Unfinished thinking and the unfinished film: Feminist filmmaking in Cuba, Catalunya, and Scotland

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

Critiques of gender mainstreaming (GM) as the officially agreed strategy to promote gender equity in health internationally have reached a critical mass. There has been a notable lack of dialogue between gender advocates in the global north and south, from policy and practice, governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This paper contributes to the debate on the shape of future action for gender equity in health, by uniquely bringing together the voices of disparate actors, first heard in a series of four seminars held during 2008 and 2009, involving almost 200 participants from 15 different country contexts. The series used (Feminist) Participatory Action Research (FPAR) methodology to create a productive dialogue on the developing theory around GM and the at times disconnected empirical experience of policy and practice. We analyse the debates and experiences shared at the seminar series using concrete, context specific examples from research, advocacy, policy and programme development perspectives, as presented by participants from southern and northern settings, including Kenya, Mozambique, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Canada and Australia.Focussing on key discussions around sexualities and (dis)ability and their interactions with gender, we explore issues around intersectionality across the five key themes for research and action identified by participants: 1) Addressing the disconnect between gender mainstreaming praxis and contemporary feminist theory; 2) Developing appropriate analysis methodologies; 3) Developing a coherent theory of change; 4) Seeking resolution to the dilemmas and uncertainties around the ‘place’ of men and boys in GM as a feminist project; and 5) Developing a politics of intersectionality. We conclude that there needs to be a coherent and inclusive strategic direction to improve policy and practice for promoting gender equity in health which requires the full and equal participation of practitioners and policy makers working alongside their academic partners.

The article considers the main aspects of the use of project activities in higher educational institutions of culture and art, the effectiveness of the method of artistic and creative projects in the training of future teachers of music, highlights the main stages of preparation of artistic and creative projects in the study of music theory. Solving the issue of improving the quality of the educational process in higher education is directly related to the problem of forming research and cognitive and experimental activity of students, which is part of the motivational, cognitive, creative and reflective components of professional development and one of the main conditions of intellectual development. successfully develops only in the presence and development of cognitive needs. The traditional system of education is not sufficiently focused on the individuality of students, so it is necessary to find new systems and technologies, forms and methods. Pedagogical modern technologies provide a new approach to teaching, education and formation of the student's personality. Without the appropriate level of cognitive activity in the educational process, students can not properly acquire knowledge, skills and abilities, so the problem of stimulating cognitive, research, experimental activity and independence during learning does not lose its relevance, and its solution becomes possible under scientific development and application of pedagogical innovative technologies in higher education, both during classroom classes and in extracurricular activities. The ideas of project-based learning have become widely used in the modern educational space. Project activity promotes the development of research and cognitive, experimental activity of students, forms the ability to independently acquire new knowledge and combine them into a single system, organization of cognitive processes and more. The result of artistic and project activities is the presentation of artistic and creative projects at regional, regional, national, international festivals, competitions, Olympiads and scientific conferences. The method of artistic and creative projects is universal and has a wide range, because in it the student can express himself creatively in different qualities: performer-instrumentalist, vocalist, researcher, screenwriter, director, actor, lecturer-musicologist and more. Project activity, as shown by the experience of its organization in the process of studying music-theoretical disciplines, promotes the development of creative qualities of the student's personality. According to the approaches of project activity, students focus on their own research, which provides an individual solution to the problem. The use of the method of artistic and creative projects helps to provide conditions for the development of individual abilities and inclinations, forms creative thinking and intelligence, orients students to independent activity and intensification of learning.

Based on the paradigm of Eurocentric hegemony and the respective cartographies of knowledge, feminist theorizing is conventionally perceived as being situated in the academy and in the so-called ??Global North.?? Feminism seems to be ??owned?? by Western European and US-American academic (and mostly white) feminists, whereas other regions and epistemes serve as object of knowledge production. For example, the concept of ??intersectionality?? has by now become an academic concept in the humanities and the social sciences, even so the idea behind it originates from African American feminist and activist contexts. Also black feminists from ??peripheral?? spaces such as the Caribbean or Brazil had for a long time been claiming the need for examining the interdependent inequalities they experience as addressed in the concept, however mostly not under the same terminology. Exemplifying the Occidentalism paradigm for addressing epistemic inequalities, this article elaborates on the persistent geopolitics of knowledge within and between different feminism(s) and between different feminisms in different regions of the world. Against the backdrop of the ways in which the feminist concept of ??intersectionality?? for addressing interdependent axes of stratification has travelled, the article seeks to discuss possible forms of solidarity and theorizing across and beyond borders. For analyzing epistemic asymmetries between feminisms, the article proposes the concept of Occidentalism, which, in a broader and more structural sense than Eurocentrism, implies a structural organization of highly unequal, asymmetrical and hierarchical knowledge production and circulation. Furthermore, a critical Occidentalist approach critical of hegemony and focusing on a relational understanding serves for imagining feminist practice and theorizing beyond Eurocentrism and Occidentalism

Coles, A., Gray, L. and Momsen, J., editors, 2015: The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Development. London/New York, NY: Routledge. 594 pp. £190. ISBN: 9780415829083 (Hardcover).

