Feminist Agenda Research Articles

The decline of Brazil in the global health field: Rupture, loss, and reversal of leadership in the international health agenda

AbstractThe implantation of a public system of universal access to care has been the most significant contribution from the health sector to Brazil's democratization, and its diffusion through foreign policy raised the country to a status as a global health leader. Yet, the rise of a far‐right government impinges a fracture upon this dual process, through the renunciation of leading roles in both regional and wider progressive initiatives. Based on documental and literature analysis guided by exploratory interviews with global health agents, this article introduces the actors responsible for the alignment between foreign policy and the Unified Health System principles and demonstrates that a significant retrenchment of diplomatic activity paved the way for the renunciation of protagonism in progressive agendas. The process began with the shutdown of Unasur Health and public opposition to the sexual and reproductive rights agenda and culminated in the felonious emptying of technical cadres from the Ministry of Health and the change of position on intellectual property issues related to public health during the Covid‐19 pandemic.

Gender-marked heritage and intersectionality: women’s singing as heritage

ABSTRACT This article charts a yet unsuccessful attempt to have a gender-marked musical expression legally recognised as heritage: ‘women’s singing’ of Potosí, Bolivia. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivian contexts, the authors read the gender-marked status of this initiative as a symbolic site of intercultural disjunctures. Conflicting gender politics sit at the crux of this difficulty to assemble ‘women’s singing’ as a heritage object, contradictions between Bolivia’s persistent neoliberal state in which feminist discourses of gender equality reign within a development apparatus, and a plurinational state that originally emerged from social movements that brought Indigenous concepts into governing practices. Expanding on the topic of gender in heritage studies, this work points to critical applications of intersectionality, and uncovers useful openings that this concept lends to heritage studies in general. Through an intersectional lens, key inconsistencies are revealed between a liberal feminist agenda that focusses on empowering stand-alone women and Indigenous working class women’s mobilisation politics that cannot address gender inequalities without also engaging class and ethnic marginalisation. The case study shows how social justice mobilisations, central to political intersectionality, productively disrupt the compartmentalised approaches to rights that usually operate in bureaucratised governing entities.

Global Financial Governance and Progressive Feminist Agendas

Feminists and other progressives have long argued that global macroeconomic governance is deeply deficient. The deficiencies have been revealed and amplified by the COVID-19 crisis. The need to radically reconstruct the global economic governance architecture is therefore pressing. Albert Hirschman’s conception of “possibilism” is particularly relevant for navigating these challenges. In the spirit of Hirschmanian possibilism, I make a case for what I refer to as “enabling global financial governance.” I use this term to refer to reforms of global financial governance that could provide a supporting environment for feminist and other progressive plans for sustainability and social justice. I advance the provocative claim that feminists and other social justice advocates should embrace what I term “permissive multilateralisms” rather than “harmonized multilateralism.” I also highlight a number of directions for global financial governance reform that could provide policy space for progressive initiatives, including those advanced by feminists. I offer this paper as a small way of honoring my friend, Eugenia Correa, whose intellectual legacy and commitment to engaged scholarship has influenced me profoundly.

How to Problematize the Global?

International Relations (IR) has long been criticized for taking a particular (Western) experience as basis for formulating theories with claim to universal validity. In response, recent discussions have therefore centered on making IR ‘truly global’, that is, more inclusive and less parochial in its language and substance. But the concept of the global underpinning this discussion is both illusive and strongly contested. It requires problematization. But how? In this Forum, scholars discuss this question with a forward-looking agenda. Building on recent critical engagements with the question of the global as a concept in general and Global IR specifically, the authors ask how the global should be problematized in order to achieve a (more) progressive agenda for IR. They draw on different regional and disciplinary perspectives to both further the agenda of a less exclusive and racist discipline without falling into the trap of shallow inclusivity, and to discuss ways of problematizing the global without falling back into nativism or nationalism.

