Male Activists Research Articles

Disrupting Anxious Masculinity: Fraternity as Resistance

Within the experience of our work in India, context and positionality determine what we perceive as backlash against gender justice. An important underlying cause of backlash today is the widespread crisis of masculinities, where subaltern masculinities are evolving differently in response to the aggressive nationalist Hindutva masculinity. Gender and development strategies have failed to recognise or address this. This article analyses grounded examples from our action research towards generating new knowledge on how two collectives are negotiating backlash. These include the community-based transgender organisation Kolkata Rista and Humqadam, a platform comprising male activists in Uttar Pradesh working with men on gender equality. Applying the framework of ontological insecurity, this article explores ways for discovering common ground in situations where polarisation destroys the space for debate and discussion. Reflecting on the political practice of fraternity, the article examines how social movements can shift strategies when faced with exclusionary discourses.

Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

More than a year before Chile's massive social uprising (estallido social) erupted in October 2019, protests in May 2018 against sexual harassment in higher education sparked a broader national reckoning over the historical entrenchment of patriarchy, gender violence, and gender inequality. In the context of resurgent feminist movements in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America in the twenty-first century, historical anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier's Desired States makes a timely contribution to theorizing the role of desire in shaping modern Chile's political culture.As an interdisciplinary scholar, she creatively marshals an impressive array of methodologies and theoretical texts to analyze cultural texts as well as ethnographic and archival research. The book is organized around four episodic case studies spanning from 1913 to 2019. Chapters 1 and 3 trace debates about sexuality within leftist political movements, while chapters 2 and 4 consider the role of gender and desire under repressive states. For each case, she “maps constellations of desires—relationships, affects, projects, and practices” in support of her overarching argument that “by understanding how desire in and for political projects works through gendered and sexualized orientations, we unlock an indispensable dimension for the analysis of states and political cultures more broadly conceived” (p. 13). Frazier's expansive application of desire as a category of analysis includes desire by representatives of the Catholic Church and the anarchist feminist movement for divergent forms of working-class sexuality, desire by the military for different modes of gendered discipline in prison camps, desire by 1960s leftist militants for a socialist state compatible with their continued heterosexual male privilege, and desire by civilian authorities for a domesticated citizenry complacent with the neoliberal state's reconciliation process. Given the author's stated goal to “participate in ongoing imaginings of more just, yet still passionate, politics” by highlighting the “high cost” of organizing “political culture around a certain desire for the state,” a narrower focus on political desire vis-à-vis changing modes of state formation might have produced a more cohesive narrative across the four case studies (pp. 22, 119).I found that the book's expansive thinking, tantalizing theorizing, and impressive breadth at times came at the expense of a deeper engagement with the historical context. In several places, the analysis contains interpretative leaps not always convincingly substantiated by the historical evidence. For example, Augusto Pinochet's 1979 memoir, El día decisivo: 11 de septiembre de 1973, covers his experience in 1948 guarding relegated Communist families at the Pisagua prison camp, including a lunchroom protest over the poor quality of food in which he found himself surrounded: “Defenderme en forma violenta significaría ser arrollado por la multitud, que luego se ensañaría en contra mía.” By mistranslating the last phrase as “looking for blood,” as opposed to ensañarse being more akin to the intent to cause harm, Frazier makes a conceptual leap to argue that “postmenopausal” women protesters threatened military men's bodily integrity and masculinity (pp. 76–77). While thought provoking, such assertions may not be sustained by the evidence or at least require far more contextualization. Indeed, imprisoned Communist militants' respect for party hierarchies during this incident invites a deeper discussion of the centrality of the Communist family to Chile's political culture, which would have directly connected with the analysis in chapter 3 of “respectable heteronormativity” as one element in the “sexual ideologies and practices of the leftist male activists who came into power” in 1970 (p. 21). Here again, however, the analysis appears to flatten the Chilean Left into a more homogenous entity than it was. In making arguments about the “New Man's sexuality” as it pertained to “the hegemonic left,” meaning the Communist and Socialist Parties, Frazier bases her argument around Trotskyist labor historian Marcelo Segall and his archive (p. 111). Yet Segall's own biography confounds his representativeness. Born in 1920, he left the Partido Comunista de Chile in 1957, prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and remained a political independent. Thus during Chile's experiment with democratic socialism under Salvador Allende (1970–73), Segall was neither a '68 rebel youth inspired by Che Guevara nor a member of the mainstream “hegemonic left” that formed the governing Popular Unity coalition. Other prominent Communist militants, including Raquel Weitzman and Volodia Teitelboim, discussed in the epilogue, might have been more logical examples to illustrate the persistence of patriarchal attitudes, party hierarchies, and sexual practices in Chile.These concerns aside, historians of modern Latin America will do well to heed Frazier's intellectual provocation to see political desire as something beyond the passionate politics associated with charismatic populist leaders. Desired States is an open invitation to explore how these dynamics play out in Chile and elsewhere.