L. Martinsson, D. Mulinari (eds.), Dreaming global change, doing local feminisms. Visions of feminism. Global North/ Global South encounters, conversations and disagreements, 2018

This article compares entanglements between activist demands and policy in the Spanish and Swedish film industries using a critical frames approach. Considering contextual factors such as domestic discourse on film policy and resistance against gender equality, the comparison is based on deep insider knowledge aiming to deepen the understanding of feminist activism and its relation to policy in the two countries. In both Spain and Sweden, activists have demanded equality in the film sector since the seventies. Today, both countries feature gender equality measures and vivid feminist organizations. Based on current equality policies, reports from the Swedish and Spanish Film Institutes, documents from feminist filmmakers’ associations and interviews with activists, the article shows that feminist activists oscillate between strategically converging their demands to policy and criticizing reforms. Furthermore, policy echoes activists’ arguments but are less informed by ideas about structural inequalities. Activists in both Spain and Sweden stand up for the gender equality measures which have been implemented, but the Spanish activists are more prone to simultaneously voice criticism against the reforms..

Weaving Solidarity (2022) by Sebastian Garbe is a novel and potent contribution to debates on international solidarity and decoloniality. The thread that connects the book’s different chapters is the author’s examination of how the Mapuche, as a transnational and collective actor composed by the Mapuche living in the Indigenous territory of Wallmapuand the Mapuche diaspora living in Europe, produce their own network of solidarity. Contrary to analyses that interpret relations of solidarity in a humanitarian key, i.e. analyses that make a clear distinction between passive receivers of support who are affected by a particular conflict and active agents (external to the conflict) whose moral imperative is to give support, Garbe shows how the Mapuche are not mere receptors of solidarity. On the contrary, the Mapuche themselves have created a design of transnational solidarity since the 1970s, which has neither been fully determined by non-Indigenous givers of support located in the global north, nor fully occupied or saturated by “the conflict” with the Chilean state.

The main purpose of the thesis is to examine everyday security for refugee and asylum-seeking mothers who encounter border securitisation. In order to undertake the thesis investigation to answer the lack of understanding about refugee and asylum-seeking mothers’ security, I structured methods of research based on qualitative feminist research that focused on reflexivity, ethnography, and narrative interviewing. I interviewed mothers from Iran and Afghanistan who were asylum seekers or refugees and currently lived within Melbourne. States of the Global North are increasingly securitising their borders through physical and technological deterrent tactics aimed at the migration of people from the Global South. The tactics of states cause physical and psychological harms that are direct and structural in nature to women, especially mothers, due to their precarious security. Masculine, statist, single point crises frameworks like human security do not encompass mothers’ security needs when encountering border securitisation tactics. In order to determine refugee and asylum-seeking mothers’ security needs, it is essential examine their home country, journey, and settlement experiences. Security and citizenship are precarious for women, especially mothers, due to structural gendered inequalities. Precarity is increased in certain regions where legal measures either heighten or ignore gender inequality, specifically in the realms of reproductive health and violence against women. The lack of basic security for mothers is further complicated by migratory journeys, in particular journeys which have been illegalised by states. Examining the interviews, I find the women describe a lack of basic security in their home country and the security becomes more perilous during illegalised journeys. The precarity of security is additionally complicated by mothering within insecure contexts due to structural inequalities and state practices. There are immediate crisis points during migration which are often the focus of refugee experience, but the daily devastations incurred by mothers emerge as focus points for the women themselves. The daily insecurities are a result of structural violence that arises from border security tactics. Despite the harms from border securitisation and the bigger crises faced, women’s agency is clearly present when navigating the daily challenges of motherhood and carework within insecure spaces. I demonstrate how women exercise their agency and build security through carework. Taking into account factors of temporality, spatiality, and needs of mothers, I centre carework, as identified for mothers, to reconceptualise security for mothers.