Entretejidxs: Decolonial Threads to the Self, the Communities, and EFL Teacher Education Programs in Colombia

In addressing the 21st century neocolonial research condition, in this article the au- thors firstly discuss how academia in general, and elt in particular, may configure as oppressive colonizing sites. Secondly, they introduce their own experience as pre- service and in-service educators who took part in pedagogy of possibilities (pop) at a university in Tunja, Colombia. Indigenous principles like interconnectedness and relationality and Chicanx/Latinx concepts, such as bodymindspirit, path of cono- cimiento, and spiritual activism were foundational to these educators’ pop. To them, pedagogy was a political act to resist the disembodied/disengaged/dispassionate nature of teaching/researching/being in academia and beyond. This four-year crit- ical-community autoethnography, uses testimonies, journals, and artistic creations as knowledge-gathering methods to analyze how decolonizing teaching-research practices informed the re-signification of these educators’ personal and professional identities. Theoretical coding revealed that pop permitted participants to engage in decolonial practices of self-recognition, re-construction, empowerment, growth, and healing. The analysis also revealed that decolonizing the self leads to the adoption of a positionality where values such as care and respect for one’s self and communities are paramount to move forward social-justice-critical-decolonial agendas. The results suggest the need to re-signify elt pedagogical and educational practices beyond neo- liberal agendas which propose rankings, individualism, and competition.

Will Nation-state Survive?: A Narrative on its Decline, Essentiality and Alternatives

The debate over whether nation-states are a recent development or a long-standing phenomenon, as well as whether to prioritise the nation or the state when analysing nation-states, has recently taken on a lot of significance. This has sparked discussion on whether the idea itself is a part of the liberal agenda, a project to homogenise the nation at the expense of many cultural practises, or is just a phenomenon that is deeply troubled. There are arguments that attempt to portray the nation-state as vanishing in the midst of globalisation, yet many continue to support its relevance by putting up alternative models. Keywords: Globalization; McDonaldization; Clash of Civilization; Dialogue among nations

DUALIST POPULAR CONSTITUTIONALISM A Reply to Michelman

DUALIST POPULAR CONSTITUTIONALISM A Reply to Michelman

White spatial politics in mainstream agroecology activism in Argentina

ABSTRACT This paper addresses whiteness in environmental imaginaries underpinning mainstream agroecology activism in Argentina. It examines the cultural politics of race and nature articulated by intellectual leaders during the period of nation-making, and by contemporary agroecology advocates who are preoccupied to define appropriate human-land relations. Empirically, it mostly focuses on an activist organization that has been reimagining alternatives to the dominant agro-export economy in an agricultural hub in central Argentina. Paradoxically, new territorial configurations to regulate pesticide drift from herbicide resistant (HR) soy fields leave fresh vegetable producers outside environmental protection zones. I argue that by neglecting the exposure to toxicity of farmworkers who fall outside dominant ethno-racial identifications, mainstream agroecology advocates endorse a double standard in food production. The article suggests that there is a need for deeper attention to the ways in which the practices of racialization work in and through ideas of ‘proper environmental relations’ in progressive agendas for socio-environmental change.

De kerkelijke Laeyendecker

Leo Laeyendecker was not just a renowned sociologist, he was also a prominent voice in late-twentieth-century Dutch Catholicism, first as an Augustinian priest and then as a progressive public intellectual. This article offers a biographical sketch of the Catholic Laeyendecker, and focuses specifically on his performance of the roles of priest-scientist and Catholic public intellectual. He became a sociologist at the behest of his superiors, who hoped he would be able to assist church leadership with scientifically sound policy advice. But once he had completed his training, his objective as a priest-scientist was to use sociological analyses to convince his fellow friars and Catholics that the realities of modernity militated for church renewal. As a public intellectual, he continued to advocate a progressive agenda in an era in which church leaders were retreating from the specific reformist stance of their predecessors. This new context prompted another change of role, from that of a voice within the wider church community to that of theorist of its progressive wing.

Cyberfeminisme: Pembebasan Psikologi Perempuan di Ruang Digital

Cyberfeminism emerged as a feminist response to cyberpunk politics, as well as the development of communication technology in the digital space. The agenda of women's liberation in cyberfeminism, echoed by feminists, is to fight subordination. In practice, subordination refers to, among other things, gender inequality. Sexual violence that often afflicts women is often a manifestation of the position of women who are considered weak. Moreover, sexual violence is also targeted online. This is evident from the rise of Online Gender-Based Violence (KGBO). Thus, in this study, the author attempts to describe how cyberfeminism is a way to liberate women from sexual violence. This research uses descriptive qualitative method. The data is obtained through books, papers, or related articles as a support to clearly describe the formula used by feminists. The results of this study indicate that as a way to liberate women in the digital space, it is necessary to have a media with a gender perspective. In addition, feminists and women need to have the power of data as a basis for carrying out the path of liberation.