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Toward a Trans* Masculine Genealogy in South America

Mothers on the move: manyanos and the social history of transportation in a South African homeland township, 1963–1990

ABSTRACT Histories of bus boycotts and of the taxi business in apartheid South Africa have been told with male activists and taxi entrepreneurs as the protagonists. Women’s oral histories reframe transportation history to include the experiences of commuters. This article is a history of travel by African Christian women’s organizations (manyanos) in the township of Mdantsane. Township infrastructure presented barriers to these social organizations, but in the 1960s and 1970s manyanos adapted their mobility practices to attract members. The bus boycotts of the 1980s and the growth of the taxi industry were connected to protest against the apartheid order. However, this revolution in transportation had ambiguous consequences for commuters. As dissatisfied commuters in the late-apartheid urban landscape, manyano women continued to innovate travelling strategies to maintain local and long-distance connections. Their experiences show that commuters, as well as governments and transport-owners, shape the possibilities of urban travel in twentieth-century Africa.

The “Greta Effect”: Networked Mobilization and Leader Identification Among Fridays for Future Protesters

Drawing on walking interviews with 19 Fridays for Future (FFF) activists in Germany, this study focuses on Greta Thunberg by researching strikers’ perception, identification, and online networking practices with the movement’s central figure. With respect to protest mobilization and collective identity formation, this study finds that participants primarily identify with Thunberg via her class standing. While male activists highlight Thunberg’s gender as a mobilizing factor, female and non-binary activists often dismiss it, thereby distancing themselves from FFF’s feminized public image. Participants believe that Thunberg’s disability gives her an “edge” to generate media attention for FFF, calling it an asset to the cause. Although all participants engage with Thunberg via social media, many downplay her leadership role in the movement. Similarly, local organizers actively use Thunberg’s posts to build up their own online networks while routinely emphasizing FFF’s leaderlessness. The findings thus nuance assumptions about identity-based mobilization, explore the construction of networked leadership, and chart digital organizing practices in a transnational youth climate movement.

A Gendered Approach to the Yu Chi Chan Club and National Liberation Front during South Africa's Transition to Armed Struggle

AbstractSouth Africa's anti-apartheid struggle reflected an ideal of heroic masculinity that ignored and depreciated women as active political agents. This has contributed to a post-apartheid social order that accepts formal gender equality but that perpetuates gender inequality by discounting women's experiences. This article examines the little-known and short-lived Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) and National Liberation Front (NLF). Tiny Cape Peninsula-based breakaways from the Non-European Unity Movement – an African National Congress rival – the YCCC and NLF were exceptional amongst early 1960s underground groups in their systematic attempts to theorize guerrilla struggle and assess its applicability to South African conditions and, in the NLF's case, to build a cell structure through political education. Although the NLF's idealized notion of revolutionary life was premised on an abstract individual with traits then associated with public and vocal male activists, nonetheless women participated as equal abstract individuals. The NLF's relatively horizontal cell structure, small cell size, and lack of hierarchy made participation easier for both women and men, allowing women to operate equally within the political space. From their gendered upbringing and early experiences in hierarchical organizations to their brief experience of equality within the YCCC and NLF, the women were then forced into a prison system with an extremely rigid and unequal gender divide. Subjected to the state's regendering project, the political space available to the NLF's women prisoners shrank far more than it did for their male comrades, whose prison experiences became the measure of anti-apartheid politics.

