Feminist Review Issue 56: Debating Discourses, Practising Feminism (Feminist Review)

Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms CONTENTS Editorial Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms Avtar Brah Ja...

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Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms

CONTENTS

Editorial Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms Avtar Brah Jayne O.Ifekwunigwe and Merl Storr

1

Who Needs (Sex) When You Can Have (Gender)? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz

3

To Whom Does Ameena Belong? Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood and Nationhood in Contemporary India Purnima Mankekar

25

Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science and Technology Laura Chernaik

57

‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy Sally R.Munt

81

Poem: American Eve Paula Burnett

95

Reviews Susan Forsyth on Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women

97

Caroline Evans on The Good Body: Asceticism in Contemporary Culture

99

Deborah Lynn Steinberg on Idols to Incubators:Reproduction Theory through the Ages

102

Lesley Doyal on Gender, Drink and Drugs

105

Jayne Mooney on International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology

107

iv

Pauline Lane on Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham

110

Sheila Rowbotham on Labour Women: Women in BritishWorkingclass Politics, 1918–1939

111

Noticeboard

115

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Feminist Review is published three times a year. It is edited by a Collective which is supported by a group of Corresponding Editors. The Collective: Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Merl Storr. Guest Editor this issue: Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. Corresponding Editors: Ailbhe Smyth, Ann Curthoys, Hala Shukrallah, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Jacqui Alexander, Lidia Curti, Meera Kosambi, Patricia Mohammed, Sue O’Sullivan, Zarina Maharaj. Correspondence and advertising Contributions, books for review and editorial correspondence should be sent to: Feminist Review, 52 Featherstone Street, London EC1Y 8RT. For advertising please write to the publishers: Journals Advertising, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE, UK. Subscriptions Please contact Routledge Subscriptions Department, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP10 5BE, UK. Tel: 44 (0) 1264 342755; Fax 44 (0) 1264 343005; for sample copy requests, e-mail [email protected]; for subscription and general information, e-mail [email protected]. A full listing of Routledge books and journals is available by accessing http://www.routledge.com/routledge.html Notes for Contributors Authors should submit four copies of their work to: Feminist Review, 52 Featherstone Street, London EC1 Y 8RT. We assume that you will keep a copy of your work. Submission of work to Feminist Review will be taken to imply that it is original, unpublished work, which is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All work is subject to a system of anonymous peer review. All work is refereed by at least two external (non-Collective) referees. Please note that we cannot accept unsolicited book reviews. Bookshop distribution in the USA Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001, USA. Copyright © 1997 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review . Copyright © 1997 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. ISSN 0141–7789

The Feminist Review office has moved. Please send all correspondence to: Feminist Review 52 Featherstone Street London EC1Y 8RT ISBN 0-203-98510-9 Master e-book ISBN

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Editorial: Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms

The essays in this issue demonstrate that any serious attempt to develop feminist practices is also an engagement with multiple discourses. By ‘discourses’ in this context we mean not just linguistic or textual issues, but dynamics and dialogics of substantive political debates. Each contribution is situated within complex and multi-layered terrains. Thus Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz map discursive conflicts at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing; Purnima Mankekar locates one particular public debate in India as a site of political and cultural contestation; Laura Chernaik traces postmodern ethics in contemporary feminist science fiction; Sally R.Munt places the lesbian educator at the centre of debates around politics and pedagogy. In pursuing each of these projects, the articles inevitably also interrogate myriad interrelated themes. ‘Who needs (sex) when you can have (gender)?’ is not just a report on the proceedings of the Beijing conference but also discusses the re-emergence of ‘gender’ and the subsequent de-centring of ‘women’ in feminist theory in general and development policy in particular. It also reflects on tensions between activism and policy-making, and indeed on power relations between policy-makers in the ‘north’ and activists in the ‘south’. In ‘To whom does Ameena belong?’ narratives of identity, citizenship and belonging reveal the inextricable links between notions of public and private, state, law and family, and ‘childhood’ as a barometer of gender, culture and political power. ‘Pat Cadigan’s Synners’ examines a literary recasting of the relationship between nature, technology and what it means to be human in a postmodern moment, invoking problems of agency, difference and action. ‘“I teach therefore I am”’ addresses the fraught politics of the academy—both its sexual politics and its professional politics—and in particular the ambivalent positions of lesbian teachers and lesbian students in institutions which both empower and disempower them. Thus the essays presented here are wide-ranging in scope and very different in perspective and subject matter. However, their meeting points are at the borders delimiting the ethical, the political and the institutional. Borders between ‘north’ and ‘south’, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, adulthood and childhood, lesbianism and heterosexuality, technology and nature…and ultimately between debates and

2 FEMINIST REVIEW NO 56, SUMMER 1997

practices. But borders do not only demarcate separate territories: they also connect them. Avtar Brah Jayne O.Ifekwunigwe Merl Storr It has been brought to our attention that in the Summer 1995 issue of Feminist Review devoted to Ireland, one of the articles described Carol Coulter as a ‘republican journalist’. Dr Coulter has been a staff journalist with The Irish Times for over ten years, working in Belfast and London as well as Dublin, and her professionalism and impartiality have never been questioned. She is also the author of a number of books and essays on questions relating to women’s rights, feminism, nationalism and identity. She has never been associated in any way with any republican organization. We apologize to Dr Coulter for any distress caused.

Who Needs [Sex] When You Can Have [Gender]? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz

Abstract

‘Gender’, understood as the social construction of sex, is a key concept for feminists working at the interface of theory and policy. This article examines challenges to the concept which emerged from different groups at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995, an important arena for struggles over feminist public policies. The first half of the article explores contradictory uses of the concept in the field of gender and development. Viewpoints from some southern activist women at the NGO Forum of the Beijing Conference are presented. Some of them argued that the way ‘gender’ has been deployed in development institutions has led to a depoliticization of the term, where feminist policy ambitions are sacrificed to the imperative of ease of institutionalization. ‘Gender’ becomes a synonym for ‘women’, rather than a form of shorthand for gender difference and conflict and the project of transformation in gender relations. ‘Gender sensitivity’ can be interpreted by nonfeminists as encouragement to use gender-disaggregated statistics for development planning, but without consideration of relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology, and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. A completely different attack on ‘gender’ came from right-wing groups and was battled out over the text of the Platform for Action agreed at the official conference. Six months prior to the conference, conservative groups had tried to bracket for possible removal the term ‘gender’ in this document, out of opposition to the notion of socially constructed, and hence mutable, gender identity. Conservative views on gender as the ‘deconstruction of woman’ are discussed here. The article points out certain contradictions and inconsistencies in feminist thinking on gender which are raised by the conservative backlash attack on feminism and the term ‘gender’. Keywords sex; gender; Beijing conference; instrumentalism; feminism; development studies


Introduction For academics working in the gender and development (GAD) field, the concept of ‘gender’ is everyday currency. In the UK, at least, social relations of gender analysis, with its roots in socialist feminism, is a major foundation for GAD thinking (Young et al., 1981; Razavi and Miller, 1995a: 27–32). Understanding the concept of ‘gender’ in the context of social relations analysis remains a touchstone of gender and development research, teaching and training in many institutions in the UK and elsewhere. However, outside of academia, within policy and activist arenas, the utility and relevance of ‘gender’ has been highly contested. Indeed, in some policy applications, ‘gender’ has come to lose its feminist political content. This article explores conflicting discourses on the relevance and meaning of gender in policy and activist contexts. We draw on debates over ‘gender’ aired at the NGO (non-government organization) Forum of the United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, in September 1995.1 This conference provided an extraordinary opportunity to investigate a vast range of contemporary policy and activist discourses, given the very broad spectrum of interest groups represented there. The first section of this chapter is inspired by the challenge to GAD from grassroots development workers and women activists in the south. This challenge is linked to the current debate over the institutionalization of gender in development policy and practice, and relates to the perceived depoliticization of the concept of gender. The second part explores a completely different critique of ‘gender’ from conservative groups who attacked ‘gender’ during the Beijing process on the grounds that it is an over-radical and unrepresentative approach to thinking about social relations. We consider the ways in which the conservative critique illuminates contradictions and lacunae in feminist theorizing about gender. Underlying both sections are questions about what happens to feminist concepts in activist and policy arenas and about our own role in this process, as gender and development researchers. The mainstreaming agenda The Beijing Conference reflected the extent to which gender issues have entered the ‘mainstream’, at least at the level of rhetoric. The entire range of bilateral and multilateral development agencies vied to display their gender sensitivity with a range of policy documents and promotional literature as well as presence at workshops and on panels at both official and NGO events. For example, the World Bank launched its analytical framework Toward Gender Equality: The Role of Public Policy; while the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) proferred the 1995 Human Development Report focusing on gender. In the 1990s, ‘mainstreaming’ has become a dominant theme in gender and development policy circles. Mainstreaming evolved from the earlier call for the ‘integration’ of women in development, dating back to the 1970s. It arose

SEX AND GENDER IN BEIJING 5

following the Nairobi UN Women’s Conference in 1985, in part reflecting the perceived failure of national women’s machineries, many set up in the 1970s and early 1980s, to achieve significant results or influence over government policy. Mainstreaming signifies a push towards systematic procedures and mechanisms within organizations—particularly government and public institutions—for explicitly taking account of gender issues at all stages of policy-making and programme design and implementation. It also represents a call for the diffusion of responsibility for gender issues beyond small and underfunded women’s units to the range of sectoral and technical departments within institutions (Razavi and Miller, 1995b). Mainstreaming has been heavily promoted within international development circles by gender policy advocates in a relatively small group of bilateral agencies, sometimes leading to accusations of a donor-driven agenda. It has also been argued that the mainstreaming agenda focuses on process and means rather than ends, leading to a preoccupation with the minutiae of procedures at all levels, rather than clarity or direction about goals (Razavi and Miller, 1995b). Feminist (or radical and Marxist) critiques of bureaucracies and their potential for promoting women’s interests—or indeed those of any other disempowered social group—are not new, although they have only relatively recently filtered into the GAD field (Staudt, 1990; Razavi and Miller, 1995b; Goetz, 1995). Echoing these critiques, disquiet about the mainstreaming agenda and the way in which the GAD discourse is evolving was in evidence at the NGO Forum of the Beijing Conference, from both the left and the right. The Platform for Action of the official conference in Beijing had comprehensively adopted the language of gender and, specifically, of gender mainstreaming. In the final chapter on institutional arrangements, a commitment was made to ‘promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective…in the monitoring and evaluation of all policies and programmes’ (United Nations, 1995a: 134). The preoccupation with institutionalization was also evident in the number of workshops at the NGO Forum (and panels at the official conference in Beijing) which focused on the issue from a variety of perspectives. One of these, early on in the Forum, was entitled ‘Feminism: from movement to establishment’, convened by the Applied Socio-economic Research (ASR) organization of Pakistan. Nighat Khan, Director of ASR and a panellist at this workshop, argued that gender analysis had become a technocratic discourse, in spite of its roots in socialist feminism, dominated by researchers, policy-makers and consultants, which no longer addressed issues of power central to women’s subordination. She identified factors underlying this shift as the professionalization and ‘NGOization’ of the women’s movement and the consequent lack of accountability of ‘gender experts’ to a grassroots constituency. A more radical perspective on the Beijing process and associated discourse on gender came from the Revolutionary Women of the Philippines, whose pamphlet ‘The Gender Trap: an imperialist scheme for co-opting the


world’s women’, attacked gender mainstreaming as a scheme to buy off once committed activists (Makibaka 1995: 5). Nighat Khan asserted that the focus on gender, rather than women, had become counter-productive in that it had allowed the discussion to shift from a focus on women, to women and men and, finally, back to men. This latter point was echoed by others at the NGO Forum. Eugene Barriteau, presenting on a panel for Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era (DAWN), described how in Jamaica the shift in discourse from women to gender had resulted, in policy circles, in a focus away from women, to ‘men at risk,’ reflecting concern about men’s failure in education and in securing employment, while women perform much better educationally and many support families alone. This view is also reflected in other accounts. A Bangladeshi development worker is quoted by Kabeer as saying: ‘Do you think we are ready for gender in development in Bangladesh when we have not yet addressed the problems of women in development?’ It transpired that ‘the new vocabulary of gender was being used in her organization to deny the very existence of women specific disadvantage and hence the need for specific measures which might address this disadvantage’ (Kabeer, 1994: xii). According to Razavi and Miller, in their recent review of conceptual shifts in the women and development discourse: Although the gender discourse has filtered through to policy making institutions, in the process actors have re-interpreted the concept of gender to suit their institutional needs. In some instances, ‘gender’ has been used to side-step a focus on ‘women’ and on the radical policy implications of overcoming their disprivilege. (Razavi and Miller, 1995a: 41) Mainstreaming in research: from subordination to disaggregation The contradictions generated by mainstreaming resonate closer to home. As gender has become a more mainstream and therefore more respectable and fundable field of research, new players are entering the field, who bear no allegiance to feminist research and may not even be familiar with its basic texts, concepts and methodologies. Economists, statisticians and econometricians (many, though not all of them, men), responding to the growth in demand from major development bureaucracies for research and analysis to inform their new ‘gender-aware’ policy directions, have taken up research into gender issues. This recent body of research has tended to look at gender as an interesting statistical variable, although certainly not a defining or universally relevant one (e.g. Appleton et al., 1990; Haddad, 1991). Elson (1995) refers to this as ‘the genderdisaggregation approach’. Drawing heavily on the neoclassical economic paradigm, it tends to a static and reductionist definition of gender (as


woman/man)—stripping away consideration of the relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. To the extent that such approaches do consider the factors underlying gender disadvantage or inequality, they tend to look to information problems (e.g. women’s tendency to follow female role models) or to ‘culture’ (defined as outside the purview of mainstream economics) as explanatory factors (see Lockwood, 1992 on Collier, for example). While such research may be of great interest and can provide invaluable insights and empirical evidence, it can under-specify the power relations maintaining gender inequalities, and in the process de-links the investigation of gender issues from a feminist transformatory project. Bureaucratic requirements for information tend to strip away the political content of information on women’s interests and reduce it to a set of needs or gaps, amenable to administrative decisions about the allocation of resources. This distillation of information about women’s experiences is unable to accommodate or validate issues of gender and power. Women are separated out as the central problem and isolated from the context of social and gender relations. Furthermore, bureaucracies tend to privilege certain kinds of information perceived as relevant to dominant development paradigms and attribute significance to information in proportion to the perceived social and political status of the informer. Thus the information provided by western feminists has tended to get a better hearing than the perspectives of southern women (Goetz, 1994). It now appears that the quantitative expertise of male economists on gender is gaining increasing weight as the discourse becomes more technocratic, with the danger that in-depth, qualitative, feminist research may be devalued. The Beijing Conference itself saw the production of several compendia of gender-disaggregated data, including a new edition of The World’s Women produced by the UN Statistical Office (United Nations, 1995b) and UNDP’s 1995 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1995). The latter featured two new indices—the Gender Disparity Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM is an interesting departure in that it attempts to establish a universal index by which ‘empowerment’ (a highly culturally loaded concept) can be measured and compared between countries, based on a composite of measures of income, participation in professional and managerial jobs, and formal political participation.2 It is especially ironic that the rhetoric of grassroots, collective, bottom-up development (‘empowerment’) is invoked to name a top-down and universalizing statistic. This is not to say that quantitative data or analysis of gender issues are not valuable. One key victory at Beijing was the successful campaign for the Platform of Action to include a commitment to the valuation of women’s unpaid labour in satellite national accounts, making concrete a long-standing feminist rallying cry. In this case, an organized feminist campaign was able to exploit the increasing sophistication of gender-disaggregated statistics and of statistical method in general.


Advocacy and accuracy: lies, damned lies and gender statistics As feminist researchers we felt it important in the build-up to Beijing to forge alliances with activists and campaigners within NGOs and women’s organizations who are attempting to change the policies of public institutions. This proved challenging in a number of ways. Specifically, it highlighted our distance from the language used in the lobbying process, in both its conceptual underpinnings and style: our proclivity for academic rigour, complexity and critique seemed at times to be in direct opposition to the demands of consensus building, political utility and direct campaigning messages. A couple of examples illustrate the point. We are all familiar with the claim that ‘Women [account] for two-thirds of all working hours, receive only onetenth of the world’s income and own less than one percent of world property’ (United Nations, 1980, cited in Duley and Edwards, 1986:48). It has recently come to light that the figure was made up by someone working in the UN because it seemed to her to represent the scale of gender-based inequality at the time. It has been taken up since and repeated endlessly, to the point of becoming a cliche, as a justification for attention to gender inequality in access to resources. The point is that, whilst highly effective as an advocacy slogan (still in circulation fifteen years on!), the claim had no basis in reality and thus had the potential to backfire and discredit feminist research. In the context of ‘mainstreaming’, such slogans may have little credibility. Nevertheless, similarly dubious statistical claims continue to be made by activists and gender advocates in order to justify attention to women. DAWN’s position paper for the Beijing Conference asserts that ‘Women world-wide produce half of the world’s food, constitute 70 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor and own only 1 percent of the world’s land’ (DAWN, 1995:6). Throughout the conference, the ‘feminization of poverty’ featured prominently as a topic of discussion and as a justification for channelling resources to poor women. The Platform of Action features a chapter on the ‘persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women’ which specifically refers to the ‘feminization of poverty’, and identifies female-headed households as a particularly vulnerable group in this context (United Nations, 1995a: 21). At the conference, we distributed a briefing paper on gender and poverty reduction strategies, which, drawing on recent work in the GAD field (Jackson, 1996), questioned the growing orthodoxy of the feminization of poverty and, specifically, the claim that rising female headship is responsible for this.5 But other critics of the ‘feminization of poverty’ at Beijing tended to be those on the religious right who viewed the association with female headship and the resulting demands for resources to be channelled to lone women as a threat to family values. Thus, we found ourselves going against the tide of the advocacy effort in rather unwholesome company.


Instrumentalism and opportunism Activists, lobbyists and gender policy advocates working within institutions have adopted a variety of strategies to influence institutional agendas and bring about ‘mainstreaming’, often resorting to instrumental arguments to convince hardened bureaucrats of the need to address gender issues. Common instrumental arguments used are the need to invest in female education to serve population control and child welfare goals, or the importance of women’s participation in community organizations to improve service provision and assist anti-poverty efforts. Such arguments appear justified to get gender issues on the table in organizations whose mandate and goals do not embrace social justice or equity. The World Bank’s recent policy document for Beijing, for example, makes the case for gender almost entirely on efficiency grounds, constructing a convergence between the interests of women and the promotion of economic liberalization: ‘Sound economic policies and well functioning markets are essential for growth, employment and the creation of an environment in which the returns investing in women and girls can be fully realized’ (World Bank, 1995: 5). Instrumental arguments, while they may prove successful in raising gender issues, are problematic in that they often result in women or gender being simply a means to other ends. Further, they run the risk of being discredited. Tenuous evidence on the relationships between female education and fertility decline, or female education and productivity, can be easily challenged, weakening the justification for addressing gender issues, with a danger that resources will be withdrawn. Finally, the use of instrumental arguments fails to recognize the gendered nature of institutions themselves: information or the right arguments will not in themselves produce change. Institutional structures, rules and cultures, including the ways in which information is collected, processed and prioritized, reflect dominant gender interests, so that the pursuit of gender equity must include demands for organizational change. Mainstreaming: the depoliticization of gender? The ambivalence about—or even hostility towards—the GAD discourse expressed by some southern women activists at Beijing perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the imposition of what is perceived as an external agenda and about whose interests are served by the mainstreaming project. This is underlined by the lack of accountability of northern development agencies to the southern women in whose interests they claim to be acting. While northern feminist groups can lobby their governments, albeit to limited effect, the responses of southern women to policy decisions taken in Washington or London do not even form part of the ‘feedback loop’ characteristic of pluralist politics (Jacquette and Staudt, 1988). The variety of ways in which ‘gender’ has come to be institutionalized and operationalized in the development arena presents a contradictory and ironic


picture. There is a disjuncture between the feminist intent behind the term and the ways in which it is employed such as to minimize the political and contested character of relations between women and men. A problem with the concept of ‘gender’ is that it can be used in a very descriptive way and the question of power easily removed. In order to bring the power back into gender, feminists need to move away from the idea of simple oppression and bring a gender critique into new theorizing about power (Oldersma and Davis, 1991). More practically, we also need to challenge the privileging of certain kinds of information on women and as a consequence particular kinds of expertise within development bureaucracies. It is ironic that a concept which was engineered to carry a political message can be so depoliticized in its use as to be rejected by some of the people most committed to gender-redistributive change, such as feminist development activists. This speaks not to a need to reject the concept of ‘gender’, but rather to the need for much greater, and perhaps much more pragmatic and applied, dialogue between researchers and practitioners, to ensure that concepts developed for activist arenas are not developed in the isolation of theory. Theorists can never, of course, control what happens to concepts when they are taken up by activists, nor would that be desirable. But given that much of feminist academic research grounds its legitimacy on a claim to relevance to the struggles of contemporary women, the ways in which feminist concepts can be distorted, even by well-meaning newcomers and potential allies, deserves careful monitoring. The second half of this article now turns to a virulent challenge to the concept of ‘gender’ which came from a very different direction in Beijing: conservative backlash politics. While the first set of challenges related to concerns about the depoliticization of gender relations, this contrasting challenge, ironically, related to a view that ideas behind the concept of ‘gender’ tend to over-politicize the relations between women and men. This backlash challenge demonized ‘gender’ as a code for the disruption of cherished certainties about human relations. The bracketing of gender in the Platform for Action ‘We have to try to neutralize the tremendous amount of gender, gender perspectives, which are going to go directly against our families and against our children.’ Speaker on a panel of conservative women at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, fringe meeting, September 1995. The Platform for Action agreed in September 1995 at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was a more highly contested text than any of the other international statements agreed at recent international conferences—at one point two paragraphs of text alone had generated thirty-one pages of amendments. Unlike any of these other agreements, debate over the Platform for Action was unique in calling into question the conceptual foundation and subject matter of the conference itself—the concept of gender, and with it, notions of the


injustice, and mutability of gender relations. Was the conference to be about ‘sex’ or ‘gender’? At the final preparatory committee meeting in March 1995 in New York, divergent views on this question emerged as country delegations had their last opportunity to signal their reservations over parts of the text prior to the Beijing meeting. Most dramatically, the representative from Honduras, backed by representatives from other Catholic countries, proposed the bracketing of the word ‘gender’ throughout the text. A working group eventually resolved on an acceptably broad definition of the term, but the tremendous anxieties over the meaning and implications of the ‘gender perspective’ illuminate an unexpected politicization of the concept of ‘gender’, which expressed, in part, aspects of backlash reactions to contemporary feminism. The debates over the word gender also shine light on some contradictions and inconsistencies in feminist theoretical and political distinctions between sex and gender. It may be that the conservative opposition to the concept expressed a secondwind reaction after the failure to prevent agreement at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 on a broad definition of women’s reproductive health rights. Other factors explaining the conservative fixation on gender may include the perceived greater influence and presence of feminist NGOs, the greater visibility of lesbians in NGOs, and the inclusion, for the first time in the UN conferences on women, of very open language on sexual and reproductive rights. The issue of the perceived influence of feminist NGOs became a particularly important target for conservative concern. The UN conferences on women over the last twenty years have set in place mechanisms for collaboration between feminist non-governmental groups and multilaterals which are of a much more sophisticated nature than is conventional in these fora. In part, the growing importance of these NGOs in the UN conferences on women is a reflection of their relative weakness at the national level; international fora have become arenas where they can ‘leap frog’ past the boundaries of state sovereignty to propose visions of women’s liberation which national governments might not countenance—and for which there is often insufficient domestic support, even from among women. As a consequence, there is a high degree of discursive familiarity between NGOs and multilaterals such as the UN on issues such as women’s rights, or the meaning of ‘gender’, sometimes leaving individual states in the dark. This appears to have fanned conservative suspicions of a conspiracy by a minority of unrepresentative women in these NGOs to undermine national sovereignty and cultural self-determination. The trouble with gender The conservative challenge to the use of the concept of ‘gender’ raises issues central to feminist epistemology and politics. How is the body constituted in gendered identity formation? What is the relation between gender identities and political subjectivities? Does sensitivity to gender reveal a concern for equality


or for a celebration of difference? Does a concern with equity risk assimilating women to the masculine mean? Would a celebration of difference play into the hands of a tradition which has used notions of ‘biology as destiny’ to explain and justify inequality? The trouble with gender is that it allows for considerable variation in the ways in which feminists interpret identity formation and the relationship between anatomy and culture. This variation has been seen as part of the richness and flexibility of feminism, but it has also meant the production of ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions which conservative groups exposed in attacks on feminism. On the one hand, the lingering essentialism or ‘biological foundationalism’ (Nicholson, 1994:82) in feminist thought encourages romanticism about women’s shared experiences and interests, and supports policy solutions which assume a relationship between female embodiment and representation of women’s interests—such as the assumption that more women in decision-making will result in feminist decisions. This is incompatible with, on the other hand, the postmodern exposure of ‘women’ as a product of a masculine dominative logic, and the degendering of ontology, which so fundamentally denies a determinate meaning to both ‘woman’ and ‘women’, that it hardly makes sense to have a conference on ‘women’ at all. Problems of universalism, essentialism, relativism and nihilism are not new to critical feminist theory or feminist practice. What is argued here is that the conservative reaction to ‘gender’ highlighted inconsistencies and areas of neglect in contemporary feminist approaches to the constitution of gender identity and political subjectivity, and that these are problems which stand in particularly stark relief in an internationalist context like the Beijing Conference, which puts feminist claims to represent the meaning of women’s experiences in all their heterogeneity to their starkest test. To develop this argument, a conservative polemic attacking feminist conceptions of gender which was circulated at the NGO Forum is analysed here, with a particular focus on its implications for feminist conceptions of the sex/gender relationship, and for conceptions of desire, motherhood, relationships to men and the equality/difference tension. ‘Gender: The Deconstruction of Women’ ‘Gender: the deconstruction of women’ is a 29-page essay by Dale O’Leary which was widely circulated at the NGO Forum. O’Leary is a writer for the US conservative Catholic publication Hearth—Journal of the Authentic Catholic Woman. It is not assumed here that her paper is representative of all conservative views or of fundamentalist religious perspectives in general. The paper does deserve some attention, however, in that of all the conservative documents available at the NGO Forum, it is the only one we are aware of which engages directly with feminist theory, and thus directly outlines some ways in which conservatives are politicizing gender in reaction to feminism. The paper will not be analysed in terms of what it shows of a conservative position, but rather in terms of the issues it raises for the coherence of feminist approaches to gender.


