Bhavani, Kum-Kum John Foran and Priya Kurian (Eds.) 2003 Feminist Futures: Re-Imagining Women, Culture, and Development Zed Books

This collection works to understand the ways that feminists identify, possess, and define agency without relying on standard notions of emancipation. In this collection of essays it is suggested that agency is more complicated than simply obtaining freedom. One body (i.e. individual, community, or nation) can simultaneously be read as victim and agent. “Agency” is not monolithic and involves shifting relations of power that sometimes surpass gendered categories. Therefore, agency is not necessarily located in “woman” or in “woman’s culture” but rather is defined through specific and varying constraints and liberties partially shaped by normative, gender, sexuality, race, and economic systems.

Coomaraswamy, Radhika. (2002). Meridians Lecture:.Are Women's Rights Universal? Re-Engaging the Local.” Meridians, 3(1), 1-19.

Coomaraswamy’s goal is to construct a position on women’s rights that negotiates and resolves the tension between universalism and cultural relativism. Some do this by focusing on human rights. Some do this by focusing on the “arrogant gaze” of universalism and suggest that each nation handles its own issues internally, regardless of resources available. Alternatively, Coomeraswamy argues that human rights be used as a framework to identify which cultural practices are violations but then local movements should take the lead in changing those practices. She maintains that human rights discourse is one of the best to fight against social injustices but that local groups should continue to be visible in any global human rights movement.

Descarries, Frances. (2003). “The Hegemony of the English Language in the Academy: The Damaging Impact of the Sociocultural and Linguistic Barriers on the Development of Feminist Sociological Knowledge, Theories and Strategies.” Current Sociology 51(6), 625-636.

Descarries addresses the dominance of the English language in feminist texts, especially those texts that have come to be recognized as essential texts. This is problematic in three ways: 1.) Scholarship from other parts of the world can be misrepresented by English speaking academics (i.e. American feminists’ interpretation of French Feminism being primarily Kristeva, Iraguay) 2.) The original meaning of non-English scholarship may be lost when translated to English and 3.) Academia’s over-dependence on English excludes critical scholarship in other languages. Because language is not neutral and affects our understandings of experiences as well as conceptual ideas, Descarries aim is to strategize on ways to integrate non-English speaking texts into mainstream feminist approaches and theories.

Naples, Nancy & Desai, Manisha (Eds) (2002). Women's Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics. New York: Routledge

Women’s Activism and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics emphasizes the local in activism and highlights the connections and contradictions between globalization, neo-liberalism and transnational feminist efforts. Illustrated in this collection are various ways that women organize against gendered, racialized, and regional processes of increasing globalization of capital expansion. Transnational activists are addressing global processes locally and across national borders, working to obtain resources and use them in ways that do not mimic first world/third world dichotomies, and creating alternative spaces and foundations that continue to struggle for social, political, and economic justice.

Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. (2002). Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime Oxford University Press

Oldenburg challenges the belief that the Hindu custom of dowry leads to wife murder. In this historical ethnography, Oldenburg demonstrates that the meaning of dowry was ideologically manipulated during British colonialism of India and its resulting modern acculturation. Before British rule, dowry served as an economic safety net for women leaving their natal families to marry. By codifying custom into textual law and imposing its gendered norms on colonized Punjab (British women did not own property), the British altered cultural meanings of dowry, reversing its entitlement from the bride to the groom and his family. This change in customary and civil law left abused or neglected women little recourse, limited connection to their natal families and further dependent on marital families. Oldenburg argues that bride murder is not a response to inadequate dowry but is actually a consequence of increasing male violence against women – an effect of British imperialist economic policies that have created a more masculinized economy and a deepened gendered division of power and patriarchal cultural and social norms.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press

Oyewumi extends the discussion of social construction of gender through multiple subjectivities of race, nation, sexuality, and class by demonstrating that it is not universal not only because it requires contextualization but primarily because the concept itself is not fixed and may not exist in non-Western cultures. Oyewumi argues that there were no women (or men) in Yoruban society and that to impose a gendered analysis on Yoruba is an assumption of “bio-logic” that provides a false cultural logic.