“In Kibitkas through Snow…” Faithful Wives and Fragile Masculinity in the Late Soviet Jewish Movement

The article explores the participation of women in Jewish national movement: their family roles, activism and their images in the narratives of the movement. The sources and the scholarship of the movement often mentioned an important role of its women. However, for all great numbers and activism of these women, they were not seen as independent actors: their struggle was the struggle for husbands and sons. Activism and self–sacrifice of the women notwithstanding, their role was viewed as that of helpers, and this fact has been articulated in the sources and seen as natural. The movement’s rhetoric is patrilineal, activists linked their Jewish consciousness with fathers, learned the language of fathers and desired to go to the fatherland. As a result, synchronically and diachronically, a new Jewish nation has been constructed as a predominantly male community, faithful women–helpers’ presence remained at the background and confirmed the male activists’ heroic self–image and made it possible to create a new and desirable masculinity of cunny and fearless fighters against regime.

My Fight or Yours: Stereotypes of Activists From Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups.

In social movements, activists may belong to either the disadvantaged or the advantaged group (e.g., Black racial justice activists or White racial justice activists). Across three experimental survey studies, we examined the content of these stereotypes by asking participants to freely generate a list of characteristics to describe each target group-a classic paradigm in stereotype research. Specifically, we examined the stereotypes applied to Black and White activists within racial justice movements (Study 1, n = 154), female and male activists within feminist movements (Study 2, n =134), and LBGT and straight activists within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender movements (Study 3, n =156). We found that the "activist" category was consistently differentiated into subcategories based on group status: Disadvantaged group activists were stereotyped as strong and aggressive, whereas advantaged group activists were stereotyped as altruistic and superficial. These findings underscore the importance of considering status differences to understand the social perception of activists.

Black Women's Groups, Life Narratives, and the Construction of the Self in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

AbstractBlack British women's centres and groups evolved out of black women's combined exclusion from male-dominated anti-racist activism and the resurgent feminist movement of the late 1960s. And yet, despite their stable presence in many of Britain's inner cities, black women's centres and groups, and the lives of the women who forged them, have evaded historical interrogation. This article explores how black women's centres provided women with the space and time to nurture their personal experiences of sexism and racism, achieve a sense of self-sufficiency, and celebrate their heritage, which placed every member on a path towards self-discovery. This centring of the black female self was not, as black male activists believed, set on undermining the Black liberation movement, but was considered as a vital tool in the overarching mission to defeat white global supremacy. Drawing on a collection of oral history interviews, this article explores how black female activists constructed a sense of self that turned away from the homogenizing white gaze of post-war Britain. Teasing out the complexities around black female activism, selfhood, and memory, this article contributes substantially to the growing body of literature on late twentieth-century black British history.

Between powerlessness and protest: Indigenous men and masculinities in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul and the emergence of the American Indian Movement

ABSTRACT The Red Power era (1969-1978), the most pivotal time for Indigenous people in the twentieth century, is commonly associated with a fundamental restructuring of Indigenous-settler colonial relations and a major cultural renewal of self and society across Indian Country. This article examines the social formation of those Indigenous men and masculinities who instigated that profound change and became politically active, questioning domestic colonialism and challenging their subaltern status vis-à-vis dominant U.S. society. More specifically, this article explores the shared experiences of Indigenous male activists within the American Indian Movement (AIM) during its early beginnings between 1968 through mid-1972. AIM (1968–1978) originated in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St-Paul and rose to become the most significant player in Indigenous protest politics at its time. Indigenous men in AIM shared key experiences with settler colonial institutions and the forces of modernity (boarding schools, military service, prisons, the urban experience) that affected their male identities in multiple, complex, and contradictory ways. Western-centric concepts of race, gender, and nation have consistently worked towards the marginalization and oppression of the Indigenous ‘other' -commonly through the imposition of colonial standards as a ‘civilizing force.' This article argues that the inculcation of Indigenous men with hegemonic ideals, together with experiences of emasculation, have led to an unintended outcome, namely the emergence of a ‘protest masculinity.' This ‘protest masculinity’ arose as a result of and in reaction to assimilationist policies. Paradoxically, Indigenous male activists contested dominant concepts of masculinity, yet at the same time conformed to the very cultural ideals they struggled against. This article offers an understanding of how gender and race bias intersect to disadvantage Indigenous men and how this in turn constitutes a powerful catalyst for change.