Tracking the trajectory of feminist advocacy in Uganda: How has theory informed the practice of advocacy?

abstract Since Uganda’s independence in 1962, feminist advocacy in Africa and Uganda, in particular, has experienced waves and critical agendas that have shaped the direction of movements and women’s rights organisations. How can we map the trajectory of feminist advocacy to understand the influence of theory, in particular African feminism(s) in Uganda? This is the central focus of this article. Literature shows how women activists in Africa took centre stage, questioned women's conspicuous absence in social economic and political history and assertively challenged patriarchal oppression against women in public and private spheres. Activists in the Ugandan feminist movement formulated advocacy strategies to resist colonial gender oppression, mobilised women to respond to the review of the constitutional provisions on women’s rights, to organise even when confronted with state silencing, and to form critical alliances to meet male resistance to their political representation in Parliament head on, among others, since independence. The article draws on findings from an empirical study conducted in 2019-2021, Kampala, Uganda, on selected historical junctures and interrogates theoretical origins and motivations that could be read as having informed feminist advocacy - the feminist agenda, strategies and tactics, framing and language. I am particularly interested in how African feminists’ theoretical frames critically inform shifting advocacy positions in Uganda over time to advance gender transformation, and thereby advance the theorisation of an African centred-feminist advocacy.

On Social Networks, Anonymous Testimonies, and Other Tools of Feminist Activism against Sexual Violence in Egypt

On Social Networks, Anonymous Testimonies, and Other Tools of Feminist Activism against Sexual Violence in Egypt

Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert

Reviewed by: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice ed. by Redi Koobak, Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert P. Watson Koobak, Redi; Tlostanova, Madina and Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi (eds). Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice. Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2021. xvi + 265 pp. Illustrations. Figures. References. Index. £120:00; £36:99; £33:99 (e-book). By bringing together the postcolonial and the postsocialist, until now addressed separately in feminist studies, this anthology aims to open the way to new sets of political questions with the potential for impacting global change. [End Page 591] Postcolonialism is rarely addressed through postsocialist perspectives, which have typically been concentrated on East European and post-Soviet countries. Moreover, as the book observes, after the Cold War feminists in Eastern Europe tend to engage with postcolonial discourse to the extent of describing their location as the internal other of Europe, while feminists from the global south are reluctant to engage in a critical discussion of postsocialism. Instead of abandoning past and present versions of socialism, the book contends, postsocialism should be productively rethought. The book is composed of eighteen chapters ranging from interviews and conversations to straight single author texts. The chapters traverse themes such as disability, gender, sexuality, migration, the EU and racism/whiteness. The diverse group of twenty-eight contributors includes activists, artists and scholars from a range of scholarly backgrounds. Chapters are organized under three headings: intersections/opacities/challenges, which represent broad axes for thinking between the postcolonial and the postsocialist. The first section considers intersections in terms of the interactions of cultures, epistemologies, ideologies and human conditions within modernity/coloniality. The second interrogates normative understandings of opacity with the aim of extracting the idea’s potential for resistance, while the third part grapples with the challenges posed by the complicity of feminisms in upholding a racist European imperial project. In her chapter on postsocialist precarity, Jennifer Suchland explores the ways in which East European and Eurasian postsocialism relate to the history of colonialism. Looking at postsocialism as a global condition, postsocialist precarity involves the defunding of public services, the promotion of austerity and of profit over wellbeing, as well as the criminalization of protest. Suchland encompasses postsocialist and decolonial critiques of power with the aim of exposing the hidden Eurocentrism in critical postsocialist theorizing. She offers a decolonial reading of precarity by analysing two images — Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga and an image of a sex-trafficked person — uncovering how hidden eurocentrism can be carried forward in the discourses around them. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s intention is to bring back socialism as a way of framing analysis. They raise unasked questions such as: how is Eastern Europe racialized in complex ways through the commodification of bodies? How does such racialization complicate notions of US racial formations? What might be the implications for postcolonial theory? In her interview with Manuelā Boatca, Madina Tlostanova notes the way in which a new postsocialist feminist subject is abandoning past and present socialist phenomena, and the scale of the challenge of engaging feminists from the global south regarding this issue. Boatca identifies this as coloniality of knowledge, which produces categories such as Second versus Third World which come to constitute a field [End Page 592] within which competing political interests are played out. Deconstructing colonial categories is prerequisite for making transverse connections. In other chapters, Lidia Zhigunova discusses the racial status of Circassians who have become the epitome of ‘whiteness’ in US racial discourse yet who are branded as ‘Blacks’ in Russia together with other ‘Caucasians’. Tjaša Kancler pushes for a radical approach to analysis that interrogates or leaves behind Western-derived meanings of gender. Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik, writing on post-Maidan Ukraine, argue that ‘uneventful activism’ can help forge futures that can avoid the trap of nationalism, capitalism and colonialism, even at a time of war. Angéla Kóczé in conversation with Petra Bakos reflects on developing a critical race feminist agenda sensitive to the specific characteristics and needs of Eastern European Roma communities. Alyosxa...