Samantrai, Ranu. (2002). AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation, Stanford University Press

Samatrai argues that sustaining dissension in social movements is necessary to ensure social justice and to maintain democratic principles. Historically, many feminist movements have strived for consensus decision-making and full inclusion and participation in social and political realms by relying on logics of difference and identity. It is here where Samantrai sets up a strong theoretical stage for her argument. She suggests that Black feminist movements should not frame their efforts around gaining rights or inclusion. Rather, Samantrai argues that focusing on exclusion or on gaining equal political and social rights assumes a normative standard that any “other” can’t avoid being measured against. She rejects this dichotomous framing of norm versus “other” and instead, focuses her attention on revealing the mechanisms of normativity to undermine the norms’ seemingly rock-solid permanence. Through extensive text analysis, Samantrai examines the various (and sometimes contradictory) ways that British citizenship and nationalism have been codified to reveal and discuss circumstances defining women’s migration into Britain.

Satrapi, Marjane. (2003). Persepolis: The story of a childhood. New York: Pantheon Books

Marjane Satrapi, in her book Persepolis, departs from depicting fundamentalism and democracy as oppositional, conflicting ideas and instead, describes both Iranian political revolutionaries and religious fundamentalists combating Western import of capitalism and accompanying ideologies that support class inequality. Rather than lengthy, complicated analyses that often rely on dichotomous framing, Satrapi has painted an accessible story that better illustrates the complexity of a nation fraught with class inequality that partially results from import of western ideologies and democratic principles as well as the return to tradition, albeit restrictive, as a mode to equalize the economic playing field.

Yvonne Vera, (2003). The Stone Virgins New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The Stone Virgins illustrates the violence entrenched in Zimbabwe during two time periods: the guerrilla war that fought against British colonial rule from 1950-1980 and the violence from political unrest that occurred after gaining independence in 1980. This is a story that weaves the narratives of three voices: two civilian sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, who lived in Kezi and the psychologically and physically wounded former guerrilla soldier, Sibaso, that brutally rapes and attacks Nonceba and murders Thenjiwe. This is also a story of a nation besieged with violence and political disruption resulting from colonialism and then from political transition and civil unrest after gaining independence.

Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Radical Perspectives) (Paperback)
by Mrinalini Sinha

Duke University Press (May 2006)

ISBN-10: 0822337959

Book Description: Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents.

Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya
Lynn M. Thomas

University of California Press; 1 edition (August 20, 2003)

ISBN-10: 0520235401

Book Description: In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance--and complex ramifications--of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Doing Gender
Candace West, Don H. Zimmerman
Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation.

Isabelle Gunning

Faculty profile at: http://www.swlaw.edu/faculty/faculty_listing/facultybio/184039

"Female Genital Surgeries: Eradication Measures at the Western Local Level—A Cautionary Tale" in GENITAL CUTTING AND TRANSNATIONAL SISTERHOOD (University of Illinois Press, 2002)

"Global Feminism at the Local Level: The Criminalization of Female Genital Surgeries" in CROSSROADS, DIRECTIONS, AND A NEW CRITICAL RACE THEORY (Temple University Press, 2002)

"Arrogant Perception, World Traveling, and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries" (originally in 23 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW 189 (1992)), reprinted in GENDER AND LAW: THEORY, DOCTRINE, COMMENTARY, 2nd ed. (Aspen Publishing, Fall 1997), and in CRITICAL RACE FEMINISM: A READER (New York University Press, 1997)

"Female Genital Surgeries and Multicultural Feminism: The Ties the Bind; the Differences that Distance," THIRD WORLD LEGAL STUDIES 1994-95, WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND TRADITIONAL LAW: A CONFLICT 17 (1995)

Saba Mahmood

Faculty profile at: http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/mahmood.html

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005)

Book description: Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

** 2001. “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of
Salat,” American Ethnologist, 28(4):827-853. (Particularly recommended by RR.)

2002. “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency” (with Charles Hirschkind), Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2):339-354.

2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology, 6(2):202-236. This essay won the Cultural Horizon Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology in 2002.