To emphasize the problem of gender, although at the cost of any subtlety, O’Leary lumps together virtually all feminisms under the general title ‘Gender feminism’. The agenda of ‘gender feminists’ is presented through a translation of their ‘code words’ in the Platform for Action (this heightens the sense of conspiracy): ‘free choice in reproduction’ is explained as a code for abortion on demand; ‘lifestyle’ a code for homosexuality (O’Leary, 1995:19). The argument of O’Leary’s paper runs as follows. If gender is defined as the social construction of roles and relationships between women and men, sexuality can be fluid, the centrality of the family can be challenged, role assignments such as motherhood and male breadwinner are revealed as social constructs, and indeed the fixity or irreducibility of anatomical sex itself can be questioned. All this, of course, has always been central to a feminist logic, though there has been less certainty about the last point, as will be suggested shortly. O’Leary’s reaction to the feminist argument on social construction is to point out that there is no scientific proof for any of it, nor is there evidence that women do not freely choose traditional roles. On the contrary, science shows that sexed behavioural characteristics and social choices are programmed genetically,6 and surveys of women show that they do freely choose their roles and are not victims of ‘false consciousness’, and that even if they want equal opportunities, they do not necessarily desire a sex/gender revolution—they value their womanliness. These views might be considered fairly typical of conservative reactions to feminism. The key reason for the panic in relation to the term gender, however, appears to be its implications for sexuality and reproduction, reflecting two major conservative bogeys—homosexuality and abortion. Interestingly, conservative positions on the naturalness of restricting women to mothering roles, or to secondary economic positions, and so on, are not particularly stressed in O’Leary’s document, nor, by and large, in other conservative pamphlets available at the Forum. This perhaps reflects changes in the economic roles of women in conservative countries worldwide. Poverty and male unemployment globally have pushed more women into work and enhanced their role in supporting families, and few conservatives would suggest that women withdraw from work in the context of poverty (though they might defend men’s privileged access to favoured labour market positions). Nor is any disapprobation expressed for women in public decision-making roles, and indeed, many conservative delegations, including the one from the Vatican, were led by women. This may reflect pressure from conservative women for more participation in decisionmaking, and a secular increase in women’s education levels and participation in government in many developing countries. Declaring war on women’s natures? Although the predominant concern with sexuality and reproduction reflects perennial conservative anxieties, it is also a direct reflection upon the implications of the gender argument for the way we think of the body. Implicit in


O’Leary’s document is an understanding that, taken to its logical extreme, the argument about social construction must eventually deconstruct the body. As Linda Nicholson points out, this understanding of the implications of gender thinking has come unevenly to feminists. She shows that there have been two trends in the ways that feminists currently think of gender. First, there is the more familiar use of the term to stress the social construct in contrast to the biological given. Second, gender is increasingly used to refer to any social construction having to do with the male/female, as opposed to the masculine/ feminine distinction (1994:79). Nicholson quotes Scott to show how sex is subsumable under gender: gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences…. We cannot see differences except as a function of our knowledge about the body, and that knowledge is not ‘pure’, cannot be isolated from its implication in a broad range of discursive contexts. (Scott, 1988:2) Nicholson argues that the problem with the first definition is that it is selfcontradictory and risks biological essentialism, because biological sex has to be invoked at the very moment that the influence of the biological is being challenged—in other words, ‘woman’ remains a given upon which characteristics are imposed through social reactions to the body (1994: 80–1). This first understanding of gender has grounded feminist cross-cultural work on women’s status in the sense that sufficient physiological givens are assumed to be shared by all women to generate a common range of social constructions. The changeability of these social reactions across culture, the important exceptions, rescues this approach from complete biological essentialism, in stressing the mutability of sex identities. The cost of this approach has been a central dilemma and political schism within feminism, stemming from the underplaying of differences between women, across culture and race in particular, in the interests of maintaining a notion of universality in the cross-cultural feminine, a universality, moreover, which disguised its roots in the experiences of white western women (Persram, 1994; Mohanty, 1991). O’Leary’s discussion of this first understanding of sex and gender illuminates familiar problems which it poses for the ways we think about equality and difference. The notion of social construction can be interpreted as suggesting a fundamental equality and sameness between the sexes, and O’Leary touches on a problem with this. Bringing up the liberal feminist concern to see parity for women and men in all forms of employment, she argues that this will inevitably force women to conform to the male standard. She explains this, however, rather differently from feminists who point to structural pressures on women to become sociological males when they cross the public/private divide. Instead, she argues, the problem inheres in men’s incapacity to become biological females:


Trying to pretend that all the obvious differences are socially constructed and can therefore be changed, or that men and women can and should be the same, makes maleness the standard for women, because while women can enter the world of work, men cannot give birth. (O’Leary, 1995:14) This ignores, of course, the wide range of reproductive activities which men are perfectly capable of performing, but it does touch on a widely shared disappointment among women about the difficulty in winning social value for women’s work, rather than struggling for success in the public sphere, only to be found wanting by a male standard. O’Leary links this problem with the drive for equality with the obsession with generating gender-disaggregated statistics on women’s representation of women in all public forms of employment or politics. Although she does not intend the point in this way, she is identifying a problem with the unreflective pursuit of formal equity. Not all statistical differences reflect discrimination. Nor does fifty-fifty statistical equality reflect genuine equality and a cultural change to value women’s interests—male/female equity in enrolment levels, for instance, tells us little about gender bias in the curriculum. The second account of gender, in which ‘sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along’ (Butler, 1990:8), is so sensitive to problems of essentialism that it rejects any account of sexual difference which invokes what is unique in female sexuality because this would re-cement the boundaries of gender identities. All associations with the term ‘woman’ are exposed as arbitrary meanings, and biology, rather than being something which women in all countries share, is instead a culturally specific set of ideas with little translatability across cultures. Now, the extreme postmodern unravelling of both ‘woman’ and ‘women’ is disconcerting enough to many feminists, whether academics or activists—it has often been pointed out that it may lead to a nihilistic conception of women (Persram, 1994:287). As Nicholson observes: ‘If those who call themselves feminists cannot even decide upon who women are, how can political demands be enacted in the name of women?’ (1994:102). To those espousing a conservative interpretation of women’s roles7 this is not the issue, as they have never made the politically motivated assumption that women are socially constructed. Instead, the anxiety is over the challenge to the notion that ‘biology is reality’ (O’Leary, 1995:14). This second approach to understanding gender appears to have been identified more clearly by conservative groups than it has been, perhaps, by feminist activists—for instance, in the gender and development field it does not appear to have much currency. One strategy to bring out the implications of these notions of the fluidity of the body in an alarmist and trivializing way prior to the Beijing Conference was the mock horror expressed by conservatives in the US over a scientific paper about genital abnormalities. Anne Fausto Sterling’s discussion, ‘The five sexes: why male and female are not enough’ (1993), showed that


genital abnormalities produce ‘herms’ (hermaphrodites), ‘ferms’ (female hermaphrodites) and ‘merms’ (male pseudo hermaphrodites). Conservatives used this as a springboard for insisting on clarifying the status of ‘sex’ in the Platform for Action, demanding ‘assurance that only two sexes would be recognised’ (O’Leary, 1995:6). While these kinds of reaction and strategy can be, and often are, dismissed by feminists as distracting irritations, it is worth noting that feminists have not been consistent in the way that notions of sex and gender, of biology and culture, ground their tactics. There is a tendency to use social constructivist arguments when convenient, and biologically essentialist ones at other times. At the Beijing Conference there were examples of policy arguments made on the basis of either sex or gender. Some lesbians invoked both in contradictory ways—for instance, it was widely maintained that the brackets around ‘gender’ in the Platform for Action directly signified homophobia, in that they expressed an attack on the notion of fluidity in the construction of the sexed body and of desire. Yet at the same time, a lesbian was reported as announcing, at one of the human rights tribunals, that she had been ‘born a lesbian’, insisting on a biologically grounded notion of her identity.8 The straw man of patriarchy—and other feminist universals ‘Everyone has a right to be listened (to),…and atheists and lesbians do not have the right to impose their views on the rest of us’. Speaker from the floor at a meeting of conservative women at the Beijing Conference. O’Leary presents a crude version of feminism which bears little resemblance to the complexity of feminist thought. It is hard to imagine feminists today who would accuse happy mothers of suffering from false consciousness or dismiss women’s subjective interpretations of meaning in their lives. However, her interpretation of feminism is probably not so different at a general level from popular understandings of feminism, and as such it points to certain ‘sore points’— or neglected issues—within feminism which have alienated women and men, perhaps more than necessary. Not all feminists are ‘atheists and lesbians’, but if this is the popular perception of feminism, this suggests that feminists have under-theorized, or been dismissive of, a range of important aspects of women’s lives. These include the role of women in many parts of the world in maintaining tradition, and the centrality of religion to their lives; women’s joy in mothering and nurturing; and women’s individual choices to make ‘bargains with patriarchy’ (Kandiyoti, 1988). Another neglected area is the great range of masculinities. This list may seem a reactionary set of concerns to some. Others may argue, and rightly, that feminists do deal with each of these areas, with masculinity perhaps more neglected than other areas because of the political imperative of addressing women’s concerns first. Although feminists do deal with religion, motherhood, and so on, their analytical proclivities have been


oriented primarily to critiquing not the subjective experience of motherhood or of worship or of partnership with men, but rather the conditions which are felt to strip freedom from women’s choices in these situations—feminists critique the conditions of motherhood, not the value of parenting; they critique the gendered constraints of religion, not the value of spirituality. These subtleties are lost, however, on most people, and unfortunately the negative language which is sometimes used—such as speaking of women’s ‘burden’ of child care, or of the ‘reproductive tax’ (Palmer, 1991)—does not convince people that positive value in women’s choices and identities is being recognized. Nowhere is this more so than in popular perceptions of the way that feminists think about men and their relationship with women. O’Leary brings this out rather wittily, charging feminists with creating a ‘straw man of patriarchy’: ‘the proto-typical male chauvinist, patriarchal sexist oppressor who believes biology is destiny and wants women confined to the house, barefoot and pregnant, inferior, subordinate, second-class citizen’. She points out that if this person actually existed he would ‘probably be confined to a maximum security facility as a sociopath’ (O’Leary, 1995:17). Feminists have always had trouble theorizing patriarchy with enough subtlety to embrace historical and cultural variation (Nicholson, 1994:91–2), let alone individual male subjectivities. Although they have not been quite as crude as O’Leary suggests, there is room for much more work in understanding masculinity and male domination. More critical, perhaps, is the need to move beyond the sharply dualistic confrontational categories in which western feminists have tended to place the relations between the sexes. Feminists from the south have pointed out that this male/female opposition may be more central to the constitution of the gender identity of white middle-class western women than of women elsewhere (Minh-ha, 1987:18). Postmodern feminists have pointed out that the very sharpness of this male/female dualism informing the concept of ‘woman’ actually undermines any meaning that ‘woman’ might have. Crowded ‘with the overdeterminations of male supremacy, invoking in every formulation the limit, contrasting Other, or mediated self-reflection of a culture built on the control of females’ (Alcoff, 1988:504), ‘woman’ is emptied of any meaning of its own and is less useful for feminist politics. Feminists have argued for the need for a more plural interpretation of ‘woman’ which refuses to ‘brace woman’s mobility against the fixity of a petrified man’ (Berg, 1982, in Persram, 1994:286). Just as important, however, are more plural interpretations of ‘man’ are also needed. In the name of women Given that feminists are indeed, as conservatives charge, a minority of women, and given that they are not in a position to legitimize their claims to represent the concerns of most women on the basis of democratic processes in social and political institutions which produce feminist representation, challenges to the relevance of feminist claims to women must be taken seriously. What is at stake


is very clear in O’Leary’s text—the relevance of feminism to women in developing countries: The success or failure of the Beijing conference depends on the delegates from developing countries…one senses their frustration with the Gender Perspective. Most are pro-family, pro-religion, and basically pro-life. They know instinctively that Gender Perspective is not the perspective of women in their countries. On the other hand, they strongly support the advancement of women…. They are grateful for Gender Feminists’ willingness to join with them in the battle against economic neocolonialism. They do not want to appear to be opposing the equality of women. (O’Leary, 1995:28) As O’Leary implies, feminism has an edge in the developing country context because of its tendency to take a structural approach to problems of women’s poverty and oppression.9 But to return to the subject of this article, a broader concern for feminists working in coalition the world over relates to the place of gender in theorizing women’s political subjectivity in cross-cultural contexts. Postmodernists argue that the only way to avoid generalizing from an essentialized western version of the feminine is to refuse to seek shared sex or gender characteristics, and to deny them political status. Cultural feminists propose instead a celebration of a multiplicity of feminine identities, but this can lead to a politically paralysed relativism (Persram, 1994; Goetz, 1991). The risk is that the reality of women’s oppression can fall between the many stools of feminist anxieties over identity. It seems possible to construct a feminist politics without insisting that the category of ‘woman’ or ‘women’ has a determinate meaning. The key as Mohanty suggests (1991), is to refuse to make an elision between ‘women’ as a socially constructed group, and ‘women’ as material subjects of their own history, in order that the material and ideological specificity of women’s positions are appreciated, and generalization about gender relations is avoided. According to Nicholson, this also means refusing to assume sisterhood on the basis of gender or sex, but to seek instead to construct coalitions which acknowledge difference (1994:103). The creation of coalitions between groups with very different interests certainly seemed to be taking place in Beijing, with, for example, a broad alliance on reproductive rights between north and south women, which allowed for rather different interpretations of these rights—abortions rights concerns predominating among northern women, and concerns for freedom from coerced abortions and contraception among southern women. Similarly, coalitions concerned with economic crisis were formed between southern women affected by structural adjustment, western women dealing with social service cuts, and women in transitional economies dealing with high unemployment


(Agarwal, 1995). As Agarwal notes, this was the expression of the emergence of a ‘strategic sisterhood’ to replace the ‘romantic sisterhood’ of the past (ibid.). At some level, however, the appeal to coalitional politics as a replacement for appreciating the relevance of sex or even gender to feminist politics is unsatisfactory. Why then organize together as women at all? It is hard to find space in contemporary feminist theory for the genuine sense of connection as women of which so many women spoke in Huairou and Beijing, yet it seems dishonest not to bear testimony to the palpable sense of commonality in spite of great differences. It seems important not to confuse discursive constructions of ‘woman’ with the living, talking, real person who engaged with other women in the Forum and the conference. If we still find meaning in shared biology only because the world continues to behave and treat women as though this is their primary defining characteristic, this does not erase its meaningfulness as a point of connection among women. Acting as women in the name of women we will inevitably infuse ‘sex’ with meaning, but attention to the various paths by which we each come to be ‘sexed’ should help to ensure that we avoid sinking back into reductive essentialisms. What seems critical, however, is that we are consistent in applying the politically motivated assumption that woman is a socially constructed category to feminist activism and policy work. This will protect us from the dead end of essentialism, the cultural brutality of universalism, and will also allow us to broaden our base of allies beyond the boundaries of ‘sex’. Conclusion So, where does this leave us, departing from Huairou clutching somewhat battered gender concepts and wondering how to reclaim their feminist content without alienating potential allies, particularly among southern researchers and activists? As northern feminist researchers in gender and development, one role we can play is to track the redefinition of concepts as discourses become institutionalized and help to identify opportunities for advancing feminist ideas within this process, being aware that we are often complicit in it. An example is the current debate in donor circles about good governance and participation, which provides considerable scope for questioning the nature of participation and indeed politics from a feminist perspective and, concretely, the opportunity to push for greater accountability of donor agencies and wider institutions to women and their organizations. It is also important that we engage in dialogue with colleagues who work on gender issues from outside a feminist perspective, to attempt to broaden the scope of their studies and to see how their findings can inform our own work and campaigns. Training workshops in feminist research methods might be one vehicle for such a dialogue. We also need to ensure that the pioneering contribution of feminist theorists and researchers is recognized as gender and development work


moves into the mainstream, and thus to convince funding agencies of the value of supporting non-quantitative, innovative and challenging research. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to look at whether and how GAD research serves those attempting to promote women’s interests either in grassroots development work or through influencing policy. Some might claim that as academics it is not our business to determine how our research informs policy. At the very least, we need to maintain an open dialogue with feminist researchers and activists in the south, to listen to their critiques of current gender and development thinking, policy and practice, including our own, and to take on board their perspectives and priorities. Notes 1 We were part of a team from several UK universities, comprising, apart from ourselves, Bridget Byrne, Lyla Mehta, Kirsty Milward and Sheelagh Stewart (IDS, University of Sussex); Cecile Jackson and Ruth Pearson of the University of East Anglia; Tina Wallace of the University of Birmingham and Inez Smyth, formerly of the London School of Economics, now based at Oxfam. Tahera Yasmin Huque, who works for the Canadian International Development Agency in Bangladesh, was also involved in the UEA/IDS workshop, ‘Breaking in; speaking out: making development organizations work for women’ (Stewart, 1995). 2 This is not the place for a detailed critique of this index: suffice to say that numerous questions could be raised about the validity of the measures chosen as indicators of ‘empowerment’. 3 The figure for the proportion of work done by women is variously reported at 60 per cent, 67 per cent (Maguire, 1984:1, citing World Bank, 1980; UN, 1979) and ‘nearly two-thirds’ (United Nations, 1980). 4 A few weeks before the conference, a senior policy adviser in a bilateral agency rang the Institute of Development Studies to inquire whether there was any evidence to support the ‘two-thirds’ figure, since male colleagues had challenged her use of it. In a similar vein, a recent evaluation of the gender activities of the Canadian International Development Authority (CIDA) found that CIDA had not been able convincingly to back up its claim that failure to take on board gender will hinder the development process, such that this claim was now met with considerable scepticism (CIDA, 1993). 5 This questioning arises partly from the lack of conceptual clarity over what feminization means, partly from the limitations of empirical evidence, and partly from the implication that poor women should be the focus of our attention, rather than broader processes of gender discrimination. 6 Interestingly, in the months following the Beijing Conference, many UK newspapers carried stories reviving socio-biological arguments and presenting new scientific evidence for gendered genetic programming. 7 Or, as O’Leary puts it, women’s ‘vocations’ (1995:12). 8 We are grateful to Cecile Jackson for this example. 9 Of interest is the fact that O’Leary’s text refuses structural explanations for a whole range of oppressions that women experience—like inner city poverty, domestic


violence, lack of employment opportunities. However, she makes one exception, referring to women’s poverty, lack of social rights and poor labour market options, when explaining why some women become prostitutes (1995: 23).

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24

‘To Whom Does Ameena Belong?’ Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood and Nationhood in Contemporary India Purnima Mankekar

Abstract

This article examines the discourses of the Indian state and of community élites during battles for the custody of a young Muslim girl, Ameena, who was ‘rescued’ from a marriage with an elderly Arab. The battles for Ameena’s custody were fought as much in news reports, opinion columns, and letters to the editor of metropolitan and vernacular newspapers, as in courts. Questions were raised about Ameena’s age, the viability of her marriage, the applicability of secular laws to Muslim communities, and the political economy of the sexuality of girl-children. In these representations, Ameena became a symbol of minority identity, and was transformed into an unwilling and unwitting object of protection. Why did Ameena’s story attract so much attention? What were the different positions underlying the arguments made for Ameena’s ‘protection’? Without dismissing the protection of children and the advocacy of their rights, this article analyses the agendas shaping the discourses of the Indian state and national and community élites during the battles for Ameena’s custody. The article situates the controversies surrounding Ameena in the wider context of the increasing polarization between Hindu and Muslim communities in India in the early 1990s, and focuses on the relationship between notions of childhood and discourses of community, gender and nation. The article argues that there was a synecdochic relationship between the purity of girl-children and the purity of the Indian nation: far from being ‘pre-cultural’ or apolitical, discourses of childhood were profoundly implicated in the politics of gender, sexuality, community and nation. What are the implications of Ameena’s predicament for feminist epistemology and praxis? In pointing to the ways in which feminist critiques of modernist regimes of power and knowledge can enable us to understand the multiple positionalities of children in the contemporary world, the article explores the spaces available for feminist theorists and activists to engage in a politics of vigilance and intervention with regard to the state’s positions towards children.

26 ‘TO WHOM DOES AMEENA BELONG?’

Keywords childhood; gender; nationalism; modernity; feminist analysis I On 9 August 1991, Amrita Ahluwalia, a flight attendant on an Indian Airlines flight from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to New Delhi, spotted a young girl sobbing bitterly. The young girl Ameena, who reportedly looked about ten years old, was travelling with an older man, later identified as Yahya al-Sagih of Saudi Arabia. When the flight attendant asked her why she was crying, Ameena replied that she had been forcibly married to al-Sagih, and that she did not wish to go with him to Saudi Arabia. The crew informed the control tower at New Delhi airport. As soon as the plane landed, the Delhi police arrested al-Sagih on charges of kidnapping and marrying a minor, and sent Ameena to Nari Niketan, a state-run home for destitute women. As newspapers, women’s groups and politicians debated her future, Ameena became a household name; in addition, the ensuing controversy played an important role in mobilizing and, to this extent, reconstituting Hindu and Muslim communities. Questions were raised about her age. In her report to the police she claimed that she was ten years old, but the marriage certificate presented by al-Sagih listed her age as thirty-two. There were doubts about the validity of her marriage. Under Islamic law, the explicit consent of both bride and groom is required for a marriage to be valid. But while al-Sagih and her parents claimed that she had given her consent, Ameena insisted that she had been forced into the marriage. Occurring at a moment when tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities were volatile, the situation quickly acquired a communal hue: Hindu right-wing organizations lost no time in using this as an opportunity to condemn the minority community for ‘how Muslim men treat their women’. The most contentious and fractious battles pertained to Ameena’s custody. As one newspaper headline succinctly put it, ‘To whom does Ameena belong?’ (Hindustan Times, 4 September 1991). This question, as I will demonstrate shortly, encapsulated the stakes underlying the custody battles and, more generally, some of the protectionist discourses surrounding Ameena. Several agencies sued for her custody. Amrita Ahluwalia, the flight attendant who had taken it upon herself to ‘rescue’ Ameena, moved the court for her custody. Five women’s groups and Ameena’s parents filed similar petitions. Rejecting all their pleas, the judge ruled that the state be given temporary custody. After several medical examinations, it was resolved that she was ‘between ten and twelve years old’, that is, she was a minor. Ameena was transferred to a remand home for juveniles. The Juvenile Justice Board declared her parents ‘unfit’ to be awarded her custody (a) because they were too poor to take care of her, and (b) since they had ‘conspired’ to marry Ameena to a sixty-year-old Arab, they could not be entrusted with her welfare. The Juvenile Justice Board ordered that

FEMINIST REVIEW NO 56, SUMMER 1997 27

Ameena remain a ward of the state and be transferred to a children’s home in her home town, Hyderabad. However, their ruling was overturned by a judge in the Delhi High Court who, after interrogating Ameena in his chambers, ordered that she be ‘restored’ to her parents, with the proviso that representatives of the state social welfare board visit her twice a month until she was eighteen years old. Ameena’s painful saga lasted for seven long months, during which it hit the headlines of national and foreign newspapers. The clamour surrounding Ameena was in conspicuous contrast to the deafening silence shrouding the abominable conditions in which children work as prostitutes, and in factories, quarries and sweat shops: indeed, the contemporary Indian state has been markedly indifferent to domestic violence, dowry murders, and other instances of the oppression and exploitation of Indian children and women. Similarly, very seldom do stories about the high rates of morbidity, malnutrition and mortality among female children make it to the front pages of newspapers, lead to debates in parliament or arouse such a public outcry. Why, then, did Ameena’s story attract so much attention? What were the different positions underlying the arguments made for Ameena’s ‘protection’? My intention in this article is not to dismiss the protection of children, but to analyse the agendas shaping the discourse of the Indian state and national and community elites during the battles for Ameena’s custody. In what follows I will focus on public discussions of what is now known as ‘the Ameena case’ as they occurred in the mass media, chiefly reports published in the British and Hindi press and reprints of articles that appeared in the Urdu press in Hyderabad. As I state elsewhere, mass media neither transparently ‘reflect’ broader social practices nor single-handedly ‘impact’ it (Mankekar, 1993). In an article on the Indian state, Akhil Gupta has noted that analysts of contemporary culture frequently treat newspapers with ‘benign neglect’ (1995:385). Describing newspaper reports, he states: ‘perceiving them as having a privileged relation to the truth of social life is naive; they have much to offer us, however, when seen as a major discursive form through which daily life is narrativized and collectivities imagined’ (1995:385). The newspapers I draw on here created a ‘zone of public debate’ (Gupta, 1995:385) in which journalists, politicians, women activists and community leaders formulated specific discourses about childhood, sexuality, gender, community and nation. What I intend to foreground is the construction of particular kinds of narrative about Ameena in which childhood comes to signify the endangered purity of the nation.1 I will demonstrate that these narratives had concrete consequences for the spectacularization of Ameena’s predicament for voyeuristic consumption, for public responses to al-Sagih and, most tangibly, for the resolution of Ameena’s case in the nation’s courts. I begin this article by reading Ameena’s story in terms of what it tells us about the imbrication of children in struggles over national and minority identity occurring in India in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The contests for identity engaged by different communities, together with the arguments made by the


agencies fighting for her custody, reveal that Ameena became a polyvalent signifier: she symbolized not just the identity of the minority Muslim community, but also became an icon of the endangered female children of the nation. Second, Ameena was frequently described as a ‘child bride’, a term that conjoins specific notions of childhood and sexuality: hence, I am concerned with the ways in which discourses of gender and female sexuality complicate the modernist construction of the ‘boundaries’ of childhood. For instance, I am interested in the role of discourses of gender and sexuality in discussions of whether or not she was a minor. I do not aim to recuperate Ameena as a sovereign subject; instead, I intend to argue that her story demonstrates the manner in which conceptions of childhood are mediated by the ideological frameworks, institutions and social practices pertaining to nation, community and gender. My argument rests on an analytical differentiation between public discussions of Ameena, the specific gendered subject, and discourses of childhood that were constructed as a result of the controversy. I draw on Carolyn Steedman’s distinction between childhood and children: I take childhood to be a form: an imaginative structure that allows the individual to make exploration of the self and gives the means to relate that understanding to larger social organizations…. It has something (but by no means everything) to do with real children. (Steedman, 1992:11–12) The ‘Ameena case’ demonstrates the consequences of modernist discourses of childhood for the lives and destinies of children. Some of the controversies surrounding Ameena reveal that, in contemporary India, there is a synecdochic relationship between the purity of girl-children and the purity of the nation. The concluding section discusses the implications of Ameena’s predicament for feminist intervention and epistemology. What is the role of the modern state in formulating discourses of childhood? What sorts of spaces are available for feminist theorists and activists to engage in a politics of vigilance and intervention with regard to the state’s positions towards children? My aim here is to reflect on the consequences of constructions of subjectivity for the kinds of intervention that feminists can formulate and, hence, to argue that feminist theory and praxis are mutually constitutive. Significantly, even as public discussions of Ameena were formulated in terms of contests over national and minority identity, childhood was discursively constituted as transcending the politics of class and community and, by implication, as ‘outside of’ culture. I will argue that in order to intervene responsibly in situations where the health and lives of children are jeopardized, it is essential to demystify these naturalized constructions of childhood and to foreground the political stakes of these discourses for children. My objective, therefore, is to point to how feminist critiques of modernist regimes of power and knowledge can enable us to understand the multiple positionalities of children in the contemporary world.