Lithuania: Political Developments and Data in 2021

AbstractThe main political developments in Lithuania in 2021 were mayoral elections in three municipalities, tensions in the Cabinet related to management of the COVID‐19 pandemic and a conflict between Lithuania and China, splits in the parliamentary political groups, and party leadership changes. Much of the article is devoted to issue politics, including the migration crisis, and social unrests directed against both the government's pandemic measures and the progressive agenda of the ruling parties.

Patrum Traditio: A Patristic Remedy for Modernist Woes

Patrum TraditioA Patristic Remedy for Modernist Woes1 Joseph A. Carola SJ (bio) Key Words Pius IX, Pius X, Leo XIII, Modernism, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Quanta Cura, The Syllabus of Errors, Qui Pluribus, Inscrutabili Dei Concilio, Aeterni Patris, Providentissimus Deus, Patrum traditio Introduction On September 8, 1907, in the fifth year of his pontificate, Pope Pius X promulgated his encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis condemning Modernist doctrine. Scholars—especially those who do not hold the encyclical in particularly high regard—are quick to point out that the Modernist system elaborated in the encyclical exists in its totality nowhere else other than in the encyclical itself. Pope Pius willingly acknowledges their criticism, observing that the Modernists “present their doctrine without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner.”2 The pontiff cautions, however, that the Modernists themselves are hardly scattered-brained. They are rather “quite fixed and steadfast” in their Modernist convictions. Pius groups their teachings together in order “to point out their interconnection, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil results.”3 He explains further “that the three chief difficulties which stand in the [Modernists’] way are the scholastic method of philosophy, the authority and tradition of the Fathers, and the magisterium of the Church, and on these they wage unrelenting [End Page 61] war.”4 Our particular interest lies in the second of these three antidotes for the Modernist heresy—the Patrum auctoritas et traditio. In our consideration of patristic remedies for Modernist woes, we shall not, however, limit ourselves solely to Pius X’s Pascendi. Rather we shall take a broader view of the question beginning with an examination of five earlier papal encyclicals: Pope Pius IX’s first encyclical letter Qui Pluribus promulgated on November 9, 1846; his later encyclical Quanta Cura promulgated on December 8, 1864; Leo XIII’s first encyclical letter Inscrutabili Dei Concilio promulgated on April 21, 1878; his third encyclical Aeterni Patris promulgated on August 4, 1879; and his encyclical on biblical studies Providentissimus Deus promulgated on June 18, 1893. Fierce cultural wars, waged in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, rattled the six decades that these encyclicals delineate. By no means were those cultural wars merely a matter of intellectual debate. Humanity reaped their bitter, existential fruit during the two world wars that engulfed the globe in the first half of the twentieth century. In retrospect, Pope Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of Modernism both looked back to the dangerous currents that flowed mightily throughout the nineteenth century and anticipated at the beginning of the twentieth century their tragic consequences for a society that had factored God out of the civic equation. As we shall see, getting philosophy and theology right with the help of the Church Fathers offers a crucial remedy even now for the Modernist woes that perennially plague us. Pope Pius IX’s Qui Pluribus and Quanta Cura On June 16, 1846, the cardinals, who had gathered in conclave in the chapel of the Quirinal Palace, elected the fifty-four-year-old Giovanni Maria Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti to succeed the recently deceased Pope Gregory XVI. Mastai-Ferretti took the papal name Pius IX. Soon after his election, he issued a general amnesty for political prisoners in the Papal States—an act of his temporal sovereignty that immediately endeared him to progressives throughout [End Page 62] Europe and the world. Enthusiastically did they hail the new pope’s liberality to the great consternation of the Austrian Imperial Chancellor Klemens von Metternich, who in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna had orchestrated post-Napoleonic Europe’s reconstruction according to conservative monarchical lines. The crowds’ incessant hosannas acclaiming the “liberal” pope unfortunately deafened them to the pontiff’s own voice. For, even though the amnesty that he had granted did attest to his compassion, it offered no seal of approval for a socially progressive agenda. On the contrary, as the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius IX was quite well aware that “a very bitter and fearsome war [was being waged] against the whole Catholic commonwealth.”5 In his...