A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s

Reviewed by: A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s by Elizabeth Todd-Breland Jillian Deas (bio) ELIZABETH TODD-BRELAND, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN 9781469647173. Elizabeth Todd-Breland explores the history of Chicago schools to discuss the politics that impacted and influenced Black achievement and the power, resources, and representation that maintain controlling politics. According to Todd-Breland, desegregation is a strategy to acquire “educational equity and liberation” (p. 6), which shifts to community control as a strategy. The lack of consensus in Black Chicago communities regarding education led to the rise of community control as a tactic to improve the resources and programming that occurred within the Black communities dictated by local control. When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965) launched, many community organizers transitioned from grassroots protest and activism to community-support agencies due to newly available funding opportunities. The rise of racial pride through Black Power movements led to the recognition that “African-Centered education” (p. 85) was starkly missing from what [End Page 155] students were receiving, which led to parents transitioning their children to private educational institutions. Todd-Breland discusses Independent Black Institutions by presenting the question, “can we create or re-create the Afrikan mind in a pre- dominantly European-American setting?” This educational framework only impacted a small portion of the Black population in Chicago during the 1960s, as most students remained in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. Harold Washington became Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983, through the local political power possessed by Chicago Black teachers, who played a major role in his election. Accordingly, they exhibited heightened expectations of Washington to provide more equitable educational opportunities for Chicago’s teaching force and students. In the second section, Todd-Breland separates Chicago school reform and corporate school reform to analyze and consider the power, resources, and representation that impacted the Chicago education system. Centered on the rise of the first Black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington seemed to introduce a new level of Black politics and achievement. By the close of Washington’s political career, education reform leaders were more interested in decentralizing schools to local control with the rise of corporate and private school reform. The rise of neoliberal ideology, private and school choice options, aimed to solve all the issues that parents, students, educators, and communities were concerned with, nonetheless, much of the interest in corporate reform was self-serving and motivated by the hope of making profits, which commodified students, particularly Black students. A strength of this book is the concurrent nature of the content. The grit and determination displayed by Chicago’s Black educators is displayed through their repeated strikes for better conditions for the students and themselves. Additionally, we are introduced to some key players in the teachers’ and community’s movement toward equitable educational opportunities, such as Rosie Simpson, Barbara Sizemore, Soyini Walton, Lillie Peoples, and Karen Lewis. Todd-Breland clarifies her hopes for Black women educators and the Black community and her purpose in pursuing this history in the introduction and then mutes many of her positions until the end of the book. This allows the reader to trust her objective analysis and the authenticity of the history being told. She lays out the facts as she found them through archives, oral histories (p. 23), other texts, and videos. Structurally, she intertwines the women presented, whether they were connected through shared experiences or ideologies. Prominent organizations and male activists are mentioned but are limited to their contributions or deviations from the movement; this helps keep the focus on the unwritten histories of these women. Todd-Breland discusses the middle-class focus held by the Chicago Urban League and the fact that they didn’t support the Black woman educator’s movement. This in-depth exploration was initially a strength, but this wasn’t maintained with the other entities she discusses. One area [End Page 156] that would have benefited from further exploration is Reverend Jesse Jackson’s background before coming to Chicago to organize Operation Breadbox (p. 116...

Crossing the Line: Violence against Jewish Women and the New Model of Antisemitism in Poland in the 1930s

This article examines anti-Jewish violence in the Second Polish Republic through the lens of gender. By focusing on verbal and physical attacks against female Jewish students at Polish universities in the 1930s, it highlights the radicalization of the antisemitic movement among Poland’s future elite. Jewish women experienced discrimination and increasingly also violence at Polish universities as Jews and as women. The assaults suggest the need to examine both gender and Jewish differences. Although all Jewish students were targets of violent antisemitic attacks, women were especially vulnerable when they dared transgress gender boundaries by acting in “unfeminine ways” and signifying their intellectual empowerment—talking back, resisting, or defending Jewish men under attack. Indeed, Jewish women who stood up to their attackers transgressed the norms of both gender and Jewishness, and were thus doubly exposed to aggression and violence. Using the contemporary Jewish press, university archives, memoirs and testimonies, the female Jewish experience and the response of male Jewish students and community activists are reconstructed. Understanding these assaults as a window into gender politics in Jewish student associations, the Jewish press and Jewish communal institutions, the author examines their place in the public discourse of the Second Polish Republic.