II In this section, I will situate the ‘Ameena case’ in three interlocking contexts that directly implicated the unfolding of her story: the explosive relationship between Hindus and Muslims and the rise of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the articulation of national and global political economies, and the protectionist discourses constructed in the post-colonial Indian nation about Ameena and, more generally, about girl-children. Ameena: a symbol of minority identity As indicated above, we can recognize the complexity of Ameena’s predicament only when we place it in the socio-historical conjuncture in which it occurred. The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by an escalation of communal tension between Hindu and Muslim communities in different parts of India, the rise of Hindu nationalism, and the increasing intrusion of the Indian state into different aspects of civic life: this was a conjuncture marked by the hegemonic deployment of exclusionary discourse of nationalism that sought to create increasingly rigid, gendered subject positions for men and women, and impose a unified identity on all citizens. Yahya al-Sagih’s defence counsel stated that according to Islamic Shariat Law a Muslim could marry a minor even without her consent (Hindustan Times, 14 August 1991). Although experts in the Shariat were quick to contradict this claim, from this point onwards Ameena’s situation acquired a different dimension: it threatened to become a test-case for contests between Islamic law and secular, civil law, thus repeating what had happened with Shahbano, a Muslim woman who had appealed to civil courts for maintenance from her husband. As argued by Pathak and Sunder Rajan (1992), the ‘Shahbano case’, as it has now come to be known, became a crucial landmark in relationships between Hindu and Muslim communities, minority communities and the state, civil and religious laws, and women’s organizations and minority women. Since the ghost of the Shahbano case haunted all discussions of Ameena (see also Sunder Rajan, 1994:154), it is imperative that we take a brief detour and recapitulate some of the public debates that it evoked. In April 1985, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgment granting Shahbano, a seventy-year-old, working-class, Muslim woman, her right to maintenance by her divorced husband. Occurring at a juncture when Muslim communities in different parts of India were besieged by the homogenizing impulses of a secular state and the ascent of militant Hindu nationalism, this judgment led to a furor among some sections of the Indian Muslim community, who interpreted it as yet another encroachment into the ‘internal affairs’ of their community. Shahbano became a symbol of the identity of an embattled community. The government, apprehensive that the controversy would result in the spread of violence between majority and minority communities and nervous


about losing Muslim votes in the impending elections, instituted a new bill. This bill, the Muslim Women’s Protection of Rights in Divorce Act, upheld community law pertaining to the maintenance of divorced women. Despite the protests of progressive leaders from Muslim communities, secularists and some women’s groups, the bill was passed in Parliament and made into law: according to the Muslim Women’s Act, Muslim women would no longer come within the purview of civil/secular courts.2 In their analysis of the controversy surrounding Shahbano, Pathak and Sunder Rajan note that the relationship between state or secular law and personal or religious law has always been ‘vexed’ (1992:258). 3 In 1937, the colonial state instituted the Shariat Law. Articulated in the rhetoric of respect for the internal affairs of communities, the Shariat Law posited that Indian Muslims would be governed by religious laws in all matters relating to the family. However, at the time of Independence, the authors of the Indian Constitution declared as a state objective the passing of a common civil code. As Pathak and Sunder Rajan argue, the project of instituting a ‘common’ civil code has been surrounded by controversy right from the outset: the efforts of secularists and some women’s groups to campaign for the establishment of a common civil code has been opposed by the leaders of the communities implicated by the new law (1992: 258–9). At the time when Shahbano petitioned the Supreme Court, community ‘personal’ laws still prevailed, compelling women from minority communities to appeal for maintenance from their divorced husbands under criminal law. Clearly, controversies surrounding personal law are deeply embedded in contests over the identities of minority communities. Some leaders of minority communities, in particular, have tended to perceive all attempts to impose a secular ‘common’ law as threats to their identities. Pathak and Sunder Rajan point out that, in the case of Shahbano, some Muslim leaders saw the Supreme Court judgement as yet another instance of ‘the Hindus’ homogenizing influence, an influence that would eventually lead to the assimilation and destruction of Muslim identity’ (1992:259). The Shahbano case also resulted in a deep schism within Muslim communities between ‘“progressives” (those supporting the judgment) and “fundamentalists” (those opposing it)’ (Pathak and Sunder Rajan, 1992:259). Although experts in Islamic law pointed out that the Shariat did not endorse the forced marriage of a minor, the debates surrounding Ameena threatened to become a repeat of the Shahbano case where Muslim Personal Law was brought into confrontation with the state civil code. Some community leaders sought to pre-empt the snowballing of the ‘Ameena case’ into a repeat of the Shahbano controversy. Salman Khurshid, a cabinet minister and a spokesperson for a section of the Muslim community in New Delhi, claimed that the Ameena case would ‘not become another Shahbano case’. He argued that, although it may have opposed the payment of maintenance to Shahbano, the Muslim community had not resisted attempts to forbid the marriage of minors (Hindustan Times, 21 August 1991). Progressive community leaders and some secularists were


apprehensive that, as in the case of Shahbano, this controversy would lead to a polarization within Muslim communities, and would vitiate the already explosive atmosphere in the nation. Many members of Hyderabad’s Muslim communities were justifiably resentful about the controversies surrounding Ameena. Local newspapers received a torrent of letters from readers expressing their indignation over the ‘tenor of responses to the Ameena incident’. The writers of these letters were particularly resentful that the majority community was using what happened to Ameena as an opportunity to humiliate them. They alleged that ‘the entire Muslim community’ was ‘being jeered at’ and that ‘many of the people who are making a fuss over the Ameena incident’ were indifferent to the socioeconomic circumstances that might have ‘compelled’ Ameena’s parents to force her to marry. They protested that ‘the entire Muslim community of Hyderabad was being looked down on as en mass practitioners of an evil trade in child brides.’ One writer, Masood Ansari, editor of the Urdu daily Munsif, argued that this case had its roots in the custom of dowry which, despite being alien to Islam, had spread in the Muslim community of Hyderabad. Jeelani Bano, a well-known Urdu writer, concurred with this view and insisted that while dowry was indeed ‘un-Islamic’, ‘it is there in the society around us and people are quick to copy Hindus’ (Times of India, 16 September 1991). Responding to the fact that Hindu nationalist organizations like the Bhartiya Janata Party were using Ameena’s predicament to argue for a ‘common’ civil code that would contravene Islamic personal law, several writers felt that the discourses surrounding Ameena revealed the majority community’s ‘lack of sensitivity towards the ethos and feelings of Muslims’. Some spokespersons of the Muslim community claimed that while Hindus had accepted amendments to the Sarda Act, whereby the minimum age for marriage had been set at eighteen for girls and twenty-one for boys, Muslims deferred to the Koran for guidelines on marriage and family (Times of India, 16 September 1991). The transnational ramifications of these contests over identity are illustrated by a letter to the Times of India by Zafarul-Islam of London who interpreted the ‘current media hype’ surrounding Ameena as yet another example of ‘how a section of Indian intellectuals grasps any opportunity to put the whole Muslim community on the defensive and make it feel guilty’. The writer explicitly connected the controversies surrounding Ameena with those stirred up by Shahbano, and with Hindu nationalist demands to destroy the Babri Mosque. He asked why there was no outcry about the existence of child marriages within Hindu communities, the systematic abortion of Hindu female children or about dowry deaths among Hindus. The letter ended on an ominous note, warning that these anti-Muslim controversies would turn India into ‘another Lebanon or Sri Lanka’ (Times of India, 13 August 1991). Clearly, the controversies surrounding Ameena had profound implications in terms of discourses of identity. As in the Shahbano case, Hindu nationalist organizations like the Bhartiya Janata Party used Ameena’s predicament as an opportunity to campaign against Muslim personal law. This was articulated in


the rhetoric of the protection of Muslim women from Muslim men.6 One Muslim feminist and journalist, Sadia Dehlvi, pointed out that Ameena, like Shahbano, became a ‘national issue’, and the tragedy of Ameena became ‘a debate on how Muslim men treat their women’ (India Today, 15 October 1991). As in the case of Shahbano, Ameena’s predicament was framed, in large, in terms of controversies about religious and secular law. The ‘bride bazaar’: the political economy of sexuality Newspaper reports on Ameena highlighted the poverty of her family. By placing her predicament in a socio-economic context, these narratives provide us with an interpretive framework that enables us to understand the strained circumstances in which some families may have felt compelled to arrange their daughters’ marriages with men from the Middle East. In addition, the socio-economic circumstances of Ameena’s family can also be situated in a broader context, that of economic relations between Hyderabad and the Middle East, thereby enabling us to understand the articulation of global and local political economies, as well as the co-implication of gender and sexuality with political economy. However, at the same time that these frameworks illuminate the role of global and local political economies, they rob the poor of all agency by making ‘poverty’ responsible for all their actions; second, they erase the politics of gender and sexuality mediating marriages between older men and young girl-children. One newspaper report, titled ‘Poverty is culprit, says Ameena’s father’, began thus: ‘Poverty has its own logic. Ask Badruddin, father of Ameena. He knows what it means to be poor’ (emphasis added). The report stated that after driving an autorickshaw all day, Ameena’s father Badruddin earned between Rs 40 and Rs 60 (approximately $1 to $2) a day, barely sufficient to support his wife and eight children. The report continued: ‘So when a Saudi Arabian national Mr Yahya M.H.Ali Sagih offered to marry his daughter, Badruddin found no reason to refuse.’ The article explained that Badruddin had thought that the marriage would economically benefit the entire family. Calling the opportunity a ‘godsend’, he had felt that through al-Sagih’s contacts, he would get a job in Saudi Arabia, and the cash settlement would provide his family with an improved standard of living (Hindustan Times, 29 August 1991). In another article, Badruddin is reported to have cried that he and his family were ‘victims of the society in which we are living’. The report described the neighbourhood in which he and his family resided as one of the poorest in Hyderabad, and as particularly badly afflicted by communal riots between Hindus and Muslims. Stating that ‘poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and social unrest are endemic in Shakkargunj [the neighbourhood where Ameena grew up]’, the report proceeded to describe how the ‘lure of Gulf money’ had ‘naturally attracted, or rather compelled, many Muslim families’ to arrange their daughters’ marriages with foreigners from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE, Libya and Muscat (Indian Express, 18 August 1991; emphasis added).


Newspaper reports claimed that, in Hyderabad alone, as many as 8,000 such marriages had been arranged in the past ten years. One article argued that these marriages did indeed bring ‘a measure of economic benefit to the families involved’: the men found well-paying jobs in the Gulf and in other Arab states, and the cash settlements went a long way in alleviating the misery of the conditions in which these families lived. At the same time, the report spoke of the ‘evil consequences’ of these arrangements as exemplified by what happened to Ameena: poverty hence ‘compelled’ poor parents (who are thus constructed as a homogeneous monolith) to marry their daughter to older Arabs (Indian Express, 18 August 1991). As noted above, the ‘traffic’ between Hyderabad and the Middle East can be located in a broader context of global political economy and the transnational movement of labour and commodities. Second only to Kerala, Hyderabad is an important centre for the ‘export’ of labour to the Middle East. Migrant workers have changed the financial conditions of their families and, through the remittances they send back, boosted local economies. The relationship between Hyderabad and the Middle East may be traced to the last century. When the ruler (Nizam) of Hyderabad built his private army, he employed mercenaries from Syria and Yemen. Most of these soldiers stayed on in Hyderabad, and lived in a neighbourhood named Barkas (the article claimed that the name Barkas had been derived from the English word ‘barracks’). Traffic between Hyderabad and the Middle East increased after the oil boom of the late 1970s. Local men began to go to the Gulf in search of jobs, and more and more Arabs visited Hyderabad as tourists. The practice of marriages between local women/ girls and Arabs coincided with the exodus of young Muslim men to the Gulf to work as semiskilled labourers. Further, according to one report, the growing traffic between the Middle East and Hyderabad, combined with the spread of the practice of dowry among Hyderabadi Muslims, led to an increase in marriages arranged between local women and Arabs. A local resident and an owner of one travel agency in Barkas stated that at least one member of each family in the area was either employed in the Gulf or married to someone in the Gulf, and that ‘those working in the Gulf give the reference of their Hyderabad relatives about the prospective Arab grooms seeking a match in India.’ By arranging their daughters’ marriages with Arabs, parents were saved from giving dowries and would, instead, receive bride-price in the form of cash payments, jewellery or jobs for the brides’ male relatives (Pioneer, 10 December 1993). Clearly, the socioeconomic circumstances in which these families lived is best illuminated when placed in contexts of global and local political economies. However, the explanations analysed above also reveal the dangers of using the ‘compulsions’ of poverty in a deterministic manner. This interpretive framework, particularly limiting when it lapses into economic reductionism, is evident in the explanations formulated by élites within the community. For instance, the managing editor of a local Urdu daily commented that ‘because of stark poverty, the poor girls are married off to aged Arabs’. Similarly, the editor


of another Urdu daily explained that ‘a sizeable section of the Muslim population in the city are poor…. The parents do not hesitate to marry off their girls to the Arabs as they cannot afford to pay dowry for a local marriage’ (Hindustan Times, 14 September 1991). I do not deny that arranging their daughters’ marriages with wealthy Arabs might have been tempting for poor parents who could not afford the dowries demanded by local men; the explanations cited above, however, completely rob ‘poor parents’ of all agency and volition. In these explanations, poverty indeed ‘has its own logic’: poor parents are ‘naturally’ tempted or ‘compelled’ to arrange marriages with foreigners from the Middle East. The dangers of these interpretive frameworks became evident when, at a later stage in the custody trial, Ameena’s parents were refused her custody largely on the grounds of their poverty. Second, the politics of gender and sexuality within the family are marginalized in these descriptions of the export of sexual labour. For instance, we are told that ‘the phenomenon of the bride bazaar is rooted as much in the Gulf job boom of the 1970s as in poverty’ (Times of India, 7 September 1991). Another article about Barkas, the neighbourhood in which these marriages are arranged, was entitled ‘Barkas—the bride bazaar’, thus conjoining the market with discourses of sexuality. One observer, writer Jeelani Bano, described how on Sundays and holidays, girls are brought to Barkas by their parents and marriage brokers and that ‘the Arabs then take their pick and the deals are finalized’ (Hindustan Times, 14 September 1991). Even as they show the articulation of global and local political economies, these interpretations erase the politics of gender and family that enable parents to arrange the marriages of their daughters (rather than their sons) with wealthy foreigners. Clearly, it is essential to trace the conjunction of sexuality and the market in terms of its relationship with the discourses of sexuality surrounding girl-children in the family and nation. Indeed, the vilification of Ameena’s alleged husband as a violator of national honour, and the arguments formulated by the different agencies that fought for her custody, reveal another context in which her story needs to be situated. This is a discursive context constituted by notions of the sexuality of girl-children. In what follows we will see how these discourses shaped the construction of childhood in terms of purity, and the synecdochic relationship between the purity of childhood and of nationhood. Childhood as a space of purity: the foreigner as violator Nowhere was the relationship between notions of the purity of girl-children and the purity of the nation more striking than in representations of al-Sagih. In these representations, al-Sagih was cast as the foreigner who had attempted to violate the purity of an Indian girl-child; more generally, Arabs were associated with corruption and disorder.7 Even though a medical examination of Ameena established that she was still a virgin, public discourses emphasized that the threat to Ameena and, through a


discursive elision, to the purity of the nation had come from a foreigner, specifically an Arab. As pointed out above, the public outcry surrounding Ameena and al-Sagih is particularly striking given the apathy to violence against children and women, the abandonment and exploitation of young women (‘NRI [Non-Resident Indian] brides’) married to Indians settled abroad, and other instances of domestic violence. What made Ameena’s story so amenable to scandal was not just the fact that she was a child, but that she had apparently been forced to marry an Arab. Some of the journalists who wrote feature articles on Ameena’s marriage to alSagih attempted a ‘historical’ analysis by drawing attention to ‘the centuries old’ relationship between Hyderabad and ‘Arabs’. However, most reports about alSagih were explicitly xenophobic in their representation of foreigners as violators and Arabs as sources of corruption. What is striking and consistent in almost all these reports is that al-Sagih is seldom named, and when newspapers do give his name they often misspell it. In most stories, al-Sagih is referred to as ‘the Arab’, ‘the Saudi national’, or ‘the ageing Arab sheikh’. For instance, in one letter that claims that ‘every Indian should hang his/her head in shame, irrespective of religion, for what has happened to the hapless Ameena at the hands of a 60-year-old Arab’, al-Sagih is never named and is referred to only as ‘the Arab’ (Times of India, 3 September 1991). Similarly, a report titled ‘Saudi Arabian remanded to police custody’, begins thus: ‘The 60-year-old Saudi Arabian, who was arrested yesterday on the charges of sexual harassment and wrongful confinement of a 10-year-old girl …’ In this report, ‘the Arab’s’ name is disclosed only in the second paragraph (Times of India, 3 September 1991). One of the earliest reports that broke the story described Ameena as ‘the child bride’ who was ‘rescued…from the clutches of a 60-yearold Saudi Arabian’. The report stated that the ‘Arab national’, who was ‘old enough to be her grandfather’, was carrying two marriage certificates (nikahnamas), one in Ameena’s name and a second in the name of another woman. This report constructs and articulates several discourses that converge upon the representation of al-Sagih: not only is ‘the violator’ ‘old enough to be her grandfather’, thereby invoking sordid images of incest, he is also an Arab. Further, on the basis of the photographs, bangles and cash found on his person, it is hinted that the suspicious foreigner is ‘involved in a bigger racket’ (Times of India, 11 August 1991). Most of these reports reveal the discursive association of Arabs with corruption, licentiousness and sexual ‘perversion’. For instance, one article claimed that minor girls deserted by their Arab husbands were ostracized because, according to a local social worker, ‘these deserted wives are not able to marry local Muslims [because] marriage to an Arab automatically means that they are also associated with the insatiable sexual appetites and perverted natures of the Arabs’ (Indian Express, 14 September 1991). The hysteria surrounding al-Sagih reached such a pitch that it became difficult for the police to contain the crowd that gathered when he first appeared in court.


We are told that there was a ‘virtual stampede’ in the court when a huge crowd collected ‘to have a glimpse of the old Sheikh’. The manner in which al-Sagih is described is particularly significant. In the words of the report: The Sheikh who was dressed in a soiled long blue kurta [shirt] appeared quite dishevelled and shied away from the cameras. When he was brought out of the court, a large mob ran after him to have a glimpse and the cops accompanying him had a tough time keeping them at bay. (Hindustan Times, 12 August 1991) Al-Sagih is once again rendered nameless; his shying away from the camera makes him appear furtive; his soiled shirt and his dishevelled appearance invoke images of contamination and disorder. The outrage and scandal his presence evoked is so intense that he is literally chased by a mob from whom the police can barely protect him. Al-Sagih was eventually released on bail paid by the Saudi Arabian Embassy; initially, however, his bail application was turned down: the prosecution argued that, because ‘the accused’ was a foreigner, he was likely to jump bail. It was thus not surprising that al-Sagih’s counsel protested that his client was being prosecuted by the media and, the counsel added disingenuously, by women’s organizations. The hatred whipped up against al-Sagih, and against Arabs in general, became so vicious that the Saudi Arabian Embassy felt compelled to respond. Stating that it had been following the controversy ‘with a sense of deep pain and anguish’, the Embassy protested that the media had exaggerated the situation and was likely to mislead people into believing that ‘trade in girls or children’ was common in Saudi Arabia. It stated that Saudi laws prohibit Saudi nationals from marrying foreigners without the explicit permission of the Saudi Arabian Home Ministry, and described al-Sagih as a ‘simple, illiterate old man’ who had been ‘exploited’ and ‘misled’ into believing that Ameena was nineteen years old. The statement concluded: The Royal Embassy is anguished because the name of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its citizens is being dragged into this case by depicting it as a very common phenomenon’ (Times of India, 23 August 1991). Anti-Arab sentiments became so widespread that the judge presiding over Ameena’s custody appealed for legislation ‘whereby the interests of such hapless parents and children could be protected from the hands of such foreign nationals’ (Hindustan Times, 6 September 1991). The virulence of the discourses surrounding al-Sagih was fuelled, in part, by anti-Muslim organizations. For instance, Madan Lal Khurana, an MP from the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party, stated in parliament that airport officials had confirmed that they had frequently seen ‘the same sheikh’ visiting India, thus leading the MP to conclude that ‘the Arab’ was ‘engaged in the flesh trade’. Demanding a high-level probe, the MP insisted that a well-established ‘racket’ existed in which ‘not one but many persons were involved in the sale of girls to wealthy Arab sheikhs’ (Times


of India, 13 August 1991). At the same time, however, equally xenophobic statements were made by some Muslim intellectuals.8 For instance, Islamic scholar Professor Tahir Mahmood made a public statement in which he insisted that ‘the exploitation of young Indian girls by foreigners cannot be allowed under any pretext and stringent action should be taken against the guilty’ (Hindustan Times, 21 August 1991). In addition, organizations like the All India Lawyers Union spoke of the ‘shocking revelation of what appears to be going on, on a much larger scale, as a trade in innocent females at the bidding of moneyed foreigners’, and described the ‘Ameena case’ as an example of ‘the abominable violations of human rights, particularly [in light of] the duty that our society owes to its children’ (Hindustan Times, 1 September 1991). Ameena as object of protection Xenophobic discourses of ‘the foreigner’ (and, specifically, ‘the Arab’) as violator were constructed in conjunction with the representation of childhood as the ‘pure’ space of the Indian nation. For, at the same time that Ameena became the symbol of the identity of embattled Muslim communities, the controversies surrounding her alleged violation (and the subsequent establishment of her virginity) reveal that she also became a synecdoche of the endangered purity of the Indian nation. How did these representations serve to establish the gendered boundaries of childhood? As noted earlier, there was considerable confusion surrounding Ameena’s age. Was she indeed ten years old, as she insisted in her report to the police, or nineteen as claimed by her parents, or thirty-two as listed in her marriage certificate? In any case, why was it essential for the state to determine her age? For one, establishing her as a minor had specific legal implications. As soon as he landed at New Delhi airport, al-Sagih was arrested under Sections 363 and 366 of the Indian Penal Code on charges of marrying a minor. Whether or not ‘the Arab’ could be convicted of kidnapping a minor or Ameena’s parents could be arrested for ‘abetting the conspiracy’ depended on determining that she was a minor. Reports claimed that ‘the Ameena case could be settled in the courts if it could be proved that she was a minor, a fact flatly denied by Ameena’s father’ (Indian Express, 18 August 1991). The magistrate asked that Ameena be medically examined so as to determine her age. Ameena’s age was eventually established by a bone ossification test to be ‘between ten and twelve years old’. That Ameena was a minor made her alleged violation even more scandalous. But, clearly, establishing Ameena’s age had a significance that went beyond its legal implications. This was evident from the fact that discussions about her age were invariably cast in terms of the purity of the nation. Childhood was discursively constructed as the space of purity and innocence that the nation was morally bound to protect. At stake was nothing less than the honour of the nation. Second, Ameena’s purity and innocence was conceived entirely in terms of


whether or not al-Sagih had raped her. A medical report established that Ameena was still a virgin but, far from subduing the outrage and scandal, this report only highlighted the fragility of her ‘purity’ and, by extension, the purity of the nation. Indeed, Ameena’s fragile innocence and purity, and that of girl-children in general, became a synecdoche for the purity of the nation. This construction of childhood was evident from the manner in which Ameena’s helplessness and innocence was repeatedly emphasized. One of the reports that first broke the story described her as ‘soft-spoken and wide-eyed innocence writ large’. This report was to set the tone for the manner in which she would be represented henceforth. Consistent in all representations was the infantilizing of Ameena. For instance, we are told that ‘even though she had been rescued…[she] had no idea what was to become of her’ (Times of India, 11 August 1991). Ameena’s innocence (if not ignorance) was reinforced in discourses of victimology that inscribed her as helpless and, to use a favourite adjective of the reports, ‘hapless’. Ameena, the ‘child bride’, also became an object of the reporter’s (and the readers’) voyeuristic gaze. An article about her first court appearance described her thus: In an alien milieu of a courtroom today, the eleven-year-old girl had suddenly grown up to realize the meaning of revulsion and poverty…. Mehndi [henna] adorned small palms, imitation jewellery around her neck and ears made Ameena a child bride, traded for a decent marriage for the sake of her five other sisters and financial security for her parents. (Hindustan Times, 11 August 1991) Even as this description infantilizes Ameena (note how our attention is drawn to her ‘small palms’), it establishes her as an object of our voyeuristic fantasy: the henna on her palms marks her as a bride and exoticizes her sexuality; her imitation jewellery indexes not just her lower-class status but, for most middleclass, metropolitan readers, the sordidness of her situation. This report exemplifies the representation of Ameena as an object of trade: she is thus an unwilling and, more importantly, an unwitting object of exchange. These images of victimology rest, in turn, on the fragile innocence of a ‘child bride’. As Ameena becomes the object of infantilizing discourses, she is robbed of subjectivity. The infantilizing of Ameena, along with attempts to underscore the fragility of her ‘innocence’, were themes that were taken up with particular zeal by the different agencies that fought for her custody. Amrita Ahluwalia, the flight attendant who ‘rescued’ her, pleaded to the court that Ameena’s custody be transferred to her from Nari Niketan (the women’s home run by the state) because, she feared, Ameena’s ‘innocence was at risk’ (Hindustan Times, 19 August 1991). Ahluwalia and some of the women’s groups that sued for her custody argued that a prolonged stay in the home for destitute women would


