American women, unpaid work, community work

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Race Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2020

The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve: A Postcolonial Feminist Political Ecological Reading of Violence and Territorial Struggles in Honduras

Citation:

Mollett, Sharlene. 2018. “The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve: A Postcolonial Feminist Political Ecological Reading of Violence and Territorial Struggles in Honduras.” In Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice. Routledge.

Author: Sharlene Mollett

Abstract:

This chapter aims to rethink the relationship between “parks and people” by making visible mundane and spectacular forms of violence inside the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve. In spite of landmark territorial legislation awarded to Miskito Territorial Councils beginning in 2013, the Miskito peoples continue to face impending colono land invasions inside ancestral customary territories. Drawing from ongoing research in Honduras, this chapter blends ethnographic data collection with news media, archival documents, development reports and secondary literatures to examine the violent challenges to Miskito territorial autonomy. Such violence extends beyond the Reserve and is emplaced on the bodies of land and territorial defenders mobilized against a growing extractivist Honduran state. With a focus on a coloniality of power and postcolonial intersectional thinking, this chapter maintains that biodiversity conservation and extractive development are linked, imbued with past logics of race and gender employed in the dehumanization of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the present. Thus, in Honduras, I argue, contemporary Indigenous struggles over land and territory are simultaneously historical contests that work to disrupt state and elite practices of Indigenous peoples’ dehumanization, in the name of modernity and development.

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Conflict, Resource Conflict, Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Gender, Indigenous, Intersectionality, Land Tenure, Race, Violence Regions: Americas, Central America Countries: Honduras

Year: 2018

Feminisms, the Environment and Capitalism: On the Necessary Ecological Dimension of a Critical Latin American Feminism

Citation:

Schild, Verónica. 2019. “Feminisms, the Environment and Capitalism: On the Necessary Ecological Dimension of a Critical Latin American Feminism.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 20 (6): 23–43.

Author: Verónica Schild

Abstract:

Latin American women are on the move today, taking their demands to the streets throughout the region in unprecedented numbers. What these demands reveal is a growing frustration and anger among women with the distance between official democratic promises and protections and the limited gains in basic rights, even the reversal of minimal achievements in places like Central America and Brazil. Feminists are weaving together different struggles into an intersectional movement explicitly linking gender demands to the end of a neoliberal capitalist model of development and its devastating social, economic and ecological effects on Latin America’s overwhelming majority. A critical Latin American feminism aimed at apprehending the present predicament of women in the region, I suggest, needs to extend its commitment to producing knowledge from below and to the left, by reaching further, and engaging critically with Marx and his feminist critics. Given the widespread impact of the present capitalist modernity, tethered to neo-extractivism, not only on the lives of peasant and indigenous Latin Americans but also of increasingly broader sectors of rural and urban society and in particular, on the lives of women, it is imperative that we understand the structural nature of the relation between women, capitalism and nature.

Topics: Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Rights

Year: 2019

“Drawing the Line” and Other Small-Scale Resistances: Exploring Agency and Ambiguity in Transnational Feminist and Queer NGOs

Citation:

Liinason, Mia (she/her/hers), 2021. “'Drawing the Line' and Other Small-Scale Resistances: Exploring Agency and Ambiguity in Transnational Feminist and Queer NGOs." International Feminist Journal of Politics 23 (1): 102-124.

Author: Mia Liinason

Abstract:

This article explores the workings of gender expertise inside the institutions of the international governance system as it engages with faith-based actors. Utilizing narratives of gender experts, documentary analysis, and observation, I focus on these experts’ encounters regarding gender equality and women’s rights with religious leaders, religious actors, and conservative governments. Focusing on episodes in which the terms “cultural difference” and “religion” are used synonymously, first, I show how encounters between transnational actors can play a role in hegemonic interpretations of these terms. Second, I explore how powerful actors can become more authoritative in making claims of cultural difference or how the existing distribution of power may be disrupted. I contend that these power relations affect discussions of gender equality. My goal is to contribute to feminist debates by highlighting the ways in which these transnational interactions disrupt assumptions of West versus East. Paying attention to these complex processes can challenge ethnocentric and racist discourses without taking claims of cultural difference at face value.

Keywords: 'feminism', queer, NGOs, transnational, neoliberalism

Topics: Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, International Organizations, Intersectionality, NGOs, Religion, Rights, Women's Rights

Year: 2020

Ecowomanism: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue from a Womanist and Ecological Perspective

Citation:

Harris, Melanie L. 2020. "Ecowomanism: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue from a Womanist and Ecological Perspective." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 36 (1): 123-9.

Author: Melanie L. Harris

Abstract:

Ecowomanism is an approach in religion and ecology that embraces the environmental justice paradigm: a theoretical lens through which one can examine the intersections among racial, economic, gender, and sexual injustice and how these forms of oppression converge with climate injustice. Here, Harris introduces ecowomanism as a multilayered approach to climate justice that can inform and be informed by Christian-Buddhist dialogue. In previous work, she has discussed the significance of an interfaith lens in the work of ecowomanism. Due to the drastic impact of climate change across religious groups, it is crucial to find shared language and bridge understanding about how people of various faiths and nonfaith can raise awareness and confront climate change together in the earth community. She argues that by moving through an eco-womanist method, activists and practitioners can engage comparative religious discourse about the shared and sometimes differing moral and ethical guidelines regarding care for the earth. 