Grassroots Women Transforming Patriarchy with Spiritual Activism

Grassroots Women Transforming Patriarchy with Spiritual Activism Ouyporn Khuankaew (bio) Keywords Buddhism, grassroots women, spiritual activism In 2014, I led a six-day training on feminism, structural oppression, and social justice for social activists that work across issues and areas throughout Thailand. Many of the participants are members of the People Movement for a Just Society (P-Move) that started thirty years ago and became the most powerful social movement in our country. This group shared stories about the problems that their movement is working to address, which include slums, landlessness, homelessness, the impacts of mining, government threats to take away land from ethnic minorities, and numerous other negative effects from government economic projects. These grassroots activists have been facing multiple forms of oppression through their class, ethnicity, politics, citizenship, and education. What particularly struck me was the experiences of grassroots women leaders in this movement. Our center, the International Women's Partnership for Peace and Justice (IWP) was founded in 2002 to focus on training grassroots women, because their wisdom and leadership ability have been missing from mainstream social movements, organizations, and groups. Grassroots women work hard taking care of their families while suffering under the government policies and patriarchal culture that continue to dominate activist groups and social movements. Despite the fact that their suffering is not being addressed and alleviated by male-led organizations, groups, and movements, they continue to organize and lead other women to resist. For instance, Aunty Jong started organizing her landless group in the southern part of Thailand thirty years ago. Her women's group has gone through many changes in government policies and tactics. But, she shared, "We just keep on speaking the truth about our suffering, and I have no fear when I speak our truth. And every time I was on stage speaking, I would notice the policemen who came to control the protesters nodding their heads while listening to me. I think [End Page 113] they understand the problems we face, and that we do not lie."1 Nowadays, her group has more than 40 million baht ($1.3 million USD) in savings, and all of the members have homes and land in their names. However, in most Thai activist groups and networks, women make up at least half of the membership (and often a majority) but very few are elected to decision-making positions. In the late 1990s, while I was working at a Buddhist social activist ashram near Bangkok, we organized a panel discussion and invited the leaders of the most powerful Thai grassroots social-justice movement at that time—the Assembly of the Poor. In a private talk with one of the woman leaders, Aunty Pha, I learned that there were only two women among the forty leaders of their movement. When I asked what their job was, she said, "the main job of myself and another woman was to mediate conflict among the male leaders." I also asked one of the male panelists, Uncle Joni, a prominent Karen (a heterogeneous Sino-Tibetan ethnolinguistic group) leader from northern Thailand, his opinion about the lack of gender balance in their movement's leadership. He said, "This movement will never win because they do not value women's wisdom and power. In our Karen culture, the ancestor spirits that protect us consist equally of females and males. So, if we are not following that gender balance, we will not succeed in our work." His answer has stayed with me—he is the only male activist leader in Thailand I've ever known to believe in gender equality. When women do come into power in movements, the media often erases or renders their leadership invisible. For example, it was a women's group that led the initial fights against the very powerful state-owned Electric Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), which built the biggest dam in the northern part of the country. When the Pak Moon Dam was built in the late 1980s, it compromised the livelihood of a million villagers whose life depended on the Moon River. Women from these villages began organizing nonviolent actions to protest the dam. After these actions were picked up by the mainstream...