This practice-led research explores the visual culture of menstruation from an interdisciplinary perspective rooted in art practice and autoethnographic reflection. The thesis aims to interrogate notions of menstrual normativity in anglophone culture, centring on, but not limited to art in the Global North. These notions are informed and reinforced through everyday beliefs, medical authority, advertising and representations of menstruation in art. With reference to art historical, sociological, political / cultural context and my own art and curatorial practice, I propose that menstrual art can be a powerful medium to re-frame academic, medical and everyday discussions about menstruation by revealing varied experiences of menstruation. The practical element of this work employs an interdisciplinary queered practice-led research approach to explore and critique themes including subjectivity, agency, ritual and performance in embodied experience, essentialist conceptions of gender, and the intersection of medical knowledge with everyday life. The art practice discussed in Volume One, and documented in Volume Two, develops artistic methods to critically examine the everyday embodied experience of menstruating through performative works which combine everyday practices with the feminist tradition of self-examination. Works in poetry and sound explore ritual and repetition encountered through medical advice, considering how these now common sites of medical authority form part of the everyday experience of medicine. In linking research to practice explicitly throughout the thesis, this research contributes unique insights to the fields of practice-led research, art and cultural studies, critical menstruation studies and the critical medical humanities. Through considering the role of online medical advice in shaping contemporary attitudes towards menstruation this research aims to expand the site of clinical encounter, as conceptualised in the critical medical humanities, to include everyday and individual engagement with medical authority and ideas in the online sphere. Through thematic analysis of multiple case studies this thesis presents a ‘queering’ of historic and contemporary menstrual art since 1970, and of contemporary menstrual norms.

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

For decades, feminist activists and scholars have stressed the importance of integrating gender perspectives into the most defining challenge of our time: the climate disaster. In this article, we analyze official Norwegian policy documents in the context of regional and supra-national levels. We identify a lack of connection between gender equality policy and climate policy in the Norwegian policy documents that is symptomatic of a general silence on gender in climate policy in the Global North. We argue that there is untapped potential for gender mainstreaming in Norwegian climate policy and suggest that gendered, disaggregated data on climate issues could be combined with scholarly insights about the Nordic gender equality model so as to further our understanding of the climate crisis. Finally, we ask whether the absence of gender perspectives in Norwegian climate policy may reflect an unrecognized contradiction between Nordic gender equality policy and sustainability.

Introduction: “The Unexpected Caribbean” Part II

Confronting Public Health ImperialismA Transnational Feminist Analysis of Critical Nurse Responses to the National Smallpox Vaccination Program of 2002 Gwen D'Arcangelis (bio) small acts of resistance: gender and imperialism The juggernaut of US empire known as the "War on Terror" is by now a familiar, ubiquitous part of the twenty-first century. Less familiar to most is one of its early missteps, namely, the National Smallpox Vaccination Program (NSVP), a biodefense program that the Bush Administration devised to protect the US from a bioterror attack. From late 2002 to mid-2003, the federal government, arguing that a potential attack might occur from the likes of Al Qaeda or Iraq, attempted to recruit the health care field into a preemptive vaccination program against smallpox. Nurses were among the prominent occupational categories targeted, and more important, among the leading groups who challenged the program on the grounds of its health risks and role in the Iraq war. In this article I chronicle the multilayered intervention that US nurses made in the NSVP, specifically their reworking of hegemonic scientific and national security discourses. Nurse intervention into the NSVP is significant for two reasons. First, nurses reclaimed their centrality as decision makers in the NSVP, a prominent public health campaign that, as I show, exploited their labor and marginalized their medical expertise. Feminist scholars have analyzed nursing as a feminized labor domain long beset with the historical character of "women's work"—for example, low wages and devalued expertise.1 I demonstrate that nurses' defiance of the NSVP contributes significantly to a legacy of resistance to these conditions. Second, nurses challenged the NSVP based on its connection to the US program of aggression in Iraq and the War on Terror during a period of extreme "patriotism," when it was difficult to wage criticism of the US national security apparatus. Remarkably, US nurses linked their struggles for better safety and protections to a broader critique of US imperialism. In doing so, I argue, they enacted a model of transnational feminist praxis [End Page 95] wherein women in global north and imperial nations hold their governments accountable for perpetrating oppressive practices of imperialism and other forms of structural violence against less powerful nations in the global south. Transnational feminist theory builds on the intersectional analysis forwarded by feminist theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw2 and Patricia Hill Collins,3 who analyze women's struggles through a gendered lens that considers how race, class, nation, and other socio-structural positions determine gender relations and social power. Transnational feminist theorists focus on the intersection between gender and nation, noting that women across the globe are not only connected by their commonalities but also severely divided, particularly along the axis of colonialism and imperialism. They have noted that many feminist movements in imperial countries have been insufficiently critical of their government's expansionist foreign policy and imperialist practices globally, at times even joining forces to further them. Transnational feminist scholars have criticized the US-based Feminist Majority Foundation, for instance, for aligning itself with the US government's war on Afghanistan and its paternalistic rescue mission to save Afghani women, in the process marginalizing Afghani feminists' work and leadership.4 Transnational feminist theorists espouse that women in imperial nations should attend to their complicity in the actions of their governments. In the context of the most recent bouts of US imperialism targeting Afghanistan and Iraq, transnational feminist scholars such as Chandra Mohanty have challenged global north feminists to be self-reflexive about their political praxis (politically informed theory and action): What role have US feminists who supported the Bush administration's war in the name of "rescuing" Afghan and Iraqi women played in [the] narrative of empire and imperialism? This is one of the questions we need to pose to address the politics of complicity and dissent within contemporary feminist projects.5 In addition to calling for feminists in imperial and global north nations to reexamine their role in US imperial violence, she also highlights US imperialism as a key site for transnational feminist engagement: The militarized US State and its imperial projects are thus a crucial site of feminist struggle both in terms of the violence...

Reviewed by: Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work: Ethnographies of Accommodation and Resistance by Rob Lambert and Andrew Herod Arne L. Kalleberg Rob Lambert and Andrew Herod, Neoliberal Capitalism and Precarious Work: Ethnographies of Accommodation and Resistance (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 2016) This book addresses the increasingly important topic of precarious work, or work that is insecure and uncertain and in which risks are shifted to workers rather than employers or governments. Theory and research have established that the spread of neoliberal political-economic policies, associated with the [End Page 312] decline of unions and the growing imbalances of power in favour of employers over workers, underlie the transformation in employment relations from the standard employment relations of the 30-year period after World War II in the Global North to the precarious, often non-standard, employment relations that characterize both the Global North and South. This book assembles a collection of case studies that show the consequences of precarious work for workers in diverse contexts - such as sweatshops, day labourers, homeworkers, construction workers, and sugarcane cutters - and their varied ways of accommodating and resisting their precarious situations. The editors' introduction summarizes some of the definitional issues regarding precarious work and provides an overview of the main forms of nonstandard work arrangements (temporary and part-time work and independent contracting) and of the reasons why these have become more prominent in the past quarter century. They emphasize especially how spatial and geographical aspects of capitalism and neoliberal political-economic policies have led to the restructuring of work on a global scale and how this has impacted local workplaces and communities, a theme that is echoed throughout the volume. The book is divided into two parts. The first consists of six case studies that examine various forms of precarious work and illustrate the variety of ways in which people accommodate themselves to their precarious work experiences. These chapters also show the diverse strategies by which workers resist and protest their precarious situations, as they seek alternatives to unions, who are often reluctant to engage with precarious workers. Thus, the study of workers in unregulated factories in the clothing industry in the Fashion District in inner-city Johannesburg shows how international competition has weakened organized labour, making coalitions with faith-based organizations a more likely source of power. The chapter on immigrant industrial day labourers in Chicago in the mid-2000s examines a labour rights campaign that was done without union involvement. This accountability campaign was designed to shame the client company into transferring its temporary workforce from an abusive temp agency to a more ethical one. Another chapter looks at home-based work and provides examples of the new ways in which women home-based workers are organizing in Bulgaria and Turkey. These forms of organizing are different from traditional union or collective bargaining strategies, as they use non-union international linkages (such as with the Federation of Homeworkers Worldwide, women's movements, and consumer campaigns in Europe) to build solidarity. A chapter on the construction industry and labour subcontracting in China elucidates the culture of violence between subcontractors and workers. Its analysis of four construction sites shows how the labour subcontracting system (which is the single most important way of obtaining the labour needed by the industry) is leading to widespread collective action among workers, who are among the worst-paid in China today and are ripe for exploitation since most are not protected by China's labour laws. Another chapter looks at how the toxic pollution of air and groundwater generated by large steel corporations have led to social and economic insecurity in a South African community (Steel Valley, near Johannesburg). The authors' analysis links nature and capitalism by revealing how the marketization of nature driven by global corporations and ecological degradation deepens social and economic insecurity. They argue that transnational solidarity networks led by labour (such as sigtur - Southern Initiative on [End Page 313] Globalization and Trade Union Rights) and environmental campaigns ("ecological unionism") are needed to address the growing ecological crisis. The final chapter in the section examines how global ethanol corporations and export-oriented sugar policies are leading to greater concentration in the ownership of land and...