Keywords: ecowomanism, eco-memory, justice

Topics: Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Intersectionality, Justice, Race, Religion

Year: 2020

Continuums of Violence: Feminist Peace Research and Gender-based Violence

Citation:

Yadav, P., and D. M. Horn. 2021. “Continuums of Violence: Feminist Peace Research and Gender-Based Violence.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, edited by T. Väyrynen, S. Parashar, Féron, and C. C. Confortini, 105–14. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

 

Authors: Punam Yadav, Denise M. Horn

Abstract:

This chapter looks specifically at gender-based violence directed towards women, acknowledging that gender-based violence is also experienced by men and boys. The continuum of violence is a constitutive relationship between different types of violence, from small acts of personal violence to large scale institutional violence. The chapter focuses on the links between “everyday” gender-based violence and violence associated with war as part of continuums of violence. Feminist lenses perceive gender and power dynamics in relation to violence and analyses the relationships between various types of violence, which are both spatial and temporal. The interrogation of Western (white) feminism is particularly important for feminist peace researchers and gives space to consider the varieties of “everyday violence” that are the consequences of paternalism and exploitation. Feminist postcolonial theorists and transnational feminist activists draw attention to intersecting identities and the historical contexts of colonial relations that reinforce continuums of violence as a global phenomenon embedded in every institution. (Abstract from Taylor & Francis)

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Domestic Violence, Feminisms, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Intersectionality, Peace and Security, Sexual Violence, SV against Women, Violence

Year: 2021

Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism

Citation:

Fakier, Khayaat, Diana Mulinari, and Nora Räthzel, eds. 2020. Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today: Essential Writings on Intersectionality, Labour and Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books.

Authors: Khayaat Fakier , Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Annotation:

Summary:

This vital new collection presents new Marxist-Feminist analyses of Capitalism as a gendered, racialized social formation that shapes and is shaped by specific nature-labour relationships. Leaving behind former overtly structuralist thinking, Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today interweaves strands of ecofeminism and intersectional analyses to develop an understanding of the relations of production and the production of nature through the interdependencies of gender, class, race and colonial relations. With contributions and analyses from scholars and theorists in both the global North and South, this volume offers a truly international lens that reveals the the vitality of contemporary global Marxist-Feminist thinking, as well as its continued relevance to feminist struggles across the globe (Summary from Zed Books).

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Khayaat Fakier, Diana Mulinari, Nora Räthzel

Part I – Conceptualising

1. Standpoint Theory
Cynthia Cockburn

2. Outside in the Funding Machine
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

3. Contradictions in Marxist Feminism
Frigga Haug

4. Ecofeminism as (Marxist) Sociology
Ariel Salleh

5. The ‘Flat Ontology’ of Neoliberal Feminism
Jennifer Cotter

6. The Byzantine Eunuch: Pre-capitalist Gender Category, ‘Tributary’ Modal Contradiction, and a Test for Materialist Feminism
Jules Gleeson

7. Reading Marx against the Grain: Rethinking the Exploitation of Care Work Beyond Profit-Seeking
Tine Haubner

Part II – Production

8. Marx and Social Reproduction Theory: Three Different Historical Strands
Ankica Čakardić

9. The Best Thing I Have Done Is to Give Birth; The Second Is to Strike
Paula Mulinari

10. Women in Small Scale Fishing in South Africa: An Ecofeminist Engagement with the ‘Blue Economy’
Natasha Solari and Khayaat Fakier

11. The ‘Crisis of Care’ and the Neoliberal Restructuring of the Public Sector – a Feminist Polanyian Analysis
Rebecca Selberg

12. Gender Regimes and Women’s Labour: Volvo Factories in Sweden, Mexico, and South Africa
Nora Räthzel, Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen

Part III – Religions and Politics

13. Religious Resistance: A Flower on the Chain or a Tunnel towards Liberation?
Gabriele Dietrich

14. A Marxist-Feminist Perspective: From Former Yugoslavia to Turbo Fascism to Neoliberal Postmodern Fascist Europe
Marina Gržinić

15. Feminism, Antisemitism and the Question of Palestine/Israel
Nira Yuval Davis

Part IV – Solidarities

16. Women in Brazilian's Trade Union Movement
Patricia Vieira Trópia

17. Argentinean Feminist Movements: Debates from Praxis
Ana Isabel González Montes

18. Marxist Feminism for a Global Women’s Movement against Capitalism
Ligaya Lindio McGovern

19. Marxist/Socialist Feminist Theory and Practice in the USA Today
Nancy Holmstrom 

20. Solidarity in Troubled Times: Social Movements in the Face of Climate Change
Kathryn Russell

Topics: Class, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Economies, Care Economies, Environment, Feminisms, Ecofeminism, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Intersectionality, Race, Religion Regions: Africa, MENA, Southern Africa, Americas, North America, South America, Europe, Balkans, Nordic states Countries: Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Palestine / Occupied Palestinian Territories, South Africa, Sweden, United States of America

