Feminist Studies
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/f/fs/
Feminist StudiesPreface [Vol. 40, no. 3]
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.301
Millie Thayer2014This issue continues a longstanding Feminist Studies commitment to publishing critical scholarship that explores the changing national and transnational contours of feminism and feminist activism. Raewyn Connell revisits the importance of taking seriously the problem of Eurocentrism, which limits access to feminist theoretical contributions from the global South, and she points to the possibilities of circulating translated texts (see links to sample texts on our website). Tomomi Yamaguchi’s essay addresses a transnational translational dilemma: how a phrase—“gender free”—imported into Japan ostensibly from the global North, can be marshaled to resist feminist political gains through deliberate misrepresentation. Kathryn Moeller also traces the trajectory of a category—this time “adolescent girl”—as it is used in social marketing campaigns by the Nike Foundation in urban Brazil. Srila Roy’s article reads the current moment of the Indian women’s movement in the context of debates about its decline owing to neoliberalism and the role of NGO-based activism. Astrid Henry’s essay explores parallels and contrasts between US Third Wave feminist thinking and Fittstim-feminists in Scandinavia, particularly in terms of their relationship to the state and their critiques of postfeminism and neoliberalism. In our concluding article, the winner of this year’s Feminist Studies’ Graduate Student Award, Heather Berg traces the varied politics attached to the sex trade in the United States, closely interrogating the emergence of the term “sex work” in the United States in the 1970s as a means of organizing labor in commercial sex industries. These essays all sketch feminism’s changing position within the nation-state, even as they index the play of transnational feminist ideas through liberal and neoliberal discourses. They also point to the importance of Marxist or socialist feminism as an ongoing agonist for contemporary feminist analysis: Berg describes how “sex work” comes to have a liberal meaning as an “equal exchange,” obscuring it as another form of exploitative labor, while Roy and Henry pose leftist-feminist critiques of neoliberalization with a critical eye on the expanding space of feminist NGOs in India and Scandinavia; Japanese feminism in Yamaguchi’s account, on the other hand, is cast by its opponents as a “Marxist, evil scheme.” Flaudette May Datuin’s art essay dwells on how feminist interventions also occur in the context of nationalist struggle, and she highlights questions of violence and its representation. Themes of violence, gender, and representation are also reflected in this issue’s featured poetry by Claudia M. Reder, Helena Boberg, and Kim Hyesoon.Feminist Studies403Rethinking Gender from the South
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.302
Raewyn Connell2014From the time of the first UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City in 1975, the hegemony of the global North in feminism was contested. That historical moment, as Chilla Bulbeck explained in One World Women’s Movement, posed the questions of global solidarity and global inequality at the same time, launching a debate in which ambiguities in the global project of feminism quickly became evident.Feminist Studies403“Gender Free” Feminism in Japan: A Story of Mainstreaming and Backlash
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.303
Tomomi Yamaguchi2014In Japan, the introduction of the Basic Law for a Gender Equal Society in 1999 and subsequent efforts to introduce municipal gender-equality ordinances marked the mainstreaming of feminism in the country. Consequently, feminism became the target of an intense wave of criticism by conservative forces. The attacks began around 2000, appearing first in conservative organizations’ newsletters and pamphlets, and then in conservative mass media and on the Internet. The criticism of feminism has influenced the direction of local policy-making, the content of some municipal gender-equality ordinances and plans, sex education in public schools, and projects undertaken at municipal gender-equality centers. Japanese feminists adopted the English term “backlash” to describe this wave of criticism, echoing the title of Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women.Feminist Studies403Imago Mundi
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.304
Claudia M. Reder2014Feminist Studies403Searching for Adolescent Girls in Brazil: The Transnational Politics of Poverty in “The Girl Effect”
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.305
Kathryn Moeller2014In the early 1990s, Nike, Inc., the world’s largest sporting goods and apparel manufacturer, became the global target of antisweatshop and antiglobalization movements. Their criticism focused on the corporation’s well-documented abusive practices against its predominantly young, uneducated, poor, female labor force in the Global South. Responding to tarnishing accusations, including media exposés on child labor, cofounder and then CEO Phil H. Knight publically stated at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, in May 1998 that “Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse.” Despite Knight’s promises to transform the corporation’s practices more than a decade ago, accusations of abusive labor problems persist in Nike’s contract factories, as reflected in well-publicized worker strikes in Indonesia in 2007, in Honduras in 2010, and in Cambodia in 2013. Nevertheless, since its moment of crisis, the corporation has focused on remaking itself as a socially responsible entity.Feminist Studies403Piecing Together a World in Which We Can Dwell Again: The Art of Imelda Cajipe Endaya
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.306
