In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of ...murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity “femicide,” and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city’s infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels.
In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called “drug violence” unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government’s war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.
This book challenges the popular notion that Burmese women are powerful and are granted equal rights as men by society. Throughout history Burmese women have been represented as powerful and as ...having equal status to men by western travellers and scholars alike. National history about women also follows this conjecture. This book explains why actually very few powerful Burmese women exist, and how these few women help construct the notion of the high status of Burmese women, thereby inevitably silencing the majority of 'unequal' and disempowered women. One of the underlying questions throughout this book is why a few powerful women feel compelled to defend the notion that women hold privileged positions in Burmese society. Combining historical archives with statistical data published by UN agencies, this book highlights the reality of women's status in modern Burma. Case studies include why the first Burmese women's army was disbanded a few months after its establishment; how women writers assessed the conditions of Burmese women and represented their contemporaries in their works; the current state of prostitution; how modern-day sex-workers are trying to find their voice; and how women fared vis-à-vis men in education.
ABSTRACT
China's economic reforms over the past three decades have dramatically changed the mechanisms for allocating goods and labour in both market and non‐market spheres. This article examines the ...social and economic trends that intensify the pressure on the care economy, and on women in particular in playing their dual roles as care givers and income earners in post‐reform China. The analysis sheds light on three critical but neglected issues. How does the reform process reshape the institutional arrangements of care for children and elders? How does the changing care economy affect women's choices between paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? And what are the implications of women's work–family conflicts for the well‐being of women and their families? The authors call for a gendered approach to both social and labour market policies, with investments in support of social reproduction services so as to ease the pressures on women.
This article examines the gendered implications of the intertwining of Islam and politics that took shape after the process of democratisation in Turkey had brought a political party with an Islamist ...background to power. This development revived the spectre of restrictive sex roles for women. The country is thus confronted with a democratic paradox: the expansion of religious freedoms accompanying potential and/or real threats to gender equality. The ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities has been the most visible terrain of public controversy on Islam. However, the paper argues that a more threatening development is the propagation of patriarchal religious values, sanctioning secondary roles for women through the public bureaucracy as well as through the educational system and civil society organisations.
In Tanzania, 44% of women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetime, but the majority never seeks help, and many never tell anyone about their experience. Even among the minority ...of women who seek support, only 10% access formal services. Our research explored the social and structural barriers that render Tanzanian women unable to exercise agency in this critical domain of their lives. We collected qualitative data in three regions of Tanzania through 104 key informant interviews with duty bearers and participatory focus groups with 96 male and female community members. The findings revealed numerous sociocultural barriers to help-seeking, including gendered social norms that accept IPV and impose stigma and shame upon survivors. Because IPV is highly normalised, survivors are silenced by their fear of social consequences, a fear reinforced by the belief that it is women's reporting of IPV that brings shame, rather than the perpetration of violence itself. Barriers to help-seeking curtail women's agency. Even women who reject IPV as a 'normal' practice are blocked from action by powerful social norms. These constraints deny survivors the support, services and justice they deserve and also perpetuate low reporting and inaccurate estimates of IPV prevalence.
Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists such as Elizabeth ...Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers.
In the first biography of Mott in a generation, historian Carol Faulkner reveals the motivations of this radical egalitarian from Nantucket. Mott's deep faith and ties to the Society of Friends do not fully explain her activism-her roots in post-Revolutionary New England also shaped her views on slavery, patriarchy, and the church, as well as her expansive interests in peace, temperance, prison reform, religious freedom, and Native American rights. While Mott was known as the "moving spirit" of the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, her commitment to women's rights never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. She envisioned women's rights not as a new and separate movement but rather as an extension of the universal principles of liberty and equality. Mott was among the first white Americans to call for an immediate end to slavery. Her long-term collaboration with white and black women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was remarkable by any standards.Lucretia Mott's Heresyreintroduces readers to an amazing woman whose work and ideas inspired the transformation of American society.
Women in Arabia are often seen as subjects who need liberation from the constraints of patriarchal culture. Based on a report released by the United Nation in 2020, Saudi Arabia has big challenges in ...terms of women's empowerment and gender equality. The subject of limited space for women in Arabia has been extensively examined in earlier works from social and political science perspectives. However, there has been a lack of research on this topic from a linguistic viewpoint, particularly in the field of critical discourse analysis. This study aims to examine how Arab media portrays gender equality in the context of reporting on Arab government policy concerning women's rights. This research uses a critical discourse analysis approach initiated by Fairclough (1995) and a transitivity system approach introduced by Halliday (2014). This study discovered that the Arab media perceives Saudi Arabia's policy change on women's rights in a positive light. It is depicted as a demonstration of gender equality, a representation of the women's liberation movement, and a significant advancement that will propel Arab nations forward. In this particular instance, it pertains to the advancement of gender equality, which is being achieved through the implementation of policy reforms by the Saudi Arabian government with regards to women's rights. The reporting that is carried out can be a tool to guide public opinion, in this case, what is being constructed is gender equality which is realized through the Saudi Arabian government's policy reforms regarding women's rights.
This groundbreaking history of Victorian politics, feminism and parliamentary reform challenges traditional assumptions about the development of British democracy and the struggle for women's rights ...and demonstrates how political activity has been shaped by changes in the history of masculinity. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain's all-male parliament began to transform the legal position of women as it reformed laws that had upheld male authority for centuries. To explain these revolutionary changes, Ben Griffin looks beyond the actions of the women's movement alone and shows how the behaviour and ideologies of male politicians were fundamentally shaped by their gender. He argues that changes to women's rights were the result not simply of changing ideas about women but also of changing beliefs about masculinity, religion and the nature of the constitution, and, in doing so, demonstrates how gender inequality can be created and reproduced by the state.
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