Nuevas masculinidades y narrativas de excombatientes de la Farc después del posacuerdo de La Habana

una publicación de ámbito nacional e internacional interdisciplinar de carácter científico-académico y divulgativo, que pretende fomentar el intercambio de ideas y trabajos en el campo de los medios y los nuevos media aplicadas a la educación y de formación en general

Covering Women’s Rights, Silencing Suppression

Covering Women’s Rights, Silencing Suppression

PROFILING GREEN CONSUMERS THROUGH CULTURE, BELIEFS AND DEMOGRAPHICS: AN INDIAN STUDY

Consumers today not only view companies as profit centres, but also as institutions that should be sensitive to social problems such as environmental degradation. As a result, organisations have started considering the environmental needs of consumers by focusing on 'sustainability as a business goal'. Green products may help companies to improve their bottom line and brand image. This paper forms green consumer segments on the basis of cultural values, psychographics, and demographics. Demographics include income, gender and education. Cultural values include collectivism and long-term orientation (LTO) from Hofstede and man-nature orientation (MNO) from a value orientation model by Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961). Psychographics are derived from theory of planned behaviour (TPB). The results indicate that there are four distinct segments. Two of these segments 'female green activists' and 'green outlook male activists' are identified as the groups that are more willing to buy green products. Finally, implications from the results are derived for practitioners and policy-makers to develop targeting strategies for these segments.

Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s by Katie Batza

Reviewed by: Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s by Katie Batza Brett C. Stockdill Katie Batza. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s. Politics and Culture in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xii + 178 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-8122-5013-8). Before AIDS cogently analyzes 1970s’ gay health activism—primarily among affluent white gay men—in the United States. Using archival research and interviews, Katie Batza challenges the narrative that gay health services emerged during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Simultaneously, her findings counter the portrayal of gay men in the 1970s as focused solely on sexual freedom; they also sought sexual health. The medical infrastructure developed in the 1970s proved indispensable in responding to the AIDS crisis. Batza chronicles how radical social movements inspired activists to reimagine the meaning of gay health. In turn, interactions with the state led to both the expansion and the deradicalization of gay clinics. The book is organized thematically, with each chapter comparing and contrasting how these key themes played out at Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, and Los Angeles’ Gay Community Services Center. Medical homophobia marred gay men’s health care in the 1960s and 1970s. Doctor’s visits “often led to misdiagnosis, judgment, ostracism, and treatment for their sexuality rather than their medical ailments” (p. 1). Coupled with the threat of violations of confidentiality that risked family abandonment, job loss, eviction, and so forth, homophobia often caused gay men to delay or avoid medical care. Within this context, gay men (and lesbians) took collective action to forge accessible, gay-positive STI (sexually transmitted infection) testing clinics, outreach and testing in bars and bathhouses, primary care, research, and other services. Radical social movements, local political contexts, and Great Society funding catalyzed the clinics’ formation. The dynamic milieu of the black power, antiwar, feminist, gay liberation, and other movements provided ideological and strategic models for gay health activists. A Black Panther Party clinic inspired former antiwar activists to start the Fenway clinic as part of a broader antigentrification campaign. Medical students and doctors radicalized by the antiwar movement and frustrated with homophobic medical training and care established Howard Brown. Los Angeles clinic organizers more explicitly employed gay liberation politics, promoting the concept of “oppression sickness”—“the ways in which homophobia literally made gay people sick” (p. 25). Framing oppression—not homosexuality—as pathological was integral in shifting from a medical model to a health justice model in all three clinics. Sex positivity, paired with gay cultural expertise (e.g., use of nonclinical language such as “rimming”), garnered trust among patients. Health care access expanded and improved greatly by the end of the decade. Gay health activists took advantage of Great Society (and other) grant funding. Research collaborations, professional organizations, and relationships with government agencies led to a better understanding of gay health for both health care providers and gay patients. State funding fostered the growth of the clinics, but compliance with government laws and regulations also impeded efforts to fight oppression. Ideological rifts around bureaucratization and professionalization [End Page 292] developed within the Los Angeles and Boston clinics between those committed to social justice activism and those committed to service provision. Sexism pervaded the clinics. Male activists drew upon feminist critiques of mainstream medicine, but typically dismissed lesbians’ health needs. Radical gay men and lesbians often left the clinics or were pushed out. By 1980, the clinics had shifted from volunteer-run collectives fighting “oppression sickness” to hierarchical bureaucracies with million-dollar budgets providing more narrowly defined medical care. Batza challenges the common AIDS narrative depicting gay men as pathologically hypersexual and hedonistic in the 1970s. She documents gay men’s collective efforts to fight homophobia and improve health care. Batza also argues that contrary to the common “AIDS abandonment narrative”—in which state abandonment gave rise to oppositional health activism—gay health activism was enmeshed with the state. The state provided resources instrumental to the growth of gay health care. In turn, the national gay health infrastructure created in the 1970s immediately responded to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, providing frontline education, prevention, testing, medical care...