Flaudette May Datuin2014In these opening lines of an untitled poem by Gregoria de Jesus, the world is suddenly strange and unlivable. The writer—fondly called Oryang (or Oriang)—is remembering her husband Andres Bonifacio, leader of the Philippine Revolution against Spain, founder and Supremo (supreme leader) of the Philippine revolutionary society Katipunan, of which Oryang had been among the most active members. As the Lakambini (princess) of the Katipunan and widely acknowledged as one of the heroines of the Philippine Revolution, she performed dangerous tasks which only women can undertake undetected by the police. Although independence was won from Spain in 1898, Andres and his brother Procopio were arrested by rival revolutionaries, charged with treason, and executed, despite scant evidence. Oryang searched for their bodies for months and months, but failed to find them. In her poem, Oryang transfers the pain outside her body, relaying her inner state through language. Grief and suffering (dusa) are given form, disseminated, and shared, stirring the community to commiserate and take action (damay). In the words of Philippine scholar Reynaldo Ileto, damay thus becomes “a social experience, a Katipunan (collective) experience. Since damay is a manifestation of whole and controlled loob (inner sense), the Katipunan radiates heat and flame, just as Christ and other individuals of exemplary loob radiate liwanag (light).”Feminist Studies403New Activist Subjects: The Changing Feminist Field of Kolkata, India
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.307
Srila Roy2014The nationwide protests in the wake of the brutal gang rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old student in New Delhi in December 2012 have renewed debates about feminism in India. While the near-unprecedented display of public outrage was for some a welcome sign that feminism is alive and well in an Indian context, for others it signaled the absence of a genuine women’s movement that was able to give voice and direction to such public anguish. The latter sentiment has in fact long prevailed among women’s rights activists observing the major transformations to feminist politics in the wake of India’s globalization. Such activists have viewed these transitions as signaling the decline, if not the death, of the Indian women’s movement (hereafter, IWM) in the face of the “coopting” forces of the state, the market, and the project of neoliberal development. Discussions about Indian feminism in its current “third wave” are invariably motivated by generational narratives about the loss of the radical edge of the IWM.. Nostalgic narratives among older feminists continue in spite of contrary empirical evidence such as the largely spontaneous mass protests around the Delhi rape.Feminist Studies403Moonrise; Bright Rags
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.308
Kim Hyesoon2014Feminist Studies403Fittstim Feminists and Third Wave Feminists: A Shared Identity between Scandinavia and the United States?
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.309
Astrid Henry2014“Have you heard about Fittstim?” asked the Swedish woman who approached me at the end of my talk on US Third Wave feminism. It was 1999, and I was finishing my dissertation on generational relationships within US feminism. Fittstim: the word was a mystery because I didn’t know Swedish, but having grown up speaking Danish (and English), I was intrigued. Fittstim, the Swedish woman told me, was a recent book that had created a media firestorm in Sweden because of its bold representation of a new group of Swedish feminists—women the same age as the third wavers I was studying in the United States.Feminist Studies403Sense Violence
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.310
Helena Boberg2014Feminist Studies403Working for Love, Loving for Work: Discourses of Labor in Feminist Sex-Work Activism
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.311
Heather Berg2014In the late 1970s, Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot) coined the term “sex work” as a means to best describe the labor she and other workers in commercial sex industries performed. Leigh hoped the term would unite workers, provide an alternative to stigmatized language, and “acknowledg[e] the work we do rather than defin[e] us by our status.” Thirty years later, the term “sex work” is widely used, particularly in progressive scholarship, worker-directed activism, and worker narratives. In many respects, Leigh’s hopes seem to have been realized: groundbreaking anthologies and activist undertakings inclusive of workers in various sex industries have been organized under the umbrella of “sex work,” and the term remains the standard in value-neutral language. Indeed, its uses might be too value neutral—the work that emerges from much sex-worker activist writing is not the same work of anti-capitalist critique. Instead, it is the work of free exchange between equals, the dignity of a living earned, and a heady blend of both self-sacrifice and fulfilling escape from the drudgery of a nine-to-five job. It is sometimes work that is barely work at all, but instead a performance of the innate self for which the lucky just happen to be paid.Feminist Studies403Mahsa Shekarloo
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.312
2014Mahsa Shekarloo, an Iranian women’s rights activist, independent researcher, writer, and translator, died of cancer on September 5, 2014.Feminist Studies403Notes on Contributors [Vol. 40, no. 3]
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0040.313
2014Heather Berg is a PhD candidate in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received an MA in public policy and women’s studies at George Washington University. Her research interests include Marxist, queer, and feminist labor theory and sex work policy, and her current project examines labor politics in the pornography industry. Berg’s writing appears in WSQ (Summer 2014) and Porn Studies (Spring 2014) and is forthcoming in Social Policy and Society and Queer Sex Work.Feminist Studies403