Resisting Domestic Violence and Caste Inequality: All-Women Courts in India

by Veronica Magar

In the collection Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice by France Twine, Kathleen Blee
NYU Press (August 1, 2001)

ISBN-10: 0814798543

"It's Only a Penis": Rape, Feminism, and Difference
by Christine Helliwell
Signs, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 789-816

Excerpt: Thinking to obtain information about local women's responses to rape, I began to question her. Had she been frightened? I asked. Of course she had. Wouldn't I feel frightened if I awoke in the dark to find an unknown person inside my mosquito net? Wouldn't I be angry? Why then, I asked, hadn't she taken the opportunity, while he was entangled in her mosquito net, to kick him hard or to hit him with one of the many wooden implements near at hand? She looked shocked. Why would she do that? she asked-after all, he hadn't hurt her. No, but he had wanted to, I replied. She looked at me with puzzlement. Not able to find a local word for rape in my vocabulary, I scrabbled to explain myself: "He was trying to have sex with you," I said, "although you didn't want to. He was trying to hurt you." She looked at me, more with pity than with puzzlement now, although both were mixed in her expression. "Tin [Christine], it's only a penis," she said. "How can a penis hurt anyone?"

W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender

Chapter by Lori Jo Marso on use of women’s position in Afghanistan to justify U.S. invasion

Michaele L. Ferguson, Lori Jo Marso (Editors)

Duke University Press (August 2007)

ISBN-10: 0822340429

Book description: Taking seriously the “W Stands for Women” rhetoric of the 2004 Bush–Cheney campaign, the contributors to this collection investigate how “W” stands for women. They argue that George W. Bush has hijacked feminist language toward decidedly antifeminist ends; his use of feminist rhetoric is deeply and problematically connected to a conservative gender ideology. While it is not surprising that conservative views about gender motivate Bush’s stance on so-called “women’s issues” such as abortion, what is surprising—and what this collection demonstrates—is that a conservative gender ideology also underlies a range of policies that do not appear explicitly related to gender, most notably foreign and domestic policies associated with the post-9/11 security state. Any assessment of the lasting consequences of the Bush presidency requires an understanding of the gender conservatism at its core.

In W Stands for Women ten feminist scholars analyze various aspects of Bush’s persona, language, and policy to show how his administration has shaped a new politics of gender. One contributor points out the shortcomings of “compassionate conservatism,” a political philosophy that requires a weaker class to be the subject of compassion. Another examines Lynndie England’s participation in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in relation to the interrogation practices elaborated in the Army Field Manual, practices that often entail “feminizing” detainees by stripping them of their masculine gender identities. Whether investigating the ways that Bush himself performs masculinity or the problems with discourse that positions non-Western women as supplicants in need of saving, these essays highlight the far-reaching consequences of the Bush administration’s conflation of feminist rhetoric, conservative gender ideology, and neoconservative national security policy.

Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics (Berkeley, 2005)

Publisher’s description: This original and historically rich book examines the influence of gender in shaping the Egyptian nation from the nineteenth century through the revolution of 1919 and into the 1940s. In Egypt as a Woman, Beth Baron divides her narrative into two strands: the first analyzes the gendered language and images of the nation, and the second considers the political activities of women nationalists. She shows that, even though women were largely excluded from participation in the state, the visual imagery of nationalism was replete with female figures. Baron juxtaposes the idealization of the family and the feminine in nationalist rhetoric with transformations in elite households and the work of women activists striving for national independence.

Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 1993)

Pathbreaking, prize-winning, justly-praised book.

Publisher’s description: The unprecedented political power of the Ottoman imperial harem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is widely viewed as illegitimate and corrupting. This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.

Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge, 2005)

Building in part from Peirce’s work:

Publisher’s description: Ruby Lal explores domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century. Challenging traditional, orientalist interpretations of the haram that have portrayed a domestic world of seclusion and sexual exploitation, she reveals a complex society where noble men and women negotiated their everyday life and public-political affairs. Combining Ottoman and Safavid histories, she demonstrates the richness as well as ambiguity of the Mughal haram, which was pivotal in the transition to institutionalization and imperial excellence.

Refs I couldn’t locate:

Something by Geetha (maybe I got the spelling wrong?) concerning Indian women using “women’s courts” to sue their husbands for failing to provide them with sexual pleasure.