‘adversely affect’ her. Ahluwalia fumed in an interview that Ameena had been put in the company of ‘rape victims, prostitutes and delinquents’ and wondered if she had not been ‘tossed from the fire into the frying pan’ (Times of India, 26 August 1991). Thus, the controversies surrounding Ameena, a specific girl-child, opened up a space for discursive constructions of childhood as a space of purity and innocence. Significantly, the purity of childhood seems to implicate nothing less than the moral state of the nation. In these discourses, Ameena’s Muslim identity is subsumed by her representation as an icon of the essentially fragile purity of all girl-children and, by synecdochic exten sion, the purity of the Indian nation. ‘To whom does Ameena belong?’ The constitution of childhood as a space of purity is especially evident in the appeals made by the state, by Amrita Ahluwalia, and by the women’s organizations that fought for Ameena’s custody. Amrita Ahluwalia claimed that Ameena had become her ‘purpose in life’. In a newspaper article titled ‘Give my Ameena back: Amrita’, she claimed that she ‘wanted’ Ameena and was willing to ‘take care of all her needs’. She stated that she felt attached to her and, moreover, felt ‘morally responsible…for her life’ because she had ‘rescued’ her. Ahluwalia claimed that she would ‘give her the best education, the best things in life’, and cried that if she didn’t ‘get’ Ameena it would ‘break’ her: I don’t know what I will do. How can I ever be the same person?… It is going to break me…. But I am determined to get her, through hook or crook…. I know it is going to be a long battle. (Hindustan Times, 19 August 1991) Significantly, even as she claimed that she felt morally responsible for Ameena, Ahluwalia’s desire for her was expressed in the language of ownership (‘Give my Ameena back’). It was the language of a middle-class woman who had set her heart on acquiring a lower-class child by ‘hook or crook’. Her proprietary claims on Ameena became clearer when she revealed that she had told Ameena that, after she came to live with her, she would be permitted to meet her parents as long as she, Ahluwalia, was also present. Ahluwalia’s attitude was further complicated by her insensitivity to the politics of community and religious identity, and revealed the contradictory positions in which Ameena was put: at the same time that Ameena was a symbol of minority identity, she became a synecdoche for the endangered purity of the Indian nation—Ameena came to signify the essential purity and innocence of childhood. A Hindu woman, Ahluwalia insisted that she did ‘not care’ that Ameena was a Muslim. She planned to visit some ‘Muslim neighbours’ in order to ‘get guidance on Islamic ways’. As far as Ahluwalia was concerned, Ameena’s Muslim identity was peripheral because her childhood appeared to


transcend the politics of class and community. Indeed, Ameena’s helplessness and innocence marked her as essentially a child. We are told that Ahluwalia had decided to adopt her when she saw the look on the little girl’s face…. I think I was affected by her helpless look and I decided there and then that I can’t let her go through all this…. I knew that she needed protection all her life. I decided to adopt her…. I was even prepared to give the bail money…. I thought I could take her home. (Hindustan Times, 19 August 1991) Ameena’s ‘helplessness’ also marks her as an object of protection: through this process of objectification she is robbed of all agency and, more critically, of subjectivity. In all, the court received seven applications for Ameena’s custody. To whom did Ameena ‘belong’? To her ‘saviour’ Amrita Ahluwalia, to the state, the women’s organizations that filed for her custody or to her parents? The two women’s organizations, Saheli and Janwadi Mahila Samiti, which had received Ameena at New Delhi Airport and had sued for her custody, reversed their earlier stand: from claiming custody, they became mediators between Ameena and the state. None the less, Ameena was caught in the crossfire between the different agencies that fought for her custody. As time went by, she expressed her longing for her parents. She told one newspaper reporter that her father was ‘not a bad person’ (‘Abba kharab aadmi nahin hain’), and said that all she wanted was to meet her parents at the earliest opportunity (Times of India, 30 November 1991). On the day that he was to rule on Ameena’s custody, the presiding judge received a telegram from her parents, requesting him to adjourn the proceedings so as to enable them to file their appeal. The hearing was adjourned for a week. One newspaper reported that on 9 September, the date on which the court resumed its deliberations, Ameena walked into the packed courtroom like a lamb. Scared and dazed. Dressed in a simple salwar-kamiz and a white chunni, she kept her eyes down as she moved towards the chair of the public prosecutor…. Tension was clear on her innocent face. (Hindustan Times, 4 September 1991) The stage is set for a crucial act in the drama, the act that will determine her future. Will she be ‘restored’ to her parents, or ‘awarded’ to her saviour Ahluwalia or to one of the women’s organizations fighting for her custody? Or will the judge declare her a ward of the state? The language used to describe her is particularly striking: she is ‘dazed and scared’; her downcast eyes index her modesty and passivity; she is like a lamb about to be sacrificed. What is at stake


is not just the custody of a child-bride but the ‘innocence’ and purity of childhood and, as noted above, the purity of the nation. Arguing against custody being given to Ahluwalia, the counsel for Ameena’s parents claimed that, apart from the state and his clients, no other agency or individual had a locus standi, the legal right to testify and be heard in court, in Ameena’s custody. The state counsel, however, made several arguments against granting Ameena’s parents her custody. He argued that they were ‘cruel, greedy, selfish and inhuman’ and ‘conspirators in the sordid and evil design’. The judge concurred with the state counsel. Ameena’s parents’ petition was dismissed because, it was claimed, giving them custody would be ‘detrimental and harmful’ to Ameena’s interests. Pointing out that Ameena’s signature did not appear on the marriage certificate, the judge claimed that her marriage was ‘a pre-planned and well-hatched conspiracy between the parents of the girl and the accused’ (Hindustan Times, 4 September 1991). The state counsel also argued that under the Juvenile Justice Act of 1986, a girl below the age of eighteen and a boy under sixteen were deemed juveniles, and, as in all matters relating to minors, the case would have to be handed over to the Juvenile Welfare Board. The state counsel argued that because Ameena’s parents had been found unfit for the custody of their daughter, they had no locus standi in the case. And since the controversy had led to communal tension in the city of Hyderabad, there was ‘a danger to the life of the girl’; hence, he insisted, ‘it is only the state which can provide safety and security to her’ (Hindustan Times, 5 September 1991). The judge rejected the applications of Ameena’s parents, the five women’s organizations and Amirta Ahluwalia, and the state was granted custody of Ameena for three months. In his twelve-page order, the judge observed that: Since the question of the marriage of Ameena to the 60-year-old Saudi Arabian is still in dispute, [and] as none of her statements showed that she gave her consent for it, Ameena’s interest directly clashes with that of her parents’ and her alleged husband. The judge pointed out that while, ordinarily, the custody of minors usually went to their parents, this case was ‘significant’ because ‘Ameena, a minor girl, was alleged to be a victim of her own parents who come from a poor family and hence had contracted the alleged marriage with a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian, Yahya al-Sagish [sic]’ (Times of India, 6 September 1991; emphasis added). Further, he claimed, there was also a risk that Ameena’s parents and husband might compel her to accompany him to Saudi Arabia. Significantly, the judge took recourse to textual interpretations of Islamic law in his ruling. Eliding the place of the state in Islam with the duties of the contemporary Indian state, he claimed that keeping Ameena in a state home for juveniles would ‘be in her welfare and interest’ because the Prophet has declared that ‘“Persons being


destitute of guardians have a guardian in the Sultan”,’ i.e. the state (Hindustan Times, 6 September 1991). However, even though the state was given Ameena’s custody for three months, it was several months before the matter was reviewed. On 4 March 1992, the Juvenile Justice Board ordered her transfer to a children’s home in Hyderabad. Once again, it was ruled that ‘her parents were unfit to look after her’, and the Board insisted that she be sent to Hyderabad under ‘necessary police escort’. The reasons given by the Board are significant. The Board held that Ameena’s parents were ‘unfit to look after her welfare as their income was not sufficient and they already have eight children. Besides, they had married her off to a 60year-old Saudi Arabian for monetary considerations, against her wishes.’ Fortunately for Ameena, on 11 March the Delhi High Court reversed the order of the Juvenile Justice Board to transfer her to a home for juveniles in Hyderabad. Ameena was finally allowed to rejoin her parents after spending seven months in state custody. After interrogating her father and examining affidavits presented by him and a social worker that guaranteed that her family would ‘behave well’ with her, the judge ruled that Ameena be ‘returned’ to her parents (Times of India, 12 March 1992). The court also decreed that state supervision would continue: a representative from the state’s Woman and Child Welfare Department would visit her house once every two days in the first fortnight, once a week in the second fortnight, and thereafter twice a month for as long as she was a minor, i.e. until she turned eighteen. Thus we see that, in the course of the ferocious battles for Ameena’s custody, her story is played out in multiple registers of community identity, and national honour and purity, leading to an erasure of her subjectivity. Ameena, the child bride, is first constructed as an object of voyeuristic fantasy. As the virulence of the xenophobic anti-Arab discourses increases and spreads, we see that she has come to symbolize the endangered purity of childhood and, by synecdochic extension, the purity of the nation. III During the past several decades, developments in social theory have destabilized the premiss that persons are sovereign and unified subjects who make calculated choices and who, moreover, can shape the outcome of their decisions. These critiques insist on focusing on the manner in which (adult) subjects are constituted through their location in particular socio-historical contexts, and through their negotiation of hegemonic discourses (for example, Foucault, 1980, 1979; Alarcon, 1990; Min-ha, 1989). Ameena’s case demonstrates the extent to which children have even less power than adult subjects to shape the circumstances in which they live: assumptions about sovereign subjects rupture even more fundamentally when we analyse the predicament of children whose subjectivity is profoundly mediated by social, historical and political-economic factors. Further, even as a priori assumptions of subjectivity are problematic,


some of the discourses surrounding Ameena reveal how children are rendered devoid of volition, knowledge and subjectivity when they become unwitting objects of protection.9 How, then, do we—feminist scholars, activists and policymakers—formulate responses that allow us to intervene when children are exploited and oppressed and, simultaneously, acknowledge their desires, knowledges, complicities, resistances and abilities to negotiate hegemonic discourses? In what ways can we conceptualize children as actors without reinscribing them as sovereign or unified subjects? This article is based on the premiss that questions of subjectivity are never ‘just academic’ but have concrete implications for how we can respond to specific situations in which the wellbeing and lives of children are in jeopardy. In this section, I will point to the kinds of space available for intellectuals and activists to formulate interventions that do not divest children of subjectivity. The politics of ‘protection’ As pointed out by Pathak and Sunder Rajan in their analysis of ‘Shahbano’, protectionist arguments constructed by the state and by national and community élites with reference to subordinated subjects are often implicated in a will to power. When they slide into discourses of victimology, such discourses can confer upon the protector the right to interfere in areas hitherto out of bounds or the authority to speak for the silent victim; or it can serve as a camouflage for power politics…. Thus the term conceals the opposition between protector and protected, a hierarchical opposition that assigns higher value to the first term: strong/weak, man/woman, majority/ minority, state/individual. (Pathak and Sunder Rajan, 1992:263) In recent years, feminist critics of colonial and nationalist discourses have pointed to instances when women have become sites or symbols in struggles over political power and identity. For instance, in her path-breaking work on nineteenth-century debates on sati (the practice of widow-burning) in Bengal, Lata Mani argues that, in the discourses articulated by colonial authorities and the indigenous elite, women are ‘neither subjects nor objects, but rather the ground of the discourse on sati…women themselves are marginal to the debate’ (1989:117). Ameena’s predicament demonstrates the ease with which children are divested of subjectivity when they become pawns in political contests. My objective in this article is not to dismiss the protection of children. Instead, by contextualizing the discourses of nation, class and community underlying the calls for her ‘protection’, and drawing attention to the political construction of notions of childhood at a particular historical moment in post-colonial India, I wish to point to ways in which feminist critics and activists might forge interventions that respect the well-being and safety of children.


The confluence of the politics of class and community is particularly evident in the statement of the judge who presided over Ameena’s case. The judge argued that Ameena had to be protected from her parents because, he asserted, if her parents had ‘been [a] little vigilant and would have kept their family limited to two or three children this situation could have been averted’ (Hindustan Times, 6 September 1991). This statement drew, on the one hand, on discourses of class in which the poor are construed as reproducing themselves and, thus, posing a burden on the strained resources of a developing nation. Second, this formulation drew on and reinforced communal and Hindu nationalist representations of Muslims who, allegedly, ‘breed like rabbits’ and will thus soon outnumber the majority Hindu community. As emphasized at the beginning of the article, this was a historical moment when the very meaning of the nation was being contested through the efforts of the Hindu Right to assume the power to ‘speak for’ the nation. The judge’s statement reveals the role of a state that, despite its secular pretensions, was anything but neutral in the construction of an increasingly majoritarian politics. Indeed, the question To whom does Ameena belong?’ encapsulated the different agendas that surfaced during the battles for her custody. I have noted above that these battles were fought in the language of ownership articulated by upper- and middle-class elites who assumed the authority to speak for and intervene on behalf of children from subaltern and minority communities. Clearly, the politics of nation, class and community were precisely what were at stake in the protectionist arguments formulated by community and nationalist élites. At the same time, a close reading of newspaper accounts of the public debates at the time illustrates how some feminists and activists were able to intervene in ways that took into account the implications of their actions for Ameena’s complicated positionality along axes of gender, community, class and nation. Feminist interventions in the ‘Ameena case’ Indian feminists, advocates for children, community activists and women’s groups took a range of positions with regard to Ameena. In general, feminist activists and women’s groups appear to have recognized the complexity of Ameena’s predicament: for the most part, they were sceptical of the apparent neutrality of the state, and were sensitive to the role played by the politics of gender, community and class in the unfolding of Ameena’s story. What were the public positions taken by Muslim feminists and women community activists? In a letter to the editor of the Times of India, Muslim sociologist and feminist Zarina Bhatty pointed to the gender biases in contemporary invocations of the Shariat by asking why it was that ‘the Shariat [was] never referred to when men are in the wrong’ (Times of India, 4 September 1991). While she was careful not to challenge the authority of Islamic law, Bhatty argued that Muslim women were entitled to their ‘constitutional rights as


Indians’. Bhatty thus drew on nationalist discourses of the rights of citizens. Other women spokespersons of Muslim communities in different parts of India were particularly worried that Ameena’s predicament would be drowned in the controversy over religious and civil laws. These community activists were emphatic about drawing the public’s attention to the socio-economic circumstances that might have compelled her parents to arrange her marriage with an older man. For instance, Dr Abida Samiuddin of Hyderabad wrote a letter to the Times of India to ‘earnestly request’ members of her community to ‘dispassionately’ evaluate what happened to Ameena as an instance of ‘forced marriage’, and pleaded against the exploitation of her tragedy into a controversy about religious laws. She pointed to the growing demand for dowry among Muslim communities throughout India, and pleaded that Ameena’s predicament should be ‘treated on a social plank’ and not lead to a division within the community between ‘progressives and fundamentalists’. She also made a plea to ‘people in other communities’ to not ‘blow the issue out of proportion’ and, instead, to recognize that ‘poverty and a number of social evils are our common enemies’ (Times of India, 4 September 1991). The politics of community and minority identity were also foregrounded by some feminists outside the Muslim community. In a column in the Hindi newspaper Jansatta, feminist journalist and activist Mrinal Pande drew parallels between Ameena’s predicament and the plight of girl-children and women in all communities. She attempted to reverse the anti-Muslim turn taken by public discussions of Ameena by strategically reminding readers about how, when it was first broached in 1891, the Age of Consent bill met with resistance from leaders of all religious communities. She stressed that the most vociferous opposition to the bill had come from Hindu élites who protested that it represented an encroachment on their ‘traditions’. Pande warned that women of all communities needed to be particularly vigilant so that male élites did not use the controversies surrounding Ameena to withhold their rights (Jansatta, 1 September 1991). Some liberal women’s groups highlighted the importance of education and other infrastructural facilities in alleviating the condition of poor children like Ameena. For instance, the Indian Housewives Association, which was among the groups that sued for her custody, presented ‘rehabilitation schemes’ for Ameena (Times of India, 6 September 1991). Other women’s groups were worried about her moral welfare. Thus, when Ameena was remanded to the home for destitute women, the Council of Catholic Women protested that she was being ‘exposed to dangers, both from within and without’. In addition, the Council claimed that the provision of educational and employment facilities to parents from lower socioeconomic classes would be one way to prevent the sale of children. The Council’s Secretary wrote: ‘As long as parents feel that selling their children is the only way of bettering their lives they will continue to do so unless an attempt is made to improve their lot, be it through education or employment, so that this option is not the only one open to them’ (Times of India, 3 September 1991).


Two leftist women’s groups in New Delhi, Saheli and Janwadi Mahila Samiti, filed for her custody shortly after she arrived in Delhi on 12 August, and were directly involved in the controversy from the very outset. However, five days after they sued for custody, they changed their positions: as noted above, from participating in the battles over the custody, these groups became mediators between Ameena and the state. They regularly met with her at the institution where she was kept; she reportedly confided in them her eagerness to meet her parents; on one occasion, Ameena asked one of the Saheli members to write a letter to her parents. In addition, Saheli and Janwadi Mahila Samiti spokespersons made repeated efforts to push the government to initiate an inquiry into the sale and purchase of women all over the country. A delegation of the Janwadi Mahila Samiti met the Home Minister on 12 August; shortly thereafter, the Samiti presented its demands to the Delhi police commissioner to ensure that the police investigation would ‘cover a wider area to find out the ramifications of the case’. A Janwadi Mahila Samiti spokesperson issued a press statement asserting that her organization would ‘press for an inquiry into the whole issue of sale and purchase of women in the country’ because, she insisted, ‘We see it as a sale of women. It is not a question of one child. It is a full-fledged racket’. Rather than speak of Ameena as an isolated case, the Samiti insisted on foregrounding the structural conditions of all poor women and girl-children who were sold and purchased. The Janwadi Mahila Samiti was especially careful that their advocacy of an inquiry into the circumstances underlying the sale of Ameena and other girls like her was not appropriated into anti-Muslim campaigns or secularist campaigns for a ‘uniform’ civil code. Thus, for example, the court counsel for the Janwadi Mahila Samiti insisted: ‘This is not a case of Muslim personal law. It is a case of buying and selling of girls’ (Hindustan Times, 20 August 1991). The Janwadi Mahila Samiti appears to have played an important role in the reversal of the decision of the Juvenile Justice Board by the Delhi High Court. Even though the Janwadi Mahila Samiti withdrew its suit for Ameena’s custody, it actively intervened in the judicial proceedings. When five months after Ameena had been ‘rescued’ her case was still unresolved, Brinda Karat of the Janwadi Mahila Samiti petitioned the Delhi High Court pleading that Ameena be allowed to return to her parents. Karat stated that Ameena had frequently spoken of her desire to return to her family, and pleaded that she should not be left to ‘languish’ while she awaited the resolution of her case. When the Juvenile Justice Board decreed that Ameena be put in another state institution in Hyderabad for three years and not be allowed to return to her parents, the Janwadi Mahila Samiti protested vociferously. Responding to the judge’s argument that Ameena’s parents were ‘unfit’ to take care of her because of their poverty and because they had eight children, the Janwadi Mahila Samiti asked if this meant that all poor parents would have their children snatched from them under the Juvenile Justice Act. Endorsing Ameena’s father’s assurances that she would be taken care of once she was allowed to return to them, the Samiti


affirmed that they had contacted a retired magistrate in Hyderabad who was prepared to monitor Ameena’s welfare (Times of India, 5 March 1992). Thus, the feminists, community activists and women’s groups described above took positions that were as heterogeneous as their political philosophies and agendas. While feminists such as Bhatty took nationalist positions, speaking the language of constitutional rights and equal citizenship for Muslim women, others took the liberal position of advocating infrastructural facilities such as opportunities for education and employment. Feminists like Pande and community activists like Dr Samiuddin were particularly concerned that Ameena’s case should not be represented as ‘typical’ of the situation of Muslim women and girl-children. Similarly, organizations like the Janwadi Mahila Samiti insisted on linking Ameena’s predicament with that of women and children of all communities, thereby defusing the communal overtones of her case. Given the explosive relationship between Hindu and Muslim communities at the time, this was a crucial strategy. The Janwadi Mahila Samiti focused on the systemic and structural factors underlying Ameena’s predicament, and was particularly careful to link Ameena’s situation with that of children and women of different communities. Second, as described above, they became mediators between Ameena and the state. They were quick to point to the élitist and upperclass discourses of the judge and, arguing that poverty could not be used as a reason for taking poor children away from their parents, actively advocated that she be returned to her parents. My objective in this section has been to underscore the difficulties, but not the impossibility, of constructing interventionist positions in matters involving children, particularly girl-children of minority and/or subaltern communities. Clearly, the challenge for feminists, community activists and children’s advocates is to formulate positions that foreground the well-being of children and, at the same time, not divest them of all volition and subjectivity. In particular, it is essential that we develop interventions that are sensitive to the immediate effects of our actions on the lives of children and, simultaneously, are vigilant to the long-term consequences of what we advocate. Thus, even as we address the brute facts of the exploitation of children, we need to be cautious that the interventions we endorse do not yield unlimited power to the state to regulate the lives of subjects differently located along axes of class, gender and community. IV I want to conclude by pointing to ways in which we can extend feminist critique to analyses of childhood and, more concretely, to the place of children in the modern nation. What implications does Ameena’s predicament have for feminist research and praxis on children and the nation? Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid’s description of the project of feminist historiography is pertinent to all feminist cultural critique:


Historiography may be feminist without being, exclusively, women’s history. Such a historiography acknowledges that each aspect of reality is gendered, and is thus involved in questioning all that we know, in a sustained examination of analytical and epistemological apparatus…in order to be able to think of gender difference as both structuring and structured by the wide set of social relations. In this sense, feminist historiography is a choice open to all historians. (Sangari and Vaid, 1989:2–3) Thus defined, feminist cultural analysis pertains not just to women but, equally, to other gendered subjects positioned at the margins of hegemonic discourses. For over a decade now, challenges to Eurocentric feminism have critiqued its exclusive focus on gender by insisting on foregrounding the manner in which gender is itself constituted by race, community, the family, political economy and the state (cf. Combahee River Collective, 1982; Anzaldua, 1987, 1990; Collins, 1991; hooks, 1981, 1984, 1989; Lorde, 1984; Mohanty, 1984; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981; Minh-ha, 1989). In what follows, I wish to suggest ways in which a specifically feminist cultural analysis can enable us to understand how modernist regimes of power and knowledge mediate the position of children in the nation. My conceptualization of Ameena’s predicament has drawn from Audre Lorde’s insight that patriarchy is ‘hydra headed’. Hence, as noted earlier, we cannot interpret Ameena’s situation solely in terms of communal conflict or political economy, but need to analyse how the mutually constitutive discourses of community, class, nationalism and sexuality implicate children. Further, my project in this article is not hermeneutic: it is not my objective to discover what Ameena ‘really’ wanted. Nor do I aim to recuperate or ‘restore’ to her a unified or sovereign subjectivity. What I have intended to do is to analyse the processes through which Ameena is inscribed by different discourses of identity, protection and national honour. By tracing the ways in which Ameena becomes a synecdoche of the fragile purity of nationhood, I have tried to foreground how discourses of nationalism and female sexuality converge to constitute childhood as the space of purity of the Indian nation. My objective here is to explore how feminist analysis can help us to understand the construction of modernist discourses of childhood. What are the implications of these discourses for our understanding of the subjectivity of children? What are the political consequences of feminist praxis for modernist dichotomies of private vs. public? And, finally, by what means are children so easily appropriated as synecdoches for the fragile purity of the nation? I present these questions as markers of the complexity and urgency of the predicament of children like Ameena. What can we learn about the role of the state in the gendered constitution of childhood? As noted above, Ameena’s story was frequently cast in terms of the state’s obligation to protect the purity of girl-children and hence safeguard the purity of the nation. For instance, one newspaper report related the response of


members of parliament who asked: ‘What had the government done to ensure that these girls did not land in brothels or were not treated worse than slaves?’ (Times of India, 13 August 1991). These MPs thus highlighted the moral obligation of the state to protect girl-children. The controversy is reported to have ‘rocked the Lok Sabha [the lower house of parliament] today with members from both sides of the House demanding a high-level probe into the sale of Indian girls to flesh markets abroad’. The rhetoric used by the MPs conjoins discourses of sexuality (framed in the problematic of ‘the sale of Indian girls’) and the threat of foreign violators (‘flesh markets abroad’). Equally importantly, Ameena’s story reveals how the state not only participated in the custody battles, but was also fully implicated in the construction of discourses of gender and sexuality surrounding Ameena (cf. Alexander, 1991 and Sangari and Vaid, 1989 on the complicity of the state in gender and sexual politics). It is important to note that, in Ameena’s case, ‘the family’ is equated with the will and credibility of her father: even though the petition appears to have been made by both parents, he is the one who is interrogated by the judge. Similarly, in discussions of Ameena’s ‘purity’, the court placed great emphasis on whether or not Ameena was a virgin, thus revealing that notions of purity are deeply embedded in discourses of female sexuality. Indeed, the preoccupation with Ameena’s purity underscores the centrality of representations of the endangered sexuality of girl-children to the construction of childhood as the space of purity of the nation. As noted above, the authority of the state to invade the supposedly private sphere of the family on behalf of children is in striking contrast to its studied indifference to other instances of violence against children and women. What are the ideologies and discourses that give the state the legitimacy to intervene on behalf of children? Why is it so easy for children to be appropriated by the nation? Ameena’s story illustrates that, even as children become pawns in contests over community identity, childhood symbolizes an essential innocence that transcends politics and culture. At the same time, the question ‘To whom does Ameena belong?’ suggests that, unlike adults, children have to be ‘owned’ by the nation because they are ‘incomplete’ political actors. Children cannot be fully functioning subjects of the nation until they reach a certain age; conversely, it is significant that those who are held to be in need of protection (‘victimized’ women, the poor, the illiterate, the mentally ill) are often portrayed as children. Further, the discourses of the post-colonial Indian state, whether pertaining to development, citizenship or secularism, emphasize that children are ‘our’ shared resource for the future and thus it is ‘our’ common responsibility actively to protect them (cf. Sunder Rajan, 1994:158–9 for a different perspective on the custody arguments surrounding Ameena). Perhaps the ease with which children are so readily appropriated by the state emerges from the way in which they are positioned in the very construction of the national community. For, at the same time that nations construct a ‘shared’ past, they also envision the telos of a


