Subjects Archives: Feminism

  • Neoliberalism, Neocolonialism, and the Criminalization of “Homosexuality”: Interview with Scott Long

      Scott Long: Around the world, there are existing sex laws being strengthened, there are new sex laws being passed.  In Egypt you have people being jailed for homosexuality and for being HIV positive under what’s actually a prostitution law that dates from the fifties.  In Burundi and Nigeria, you have people trying to pass […]

  • Reading The Politics of Veil

      Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  Vii + 208 pp.  Illustrations, notes, and index.  $24.94 U.S. (cl), ISBN 978-0-691-1243-5. On March 15, 2004, the French government passed a law banning the wearing of « conspicuous signs » of religious affiliation within public schools.  The decision […]

  • With Help, Heterosexuals Can Become Gay

    (PU) A recently released study has found that heterosexuals can, with effort, become gay.  Eighty-six percent of a survey group of straight women and men were able, through various forms of reparative therapy, to transform their sexual orientation and achieve “good homosexual functioning.” Dr. Marvin Flabcock, of the American Psychiatric and Floral Design Association, conducted […]

  • Iran: Ahmadinejad Says No One Has Any Right to Bother Women about Hijab or Couples about Their Relationship

      [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said in a June 12 television interview that the government has “no role” in the fight against “bad veiling” and social behaviors that are considered un-Islamic and immoral. “The government has nothing to do with it and doesn’t interfere in it.  We consider it insulting when a man and a […]

  • Statement of Solidarity with the Students of Middlesex University

      On 26 April 2010, the management of Middlesex University in London, England announced that it was cutting all its philosophy programs and shutting down the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, the top-rated research department at Middlesex.  The statement below offers solidarity from Zagreb, Croatia to the campaigners to Save Middlesex Philosophy. — […]

  • Atölye Kizlari (Workshop Girls): A Study of Women’s Labour in the Export-oriented Garment Industry in Turkey

      Abstract: This study examines the informal work aspects of global restructuring with a focus on relations of gender, solidarity, and conflict in the workplace.  Rather than trying to conduct a macro level analysis of restructuring process, the study aims to explore how this process is embedded at the local level by focusing on industrial […]

  • Will Feminism Be Articulated to the Left or to the Right?

      EA: You are one of the leading theorists trying to develop the notion of the public sphere.  In what ways has globalisation affected the public sphere?  Has the public sphere become more transnational? NF: Today, the flow of public political discourse does not respect borders, but is often transnational.  The result is a serious […]

  • On Nuclear Weapons: A Feminist Perspective

      EXCERPT: Introduction This document was created by the community of Isha L’Isha—Haifa Feminist Center.  It began as a process of examination and re-conceptualization of the term “security” as we, feminist women in Israel, experience it.  Over the past five years, Isha L’Isha has been discussing and dealing with issues related to women, peace and […]

  • Ambivalent Feminism: Romantic Socialism, Gender, and the Individual

      Naomi Andrews, Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Lanhan, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006.  210 pp.  $66.00 (hb).  ISBN 10-0739-108-441. In Socialism’s Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism, Naomi Andrews brings her readers into a complex conversation that touches on individualism and egoism, on the nature […]

  • Honduras: Massive Mobilization of Feminists in Resistance

    Memory and Justice for WomenInternational Feminist Mobilization8-14 March 2010 CommuniquéTo women of Honduras and the worldTo human rights organizationsTo democratic and independent organizationsTo national and international mediaTo people in general We, Feminists in Resistance, members of the National Front of Popular Resistance of Honduras, issue a cordial and sincere invitation to all feminists, women, democratic […]

  • Palestinian Revolutionaries on International Women’s Day

      Sukant Chandan interviews Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled and Palestinian Gaza resident and revolutionary Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010 Leila Khaled: “Palestinian women have a fundamental role in uniting Palestinians” The Palestinian people’s oppression continues due primarily to the financial, diplomatic, and military support that the Zionist state receives from the USA and […]

  • Women’s Role in the Nepalese Movement: Making a People’s Constitution

    At this very moment Nepal is making a constitution through the historic Constitutional Assembly (CA).  It is important to note that up till now all prior constitutions handed over to the people of Nepal were through direct intervention of oligarchs or kings.  It was the historic ten years of People’s War (PW) (1996-2006) complemented with […]

  • Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History

    This is an exercise in historicization.  This lecture concerns the relation between feminism, the movements of second-wave feminism, and the recent history of capitalism.  My aim is to try to shed some light on where the feminist movement stands today in the current crisis of capitalism. So, I want to tell a story that has […]

  • Sexuality and the Law: An Uneasy Marriage

      Matthew Waites.  The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality, and Citizenship.  Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.  viii + 285 pp.  $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-2173-4.  $29.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-230-23718-6. There are many “ages of consent.”  But in common parlance, age of consent laws define the age at which a person can legally consent […]

  • Pederasts and Others

      William A. Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris.  New York: Harrington Park, 2004.  xii + 258.  Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index.  $49.95 US (hb).  ISBN 1-56023-485-7; $24.95 U.S. (pb).  ISBN 1-506023-486-5. As part of the burgeoning of the history of gender and sexuality, recent years have seen several […]

  • Colonialism and Homosexuality

      Robert Aldrich.  Colonialism and Homosexuality.  London and New York: Routledge, 2003.  xii + 436 pp.  Maps, notes, bibliography, and index.  $104.95 US (cl.).  ISBN 0-415-19615-9.  $32.95 (pb.).  ISBN 0-415-19616-7. It is generally seen as a sign of maturity when gay scholarship moves beyond a mere self-affirmative search for “ancestry” and develops a critical and […]

  • A Socialist View of Sexuality and Liberation?

    Sherry Wolf.  Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009.  333 pp.  $12. The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag.  Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes.  Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is […]

  • Sex-Pol among Allies in the North Atlantic

    Do you have an indelible memory of a theater experience?  One winter in the 1970s, while I was a film student at Manhattan’s Hunter College, I heard that Mother Courage, by that red cat Bertolt Brecht, was being performed downtown at Wooster Street.  So voila! next stop Greenwich Village, and I attended the Wooster Group‘s […]

  • Understanding Islamic Feminism: Interview with Ziba Mir-Hosseini

    Born in Iran and now based in London, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an anthropologist by training, is one of the most well-known scholars of Islamic Feminism.  She is the author of numerous books on the subject, including Marriage on Trial: A Study of Family Law in Iran and Morocco (l.B.Tauris, 1993) and Islam and Gender, the Religious […]

  • Sussex University Occupation, 8-9 February 2010

      “We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us. . . . They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere — and not only in the universities.  We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone […]