Author Archives: politics

This paper discusses women’s relation to land and landed property through an examination of gender relations with regard to land rights and within agrarian reforms. Women’s – especially married women’s – relation to land often has implications for their status as members of a social and political collective.  Moreover, land remains an important livelihood resource in many societies; its importance is likely to increase in time of economic crisis. The current global trend is for women to take more responsibility in agricultural production where they do not already predominate (FAO 2005).

Read more on Women’s Land Rights: Tenure, Organisational Issues, the Local and the Global by Susie Jacobs…

This article challenges orthodox Marxist conceptualisations of the revolutionary subject by building on the nearly four decade tradition of autonomist Marxist feminism . It argues that by expanding our conceptualisation of capitalist relations to include the sphere of social reproduction, the creation of a gendered division of labour and the construction of alienated subjectivities, we open a window on the multiple subjects that are at the heart of contemporary anti-capitalist struggles and render visible an increasing feminisation of resistance in Latin America.

Read more on Reinventing Revolutionary Subjects in Venezuela by Sara C. Motta…

Why is Gender Relevant to Climate Change?

Thousands of scientists voluntarily contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by reviewing and assessing the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide related to understanding climate change. The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The IPCC is an intergovernmental scientific organisation with input from 195 countries and bases its reports on the most recent scientific evidence on climate change and its potential impact. The IPCC has reported that the scientific consensus worldwide is that the earth’s climate is being impacted by human activities that increase greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC is not alone in coming to this assessment that planet earth is warming and that climate change is likely to have an increasing impact on people’s lives and livelihoods.

Read more on Climate Change and Gender Analysis: Struggles with Neoconservative Backlash in Australian Politics by Uschi Bay and Deborah Western…

This essay addresses the ways in which bell hooks’ thinking turns to a politics of critical regionalism, by tracing a line that discursively connects materialist feminism, antiracist activism, and ecological Marxism. In particular, I argue that hooks’ critical regionalism develops in the 1990s, beginning in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) as her challenge to the exclusionary politics of difference dominant in postmodernist theory and extending to her argument for a spatialized feminist subjectivity in her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996). We can understand critical regionalism as a cultural movement that, critical of postmodern aesthetics, argues for the persistence of geographical history in contemporary thought. We can read hooks as participating in this cultural logic precisely because she argues for a radical decentering of subjectivity away from patriarchy, racism, and classism and the formation of alternative coalitions on the basis of common local and regional social relations.  This means that hooks turns to critical regionalism and its theories and politics of spatial culture as a way to think through issues of race and gender oppression in the United States and the globalized world.

Read more on bell hooks, Critical Regionalism, and the Politics of Ecological Returns by Christina Van Houten…

Choice is a key concept in feminist theory that has been coopted by neoliberalism. [1] ‘A woman’s right to choose’ was one of the most effective slogans of second wave feminism, but since the 1990s, choice has been deployed to undermine feminist gains by way of the neoliberal advance of individualism and anti-welfarism. Recently, the relationships between post feminism and neoliberalism, which together promote the ideal of choice for young women in the arenas of work and consumerism, have come to be scrutinised. Most notable in this field is the work of Angela McRobbie and her study of The Aftermath of Feminism (2010), to which the title of my article owes its inspiration. McRobbie identifies one of the hallmarks of post feminism as the “new sexual contract”, which promotes a degree of sexual freedom for young women so long as they fulfil the roles of economic citizenship by working and consuming (2010, 85). In this context ‘choice’ is deployed as a lure for young women to subscribe to the anti feminist conditions of neoliberalism, so that they will decline to organise politically as feminists to disrupt liberal democratic regimes and economies. The choice to be ‘responsibly’ sexual in particular, is valorised by both young women and the dominant discourses of neoliberalism and post feminism.

Read more on Abortion and Choice in the Neoliberal Aftermath by Kate Gleeson…