‘common’ future. Does the notion that the nation’s future rests in its children make it possible for us to speak of ‘our’ children, and for the state so easily to intervene on their behalf ? Second, as I have argued above, the position of children has to be related not just to the politics of class, community and family, but also to the formulation of modernist constructions of gender, childhood and nationhood. For instance, the debates about Ameena’s age illustrate the construction of childhood in terms of binaries: thus, Ameena is either a child (a minor) or an adult woman. The binary of child vs. woman becomes especially problematic with teenagers who are represented as neither children nor women; yet, in the modernist construction of childhood as stages that form a continuum, the category of teenager or adolescent is constituted as a stage with distinct boundaries. These discourses represent childhood and adolescence as clearly marked stages in a particular, linear trajectory whereby subjects grow into adulthood and, presumably, subjecthood. As revealed in the controversies about whether or not Ameena was a minor, these constructions of childhood have profound implications for how scholars, activists and policy-makers conceptualize the desires, knowledges, volition and subjectivities of children. Third, I want to draw attention to the long-established feminist insight that the family cannot be seen as a separate (‘private’) domain (see also Sunder Rajan, 1994:160), but is infused by relations of political economy, the discourses of nationalism and the state. The ‘permeability’ (Collier and Yanagisako, 1987) of the family to the power of the state is all the more evident in the case of children. Hence, for example, even after Ameena’s parents are awarded her custody, the state will supervise her until she turns eighteen. The dichotomy between private and public domains, which feminists have long shown to be problematic, further dissolves where the state assumes the right to intervene on behalf of children. The political significance of problematizing distinctions between the private and public for feminist praxis is pointed out by Jacqui Alexander, who posits that ‘the centrality of linking the domain of the public and private, and exposing the ways they are ideologically bound’ is useful for feminist activists because ‘such linkages pose a threat to the state’ (1991:148; emphasis added). This analytical and political strategy is particularly crucial when the state becomes the arbiter of the fate of children. I have already drawn attention to the thorny issue of the subjectivity of children. As I stressed above, discussions of subjectivity are important if feminist scholars, activists and policy-makers are to know how to respond to situations such as Ameena’s; hence, they have profound implications not just for feminist epistemology but also for praxis. The dangers of discourses of victimology in robbing subjects of their subjectivity have already been discussed: we have seen that in the arguments formulated by the agencies fighting for Ameena’s custody, she is objectified and evacuated not only of will but also of subjectivity. At the same time, however, arguments that hinge upon Ameena’s alleged consent to her marriage are equally problematic because they


rest on assumptions of her intentionality and consciousness (which, in turn, are conflated with her subjectivity). According to modernist legal discourse, children become agents when they attain ‘adulthood’; hence, according to Indian law, children become agents when they turn eighteen years of age, i.e. when they become legal adults. Public interventions made by some experts in the Shariat suggest that, according to the tenets of Islam, agency is defined not by age but in terms of whether or not the child has achieved puberty, i.e. when the child becomes a biological and social adult. Ameena’s father insisted she was nineteen years old because, he claimed, she had the physical and emotional maturity of a nineteen year old: the implication is that once she achieved puberty, Ameena had become an adult and the fact that she was a legal minor was thus not relevant. Ultimately, the modernist state deferred to science in its attempts to determine her agency: recall that a bone ossification test established her age. The scientific determination of her age thus overrode other considerations of her social status. It appears that, in both legal and Islamic discourses on marriage, great emphasis is placed on the ability to ‘give consent’. But the debates about whether or not Ameena gave her consent show how tricky the category of consent really is. We are told that her signature was not on her marriage certificate. Are we to assume that she was forced into this marriage? Were her parents lying when they insisted that they had obtained her consent? When the police informed Ameena’s parents that she had stated that she had been forced into the marriage, her father replied that, although she had given her consent at the time of the marriage, she had started to weep interminably when it was time for her to leave Hyderabad with al-Sagih. His defence counsel claimed that Ameena had wept because it was ‘customary’ for a bride to cry when she left for her husband’s home. Ameena is also reported to have said to a journalist that the full significance of what had happened struck her only at the airport. Does that mean that she had initially ‘agreed’ to her marriage, but had changed her mind or regretted her ‘decision’ when she realized what she had done? One expert in Shariat Law stated that if Ameena had been ‘misled’ into marrying al-Sagih, the marriage was not valid. Another commentator stated that if Ameena had been ‘allured’ into the marriage, it cannot be claimed that she had consented to it. These debates problematize the very categories of consent and compulsion, and illustrate the dangers of conflating agency, consciousness and intentionality with subjectivity. How, then, do we talk of the subjectivity of children in the face of the brute fact of their exploitation and neglect in so many parts of the world? Put another way, how do we address their victimization without lapsing into discourses of victimology? How do we conceive of consent without falling into the trap of reinscribing the sovereign subject and, more concretely, ascribing intentionality? Lata Mani warns us that recuperating the intentions of women who committed sati is impossible because ‘the meaning of consent in a patriarchal context is hard to assess’ (1989:97). In Ameena’s case, the establishment of the validity of her marriage hinged upon whether or not she had consented to it. But how are we to


conceptualize consciousness and, more specifically, consent in the case of girl-children whose parents arrange their marriages? Clearly, questions of consent elide the politics of gender and sexuality mediating the position of girl-children in the family. Assumptions of consciousness and intentionality inscribed in the issue of consent are especially problematic in the case of children, who may be said to occupy positions of subalternity vis-à-vis dominant discourses. As pointed out by Gayatri Spivak in another context, the consciousness of the subaltern cannot be set ‘against the socius’ or the social text, but needs to be seen ‘as itself also constituted as and on a semiotic chain’ (1985:332); thus, questions of consciousness and, more critically, subjectivity cannot be analysed independently of the larger social and discursive contexts in which subjects are located. My fifth and final question has to do with why children so readily become synecdoches for all that is ‘pure’ in the nation. My sense is that this happens because, for the most part, there remains a tendency to conceive of childhood as somehow ‘untainted’ by politics: childhood continues to be associated with the natural and the pure, such that the pure is conflated with the pre-cultural.10 Feminist insights on the cultural construction of life-stages in specific sociohistorical contexts can have significant implications for our understanding of childhood; however, in the nationalist discourses analysed in this article, childhood remains irretrievably ‘natural’, thus masking the workings of power and knowledge as they implicate the lives of children in the modern world. Notes I would like to acknowledge the efforts of Jagori, a women’s organization in New Delhi, in compiling newspaper clippings about Ameena, Rebecca Klenk for her help in xeroxing the clippings, and my mother, Kamla Mankekar, for enabling this ‘transnational’ project. I would also like to thank anonymous reviewer #1 for Feminist Review, and Helen Gremillion, Akhil Gupta, Saba Mahmood, Lisa Malkki and Sharon Stephens for helping me to think through the issues analysed in this article. This is a slightly modified version of a paper presented at the Children and Nationalism Conference, 13–16 May 1994, the Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Trondheim, Norway. I thank the participants of the conference for their comments, not all of which I have been able to incorporate. I would like to note, with delight, an article by Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan on Ameena (1994). I regret that because Sunder Rajan’s article was published after the arguments presented in my article were conceptualized and presented, I have been unable to incorporate Sunder Rajan’s discussion of Ameena into my own analysis. Although there are inevitable overlaps in the issues we raise, Sunder Rajan foregrounds the discourses of liberal citizenship constructed in the ‘Ameena case’. My article, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship


between childhood and nationhood; in particular, the construction of childhood as a synecdoche for the purity of nationhood. 1 Sunder Rajan also draws attention to the role of mass media in the narrative representation of Ameena (1994:163). 2 Some of the information presented in this paragraph draws on Pathak and Sunder Rajan (1992). 3 While an analysis of colonial discourses on the protection of children is outside the scope of this article, I would like to note the ambivalent positions of the British administration on the protection of children in colonial India. The two most important legislations to have a bearing on the protection of children in India were the Age of Consent Bill of 1891 and the Sarda Act of 1929. Meera Kosambi’s research on the controversies surrounding the Age of Consent Bill is particularly helpful in understanding the position of the colonial administration. She notes that ‘the age of consent question was integral to the child marriage question, so that the technical distinction between the two was often blurred in the actual controversy’ (1991:1857). Public opinion in Britain about this legislation was divided: while, in general, public opinion favoured the legislation, some critics claimed that the marriage of girl-children ‘is a custom founded on the laws of nature and is especially suitable to tropical regions… the change could be forced on the people of India only at the cost of an amount of disorganization and discontent out of all proportions to even the imaginary benefits contemplated’ (Frederick Pincott, Mahratta, 24 May 1905, quoted in Kosambi, 1991:1860). Most importantly, some British critics alleged that the passage of the Bill would amount to interference in the religious affairs of Indians. Citing Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, these critics challenged the constitutional legitimacy of the Bill (Kosambi, 1991: 1864). The Age of Consent Bill was finally passed in March 1891. 4 Khurshid was referring to the first Child Marriage Restraint Act, commonly known as the Sarda Act, which was enacted in 1929. The Sarda Act fixed the age of marriage at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls. This Act was subsequently amended in 1949 and 1956 to raise the minimum age for girls to fifteen and sixteen years respectively. The minimum age for boys remained unchanged. In October 1978, the minimum age for girls and boys was raised to eighteen and twenty-one years respectively. 5 According to Professor Tahir Mahmood, Head of the Department of Islamic and Comparative Law, Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, the claim that Ameena’s marriage was valid under Islam was a ‘blatant misreading’ of the Shariat Law. He argued that Shariat Law posits that puberty should be the decisive factor for allowing a girl to marry by her own free will; further, regardless of the age of a child, her wish is decisive in a marriage. He also posited that, according to Shariat Law, if a child’s consent is obtained by the misrepresentation of facts, that marriage becomes invalid. Finally, Professor Mahmood stated that the Sarda Act, which disallows the marriage of a girl below the age of eighteen, also applies to Muslims (Hindustan Times, 21 August 1991). 6 The rhetoric of saving Muslim women from Muslim men was an eerie echo of British colonial discourse pertaining to the practice of sati, in which widows allegedly burnt themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, in the nineteenth


7

8

9 10

century: Gayatri Spivak has interpreted the discourse on sati articulated by the colonial state as a ‘case’ of ‘White men saving brown women from brown men’ (1991:297). Pathak and Sunder Rajan note that discourses of protecting Muslim women from Muslim men were also constructed during the Shahbano controversy (1992:263). Why was al-Sagih’s Arab identity a source of scandal? The prejudice against alSagih and, more generally, against Arabs had as much to do with fears about multinational capital as embodied by the Arabs, an ambivalence towards the influx of Arab tourists and, given the hegemony of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, anxieties regarding the transnational character of Islam. Although an examination of popular discourses towards Arabs is beyond the scope of this article, Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalist representations of the sexual appetites of Arabs seems particularly pertinent (1978:311–12). I thank Saba Mahmood for drawing my attention to this linkage with Orientalist stereotypes of Arab men. Perhaps these statements can be contextualized by the fact that, as members of a minority community, Muslims are under constant pressure to demonstrate their loyalty to the Indian nation; hence, one ‘acceptable’ way for spokespersons to represent their community is by speaking in the name of the nation. As I will demonstrate in my discussion of questions of consent and consciousness, it is crucial that we do not conflate agency with subjectivity. Veena Das points out that in ‘Indian society, the child is not regarded as a tabula rasa on which society inscribes whatever it wishes. Rather, the child is believed to bring with him memories of his previous birth as well as preconception memories’ (1989:264). I would add that, in post-colonial India, coexisting with theories that posit that children bring with them memories of a previous life, are modernist discourses that conceive of childhood in terms of a linear progression into sovereign adult/subjecthood. These modernist constructions of childhood reveal a tendency to think of children as ‘uncontaminated’ by the temporal world in which they live and, therefore, as a space of purity.

References ALARCON, Norma (1990) “The theoretical subject of “This Bridge Called my Back” and Anglo-American Feminism’ in ANZALDUA, Gloria (1990) editor, Making Face, Making Soul Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Colour San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company. ALEXANDER, Jacqui (1991) ‘Redrafting morality’ in Russo, A. , Torres, L. and Mohanty, C. (1991) (editors), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 133–52 . ANZALDUA, Gloria (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company. —— (1990) editor, Making Face, Making Soul Haciendo Caras: Creative and Criti cal Perspectives by Women of Color San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Company. COLLIER, Jane and YANAGISAKO, Sylvia Junko (1987) editors, Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis Stanford: Stanford University Press.


COLLINS, Patricia Hill (1991) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Conscious ness, and the Politics of Empowerment New York: Routledge. COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE (1982) But Some of Us Are Brave Old Wesbury, NY: Feminist Press. DAS, Veena (1989) ‘Voices of children’ Daedalus: Another India pp. 263–94 . FOUCAULT, Michael (1980) The History of Sexuality Volume 1 New York: Vintage Books. —— (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison New York: Vintage Books. GUPTA, Akhil (1995) ‘Blurred boundaries: the discourse of corruption, the culture of politics, and the imagined state’ American Ethnologist Vol. 22, No. 2:375–402 . hooks, bell (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism Boston: South End Press. —— (1984) From Margin to Center Boston: South End Press. —— (1989) Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black Boston: South End Press. KOSAMBI, Meera (1991) ‘Girl-brides and socio-legal change: Age of Consent Bill (1891) controversy’ Economic and Political Weekly Vol. XXVI, Nos. 31 and 32: 1857–68 . LORDE, Audre (1984) Sister Outsider Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press. MANI, Lata (1989) ‘Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India’ in Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (1989) editors, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 88–126 . MANKEKAR, Purnima (1993) ‘National texts and gendered lives: an ethnography of television viewers in a north Indian city’ American Ethnologist Vol. 20, No. 3: 543–63 . MINH-HA, Trinh (1989) Woman Native Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism Blooming, IN: Indiana University Press. MOHANTY, Chandra (1984) Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Col onial Discourses Boundary 2, Vols 12–13, Nos 1–3:333–58 . MORAGA, Cherrie and ANZALDUA, Gloria (1981) editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. PATHAK, Zakia and SUNDER RAJAN, Rajeshwari (1992) ‘Shahbano’ in Butler, Judith and Scott Joan W. (1992) editors, Feminists Theorize the Political New York: Routledge, pp. 257–79 . SAID, Edward (1979) Orientalism New York: Vintage Books. SANGARI, Kumkum and VAID, Sudesh (1989) ‘Recasting women: an introduction’ in Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (1989) editors, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History New Delhi: Kali for Women, pp. 1–26 . SPIVAK, Gayatri C. (1985) ‘Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography’ in GUHA, Ranajit and SPIVAK, Gayatri editors, Subaltern Studies IV Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 330–63 . —— (1991) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (1991) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313 . STEEDMAN, Carolyn (1992) Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History London: River Oram Press. SUNDER RAJAN, Rajeshwari (1994) ‘Ameena: gender, crisis and national identity’ Oxford Literary Review Vol. 16 Nos 1–2:147–76 .


Newspapers cited 11 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Child bride rescued from Arab Sheikh’, 11 August 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Child bride rescued’. 12 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Sagish released on bail’. 13 August 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena incident rocks the Lok Sabha’. 14 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Sheikh marriage has Shariat law sanction’. 18 August 1991 ; Indian Express ; ‘The reluctant bride’. 19 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Give my Ameena back: Amrita’. 20 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Case hearing adjourned till Sept., 3’. 21 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘No Shariat sanction for such marriage’. 23 August 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena was “misled” into marriage’. 26 August 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘“I’ll be finished if I fail to get her”’. 29 August 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Poverty is culprit, says Ameena’s father’. 1 September 1991 ; Jansatta ; ‘Child bride: a social ill’. 1 September 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; letter to the editor. 3 September 1991 ; Times of India ; letter to the editor. 3 September 1991 ; Times of India ; letter to the editor. 4 September 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘To whom does Ameena belong?’ 4 September 1991 ; Times of India ; letter to the editor. 5 September 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Ameena ready to go with her parents’. 6 September 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena to stay in children’s home’. 6 September 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Parents denied custody’. 7 September 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena cases rampant’. 14 September 1991 ; Hindustan Times ; ‘Barkas—the bride bazaar’. 14 September 1991 ; Indian Express ; ‘Many girls go the Ameena way’. 16 September 1991 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena case: Muslims resent publicity’. 15 October 1991 ; India Today . 30 November 1991 ; Times of India , ‘Ameena may be sent back’. 5 March 1992 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena transferred to Hyderabad home’. 12 March 1992 ; Times of India ; ‘Ameena is all smiles again’. 10 December 1993 ; Pioneer ; ‘Why Hyderabadi girls?’

Pat Cadigan’s Synners: Refiguring Nature, Science and Technology Laura Chernaik

Abstract

This article analyses an anti-essentialist SF novel, focusing on the extent to which anti-foundationalism enables a more accurate as well as a more productive representation of postmodernity. My argument stresses the ways in which Pat Cadigan’s novel Synners, mostly because of its remarkable narrative form, challenges some of the most dangerous norms and normativity of American thought and culture. I argue, that, in order to understand this complex novel correctly, we must approach technoscience and transnational capitalism as separate, interacting discourses and material practices. The representations of technoscience, in the novel, are definitely not ‘figures’ for late capitalism: they are representations of a discourse which interacts with capitalism in the fictional world as in the real world. Contrary to what has been suggested by a number of critics writing about Foucault, use of this notion of discourse does not preclude use of notions of agency. As the queer theorists who have drawn on Foucault’s work show, agency can be theorized in terms compatible with the notions of discourses, material practices and technologies. My discussion of Synners thus focuses on questions of agency, showing how Cadigan uses a deconstruction of Judeo-Christian religious tropes to argue for a responsible, and knowledgable, ‘incurably informed’ approach to technology. Keywords Feminism; queer theory; postmodernism; technoscience; ethics; cyberpunk Much of this article is a close reading of extracts from Pat Cadigan’s novel Synners. My argument stresses the ways in which Synners, mostly because of its remarkable narrative form, challenges some of the most powerful, and dangerous, norms and normativity of American thought and culture. My approach draws on three political discourses: feminist theory, queer theory and neo-marxist theory. I have written at length about neo-marxist theory elsewhere.1 will, however, give a brief overview of the feminist and queer


theories which have most influenced my work, and which I draw on or address in this article. The feminist theorist whose work most closely informs mine is Donna Haraway. Haraway is a socialist feminist, strongly influenced by both American feminist theorists of colour and by queer theorists. As the theories of women of colour have influenced my own argument, and possibly Cadigan’s implicit argument as well (although the latter may be a case of convergence, rather than of direct influence), I will begin with their work. The feminist, anti-racist social theory of American women of colour often emphasizes the importance of politics as that which motivates, enables and informs theory. The connections between politics, theory and subjectivity have, historically, been most often formulated as either an ‘identity politic’ or as a focus on ‘difference’. The Combahee River Collective (1979) produced one of the most influential formulations of identity politics: ‘We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression’ (The Combahee River Collective, 1979). The Combahee River Collective’s identity politics and ‘standpoint epistemology’2 have been made more nuanced in the later writings of American feminists of colour. Thus, for example, bell hooks (1990) argues that it is crucial to radically revise, but still draw on, notions of identity politics. hooks applies a wide knowledge of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory to a range of texts that include popular culture, history and essays, using the theory in a way that is deliberately political. hooks argues against the notion that the black feminist critique of the earlier black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s has weakened the radical African American community or radical black theory. She stresses both the continuity of contemporary radical African American politics and the importance of critiquing earlier texts by placing them in their historical context. The notion of an identity politic has also been used in the context of coalition politics. Thus, Chela Sandoval’s concept of ‘oppositional consciousness’ (Sandoval, 1991) uses a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity to formulate a common ground for all persons marginalized by the dominant culture. Theories of mestizaje have taken off from the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga; Anzaldúa (1987) focuses on the specificity of a Chicana feminist subjectivity which crosses the border between Mexico and the United States, Moraga (1983) on the analysis of a subjectivity fundamentally divided in terms of its multiple identities. The notion of difference as enabling has been put most eloquently by Audre Lorde. She argues (Lorde, 1984) that it is not enough simply to ‘tolerate’ difference. The patronizing, liberal call for ‘toleration’ cannot bring about real change. Lorde argues that difference is ‘necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action’ (Lorde, 1984:37). Change must be

REFIGURING TECHNOSCIENCE 59

conceptualized, written about; thus poetry is a vital necessity of our existence. It ‘forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action’ (Lorde, 1984:37). It is this focus on identity and difference which marks the point at which the theories of American women of colour most influence Haraway’s work. Haraway’s stress, though, is on difference, not identity. She is most strongly influenced by theorists, like hooks, who are anti-essentialist, and who are also explicitly socialist. The convergences and lines of influence will become clearer if I summarize Haraway’s arguments. The first generation of second wave socialist feminists argued that attention needed to be paid to questions of social and ideological reproduction, as well as, of course, to production and consumption. Haraway, however, argues that a new term, ‘replication’, may be more useful than the traditional pair of terms, ‘production and reproduction’. Replication is a term with greater scope, crucially including immune system discourses and a more useful meaning, lacking limiting associations with the discourse of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. Haraway argues that ‘replication’ does not only refer to the workings of capitalism. It also refers to other much broader, disciplinizing, subject-making discourses. She notes, in particular, that postmodern texts often make use of a replicative ‘immune system discourse’ in constructing narratives of the normal and pathological. It is this multivalence of ‘replication’ as analysed by Haraway which makes her work so pertinent to my argument. That is, like many other neo-marxists, Haraway (1991) argues that the workings of capitalism, in present day society, can no longer be analysed completely and successfully by a traditional marxist analysis framed in terms of class and surplus value, production and reproduction. The old certainties of class are breaking up; they are being replaced by something else. On the positive side, it appears that accumulation must be analysed in terms of race, gender and sexuality as well as class. On the negative side, it seems that it must be analysed in terms of command-and-control intelligence networks, a term drawn from military operations research and used, as well, in information technology and also medical and biological research. What is more complicated, it is not just the old certainties of class which are breaking up. The shift to command-andcontrol, to this extraordinary interpenetration of military and bureaucratic ways of thinking, information technology jargon and new biological research, has affected the ways we can think of our bodies and of our subjectivies: But how do narratives of the normal and the pathological work when the bio logical and medical body is symbolized and operated upon, not as a system of work, organized by the hierarchical division of labour, ordered by a privileged dialectic between highly localized nervous and reproductive functions [production and reproduction], but instead as a


coded text, organized as an engineered communications system, ordered by a fluid and dispersed command-control-intelligence network [replication]? (Haraway, 1991:211; identifying terms added) Thus it is not just capitalism which has changed radically; so have gender, race and sexuality and the political discourses which organize around these issues. Haraway argues that the technologies and practices of biomedical discourses in the mid-twentieth century have destabilized the ‘symbolic privilege of the hierarchical, localized, organic body’. This has not just affected the privileged. It has also affected subaltern discourses: the scientific, social and political changes which have led to the move away from the notion of a ‘hierarchical, localized, organic body’ have been part of the context within which the theories written from the point of view of those who suffer in a system of domination have been developed. Thus, Haraway argues, ‘the question of “differences” has destabilized humanist discourses of liberation based on a politics of substantive unity.’ Haraway uses this opposition between reproduction and replication to make connections between the destabilization of humanist discourses of liberation and the similar move away from a notion of substantive unity in immune system discourses. Her point is that it is not just class consciousness as the basis for political subjectivity which has been problematized. It has also become difficult to speak straightforwardly about liberation. And a unified collective political subject grounded in gender, race or sexuality seems even less reachable or defensible than a class-based political subject. Her point is that it is the shift to ‘replication’ which has brought about these political uncertainties. However, in the local context of immune system discourses (the major focus of much of the article in which Haraway most develops the socialist, neo-marxist part of her socialist feminism) it is not clear whether the narratives of the normal and pathological which are applied to Persons with AIDS and which, in the form of institutionalized homophobia, have contributed to the horrifying numbers of deaths from AIDS, can be analysed in terms of replication and production/ reproduction alone. In addition, humanist discourses of liberation may not have been as destabilized as Haraway suggests in the 1991 piece. Her characterization seems accurate, as a description of the move from gay liberation to queer theory, but her argument may be less applicable to the American new social movements which focus on race. Even if few of the most influential theorists of colour now formulate their arguments in terms of humanism, the notion of ‘liberation’ is still used, very often, when discussing race in the American context. However, the term ‘liberation’ is now often a reference to civil rights and movement politics, rather than a continuation of the discourse used at that time. Thus, for example, bell hooks uses the term ‘liberation’ twice in the phrase, ‘liberatory black liberation struggle’ (hooks, 1990:20), in an argument which stresses the continuity between African American feminist and lesbian politics and the civil rights movement.


Haraway is correct in that all these arguments are very different from a discourse of ‘liberation’. However, Haraway’s argument suggests that subaltern movements, in general, have moved towards a politics of difference. It is very misleading to call ‘identity politics’, one of the most influential forms of American subaltern politics, a politics of difference. Even if they never, or rarely, make use of a notion of ‘substantive unity’, many American theorists of colour construct a notion of ‘identity politics’. The difference between identity politics and a politics of difference is very great, even though both are part of the same anti-hegemonic discourse. Given the great influence of identity politics, it would be a distorted representation of this discourse to call it ‘the question of “differences”’ (Haraway, 1991:211). What is clear, however, is that the identity politics argued for by so many influential feminist theorists of colour in the United States, the more strongly poststructuralist or postmodernist theories of mestizaje and hybridity and the technofeminists’ opposition to the racist, sexist, speciesist, organicist, naturalizing origin stories at the heart of American culture share something: perhaps oppositionality as such, as Sandoval suggests, or perhaps oppositionality to the same multiplex set of discourses. Haraway’s attempt, in the 1991 article, to link arguments about socialist feminism with queer theory influenced arguments about normativity is not a new direction for her work. This was also central to her earlier, highly influential 1985 essay. Haraway (1985) argues that, given the consistent links in our oppressive western culture between women and people of colour and nature, the cyborg, being both machine and human, can be a more politically empowering image than ‘an imagined organic body’. Haraway analyses both the ontological and the epistemological implications of the narrative trope of the Garden of Eden in ‘A manifesto for cyborgs’, but my argument, here, is primarily concerned with issues of knowledge (‘epistemology’ and, in a Foucauldian sense, ‘the construction of knowledge’), rather than with ontology. The feminist essentialism/anti-essentialism debate is thus less relevant to my argument than a queer focus on epistemologies. Haraway focuses more clearly on the figure of the Garden in the earlier Socialist Review version than in the later (1991) collection of articles. She makes a number of brief references, in both versions, to the ways that Leftist texts use pre-lapsarian tropes. However, Haraway’s interest, as suggested, for example, in her claim, towards the end of that article, that cyborgs give us ‘a world without genesis but also a world without end’, is sometimes to reclaim, rather than to reject, religious tropes. My own approach is to hope that a deconstruction of these religious tropes might help us to reject them, since, from my admittedly biased point of view, religious tropes seem much too prevalent in the contemporary and recent USA. Before, though, I go on to analyse Cadigan’s novel Synners, showing how the novel’s modelling of a responsible way to deal with, and continue to use, technology relies on a deconstruction of pre-lapsarian figurations, I will briefly introduce the main topics I have taken from queer theory. As David Halperin (1994), for example, argues in Saint Foucault, queer theory draws, most of


all, on the work of Michel Foucault; and, as Halperin also shows, queer activism and culture influenced Foucault’s theorization. The texts of Foucault’s which most influenced queer theory are Discipline and Punish (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1980; 1985; 1986); from the former book, queer theorists take the ideas of disciplinization and normalization; from the latter, the notion that sexuality has a history. Halperin is a classicist, and his works often address the classical texts analysed in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, but most other queer theorists focus on the modern and postmodern periods. In contemporary usage, ‘sexuality’ is an identity term: one ‘is’ lesbian or gay, heterosexual or bisexual. We tend to forget that this was not always the case: in earlier centuries, as several queer historians and theorists have pointed out, sexuality, if one can call it that (for the word was only invented in the nineteenth century) was more a matter of what one did than what one was. And, crucially, as queer theory argues, once one realizes that there is this multiple genealogy to the term ‘sexuality’, one can differentiate, in contemporary texts, between character-based representations and act-based representations. This has obvious and important relevance; for example, in AIDS education. As well as focusing on the history of sexuality, queer theory also focuses on the production of knowledges. Foucault had a dual notion of power: power was both negative—it disciplined—and positive—it produced. And crucially, it produces both subjects and objects: objects of knowledge. Judith Butler’s work (1990, 1993) focuses on the production of subjects, showing how, contrary to the influential liberal readings of Foucault, a theory of the constitution or production of subjects does not preclude agency. She argues that subjectivation takes place through performance. Butler (like Zizek) extrapolates from Austin’s notion of the ‘speech-act’, showing how speech-acts retroactively constitute that to which it appears they refer. A feminist subject, or a lesbian subject, therefore, is constituted in political activity, and in social discourses and practices, rather than pre-existing them. Anti-essentialism, therefore, is easily combinable with political commitment; in fact, it can be an excellent basis for coalition politics. Queer work on the production of knowledges and the objects of knowledge has centred, for historical and ethical reasons, on AIDS discourses. Where the social sciences are concerned, the idea that ‘scientific knowledges’ are historical phenomena is becoming less radical: it is relatively easy to convince an interlocutor that ‘deviance’, for example, is ‘produced’ as a supplement to a norm that is guaranteed as normal by the production of the deviant as abnormal. However, queer theory’s application to the natural sciences, like any constructivist argument about the natural sciences, can seem more startling. As the example of AIDS discourses makes clear, though, a constructivist approach to scientific knowledges does not deny the materiality of the objects of scientific knowledges, or the material efficacy (or lack) of drug treatments, etc.; it just puts them in the context of the historicity of scientific practices. One of these sets of norms, of ‘narratives of the abnormal and the pathological’ at play in the contemporary United States, one of which is of as