Empowering Moroccan Girls through Education

Women’s empowerment is one of the main goals of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework that is adopted by many developing countries, including Morocco, to fight poverty and gender discrimination. The Fourth and fifth goals in this framework aim at putting gender equality and women’s empowerment on the agenda of education and literacy policy makers by eliminating gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education. To do so, Morocco is committed to build on the partnership opportunities with U.N agencies like Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to develop a gender-sensitive approach with specific and clear goals that would enable the implementation of gender mainstreaming at all levels and stages of policy making. In doing so, The Moroccan government will not only be able to solve gender-inequalities in different life domains including education, but also develop a policy arsenal that goes in-line with the international goals on gender equality. However, it is argued that the SDGs framework does not serve women’s cause as it serves liberal agendas by shifting the attention from real empowerment of women to integrating them in the economic system, turning them into a ‘new proletariat’. Therefore, this study analyzes the MCC’s gender policy along with Gender and Social Inclusion Dimensions Action Plan (GISAP) using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis model in the light of Sardenberg’s [31] conceptualization of women’s empowerment and current development approaches to see if the approach that the Moroccan government is adopting is ‘liberating’ girls or fostering ‘liberal’ ideology. Results showed that this approach considers empowerment an instrument for economic growth and a fertile ground for strengthening liberal ideology through a horizontal and narrow interpretation of empowerment. Thus, girls and women should be empowered through a vertically-oriented approach that enhances their participation in policy making, inhibits discriminatory practices and challenges patriarchal structures.

Arachne, self-care and ‘power-nets’ on women’s self-development programmes

ABSTRACT Our article employs a feminist perspective to interpret ethnographic data on soft skills programmes (SSPs) for female staff in Higher Education (HE). We use the story of Arachne as a metaphor for how, under neoliberalism, women are instructed to create local ‘nets of power,’ only to find themselves tangled in a web of conflicting expectations. Our method was informed by Institutional Ethnography (IE). Data incorporated autoethnography, participant observation, in-depth interviews with female SSP participants from academia and corporate services, as well as document study. SSPs emerged as social spaces promoting self-care and entrepreneurial practices to predominantly female audiences. An entrepreneurial self was promoted on SSPs, ostensibly to inoculate women against stress and exploitation, but arguably to perpetuate a ‘super-woman’ work ethic. SSPs exemplify how women are kept busy with attending to their personal ‘metamorphoses’ as opposed to ‘meddling’ in the politics of institutions, distracted from feminist agendas that might address structural gender inequalities in HE.

Progressivism, Old and New: The Spiritual Moorings of Progressive Reforms.

With the tide of progressive reforms facing strong headwinds today, this essay offers a retrospective look at the progressive movement in the U.S.A. and reflects on the lessons to be learned from its triumphs and failures. The case is made that major advances in the progressive agenda came at historical junctions precipitated by dramatic events. The stretch between 1900 and 1920 saw the first wave of social reforms following the late nineteenth century recessions and upsurge in labor unrest. The New Deal took shape in the 1930s in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The Civil Rights movement burst onto the scene in the 1960s in the face of bitter attempts to shore up segregationist practices in southern states. And the 2020s spike in progressive activism gained momentum against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 Capitol riots. Special attention is paid to the interfaces between Social Gospel theology and efforts to ground progressive rhetoric in what John Dewey called “common faith,” Robert Bellah “civil religion,” and Richard Rorty “liberal pragmatism.”

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age