‘We the ladies … have been deprived of a voice’: Uncovering Black Women’s Lives through the Colored Conventions Archive

This article will investigate how African American women’s experience with education informed the Colored Conventions movement and propose that they used education activism as an avenue to gain and normalize official participation in convention proceedings. From its inception in 1830, the Colored Conventions movement was preoccupied with political and economic uplift and self-help. With these aims in mind, delegates focused on education, specifically mechanical training for men. Throughout the nineteenth century, Black male activists articulated their entitlement to basic rights in gendered terms. The discourse on civil and political rights among Black intellectuals and activists overlapped with discourses of manhood. Consequently, the archives of the Colored Conventions movement overwhelmingly represent Black male voices while Black women’s concerns and struggles were relegated to the margins and, at times, assumed to be secondary to the needs of their male counterparts. Women’s activism did not garner the same support or attention from convention delegates even as Black women and girls faced the same severe impediments as men and boys. Although the convention minutes often say very little about Black women’s participation, it would be remiss to say that it was negligible. The article will show that these minutes can be read productively, highlighting ways we can uncover narratives of Black women and how they navigated a male-centric movement and asserted their public roles. Before being allowed to take the pulpit in these conventions, Black women’s voices had to be mediated through male delegates. While Henry Highland Garnet’s radicalism is often noted because of his fiery speech, ‘An Address to the Slave of the United States’, in an 1843 convention, historians have overlooked his wife Julia Williams Garnet whose experiences with violence informed the couple’s radicalism and advocacy for urgent action. Similarly, the injustice that Frederick Douglass’s daughter Rosetta faced as she enrolled in a boarding school found its way on to the convention floor, giving women attendees and first-time delegates a leeway to centre women’s concerns. This article, therefore, will explore how the Colored Conventions archives reveal how Black women challenged and expanded the parameters of Black womanhood in the nineteenth century.

Narrowing the Liberation Agenda: Women, Corporal Punishment, and Scandal in Namibia’s Struggle for Independence

Anti-colonial campaigns that use existing patriarchal norms to shame colonial regimes can narrow the liberation agenda for women. Based on court documents and oral histories conducted in Namibia, this article examines the corporal punishment of women in Ovamboland during the period of South African colonial occupation. Centred on the 1973 flogging of four female political activists in the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the article places the public beating of women in the broader context of histories of spousal abuse in the region. In this way, the article argues that the public flogging of women in Ovamboland demonstrated the extent to which the liberation struggle empowered women to enter spaces previously defined as masculine, thus underscoring the potential for women’s liberation through the anti-colonial upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, in the scandal that emerged in the wake of the 1973 floggings, male activists and allies sought to use the floggings to reassert patriarchal values within the liberation movement. Given this contradiction, the article explores the limitations of scandal as a mechanism for liberation, arguing that scandal’s emphasis on achieving change through appeals to established norms and group consensus worked to narrow the liberation agenda away from the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial order and towards nationalist and statist projects that have preserved structures of colonial rule.

Politicizing Piety

The Tarbiyah (education) movement in Indonesia today is the best known and has the largest number of members amongst groups in the Dakwah (proselytizing) movements that mostly work in Indonesian campuses. Using the notion of Islamic feminism, this study aims to explore the numerous and varieties of women’s activities in this movement, especially in relation to the ways women see their rights and roles within their notion of piety. Female and male activists of the Tarbiyah movement in six state universities in East Java are used as data. Participant observations and in-depth interviews are used as techniques of data collection. Data collection was done from April 2015 to September 2016. One important finding indicates that the Tarbiyah members conceive that male and female are segregated in nature (biological construction), yet in fact they subscribe to concepts of women’s rights and equality while maintaining sexual segregation.