Year: 2020

Communal Land Tenure Security for Widows in the Eenhana Constituency of the Ohangwena Region, Namibia

Citation:

Nakanyete, Ndapwea F., Romie V. Nghitevelekwa, Mark M. Matsa, John Mendelsohn, Selma Lendelvo, and Fanuel Shikale. 2020. “Communal Land Tenure Security for Widows in the Eenhana Constituency of the Ohangwena Region, Namibia.” Journal of International Women's Studies 21 (1): 131–47.

Authors: Ndapewa Fenny Nakanyete, Romie Vonkie Nghitevelekwa, Mark M. Matsa, John Mendelsohn, Selma Lendelvo, Fanuel Shikale

Abstract:

Namibia is characterized by a history of discriminatory customary practices against women with regards to access to land, rights over land, and security of land tenure. Since independence in 1990, the country has adopted policies and legislative frameworks to bring about gender equality in all spheres of life, including the transformation of land tenure rights. These policies and acts give effect to the constitutional provisions that accord both men and women equal opportunities for access to land, rights over land and security of tenure. Widows are a particularly singled-out social group for legal protection, land security and rights to land enjoyed during their spouses’ lifetimes, and are granted protection, at least on paper, from discriminatory practices such as unlawful land evictions. This article evaluates and analyses the current status of land tenure security for widows in the Eenhana Constituency of the Ohangwena Region in Namibia. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods through questionnaires, interviews and focus group discussions with widows, as well as key informant interviews with Communal Land Board representatives, members of the traditional authorities, as well as the Ministry of Land Reform’s regional office officials. Through this case study, the findings establish that even though Namibia acclaims progressive policies and legislative frameworks on gender equality, there are still pockets of discrimination against widows where they continue to be at risk of losing their land rights in some of Namibia’s communal areas. Addressing the land tenure insecurities and a guarantee of legal land rights for widows is key to reducing vulnerabilities within female-headed households in the communal areas. Traditional authorities remain a key governance structure in communal areas, particularly in relation to access to land, and land rights inheritance issues, amongst others. Similarly, the Communal Land Boards are statutory institutions mandated to ensure implementation of the provisions of the Communal Land Reform Act of 2002, including the protection of land rights for widows. The study therefore recommends three main measures: the removal of all forms of discriminatory customary practices against widows; continued awareness-raising initiatives on the rights of widows; and full implementation of legal provisions for the protection of widows’ land rights and security of tenure.

Keywords: widows, communal land, security, land tenure, land rights, inheritance, rural area, Namibia

Topics: Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, Intersectionality, Land Tenure, Rights, Land Rights, Security Regions: Africa, Southern Africa Countries: Namibia

Year: 2020

Perceived Tenure (In)Security in the Era of Rural Transformation Gender-Disaggregated Analysis from Mozambique

Citation:

Ghebru, Hosaena, and Fikirte Girmachew. 2019. “Perceived Tenure (In)Security in the Era of Rural Transformation Gender-Disaggregated Analysis from Mozambique.” IFPRI Discussion Paper 017999 (2019): 1-33. 

 

Authors: Hosaena Ghebru, Fikirte Girmachew

Abstract:

This study examines the drivers of tenure insecurity in Mozambique using data from the National Agricultural Survey (TIA) 2014 as well as a follow-up supplemental survey with detailed land tenure gender-disaggregated data from three groups: namely, principal male, principal female, and female spouses. Perceived risk of land loss (collective tenure risk) and perceived risk of a private land dispute (individual tenure risk) are used to measure land tenure insecurity. The empirical findings reveal, overall, collective tenure risks are the real threat to women’s tenure security while individual tenure risks (ownership, inheritance, border disputes, etc.) are more of a threat to the tenure security of men. However, a more gender-disaggregated analysis reveals that individual tenure risk is higher among female spouses as compared to male heads within the same household. Moreover, perceived risk of land loss is higher among non-indigenous male heads while female spouses who have no control over family land are more likely to have higher perceived tenure insecurity. Results also show that land-related legal awareness seems to be more significant in dictating the (positively) perceived tenure security of women as compared to their male counterparts. Generally, tenure insecurity for female spouses seem to be associated with the emergence of land markets while relative land scarcity in a given community dictates tenure insecurity of the principal female (female heads). Hence, the empirical findings reinforce the need to complement ongoing efforts to enhance tenure security at the household and community level with gender-tailored/targeted programs that take into account the intra-household dimension of addressing issues of land tenure security.

Keywords: gender, Mozambique, Perception, rural transformation, tenure insecurity

Topics: Agriculture, Gender, Gender Analysis, Men, Women, Intersectionality, Land Tenure, Security Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Mozambique

Year: 2019

Pages

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