much concern to feminists as to queers, has to do with the ways that oppositions between nature, science and technology work in the contemporary United States. These norms are legible both in dominant US discourses and in subaltern ones, most notably in ecofeminism. For this reason, and also because the name cyberfeminism does not, I think, make explicit the extent to which the new technologies addressed by both feminist and queer theory, and feminist and queer science fiction, include both biotechnologies and information technologies, I use, in this article, a less common term, technofeminism. Cadigan introduced this term in an interview in 1992;3 her original reference was to the explicitly political feminist science fiction which developed out of cyberpunk, but a wider application is legitimate. Of the two critics who have written most extensively on Cadigan, Jenny Wolmark (1993) and Anne Balsamo (1996 and in Dery, 1994), Wolmark focuses on the relation to information technology (IT), while Balsamo addresses both IT and biotechnology. A great number of feminist cultural critics have argued that there are gendered differences in access to IT, in the ways that one uses and reacts to IT, and in the ways that one represents IT and its impact. Thus, for example, Jenny Wolmark sets up an opposition between masculinist and feminist representations of the ‘interface between human and machine’. She argues that most cyberpunk writers use representations of this human/machine interface to ‘focus on the general question of what it means to be human’. This general question, she argues, is explored by means of ‘universalist and essentialist metaphors about “humanity” which avoid confronting existing and unequal power relations’ (Wolmark, 1993:110–11). These universalist and essentialist metaphors are, she claims, masculinist, and therefore, according to Wolmark, so is cyberpunk. Feminist science fiction, in contrast, Wolmark argues, uses representations of the human/machine interface to ‘challenge’ these ‘universalist and essentialist’ tropes; that is what makes it feminist. Thus, Wolmark argues that Synners, when it focuses on an artificial intelligence (AI), Art Fish, addresses a masculinist question, ‘can an AI be human?’. She interprets Fish as ‘unequivocally male’ and claims that Synners is limited by the ‘reification of gender relations’ purportedly ‘implicit in cyberpunk’ (Wolmark, 1993:124–5). It therefore, according to Wolmark, must be considered as cyberpunk, rather than as feminist science fiction. There are a number of problems with Wolmark’s argument. First of all, she seems to be suggesting that all universals are false universals: ‘human’ is never a general term, but always a masculinist one. A feminist argument, thus, according to Wolmark, is an argument that challenges universals. This, it seems to me, is not necessarily always the case. ‘Human’ may be overdetermined as ‘male’ in a particular text, indeed, perhaps, in most texts, but need not be overdetermined as male in all texts. Second, is ‘human’, in science fiction, necessarily used as a general term? Third, Synners, I would argue, is not about ‘what it means to be human’; as this article will make clear, Synners is about agency. Like Anne Balsamo, I analyse Synners in order to produce an argument about technoscience. Both cyberpunk and technofeminism


deal with liminality. Cadigan’s technofeminism, though, does something quite unusual. She analyses the interface between multiple discourses without reducing this to a series of binarisms. Cadigan’s concern in Synners, as in her other novels and short stories, is first of all to do with narrative form. Like, for example, the realist novelist Henry James, she produces alternatives to the melodramatic American romance form. She both parodies it, in some of the cyberspace scenes, and builds up highly complex, or multiplex, characters and plots, highlighting questions of interpretation. The metonymic and synecdochal descriptions of environment and setting, city and technology also owe more to realism than to modernism; as Fredric Jameson (1984), for example, suggests, this is not uncommon in postmodernist texts. For Cadigan, as for other politically motivated writers, the formal innovations are used to particular ends. Synners is about agency in a world not just structured but constructed by the discourses and material practices of technoscience, transnational capitalism, gender, race and sexuality. It is also about a choice between, on the one hand, norms and prohibitions, and, on the other hand, cyborgs, street-smart kids, alternative families, non-familial households and queers. Although only a few characters in the novel are gay or lesbian, the gay male characters are introduced in the very first scene of the novel, and the puzzling note which provides the hook for the plot, and for the viewers’ continued interest, is left by one gay man for the other. In addition, both academics and activists have recently popularized a somewhat controversial extension of the term queer, using it as both an anti-essentialist designation for lesbians and gay men, and for others whose sexual practices, family or household arrangements, or, in a slippage, gender, are different from the limited norms of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality. Cadigan’s approach is similarly a deconstruction of norms and normativity. Synners opposes a multiplex science fictional narrative of interfaced, multiple subjects to an Edenic story of interdiction and prohibition, using, in a move that can be analysed in a way which addresses some of the lacunae in Haraway’s argument, the deconstruction of the Garden to introduce anti-foundationalist ethics. Pre-lapsarian representations combine a discourse that idealizes an absent origin (a mythical Garden of Eden, from which, according to this influential Judeo-Christian trope, we have ‘lapsed’) with a discourse that is normative and identitarian. The figure of the tree of knowledge uses species difference to introduce prohibition. The connection between difference and prohibition is the basis of the story of a fall from an idealized time and place where and when no difference existed; at the end of the Garden story it is sexual difference rather than species difference which is focused on. However, as the focus on species difference should allow us to recognize, the stress is as much on knowledge as on ontology. Cadigan’s deconstruction of pre-lapsarianism in Synners enables us to move away from origin stories, and to escape the logical trap created by these circular, recuperative notions of prohibition and transgression. In bringing about this general refiguration, Cadigan’s deconstruction of the Garden is not so much


anti-religious as anti-normative. Cadigan’s novel treats pre-lapsarianism historically and genealogically. She suggests that Garden narratives were not just important to Puritan American culture. The notion of an Adamic man faced with the American wilderness was at the heart of American transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, and thus a garden genealogy, was picked up again in the 1960s and again, more recently, by what one of the fictional characters in Synners, Gina, wonderfully refers to as a ‘retrograde experiment in technoWalden-Pondism on the communal level’. Cadigan’s novel suggests that a stress on ‘appropriate technology’ in an urban context, for example, as in Northern Californian popular culture, is a pastoral myth, linked to transcendentalism, and to the Judeo-Christian garden chronotope. She analyses this fantasy as specific to a highly technological society. The character who coined the phrase ‘technoWalden-Pondism’ then coins the pun which gives the novel its name: they are not sinners but synners, synthesizers who work with the new technology and are changed by it. In Haraway’s terms, they are cyborgs, not goddesses; changed by technology, not in tune, cyclically, with nature. Unlike both Wolmark and, to an extent, Balsamo, who contrast women’s and men’s relations to technology, seeing women’s, and female characters’, way of relating more in terms of connection and embodiedness, while men’s reactions are more to do with the technological sublime, with a loss of self or a dream of transcending the body, my argument about Cadigan does not rely on a binary gender difference and does not find one in the text. Of Balsamo’s two versions of the argument, the gendered formulation—that the women, Gina and Sam, ‘actively manipulate’ cyberspace while the men, Gabe and Mark, are ‘addicted’ to it (Dery, 1994:137)—is less useful, I think, than her four-term matrix—the repressed body, the labouring body, the marked body and the disappearing body— while this matrix, with only four elements, in its turn reduces the complexity of Cadigan’s text. In addition, as my article will make clear, I am not entirely convinced by Balsamo’s interpretation of these four characters. The ‘synners’ of Cadigan’s title are postmodern subjects, cyborged synthesizers of a near-future Los Angeles. The text is not a metatheory: they do not produce syntheses in the marxist, theoretical sense but are located on the level of what marxism theorizes, commodity production. The plot of the novel follows from the invention of a direct neural interface between computer and human brain. The narrative centres, in turn, on each of the characters, rather than ordering them into major and minor characters. Most of the very large number of protagonists in Synners produce music videos and ‘simulations’ for the transnational company, Diversifications, Inc. In the slang used by many characters in the novel, a ‘synner’ is someone who uses a synthesizer in his or her work. For example, Gina uses a synthesizer to make rock videos, Gabe uses one to make ‘simulations’: interactive virtual reality role-playing games. The ‘synners’ are not diologizers or marxist synthesizers; they are cyborgs. They do not construct a dialogic field of vision (a consciousness that can understand the other without reducing it to the economy of the same). Somewhat to his surprise,


Gabe finds that the simulations he writes and plays with are interactive in a strong sense: his role-playing imaginary playmates are infected by a self-aware virus, Dr Art Fish, and therefore capable, to some extent, of agency. Art Fish has infected Gabe’s playmates for a reason: the AI has a dilemma. The other characters do not realize that it is a person. How can Dr Art Fish convince the others that it is a person? Can Dr Fish demonstrate its agency? Agency is also a question for the human subjects, Sam, her father Gabe, Gina, Mark, Fez, Rosa, Gator, Jones and Keely. The human characters’ problem is that Keely has disappeared, leaving Jones a strange note, ‘Dive, dive, divide, the cap and green eggs over easy, to go. Bdee-bdee’ (Cadigan, 1991:3). What does the note mean? What should they do in response? Cadigan thus links together two of her main concerns, interpretation and action. And, as the novel increasingly makes clear, ‘should’ has a moral import. What is ethical action for postmodern subjects? In particular, given the agency and thus ethical import of Art Fish, can the human, postmodern, cyborg characters find a form of ethical action which is not a retreat from technology but a way of working and living with technoscience and transnationalism, as well as with Art? The plot of the novel advances by means of the actions of this large cast of characters, each of whom attempts to interpret the discourse of the others. These characters are distributed on a matrix or grid, rather than the centre-periphery model of novels with a plot/subplot distinction. Bakhtin argues in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics that Whenever someone else’s ‘truth’ is presented in a given novel it is introduced without fail into the dialogic field of vision of the other major heroes of the novel. Ivan Karamazov, for example, knows and understands Zosima’s truth as well as Dmitri’s truth and Alyosha’s truth and the ‘truth’ of that old sensualist, his father Fyodor Pavlovich. Dmitri understands all these truths as well; Alyosha, too, understands them perfectly. In The Possessed there is not a single idea that fails to find a dialogic response in Stavrogin’s consciousness. (Bakhtin, 1984:73) In Synners, though, the ‘truths’ of each character, each polyglossic voice, are not introduced into the dialogic field of vision of the other characters. Since both the plot of the novel and the narrative structure through which it is conveyed are both complex, Cadigan emphasizes what Barthes (1974) has called the hermeneutic code. The novel is thus constructed around an enigma, a mysterious note, ‘Dive, dive, divide, the cap and green eggs over easy, to go. Bdee-bdee’. This note was addressed by one young gay man, Keely, to his lover, Jones. By the end of the novel, we are able to translate this note: Keely has stolen (B&E) some information from Diversifications, Inc., divided it and sent the halves to Fez and Sam. The information is the data concerning the neural interface sockets. The discourse of each character is an attempt to unravel this


enigma, providing the hook for the reader of the text. However, the discourse of one character frequently does not encompass the discourses of the others; most ideas fail to find a ‘dialogic response’ in the consciousness of the characters. By the end of the novel the enigma is solved and the note translated: so late that the narrative has moved beyond it. Thus it becomes apparent in the course of a conversation between Gator and Jones in Chapter 1 that they understand Keely’s note. However, the reader attains this understanding much later in the book. Cadigan keeps the note untranslated, so that it can serve as a hook, making the reader interested in reading further until she or he becomes intrigued by the data in the stolen information referred to in the note. The reader’s interest parallels that of the characters. However, as there are many characters, all of whom solve the enigma and interpret the data, the reader identifies with all the characters in turn, rather than with a central hero or heroine. In the opening chapter, Gator, the first character introduced, is a tattoo artist. She is tattooing lotus patterns on an unconscious ‘space case’, a person she refers to as a ‘filing system’ and as ‘hardcopy’. The next two chapters shift to Gina and Sam. Gator does not reappear until much later in the novel. She seems to be a minor character. Cadigan, by starting the novel with a minor character, seems to be indicating that this is a mosaic novel, rather than a novel with a centre periphery narrative form. However, Gator, although minor in the sense that the narrative only rarely focuses on her, is one of the better informed characters. The tattooed space case is in fact the hardcopy for Art Fish; Gator is thus one of the only two humans who know about Art Fish, the AI who is threatened by the socket interface. Cadigan uses representations of liminality to explore questions of judgement: knowledge-related questions and action-related questions. In Cadigan’s novel, the scenes which cohere around the character Gina focus on liminality, in particular, the liminalities to do with gender, sexuality, the juridical, and the border between human and machine. Chapter 2 focuses on Gina. She is in night court, having been arrested at a rave or ‘hit-and-run’ that she attended while looking for Mark, her lover. The juridical discourse is introduced right from the beginning of the chapter, when it is clear that Gina is in night court. It is also clear that it is the transgression that is significant: Gina has broken the law. The context of sexuality, and, in particular, the analysis of conventional feminine sexual roles is also clear: Gina was looking for Mark at the party. Gender, sexuality and the juridical are then linked with the central liminal issue for the novel, the border between human and machine, in a scene where the prosecutor reads out the charges on a case that comes up as Gina waits: ‘Unlawful congress with a machine.’ The court is cleared, as the defence claims commercial confidentiality and Gina, as she is leaving, sees Mark walk in with the people involved with that case, one of whom is Keely, who left the note that we learned of in Chapter 1. She does not know Keely, but hears him addressed by name. Chapters 1 and 2


thus illustrate Cadigan’s narrative style: the enigma is not solved by the actions and thoughts of a single person, piecing it together like a detective. Instead, the characters do not even know each other. However, collectively, knowingly or not, they move the narrative forward and solve the enigma. At first, it was coded as having to do with a sexual discourse (having been left for Jones by his boyfriend), here the sexual discourse is still present (‘unlawful congress’) but coded as aberrant: crossing boundaries; the boundary between human and machine. However, as the unmarked references to the gay couple lead the reader to infer, crossing boundaries is aberrant not as such, but in a juridical context. Cadigan therefore disrupts the binary opposition between human and machine. She does not lead one to ask, ‘What kinds of act between human and machine are wrong?’ but ‘What context constructs certain actions as wrong?’ Synners is thus clearly about boundaries and interpretation, rather than about identity; despite Wolmark’s claim that the novel addresses ‘what it means to be human’, Synners does not deal with essentialism (or anti-essentialism) but with knowledge and epistemologies. The remainder of the chapter is concerned with context. However, the context is the context for the novel, not for the ‘unlawful congress’. The text does not describe morality; it describes transnational capitalism: But the best question was what the fuck was Mark doing there all on his own without a word to her. She and Mark were in it together, always had been. They’d been in it together in the beginning, and when Galen had bought most of the video production company out from under the Beater, and they’d been in it together when Galen let the monster conglomerate take EyeTraxx over from him, and they were supposed to be in it together the day after tomorrow, when they were due to show up for their first full day working for the monster conglomerate— (Cadigan, 1991:14) Gina’s thoughts, trying to figure out what is happening, supply the context: corporate takeouts and transnational capitalism. Technology in this postmodern text is not, despite Jameson’s influential argument, the figure for transnational capitalism: in a scientifically informed postmodern text, transnational capitalism is the context in which technology develops, just as it is in the ‘real world’. Jameson argues that we should interpret representations of technology in postmodern texts figuratively, as standing for late capitalism, because he believes that the subject, in the postmodern world, stands in the same relation to capitalism, as the subject represented in a postmodern fiction does to the representations of technology in the fiction. The generic term for this relation, or aesthetic mode, is ‘the sublime’. The romantics used this aesthetic mode to figure the subject’s relation to nature; Jameson argues that the postmodernist’s figuration of technology is like the romantic’s figuration of nature. Technology is ‘ungraspable’; the subject is reminded of ‘his’ insignificance and finitude. As a


number of feminist critics have pointed out (for both the romantics and the postmodernists) the detailed examples are often strongly, and obviously masculinist. My argument is not about the masculinism of sublime figurations. Instead, I argue that Cadigan is not using the sublime at all. Thus, in the example above, technology does not stand for capitalism. Instead, transnational capitalism and biotechnology/information technology are material practices and discourses which interact with each other in the fictional world of Synners just as in the ‘real’ world. Gina, in the passage above, is not overwhelmed by the ‘ungraspability’ of capitalism: she knows perfectly well who bought out whom (as does Sam, in a scene that I discuss later in this article). Instead, as Balsamo points out, Gina thinks in terms of ‘connections’. She generalizes her model: she is connected to Mark; one company is connected to another; each in networks. The characters in Synners are technologically competent; skilful. They are also equally knowledgeable, at times, about the workings of transnational capitalism. Much ‘anti-bigness’ posturing in American science fiction, as elsewhere in American culture, is based on a valorization of Emersonian autonomy and the claim that this can best be achieved as an ‘independent producer’, a Jeffersonian or Madisonian agrarian or artisan, rather than a wage-labourer. However, as my interpretation of Cadigan’s deconstruction of Gabe’s pastoral retreat (his attempt to set himself up as an ‘independent producer’) in the conclusion to this article shows, this is definitely not Cadigan’s approach. Rather than opposing the individual to the ‘ungraspable totality’ of technology, Synners coheres around a series of encounters between subjects. One of these subjects is an AI. The encounter with technology is thus not an aesthetic phenomenon (the sublime) but an ethical one. The encounters, in the course of the narrative, create change. The transformation is not ontological or epistemological but ethical. The ethical changes come about because of epistemological puzzles: the human characters can interpret Art’s actions in more than one way. Epistemological undecidability is thus used as a springboard for an argument about agency and ethics. Cadigan’s text makes use of a characteristic SF technique, literalization, in the scene which describes the first interaction between Art Fish and Sam. This scene is also a good example of the way in which Cadigan’s novel sets up allusions to, and intertextualities with, its particular contemporary cultural and historical context. In addition to the unemphatic pointing out of the variety of families and sexualities in the opening scene, Synners also raises questions about gender construction and gender crossing. The names of several of the characters in the novel are allusions: Art Fish brings to mind Arthur Fischell, the ‘virtual agent’ developed as an exercise by Brenda Laurel et al. at Atari. Fischell’s persona became so convincing, and his influence so beneficial, that he was promoted to acting director of the lab; and, eventually, one of the Atari VPs phoned to arrange a conference. Brenda Laurel then impersonated Arthur for the video conference. Sam, or SamIAm, as well as being a Dr Seuss character, is,


according to Julian Dibbell (Dery, 1994), a male Australian Deleuzean active on the contemporary internet. Sam is alone in a room in a friend’s house. A computer terminal turns on; it shows a simulated environment and a figure, Art. Unlike the reader, Sam has no idea that Art is an AI. The scene literalizes the ‘Turing test’: Sam assumes that she is communicating with a person and that the person is human. She is, however, unsure whether Art is male or female. During the conversation over the computer, Sam asks Art to phone a mutual friend, Fez. Art does a double-take; Sam assumes, from his odd reaction, that Art is paraplegic; it never occurs to her that he is not human. Art simply apologizes, and says that he can find a way to use the telephone (Cadigan, 1991: 168). Sam both assumes that Art is capable of agency and treats him ethically. The other characters, instead, simply try to predict his actions. Even after realizing that Art has agency, most of the human characters, with the exception of Sam and Gina, argue that Art, as an information virus, is amoral. This is the reason they give for not treating Art ethically. Art is the point where epistemological (prediction, as well as more hermeneutic forms of knowledge) and moral discourses overlap in the text. The figure of Art is undecidable: the articulation point for multiple discourses, each of which is at play in the text. It is not just Sam who treats Art Fish as a subject with agency and ethical claims. So does Gina, the cynical mestiza (she reacts with disgust when someone asks her where a black woman gets a name like Aiesi) synthesizer. In the following passage, Gina both takes Art’s ethical claims for granted and also, in the dismissive comment about ‘techno-Walden-Pondism’, makes an argument about historiography: Her first reaction was an unqualified No-Fucking-Chance. It sounded like a stupid way to get their heads blown up and toss the AI to the sharks at the same time. She could tell little old Sam hated it, and as far as sense went, her money was on Gabe’s kid. All the rest of them reminded her of some kind of retrograde experiment in techno-Walden-Pondism on the communal level, including the white-headed eminence who seemed to have all the answers. The old guy, Fez, he could sound pretty good, but Gabe’s kid had been bolted together right on the first try. (Cadigan, 1991:389) Cadigan is critiquing the idealizing representations of the 1960s. Her reference emphasizes the way in which the neo-transcendentalism of some 1960s countercultures, like transcendentalism itself, set up a pre-lapsarian representation of ‘the American Wilderness’ and of a ‘primitive’ State of Nature to which the communes could aspire. The notion of an alternative society, separate from the dominant American culture, is thus condemned by Cadigan’s character Gina as naïve.


As I have said, Synners uses a mosaic narrative form, shifting between the point-of-view (pov) of a variety of characters. The plot moves forwards through the actions, and is narrated with regard to the pov of all the characters, but it is important to note that the two characters with the most theorized pov, able to analyse and critique their society and the pov of the other characters, are both women of colour. Gina is African American; Sam, Asian American. Cadigan’s privileging of the pov of women of colour is a kind of standpoint epistemology, privileging mestiza consciousness but not, interestingly enough, oppositional consciousness. Neither Gina nor Sam has a unitary racial identity; both are mestiza. Cadigan does not argue that Gina and Sam’s theorizations are arrived at on the basis of an oppositional consciousness. Gina and Sam are not represented as marginal or opposed to the mainstream of society: the future society is not described in terms of a conservative core and radical periphery. Gina and Sam are each represented as having greater insight because of their liminal positionality: Gina as a ‘synner’, creating music videos in cyberspace, Sam as a polymath, with her knowledge of computers, medicine, etc. Mestizaje is represented in the context of a specifically American identity, rather than the context of a deliberate political identification with third world peoples: Gina expressing disgust when asked where a Black woman gets a name like Aiesi, Sam’s Asian mother a yuppy realtor. Cadigan represents Gina and Sam’s mestiza subjectivities as highly nuanced and complex; in many ways the most sophisticated subjectivities in the novel. However, neither Gina nor Sam are fully able to comprehend their own society. Cadigan’s point is that a postmodern society cannot be represented from the pov of one subject. It can only be successfully represented by using the shifting pov of multiple subjects. Cadigan stresses again and again that there is no perspective from which a human being can perceive the representation as a coherent, single picture. The text thus focuses upon the inadequacies of the forms in which information is organized. One good example of this is given in a scene in which Sam, stuck in a traffic jam owing to the out-of-date information on the Gridlid traffic information service, decides to listen to some music: A full ten seconds later, the screen delivered the page. For once she was lucky; it was the very first item she selected for audio excerpt. Mechanics Run Loco, by Scattershot. The credit for the video made her blink: created by Aiesi/Eye-Traxx , acq. by Diversifications, Inc. EyeTraxx acquired by Diversifications? Since when, and how had that gotten by her? She topped back to the LA Rox general menu and selected the news. (Cadigan, 1991:26–7)


She is unable to find the information, and asks a woman of her own age, also stuck in the traffic jam: ‘I just saw this item on the dataline…. It said EyeTraxx had been acquired by Diversifications. You know anything about that?’ Now the woman stared at her as if she was crazy. ‘God, no. That sounds like biz news to me. Snore, snore.’… Feeling sheepish, she topped all the way back to the main menu and selected Business News. Then she stared at the screen while it asked her which subheading she wanted, Local, Regional, National, or International. (Cadigan, 1991:26–7) Eventually, Sam finds the information. If Cadigan had just shown Sam having difficulties with the complexity of the nested menus this could almost have been one of Jameson’s representations ‘in the mode of the sublime’. However, Cadigan introduces a character who rigidly compartmentalizes, dismissing business news as irrelevant to pop music fans. The human being is not set off, opposed to the computer. Instead, the computer is represented as having been programmed by people who think in rigid categories, separating one from the other. The passage thus condemns human prejudice and lack of curiosity. There are other key moments in the text when Sam relates to the ability of computers to exceed human agency or human comprehension. If the text were utilizing the sublime, these moments would be the point at which the mode would be engaged. However, this is not the case. The first passage describes Sam stopping at a fast food joint to buy a snack (Cadigan, 1991: 28). The computer menu screen editorializes on Sam’s order, displaying a lengthy warning of the dangers of caffeine. Sam reads Dr Fish’s Health Warning and tells the fast food workers that the easiest way to get rid of the message is to turn off the computer. They object that they are not allowed to do that. Cadigan is both making a joke about the removal of agency from workers in a transnational company, prefiguring the more serious problems of Gabe, Sam’s father who works for Diversifications, Inc., and also constructing a general argument about agency and otherness. Thus, the reader concludes that Art may have intentionally distributed the warning. The context of otherness is reinforced, in this same scene, when Cadigan includes a little joke on the partly Asian American Sam’s distinguishing of ‘I’ from ‘r’: the only point of which is to emphasize that the American subject may assimilate but the society remains multicultural. This scene is not a representation of the way in which postmodern technology ‘figures’ the intimidating totality of transnational capitalism. This scene is, like the Turing test scene, a description of Art’s attempts to demonstrate his agency to the humans; it is also one of the details which move the plot forward.


The central questions of agency and ethical action are resolved in a final cyberspace scene, where the characters Gabe and Gina must make a series of decisions which must, to them, be freely chosen. However, to Art, as they all realize afterwards, Gabe and Gina are the ‘mirror’ and the ‘fooler loop’, attracting the ‘stroke’, the repetitive killer virus, and freeing Art, or rather the Markt he has become, to act decisively. These scenes, and the earlier narratives staged in cyberspace elaborate upon the characters’ psychological limitations: Gabe interacts with his imaginary playmates, Marly and Caritha, producing friendship and adventures at the same time as he sneaks in and out of his house avoiding his wife, Catherine; Mark produces death fantasies; Gina creates a visual version of the blues, mixing images of travelling with images of love. These fantasies are utterly conventional, drawing on stereotypical representations. It is the psychological effect of the working through, in cyberspace, of each fantasy that is significant. Gabe discovers that Marly and Caritha were infected with the Dr Fish virus, so they were not as imaginary as he thought; he begins to act in the ‘real world’ as he acts in fantasy, leaving Catherine for Gina, making friends again with Sam. Gina stops chasing after Mark; replicating herself, remaining in two places, rather than singing a blues of lost love. Mark leaves his body behind, as he has been fantasizing and learns both that his actions have an effect on the world (the stroke/computer crash that threatens the fictional universe) and that he can think more clearly and more creatively in cyberspace than when embodied. Each change for the machines but the changes make them more responsible, more aware of other beings’ agency: also a conventional conclusion but a valid one. Mark, as a ‘synner’, as human, is heterosexual, and involved in a relationship with Gina. However, in cyberspace, he merges with Art. The binary opposition between human and machine is undermined, not only by the presence of the cyborgs, but also by the construction of Mark and Art as the same. They are the same, not merely as the same sex, but because they share a ‘viral’ quality: not AIDS, but a tendency to use others. Art, the AI, exists ‘in the infinitissimal spaces of the datanet’, spreading like a computer virus, using the computer programs already in the net to write and replicate his own self-aware software. Mark—and again, this is Cadigan’s metaphor, not mine—is like an organic virus which uses the nuclear material of the host cell to replicate its own genetic code; he uses other people for his own benefit. However, when Mark and Art merge, replicated, two of the same, they become fully ‘human’. And, like the comparison between organic virus and software virus suggests, the organic is no more ‘natural’, ideologically speaking, than the inorganic. The punning names make it clear that to be human is to be constructed: artificial Art Fish and the ‘synner’ Visual Mark, named after his profession and wishing to be his creations, become Markt, marked, inscribed. My reading of both Markt and Gabe, here and in the passage above, is thus quite different from Balsamo’s: she argued that Gabe and Mark, as male, were ‘addicted’ to cyberspace, while Gina and Sam, as female, ‘actively manipulate’


it. However, as I see it, three of the human characters interact with, and encounter, the AI, Art, in cyberspace, in modes of relating that combine fantasy and contact with another subject. Gabe and Gina see their choices in primarily emotional terms and in terms which stress the ways in which their choice is between human love and a longing (originally Mark’s) for death. Their actions resolve their emotional dilemmas; Markt’s action resolves the plot. Computer agency and the scientific discourse that Sam has access to become dominant. Thus, contrary to Balsamo’s argument, cyberspace is not ‘actively manipulated’ by the women, or an ‘addiction’, for the men. The men and women are mirrors and fooler loops, hackers’ tricks which Markt uses. Markt’s use of them and their psychological healing is fuelled by Sam, as cyborg, as empowered, knowledgeable young woman. Gina, the new Eve, raising the question of original sin, ends the story with the ironic words ‘Nah, that’s just stupid enough’. Synners returns to the chronotope of the Garden at the end of the story, but uses this chronotope in a way that begins to destabilize it. The story ends with a ‘nuclear’ family: the interracial step-family of Gabe, Gina and Sam, in which the question is not ‘What does a woman want?’ but ‘What’s a father for, anyway?’ (Cadigan, 1991:434). The child in this set-up is not male, as Freud’s scenario would have it, and Sam’s name would suggest, but female. Sam is not Oedipus, but Cassandra (Cadigan, 1991:76) but that story too is changed: she is listened to and believed. The family that ends Synners is not given but both provisional and dependent on female agency: ‘Sam had found him. As it turned out, he hadn’t really been so hard to find, provided someone had been actively looking’ (Cadigan, 1991:434). And for Gina and Gabe, the heterosexual pairing is heavily ironized ‘Is this like any port in a storm?’ (Cadigan, 1991:435). Cadigan’s text shows us that the Northern Californian version of the fantasy of ‘appropriate technology’ is historically and geographically specific; a late capitalist American version of pastoral linked in the text to the Judeo-Christian chronotope of the Garden of Eden and thus to a construction in which liminality and transgression are determined as interdiction rather than as performative subversion. She writes: The light on the voice-only phone meant he had email. He called the local exchange…. Just a thank-you note from the school on the latest simulations for the geography students. It was an isolated area and not a moneyed one, either. Custom-programs off the data-line would have broken their budget. (Cadigan, 1991:429) Gabe’s isolation is dependent on his professional affluence, and his ‘appropriate technology’ is so only compared to the technology he is shown using earlier in


the novel. ‘It wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art…appropriate technology, he told himself’ (Cadigan, 1991:431). Gabe thinks of his cabin in the country: But the front yard was just fine. It stopped short about fifty feet from the front door, where the land dropped sharply down a rocky incline. From there he had an unobstructed view of the ocean. Someone was operating an underwater farm a few hundred yards out; with binoculars he could watch the dolphins popping up and down, hard at work at whatever dolphins did on underwater farms. (Cadigan, 1991:430) As Cadigan’s correctly identifies, front yards, oceans, local schools and dolphins are all elements in Californian Pastoral. In this brief scene, the local school, ocean and front yard could all be in our world. It is the last sentence of the quotation that marks the text as set in the future: the farm is ‘underwater’, not on land. A professional living in ‘splendid isolation’ in present day California would be able to see Chicano farmworkers; Gabe watches dolphins hard at work. The racial and ethnic difference is transformed into species difference. The science fictional touch, the hard-working dolphins stresses the constructedness of this myth: ‘nature’ an origin only by contrast with ‘technology’; the ‘authenticity’, the ‘honest, unforced communication’ of the rural community and the ‘ideal socialization’ of the local school, having meaning only as an ideological construction. When read as SF, then, this brief description of Gabe’s retreat from the city deconstructs the American pastoral fantasy which Gabe’s action lives out. It is Gabe’s pastoral retreat that enables Sam to find him: There wasn’t another independent simulation producer in a few hundred miles’ (Cadigan, 1991:434). Significantly, here too ‘independent’ has a dual meaning: first, the financial meaning, ‘not belonging to a specific company’ that enables Sam to find him; second, the ideological meaning, ‘Heinleinesque individual’ that is part of this SF trope. Gina’s cynical laugh breaks down the figurations: ‘Gina burst out laughing. “Simulate, my ass. I did video just so I could do all that shit”’ (Cadigan, 1991:433). Linking Baudrillardian simulation with Bakhtinian carnival; action, physicality and vulgarity, all of which, in her universe, are constructed in relation to and enabled by technology. Gina’s point of view, therefore, as Balsamo argues, is one that makes action, and ethical action, possible; action and ethics rooted in physicality (‘shit’, ‘fucking’), closely linked to sexuality and also, which Balsamo does not note, based on a disruption of the border between human and machine. Sam is described as ‘bolted together on the first try’, Art as ‘tossed to the sharks’. Most


importantly, the AI is thought of as someone who matters, just as do the humans, ‘It sounded like a stupid way to get their heads blown up and toss the AI to the sharks at the same time.’ At the end of the novel, Cadigan draws on an immune system discourse which has come up before in relation to Art Fish. Like religious discourses, immune system discourses focus on the relation between subject and other, coding this relation in terms which have to do with ethics as well as very clearly, the juridical. The passage which develops the immune system discourse most fully is in Gabe’s voice and describes a possible response to the socket technology:’ “Inoculated,” he said glumly, “I thought for sure they’d just ban sockets.” ‘Gina’s response is: ‘No one’s doing the procedure now,’ she said. ‘But that’s temporary. Once they get the safeguards done right, they’ll be back in business.’ He frowned. ‘Who will be back in business?’ (Cadigan, 1991:434) The last two lines of the dialogue work in a way that is characteristic of Cadigan’s text. The latter line repeats a phrase from the former line. This repetition makes the text work deconstructively, by ‘differing and deferring’. The meaning of the phrase ‘back in business’ is different in Gina’s sentence and in Gabe’s sentence: in Gina’s it is a cliché, she means that socket implantation will resume; in Gabe’s sentence, the phrase has taken on a new meaning, the one that is often thought of as literal. The repetition of ‘back in business’ has two functions: both illustrating the difference between Gabe’s and Gina’s viewpoints and locating the scientific discovery that is the impetus for the story in its economic context. The characters in the story often discuss the ways in which context is necessary for meaning. It is important here to note that the philosophy of language of the novel is multiplex, like the narrative structure and the consciousness of the characters. The undecidability constructed by the repetition of ‘back in business’ is not resolved in Gabe’s use of the phrase; the undecidability is created by Gabe’s use of ‘back in business’ in a different sense. Gabe’s meaning, the one which refers to an economic context for the sockets, is not privileged in the text. Each context, and each pov, make up the multiplex reality of the text. What SF shows us is that Jameson’s question about the relation between postmodernism and late capitalism, his notion that technology in a postmodern text is a figure for late capitalism, his idea of a cognitive map, are all only complex, not multiplex. When Gina and Sam find Gabe in his pastoral idyll the narrative shifts from the multiplex, non-dialogic form to the narrative representation of a straightforward choice between two ethical postures with regard to the sockets: banning them, or living with them:


‘The sockets should be banned…. Appropriate technology, that’s how I live.’ ‘All appropriate technology hurts somebody…. Every technology has its original sin.’ She laughed. ‘Makes us original synners. And we still got to live with what we made.’ (Cadigan, 1991:435) Cadigan argues that the synners of the title will change for the machines, transforming their subjectivity in line with the new technology, and linking the formation of scientific knowledges with the formation of an ethic. The phrase the characters find to name this process is a deconstructive pun, referring to pragmatics and strategics: the practices of the new synthesizing technology displace the religious meaning of ‘sin’. Gina’s claim that both she and Gabe are ‘original synners’ is a direct challenge to the other character’s, Gabe’s, belief that one can retreat in a pastoral idyll from the ‘evils’ of high technology, Gabe’s suggestion—banning the sockets which interface human and machine—is simply another move, another Garden trope: a discourse, a practice, a strategy of norms, of transgression and interdiction. Cadigan’s character, ‘Gina’, does more than just comprehend Gabe’s point of view in a Bakhtinian dialogic field of vision. She appropriates his Garden metaphor and deconstructs it, transforming sinners, interpellated by a normalizing, disciplinizing Garden narrative, to synners, cyborged, disrupting difference. Rather than ending with an always recontainable transgression, Cadigan’s character Gina argues: ‘[W]e still got to live with what we made’; both acknowledging responsibility and accepting agency. Notes 1 Laura Chernaik (1994) ‘“Skulking amongst the gantries”: gender difference, species difference and transnational accumulation’, Letterature D’America, Year XIV, No. 55; (1996) ‘Spatial displacements: transnationalism and the new social movements’, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 3, No. 3:251–75. 2 My use of the term ‘standpoint epistemology/ies’ to refer to the truth claims of identity politics is taken from Nancy Hartsock; her adaptation of this Hegelian and Marxist concept is explained fully in Hartsock (1983). Many activist groups, writing before Hartsock, if they were unfamiliar with Hegel, would have found in Franz Fanon a (more pessimistic) source for this notion. 3 Locus, Issue No. 382, Vol. 29, No. 5, November 1992; Cosmopolitan, 1992. 4 cf. Butler (1990).

References ABELOVE, H. , BARALE, M.A. and HALPERIN, D. (1993) editors, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader London: Routledge.


ANZALDÚA, Gloria (1987) Borderlines/La Frontera San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute. BAKHTIN, Mikhail (1984) Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics Manchester: Manchester University Press. BALSAMO, Anne (1996) Technologies of the Gendered Body Durham and London: Duke. BARTHES, Roland (1974) S/Z New York: Hill and Wang. BUTLER, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble London: Routledge. BUTLER, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter London: Routledge. CADIGAN, Pat (1987) Mindplayers New York: Bantam Spectra. CADIGAN, Pat (1989) Patterns New York: Ursus Imprints and London: Grafton HarperCollins. CADIGAN, Pat (1991) Synners New York: Bantam Spectra. CADIGAN, Pat (1992) Fools New York: Bantam Spectra. CHERNAIK, Laura (1994) ‘“Skulking amongst the gantries”: gender difference, species difference and transnational accumulation’ Letterature D’America , Year XIV, No. 55, 113–29 . CHERNAIK, Laura (1996, forthcoming) ‘Spatial displacements: transnationalism and the new social movements’ Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 3, No. 3, 251–75 . COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE, THE (1979) ‘A black feminist statement’, first published in Eisenstein, Zillah (1979) editor, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for a Socialist Feminism New York: Monthly Review Press. DE LAURETIS, Teresa (1984) Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and Macmillan Press. DE LAURETIS, Teresa (1987) Technologies of Gender Bloomington: Indiana University Press. DELANY, Samuel R. (1980) ‘Generic protocols: science fiction and mundane’ in De Lauretis, Teresa , Huyssen, Andreas and Woodward, Kathleen (1980) editors, The Technological Imagination Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press Inc. DELANY, Samuel R. (1994) Silent Interviews Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. DERY, Mark (1994) editor, Flame Wars Durham and London: Duke. EDELMAN, Lee (1994) Homographesis London: Routledge. FOUCAULT, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish New York: Vintage. FOUCAULT, Michel (1980, 1985, 1986) The History of Sexuality : Vol. 1 , Introducton ; Vol. 2 , The Use of Pleasure , Vol. 3 , The Care of the Self New York: Vintage and Random House. GREY, Chris (1995) The Cyborg Handbook London: Routledge. HALPERIN, David (1994) Saint Foucault Oxford: Oxford University Press. HARAWAY, Donna (1985) ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’ Socialist Review 80:65–106 . HARAWAY, Donna (1991) ‘The biopolitics of postmodern bodies: constitutions of self in immune system discourse’ in HARAWAY, Donna (1991) editor, Simians, Cyborgs and Women London: Routledge. HARTSOCK, Nancy (1983) ‘The feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism’ in Harding, S. and Hintakka, M. (1983) editors, Discovering Reality Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 283–310 .


hooks, bell (1990) ‘Radical black subjectivity’ in hooks, bell (1990) editor, Yearning Boston: South End Press. JAMESON, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious Ithaca: Cornell University Press. JAMESON, Fredric (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review , 146:53–94 . LORDE, Audre (1984) Sister Outsider Trumansburg: The Crossing Press. LYKKE, Nina and BRAIDOTTI, Rosi (1996) Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs London: Zed Books. MASSEY, Doreen (1993) ‘Politics and space/time’ in Keith, M. and Pile, S. (1993) editors, Place and the Politics of Identity London: Routledge, pp. 141–62 . MORAGA, Cherrie (1983) Loving in the War Years Boston: South End Press. MORAGA, Cherrie and ANZALDÚA, Gloria (1981) This Bridge Called My Back New York: Kitchen Table Press. ROSS, Andrew (1991) Strange Weather London: Verso. SANDOVAL, Chela (1991) ‘US Third World feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world’ Genders 10:1–24 . SEDGEWICK, Eve (1990) The Epistemology of the Closet Harmondsworth: Penguin. STONE, Alluquére Rosanne (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WOLMARK, Jenny (1993) Aliens and Others London: Harvester.

80

‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy Sally R.Munt

Abstract

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Women’s Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon one’s own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere. Keywords feminism; Lesbian Studies; Lesbian and Gay Studies; the personal/experiential; liberalism; homophobia I first started teaching Lesbian Studies in 1986. In several ways my initiation typifies the historical development of the subject over the past decade. I was involved with grassroots Women’s Studies education, a member of the Brighton Women’s Studies branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (the first feminist group of its kind in the UK). The WEA is a national British liberal institution, an education provider for adults who are non-traditional participants, and determinators, of their own education. WEA students are encouraged to join their area or town branch, which operates collectively in deciding what kinds of courses to run. The WEA is a fairly devolved, localized organization, and commands a lot of affection and loyalty from its affiliates. A number of feminists had recently set up the Brighton Women’s Studies branch, and, as its membership became predominantly dyke, there was a desire to put on specifically lesbian course material. The first ever course, Lesbian Perspectives,


taught by Flis Henwood, Jane Boston and Jackie Stacey, was a big success. Brighton is one of Britain’s gayest towns, and the educational imperative was a response to indigenous community needs, and the political changes of the past twenty years which made lesbian education for lesbians realizable. The WEA is an example of an institution amenable to provincial radicalism due to its fringe independence. Metropolitan control over regional educational policies is an anathema to the WEA’s spirit of enablement and empowerment. This does not really constitute a discourse of self-determination, rather the model remains a ‘top-down’ one of benign patronage and background management. The WEA is a parental institution; as my experience unfolded, its role became more transparent. In 1988 Parliament put lesbian and gay education on the agenda by discouraging it under Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which made it illegal to fund the promotion of ‘pretended family values’. This milieu of intolerance caused many service providers to the lesbian and gay community to get itchy feet and back away from us. Liberal or leftwing organizations who had quietly given us limited support over the years—in a kind of private forbearance —suddenly found that a public statement of service provision was beyond their means. Meanwhile back on the British South coast, Bexhill-on-Sea, in the bohemian mind of a Brighton city girl, is backlash backyard. Primarily a retirement resort, this small town is true blue-rinse and Tory ladies. Bexhill branch threatened to withdraw from the WEA due to their proximity, in the Sussex area seasonal brochure, to Sodom by the Sea (UK), the Brighton Women’s Education Branch. At issue was the advert for my own course entitled Lesbian Literature—no subtlety there, and none intended. Bexhill branch wanted the offensive word ‘lesbian’ eliminated from all official publicity. There ensued the kind of familiar battle over naming, including a presidential visit from the District Council Chair, who nervously sat through a roomful of dykes telling her why we needed to call a spade a spade. (To dig your path to hell, she must have thought.) Antennae from the national office in London swung our way, sensitive to internecine strife and to the political climate created by the impending Section 28. Although our District Tutor, a straight man who turned his sexual politics around with astonishing commitment, threatened to resign over the issue, the branch (and I, as a member) backed down. The choice was to advertise the course pseudonymously, or not run it at all. Those in the know would interpret it as a lesbian course. The new name was so discreet, I can’t now remember it. Shortly afterwards I was asked to write an article for a WEA publication on teaching lesbian education. I responded by entitling it ‘Why we all need lesbian education’. Needless to say it was ‘edited’ to pieces. This was a bad experience, but there were positive constituents. Subsequently the dykes declared secession and began issuing our own publicity, which was direct and honest, and out. The branch was for a time a political home. We ran a varied and popular Lesbian Studies curriculum; converts, friendships, and girlfriends were made, lost, and found again. My initiation came through

TEACHING LESBIAN STUDIES 83

developing Lesbian Studies out of two separable but related roots—Women’s Studies and the parochial lesbian community. A liberal arts institution reluctantly facilitated its appearance, resourced it, and eventually turned a blind eye when it rebelled and bit the hand that fed it. Liberalism itself is an unpredictable beast, bad-tempered, but often pliable; eventually it incorporated local Lesbian Studies diffidently—some said inevitably—into its county provision. This story could be replicated many times in cataloguing the growth of Lesbian Studies in the UK over the last ten years. Dogged persistence, incremental institutional shifts, astute and dedicated political organizing by grassroots and professional advocates, cynical and conditional bargaining, strange alliances—Lesbian Studies has seeped into the curriculum. (An almost exclusively adult curriculum though, since it is virtually illegal to tell teenagers that lesbians are lovely, and living down your street.) Different adult education organizations, because they are often decentralized, and are market led, have an efficient response to social change. They are often staffed by people who hold dear the best tenets of a liberal education and who have not yet ossified into bureaucrats. Adult education students tend to be extremely loyal and enthusiastic, volunteering input to their own education, and conjoining in the success of its execution, plus, because they are often older, they are more confident of their desire to learn, that process is inflected by sharing. At the chalk face of these classes both the student and tutor often feel like they confront the same task. Certainly in both Women’s Studies and my Lesbian Studies classes of the 1980s, I think I had a humility, a shared sense of purpose, and a sharp enthusiasm for teaching which is difficult to crank-start nowadays. Most of the committed feminists teaching Lesbian Studies in the Brighton WEA have gone on to become full-time faculty in British universities. This career progression represents increased job security, and the completion of the PhD. In my case I expected my first appointment to mirror the collegial and optimistic working environment shared by my friends in the WEA. I had taken feminist practice to be the norm. Consequently, by the time the first department I landed in had wrought its damage, I had wised up considerably. The attacks on my professionalism—including that I ‘indoctrinated students with garbage’, that I ‘didn’t know what I was talking about’, and that I assessed students’ work according to ‘partial, political criteria’—were accusations made by the male left to discredit my field (Feminist Studies). Homophobia was intrinsic to them. One male lecturer would sit in and ‘monitor’ my Women’s Studies course. This guy had tried every manipulative incorporation (including sexual advances) and, when I had resisted, I had not got my contract renewed; I was decidedly suspicious. These were very sexual politics. This experience also provided a precursory alarm to the way my personal identity and the subject have been constantly collapsed together, as an imposed subjectivity by all facets of academe since. Another university I taught in was incrementally more accommodating. I had more control over my teaching matter, in which I included a significant amount


of lesbian and gay material. I ordered every queer book I could think of through their generous library budget. Heterosexual colleagues in Cultural Studies seemed happy for gay or lesbian faculty to teach ‘their stuff’ in courses. The two academics who refused to speak to me were not typical of the general inclusive ambience of the place. But I received blankly disbelieving looks when I tried to explain about the intimidation by homophobic students in my classes (generally young white boys in American street gear who would sit together at the back and either talk continuously, or stare at me antagonistically, never writing a note). The academy has been persuaded that an often theoretically stylized Lesbian and Gay Studies is acceptable as a ‘special option’, but the structures of homophobia spinning through the lesbian or gay person’s everyday experience of academic life are unutterable. The splitting off of theory from practice is not for our benefit. While I was teaching there the structure of the British university system fundamentally changed. Early in the 1990s the old polytechnic sector became what were to be called ‘new universities’. There has been a trenchant class hierarchy in our higher education sector. Historically the polytechnics were functionalist colleges designed to provide vocational training for the working and lower middle classes. They received poor funding, particularly for the Humanities, but due to their historically more left-wing status, they tended to produce the most radical departments. The work-force had greater unionization, and, generally, they paid their staff better rates, and offered better promotion. The polytechnics were managed by people who understood it was their employees’ only income, archetypally first generation professionals. The ‘old universities’ (the tendency to differentiate persists) have always had much more money, and still retain elements of the idea that a degree in the Humanities, a liberal education, can serve no greater purpose than to be ‘a preparation for life’. Only those who do not have to worry too much about money can afford this view. One of the tasks of John Majorism was to enhance the perception of a ‘classless society’. So, some of the imbalances between the old and new universities were to be evened out, and we were to compete on a ‘level playing field’. Aside from the inanities of this, there were two results: first, some new universities received from central government a lot of fresh cash; second, a culture of ‘publish or perish’ (arguably another undesirable American import) took over. Ironically, Lesbian, Gay, and Feminist Studies have benefited from this. Money, in the form of teaching relief, scholarships, sabbatical leave, research expenses, or research fellowships, has become available to often younger scholars (administrators believe they publish more and are cheaper to fund). This generation, because of the groundwork performed by a handful of Stonewall pioneers who have been grinding away in isolation in their respective departments since the 1970s, have traversed the academy in the belief that Lesbian Studies is legitimate, and credible. They are proliferating, and have a maze of intellectual paths. My own career has benefited from the present


research-based economy. I’m now a research fellow at an ‘old university’. I was told explicitly, after I got the job, that I was appointed because I had more publications than the other candidates. In some ways, I do not think it matters what I have published, it is the fact that I have. Years ago I understood that the liberal academic institution respects its myth of the self-regulating economy of publishing. I know my career has been built on the parameters of capital, a paradox that capitalism, like liberalism, permits the consumption of intellectual bricolage. The spring 1993 issue of the Directory of Lesbian and Gay Studies1 lists forty women teaching Lesbian Studies in British universities. The course directory also lists thirty institutions offering Lesbian and Gay Studies options. These figures are now bound to be out of date, as new courses are being validated regularly. They also do not include all the people who have not heard of, or do not subscribe to DOLAGS. There are multiple modules containing material on lesbian sexuality or culture which are not openly identified as such. There are numerous undergraduate and graduate degrees in Women’s Studies, all of which have a greater or lesser proportion of lesbian content. There is the one Lesbian and Gay Studies degree, the MA in Sexual Dissidence, at the University of Sussex. When I first began teaching in the 1980s, I used to be able to think I knew, or knew of, every woman out there doing Lesbian Studies. Now I am glad to say I do not. In recent years I have been to several major national Lesbian and Gay conferences with hundreds of participants, and various Feminist Studies conferences containing a substantial diversity of lesbian papers. Lesbian Studies in the UK, and in the USA, is geographically and conceptually a hybrid. A relationship exists which, in academic and political terms, often appears colonial. I want to address some dissimilarities evident to me in my own split locatedness between the two. Many of the iconic texts used in the USA are imported for British use, and appropriated there. The traffic is not equal. It used to be that every vaguely sympathetic straight student had read Andrea Dworkin, now it is more likely to be Judith Butler. Both are separately identifiable as North American in their styles, both assume a North American reader, of a different cultural moment. Inevitably there is, at the ideological level, a trans-global lesbian. She exists in the changing texts and intertexts of cultural and racial hegemony. We do have our own hegemonies in Lesbian Studies, but there are still substantial incompatibilities and resistances. For example, while in the USA the dominant mode of politicizing and writing from the perspectives of different ethnicities gives the impression of an uneasy amalgam of competing interest groups, in Britain these differences are tacit. In the UK the model for organizing and conceptualizing radical struggles is not the Civil Rights Movement, or the ideology of competitive individualism, but the old male left imperative of Marxism and coalition. We often succeed in alliances where the US fails. Confrontation is not our mode d’emploi of choice: quiet, polite persuasion is. There are fewer of us, and we need to maintain working relations between


different political and cultural interests. This can be seen positively as dialogistic, or negatively as a sell-out, depending on your position. My sense is that British political groups are often effective at listening to each other, but it may only go skin deep. Second, the Lesbian and Gay Studies culture in the USA (as in the academic mainstream) seems much more orientated towards the creation of big stars. While we also have our mini-heroes, they appear to have more extended roots in local communities and activisms. But I also perceive that the position of professor has an aura, a role of mentor, and a symbolic power I have not seen endowed at home (in my dreams…). The role of teaching as master, or preceptor, is articulated as character-forming in the US, whereas the British, true to type, would prefer to ignore the emotional undertows of instruction. Also Lesbian and Gay Studies in the USA has had conferred upon it greater institutional status and, hence, more privilege. We in the UK occasionally feel like poor relations. Status is awarded in spite of, rather than because of, queer interventions. The financing of the American academy exceeds anything UK teaching professionals can fantasize, and the veiled awe, resentment, and envy this generates manifest themselves in British faculty both as an inverse bourgeois moral supremacy and as intellectual intimidation. Capitalism ensnares us as the market determines the structure of our field: for example, commissioning editors in the UK have one major concern—will it sell in the USA? Related to, even produced from, these two dynamics, Lesbian Studies, when present in an institutional context, becomes indistinguishable from Lesbian and Gay Studies, and generates a culture of complaint. Countercultures are infected with the dominant ideology, and thus the hierarchical, competitive, and individualistic structure of the discipline in the USA perpetrates resentment and division. The star system has two sides to its coin, representing the same hunger for recognition. Faculty seek redress for the stigma of homosexuality, requiring inappropriate compensation, in the form of veneration, from students. Graduate students expect faculty to represent them demographically, to embody their specific identities and desires, in a simple equation of ‘I don’t see myself, therefore I will blame you’, which does not allow for the complex pleasures and merits of cross-identification. Racial categories become the fetishized representation of difference, and other oppressions become subsumed under them, and ignored, thus failing to focus on the subtleties, and thus success, of a divisive hegemony. In the ‘tyranny of co-dependence’2 each side trivializes the intention and effort of the other in resisting oppressive practices. The real relations of struggle, with our well-funded enemies, become neglected, and deferred. This results from our fixation with identity. Having been named, and contained, we now seek narcissistically to reproduce the restrictions of our immediate experience. Specific political changes can be achieved expediently, without imitating the facile, vacuous protestations of postmodernist despondency: our dystopia is real enough.


Conceptually Lesbian Studies still straddles the divide between the social history of Women’s Studies and the high theory of Feminist Studies and Queer Studies. I think what became clearer to me in planning this piece was the indebtedness Lesbian Studies has to Women’s Studies, and how, in the race to emulate European philosophy, we need to remember our foundation in a political movement, and not lose ‘street theory’ to ‘straight theory’. Street theory is a sharp, accessible, and direct political analysis of what needs to be done, it is intelligent activism. Alan Sinfield calls us to refuse an overprofessionalized Lesbian and Gay Studies, and to conceptualize ourselves, in Gramsci’s terms, as ‘organic intellectuals’, members of political movements aggravating for material change, and not necessarily academics. We also need to maintain some respect for and humility towards the effort expended by warring antecedents; when we arrogantly ignore the clashes with university authorities which more senior female faculty instigated in the 1970s and 1980s, bitter fights within and on behalf of Women’s Studies, which pushed over an empty space for us to occupy with our Lesbian (and Gay) Studies in the 1990s, we waste a priceless resource. At times I have despaired about how tough it is to be an out, butch, working-class lesbian teaching in a British university. But in those moments it has been older feminist and lesbian colleagues who have given me the most insight and support. There is an acute energy in each new generation full of the shock of its own exclusion, but outrage coupled with wisdom inflicts a deeper cut. The premise that Lesbian Studies developed out of feminism is true of my personal and professional trajectory, and the relationship continues to be interdependent, as histories of the activist, as well as intellectual movements testify. I wrote, researched, and consumed Feminist Studies, and taught it, before its covert lesbian content became explicit. Women’s Studies and Feminist Studies conferred a limited institutional legitimacy on my scarcely closeted queer studies. But this cover disabled as much as it enabled; the homophobia of middle-class heterosexual feminist faculty, their fear manifestly founded in their own insecure status, confirmed in me a self-evident axiom—the gyneroticism of feminism. I resisted the tokenistic lesbianism I felt pressured to provide. The feminist curriculum preferred by the academy still relegates its race, class, and lesbian weeks to the end of term (or worse, to a single text, like The Color Purple), problematizing a normalized, monologic, white, heterosexual, middleclass feminist theory. I do not want to be structured as a problem. To ignore the interactive, multiple, compounded presence of these inseparable categories within Feminist Studies falsely totem- and tokenizes them, creates unspoken ‘other Others’, distils into essence that which is never pure, and pays homage to a mythical liberal pluralism which makes empathetic oppressions compete. The soreness of this is rubbed when I attempt to censor/efface my workingclass culture, sensing that to be out as a lesbian is as much deviation as colleagues or managers can cope with. I do more passing as middle class nowadays, a skill in which I have invested studiously and expensively. Similarly,


I wonder how harmful it has been to Black colleagues to acquire ‘whiteness’ (although ‘race’ is more difficult to erase in the eye of the beholder). The patina of cultural homogeneity is endemic to employment opportunities in higher education. The academy organizes identities monologically as seamless and discrete entities, taking the most abjected (in my case ‘lesbian’) and spectacularly isolating it. The model operating so intransigently is the brilliant and ultra-maligned feminist epithet, ‘the personal is political’. The finesse of my own grappling with over-identification with Lesbian Studies is irrelevant to the academy, which sees us as one and the same, totalizing both. (Sometimes I yearn for a private self, a secret sex life, work that I can leave at the office.) I am a priori identified with Lesbian Studies the moment I enter a classroom or attend a meeting. This annexation of self into the subject has had a radical political history, challenging myths of objective rationality. An ethical pedagogy accepts the mutual coinvestment of the teacher with her subject. But the projections of heterosexual faculty and students are frequently unsubtle renditions of pitifully predictable types. I was once asked at a formal interview for a job at a mainstream mixed coeducational university if I allowed men in my classroom. The Equal Opportunities Officer monitoring the interview did not even notice. ‘The personal is political’ is like a refrigerator humming in the working background of a whole generation of lesbian and feminist faculty: we have learned a barely conscious praxis of accountability, but our conscientiousness can often slide into guilty defensiveness. The issue of over-identification arises out of a cognizance of scarcity; our marginal space is still precarious. Notoriously difficult is negotiating the dense, tense power structure between ourselves and lesbian students. I have been both idolized and reviled by those whose exceeding expectations are a symptomatic response to an inadequate presence. The economy of deprivation means we carry too much symbolic currency, and in the surrounding pressure many of us succumb to exhaustion and illness, and frequently withdraw into bitterness. A culture of blame surrounds each lesbian academic who is perceived to have failed the ‘community’; similarly, reification can be just as crippling. Idols are lifted only to fall. Perhaps the answer to this is continuously to address how all knowledge is invested by power, a truism which does not disappear with identity politics. Another endurable is sex: the collapsing of corruption and seduction into instruction whenever any (male or female) homosexual is let loose on impressionable minors (by default, in the case of students) ensures that sexuality is omnipresent in the classroom. Ideally this should just reveal the perpetual eroticism of pedagogy. But in a lesbian’s classroom the stakes are always intensified. Some teachers intentionally play with this pleasure: the thrill, the sexual frisson of a successful lecture performance, the flush it produces, these effects can be contrived as an accomplishment which both indulges and parodies, camps up those predetermined projections. I have dressed up for a paper, and indeed a lecture, knowing that intellectual desire, and seduction, are


intrinsic to its effect. Sometimes it is fun to twist the co-implication of self with subject back on to the audience, in a shrewd form of protective voice-throwing. This diffuse mindfuck has to remain safer sex though, for both parties. Feminism purported to imbue institutional practice with the elision of boundaries: this promise was a chimera. Most fractured boundaries in university life appear to me to be exploitative rather than liberatory. Unfortunately the straight menopausal male lecturer stepping across the line seems to quintessentialize this frame-breaking. The powerful can afford to be the most relaxed about protocol, their positions are relatively secure. Ironically, lesbian and feminist academics often are the most rigorous about maintaining professional distance, a habit that enrages the students who wish to be our allies. This dynamic is a minefield: the homophobia of the institution and the alienation it produces will often push the lesbian professor into the metaphorical and real arms of her students. The confessional moment with that always already implicated graduate student is easily understood, but it is a predicament riddled with its own dilemmas. Temporary relief from professional headaches can be a sugared, but bitter pill, as intimacy produces its own checklist of ethical obligations and torn allegiances. The power issues in this relationship are far from uni-directional though; lesbians more than most fear the accusation of sexual harassment. The lesbian lecturer is an object of scrutiny, a spectacle, a freak, a stranger, and a loner. We prevaricate on the edge, not really clear where we belong. Our research is often unclassifiable as we breach disciplinarity and conceptual traditions. To many of us our Lesbian Studies research is a second string to the bread and butter of malestream teaching. The anomaly of research opportunities, and the apparent sudden breakthrough of Lesbian Theory has been built upon years of spare-time industry. The sheer labour of love of Lesbian Studies is touching, precious, treasurable. Maybe we should pause to consider the virtual instantaneity with which Lesbian Studies seemingly appeared. Feminist Studies, for students, remained radical, but within the field I think there was a tinge of tiredness, it needed a new blade. The parallel expansion of Foucauldian gay male interest in sexuality studies gave Lesbian Studies a prospective suitor. The closetry of Gay Studies within Critical and Cultural Studies mirrored the experience of Lesbian Studies within Women’s Studies, and this new partnership, Lesbian and Gay Studies, an uneasy marriage with all the concomitant evading of difference an expedient union incites, has been the model able to be taken up by the liberal academic institution. Lesbian and Gay Studies is a weird wedlock of alliances which in its limited way works. It is a double-beard, a marriage of convenience in the grand tradition of keeping people quiet so we can get on with consummating our own desires. This liberal union cloaks the gender inequality which impregnates matrimony, trivializing certain sorts of feminist writing as essentialist or naive, denigrating its popular allure. The accusation that work is ‘too personal’ persists; the academic correctness of objective, generalized analysis is hegemonic in


Queer Theory’s quest for legitimation. Intelligent self-location and the analysis of experience remain a kind of ‘women’s genre’ in the canon of essay writing. Where was Lesbian Studies five years ago? The energy being invested now is remarkable and heroic, but this effort has been taken for years without benefiting in visibility. Certain historical conditions have allowed the contemporary generation of lesbian intellectuals to come out, and thus every essay, every paper, every comment in class is shoving compulsory heterosexuality aside, just for a moment. The patina of liberal pluralism prevailing within the Humanities has permitted this growth. The tenet of the split between private and public spheres as the organizing relationship of democracy is held fiercely by the bourgeois professions. Thus a movement whose key identity is to challenge this (feminism) held fascination. Feminism has been granted a proscribed space by the rhetoric of liberal pluralism which has an image of inclusiveness to maintain. But, as the critiques of multiculturalism have demonstrated, the centre still holds, nuanced by change, but effective nevertheless. My feelings in writing this piece collide between the thrill, the buzz that infects Lesbian Studies as it infuses the academy with a fresh perspective, the excitement that the new permissiveness of sexual inquiry has generated, and the longing to trust that this radical input retains its hold. Lesbian Studies is grabbing on to its precarious ledge with strong, penetrating fingers. Conversely, there is a depression I cannot shake off, the suspicion that Lesbian Studies, like Feminist Studies, will shake off its activists, will demur to institutional favours and the compromises they extract, will assimilate, and separate, and become isolated from its constituency. Those women to whom this transpires will become victims of two sets of antagonisms, and consequently will retire into private bitterness, or inhabit incestuous professional cliques. The belief in a lesbian, feminist, and gay community as an expedient essentialism is one way to prevent this, as it means there is no option to withdraw in stubborn, and suicidal, self-righteousness. Isolationism is our biggest menace. In our own work, isolationism can produce a Lesbian Studies that subsumes race, class, and gender under sexuality. Women’s Studies tried to do this with gender, and became heavily criticized for it. The institution tries to isolate these categories as qualifiers, or additions, to a conceptual norm. Individual lesbian intellectuals need to specify the distinctive mechanisms of sexuality, but also show their co-implication with other axes determining identity. In the war of cultural attrition, the establishment has invented a blunt instrument, a mallet to crack a nut—political correctness—in order to diminish the ideological linkages and political alliances being forged. Isolationism is facilitated by a rubric of competition enforced between us. So far I have discussed the history of Lesbian Studies in its vexed relation to Women’s Studies and Feminism. In the final part of this piece I want to concentrate on one text, which by coincidence dropped through my letterbox last week. I have not chosen it because of its excellence, but because it is indicative of a generic response, and phobia, of the establishment to the motility of power.


The abuses of English’,5 in the latest European English Messenger, written by Derek Brewer, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, England, one of the de facto figureheads of the discipline, is a diatribe against political correctness in the canon. Brewer’s nostalgic ardour for the reestablishment of literary principles such as ‘objectivity’ (p. 43), ‘common sense’ (p. 44), the ‘right or wrong’ of interpretation, and the ‘authority’ of a text, to see literature as ‘life-enhancing’ (p. 40), and replete with traditional values, his plea that we should ‘concentrate on teaching great works of literature rather than trivial ones’ (p. 45), and that English literature is a ‘definable body of texts’ (p. 40) is a predictable rehash of all the trenchant totems holding mastery in the academy since Matthew Arnold and F.R.Leavis. It is curricula cleansing. Establishment whiplash of this type is hardly rhetorically modish, but the interest of this piece lies in the structure of its case. Brewer’s language conjoins the popular moral panic around abuse with models drawn from master/slave and sadomasochistic discourse, his piece evokes a spectral and intuitive homosexual presence, his enemy of critical and cultural studies is feminized as irrational, amoral, wild, uncontrollable, and causative of a ‘weakened’ subject and self. The model of English Studies being invoked is a sexualized, gendered, dysfunctional family with Brewer at the head, as Victorian patriarch. His voice adopts the role of injured parent reluctantly curbing infantile excesses. At the same time he manages to claim his position as exponentially martyred: Those who stand out [against political correctness] are in danger of losing jobs or promotions. There are departments of English where lecturers dare not make aloud any of the asservations above’ (p. 42). Now, I am very familiar with being coerced into the place of excessive child. My role models have become Lisa Simpson and Darlene Conner. These nascent cerebral terrorists are lower-class proto-dykes who embody an in-your-face smart-assed savvy. But whereas Homer’s and Dan’s patriarchy is benign (in Homer’s case banal), the institution is far more unbending. The infantilization, and feminization, of Lesbian Studies is abstruse and compelling. It is enforced structurally by the withholding of authority and speech. It continues through our marginalization in the curriculum, and in the dismissive idea that straights cannot speak for us when they exclude us from their course material. (This is based on a mistaken premise: would we claim that we should not study History, because the dead cannot speak for themselves? Informed presence is always to be welcomed.) Until we are able to take up the status of equals (thus queering the categories themselves), our project is formed in a reaction against our parents, the metaphor is intransigent. They are doling out the pocket money. I recognize this as reformism, as maligned liberalism, and I do not see how I can pretend to anything else, given that I have chosen family membership over disinheritance. Like it or not, the liberal creed of academic freedom, pluralism and diversity, and even of liberation, has both limited and facilitated Lesbian Studies in the academy. Throughout my teaching career it has been liberally inclined management that has financed my eager corruption of young minds. The


dependence on this patronage opens me to accusations of assimilation, that the subaltern has appropriated the master’s tools. The debate runs on: is the dildo a phallus? Certainly I have often been accused of ‘selling out’ by young lesbian students on independent incomes. I am cynical because it seems I am accumulating too many debts. I see the bourgeoisification of Queer Theory and want to defend conceptual complexity but attack the political complacency appending it. Those who think there are easy careers to be won are not alert to the destiny of Women’s Studies. Compromises have had to have been negotiated, or imposed, before institutional favours were extended. Occasionally, some outstanding women have had lucky breaks, but statistically these are few. Women’s Studies has bequeathed to Lesbian and Gay Studies the awkward metaphor of family. Generally I have noticed that when lesbians appeal to it, they tend to defend it, whereas gay men tend to deride it (plus ça change…) It is a liberal prototype more amenable to our project than individualism. We need not mandate intimacy, and reproduce traditional borders, limits, and exclusions, in our vision of family. Enabling families contain respect for spatial differences, divergent desires, they nurture, support, and encourage the exploration of liberatory pleasures. Our role as intellectuals is a modest one, often our egoism exceeds any material effect we might actually have on people’s lived experience. And yet… I love the chance to teach. I believe that romantic precept that education is one proven way to dissipate prejudice. I get such a kick out of standing in front of two hundred 18-year-olds, and being able to tell them about lesbian history, women’s history. I know that, for significant numbers of them, this is the first time they have knowingly encountered a Real Live Lesbian. I know that my personification with the subject is something I can exploit. For the one or two gay or lesbian looking students out there, my lecture is for them. I love the way, sooner or later, they all make it to my office. We pass in the corridors and smile. The way we recognize our need for that acknowledgement is a statement of community. We can, and must, draw pleasure, and love, from these subversions. I remain in love with the academy because I’m a working-class girl who still can’t believe she’s here, but below that naiveté there’s a working-class cunning skilled in taking what I need from my employer. I cannot honestly see a time when Lesbian Studies will not be a subordinated interest. Neither will it ever be separated from feminism. The confluence of feminism with Lesbian Studies is historically located in a dense relation between my self, my individual ethics, my institutional praxis, and my subject. The alliances are impenetrable, the dynamics inseparable, and symbiotic. Given the present material political realities of Lesbian Studies, the enfant terrible of the 1970s liberation movements, we can wonder what we will look like when Lisa, or Darlene, grow up.


Notes Sally Munt is Research Fellow in American Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. She is the editor of New Lesbian Criticism Columbia University Press, 1992; co-editor, with Andy Medhurst, University of Sussex, of Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction Cassell 1997; and the author of Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel Routledge, 1994. From 1994–5 she held the American Council of Learned Societies Fulbright Fellowship in American Studies, and was based at the Lesbian History Archives in Brooklyn, New York, where she wrote her new book Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space Cassell, 1997. Thank you to Sarah Chinn, Kris Franklyn, Sarah Kelen, and Ina Rimpau for carefully reading through this piece, and Bonnie Zimmerman for her sensitive editing of an earlier draft. Submitted to Feminist Review 1994. 1 Available from Ford Hickson, DOLAGS, Unit 64, Eurolink Centre, 49 Effra Road, London SW2 1BZ. 2 Thank you to Laurie Essig for the appropriation of this term. 3 The terms belong to Kath Weston; she made this point in the plenary session at ‘The State of Queer Studies’ Sixth National Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies Conference, Iowa City, 18–21 November 1994. 4 Sinfield, Alan (1994) Cultural Politics—Queer Reading Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 74. 5 Brewer, Derek (1994) The abuses of English’, The European English Messenger, Vol. 3, No. 2:40–6.

94

American Eve Paula Burnett

The man has a gun and will kill me

I have words and will dissuade him

(but I caress the dinky pistol

in my purse just in case)

96

Reviews

Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women Nancy Shoemaker (ed.) Routledge: London, 1995 ISBN 0 415 90993 7, £13.99 (Pbk) ISBN 0 415 90992 9, £40.00 (Hbk) Negotiators of Change is a collection of ten essays interpreting the effects of white contact on Native American women throughout almost 400 years of European/US colonization of North America. Each essay examines a different Native American nation in its own (often shifting) geography at a time of critical cultural change. Locations include Chesapeake Bay, Kahnawake, Wisconsin borders, Georgia, Mississippi, Arizona/New Mexico, Colorado, Washington State, Florida; nations studied are Algonquian; Iroquois; Mesquakies (Fox), Sauk and Winnebago; Cherokee; Choctaw; Navajo; Southern Ute; Yakima; Seminole; Pima-Maricopa. The contributors are all history professors or doctoral candidates at a variety of universities in the United States. There is a twenty-page introduction by the editor, Nancy Shoemaker, who also contributes an essay to the collection. The introduction includes a review of the findings of previous ethnographic studies and more recent feminist theories. Contributors agree that, generally speaking, Native American women shared in a non-hierarchical society where gender roles were complementary, individual autonomy carrying more importance than gender in structuring social relationships. More often than not, however, women’s position in society was misunderstood by whites and represented (or misrepresented) by them, as Edward Said would argue, ‘for a purpose’ (Said, 1978:273). It is generally argued that women’s productive and reproductive contributions were of paramount importance in securing their equality in society but that, on contact with whites, new trade patterns favoured the European model of a maledominated society. Despite this, women were often able to adapt their traditional


roles to participate in market-oriented economic activity during the nineteenth century and, on occasions, outstrip their men in learning new skills, which increased their productive capabilities, enabling them to participate in the flourishing tourist industry in the early twentieth century. Because available resource materials are almost entirely a product of white males, oral history proves a useful tool to one essayist and to another close textual analysis is (over) optimistically viewed by the writer as a method which would enable her to uncover the ‘real’ women behind the text and ‘read their actions as a “sign language” through which they communicate directly with us’ (p. 137). Negotiators of Change is valuable in detailing the variety of effects which government policy had on Native American women and the role which they played in actively resisting the attempts of policy-makers to destroy their cultures. The most engaging texts are those by Theda Perdue and Carol Douglas Sparks on Cherokee and Navajo experiences respectively. Perdue doesn’t miss an opportunity to point out the irony of government policy in attempting to guide Native American progress (‘they must have been somewhat bemused by the preferred lessons in agriculture. Not only had Cherokee women been farming for centuries, many of the crops and techniques used by Euro-Americans came from Native peoples’ (p. 92)). Policy preferred the yeoman farmer as a model for Native American progress and policy-makers were disappointed when the Cherokee preferred to adopt the aristocratic planter role followed by heads of government. This is a balanced article which examines the effects of contact on both men and women, whereas others occasionally focus specifically on women at the expense of major events affecting the community as a whole. Sparks’ essay examines textual representation of Navajo women around the time of the Mexican War. She describes the use by early white writers of ‘tropes’ such as the ‘pathetic dusky heroine’ (p. 141) which was followed by the ‘squaw drudge’ (p. 142) while descriptions of the landscape simultaneously changed from lush wilderness to ‘inhospitable and savage’ (p. 140). It’s a good story and echoes the representations of Noble Savage vs. Savage Savage so well documented in the 1991 exhibition and catalogue The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. Confusion could have been avoided in this essay by an explanation of the use of the terms ‘Anglo’, ‘American’, ‘Anglo-American’, ‘Euro-American’ and ‘US’. There must be a pattern other than one of alternation, but it is not easily discernible. The editor explains that contributors discovered that women were not always confined by government policy but worked with or in spite of it to gain maximum benefit from the changes which were forced on them, and the essays show how, over the last four centuries, there has been surprising continuity in Native American women’s ability to resist the imposition of European gender roles, which would have brought increased marginality. Instead, they were able to merge traditional beliefs with new technology, causing changes to, but not destruction of, their culture.

REVIEWS 99

At times, the book presents controversial government policies in a sanitized manner. This has the effect of lessening the impact of Removal which brought devastating hardship and traumatic change to the lifestyles of the whole Native population. That this took effect without regard to gender perhaps explains why specifically feminist issues are still viewed by the majority of Native American women as secondary to the improvement of conditions for the entire community. There is no index. Susan Forsyth Bibliography SAID, Edward W. (1978) Orientalism Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. TRUETTNER, William H. (1991) editor, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

The Good Body: Asceticism in Contemporary Culture Edited by Mary G. Winkler and Letha B. Cole (eds) Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1994 ISBN 0 300 05628 1, £18.95 (Hbk) Abstinence, self-discipline self-imposed solitude: how do we interpret such gestures? Perhaps there isn’t much consensus about the meaning of asceticism, which demands extreme, austere self-denial, in a culture which encourages us to consume voraciously. But, as emerges from this book, if (perhaps because) we have no social or symbolic space for such concerns they nevertheless erupt, like the return of the repressed, in individual ‘symptoms’ and practices. These include dieting, exercise, even the apparently inexplicable submission of women to domestic violence. These contemporary forms of asceticism either go unrecognized as such, in their more moderate forms (the pursuit of a ‘healthy’ lifestyle) or, in their more extreme forms, are pathologized. Bulimia, anorexia, compulsive exercising are all taken to be evidence of a dysfunctional identity—a personal problem, not a societal one. This collection of essays reconfigures that personal problem as a cultural question, analysing the underlying meanings of such diverse practices as Freudian psychoanalysis and eating disorders as forms of asceticism. Sara van den Berg, for example, argues fascinatingly for psychoanalysis as an ascetic practice in so far as it can, Freud claimed, transform ‘hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (p. 169). The book mixes a kind of positive endorsement of the discipline of asceticism as a way of taking control of one’s life with a critique of it as a mechanism which can work to oppress women’s desire and selfhood. It has its origins in an interdisciplinary conference in the USA which explored the cultural idealization of control of the self and the rise in the


prevalence of eating disorders. Its contributions are immensely varied (some of them are not even about asceticism so much as medical discourse and its effects, others are historically based and don’t refer to the contemporary culture of the subtitle). Overall the collection is galvanized by the meeting of the ‘scientific’ discourses of medicine and psychiatry with the methodological tools of the humanities. The editors are academics in departments of medical humanities and psychiatry respectively. The contributors are from the fields of anthropology, psychology, literature, philosophy, history and art history, gender studies and medicine. The book crosses the boundaries between clinical medicine and cultural studies, ancient and modern, by stressing the importance of culture in the etiology of disease. These are fields which are rarely brought together by clinicians, and this book is all the more welcome for that. Mostly such interventions have come from feminists working in the humanities, such as Elaine Showalter whose The Female Malady stresses the importance of cultural ideas about femininity in shaping the historical definitions and treatment of female insanity. The Good Body makes an interesting comparison since eating disorder is largely, though by no means exclusively, a ‘female malady’. The Good Body takes a range of scholarly topics and marries them to contemporary concerns in adventurous interdisciplinary ways. In Allison M. Moore’s account of her experience of running a battered women’s shelter she argues that the self-denial of women in dysfunctional relationships is a distorted and harmful form of asceticism which can be redeveloped in constructive ways to reconceptualize the self more positively, and she compares these skills to those of fourth- and fifth-century monastic communities. Psychiatrist Janet de Groot observes similarities between anorexia and asceticism, particularly the Gnostics. This connection is also made by William F.Monroe (Fine Art and Communications) who argues that asceticism is a rejection of dominant cultural values, not an internalized acceptance of them. It is a way of setting yourself apart from the world and repudiating its values. So, he argues, ‘anorexia, bulimia, celibacy, and other manifestations of asceticism may be seen as a postmodern reappearance of Gnostic isolation—a mode of alienation from the encultured world motivated not by a desire for acceptance or esteem but by a recurrent need for isolation and control’ (p. 173). Margaret M.Miles, a theologian, invokes Augustine’s Confessions in her analysis of contemporary anorexia, and takes the argument into truly radical terrain by asking what stake pleasure has in all of this. She defines asceticism as the pleasure in giving up, and posits the social construction of female desire in middle-class North America as an ascetic practice—learning to please, disciplining and controlling the unruly female body. And she makes an interesting case for anorexia as a form of perverse pleasure. She argues against two commonly held ideas: that anorexia is an attempt by the powerless to control something, and that young women starve themselves as a result of media images of women. As a form of asceticism, then, anorexia expresses desire, or pleasure, and acts to resist socialization. That it is also damaging to the individual, her family

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and friends, argues Miles, is an effect, secondary to its primary goal, the production of pleasure. The pleasure of asceticism—be it St Augustine’s renunciation of sex, or the contemporary anorexic’s renunciation of food—is constituted in the development of a centred, chosen self, built up gradually from choices, decisions and practices. This intersection of historical research (Augustine’s constructed ‘self’ through ascetic practices as revealed in his Confessions) with contemporary ideas about the self as a construct is fascinating. And although I am not a clinician I found that her model of anorexic motivation made sense to me as a way of explaining why independent and intelligent women often adhere so tenaciously to their anorexic goals. Here, and in other essays, I would have enjoyed an expanded discussion which could have referred to the specifically feminist appropriation and development of Foucault in relation to women, body image and fashion in the work of writers like Bordo and Bartky. Some of these are canvassed in Mary G.Winkler’s final essay on images of women in fashion photography, which looks at a range of sources on representation and the female body. Reading the book from my own cultural studies’ vantage point, I missed more explicit references to Foucault, whose voice is everywhere inflected but rarely referred to, and never bibliographically cited. Some connections, both with the ‘docile bodies’ of Discipline and Punish and with The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, where he considers the significance of rules relating to diet in the construction of the self, and implies that there is a rigour, or discipline, built into all human identity and social relations, would have enriched this fascinating topic and made it more accessible to students. Female fashion students, for example, often have difficulty finding a theoretical framework in which to fit their concerned puzzlement at the continuing demands in their chosen field for women’s bodies to be svelt, slim, youthful and perfectly proportioned and at the way most of them, in common with many women, struggle with the problems of self-image in a world where the national average dress size (16) is not even manufactured by prestigious high fashion designers, where the ‘good body’ comes in a lithe, androgynous, gleaming size 10. Caroline Evans References BARTKY, S. (1988) ‘Foucault, femininity, and the modernisation of patriarchal power’ in Diamond, I. and Quinby, L. (1988) editors, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance Boston: Northeastern University Press. BORDO, S. (1988) ‘Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallisation of culture’ in Diamond and Quinby (1988). BORDO, S. (1989) The body and the reproduction of femininity: a feminist appropriation of Foucault’ in Jaggar, A. and Bordo, S. (1989) editors, Gender/ Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.


BORDO, S. (1990) ‘Reading the slender body’ in Jacobus, M., Fox Keller, E. and Shuttleworth, S. (1990) editors, Body Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science London and New York: Routledge. FOUCAULT, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish New York: Vintage Books. FOUCAULT, M. (1986) The History of Sexuality, Volume Two: The Uses of Pleasure Harmondsworth: Penguin. FOUCAULT, M. (1986) The History of Sexuality, Volume Three: The Care of the Self Harmondsworth: Penguin. SHOWALTER, Elaine (1985) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture , 1830–1980 New York and London: Pantheon Books.

Idols to Incubators: Reproduction Theory Through the Ages Julia Stonehouse Scarlett Press: London, 1994 ISBN 1 85727 052 5, £9.99 (Pbk) ISBN 1 85727 057 6, £29.99 (Hbk) The blurb of Julia Stonehouse’s Idols to Incubators: Reproduction Theory Through the Ages (1994) begins: Where do babies come from? Prior to the turn of the 20th century all the answers that people gave to this question were incorrect because no one knew about the fusion of ovum and sperm. Unaware of this biological partnership, they held other ideas—ideas which have profoundly affected our understanding of the ‘nature’ of men and women…. Idols to Incubators…examines the biological discoveries of the recent past, the influence of the Bible, the era of the goddess and the idea of the parthenogenetic woman. While it might be the case that blurbs and the books that they ostensibly describe do not always match up, it is unfortunately the case that the blurb of this book provides a pretty good picture of both its style and content. Idols is a study of sweeping historical generalizations and assertions. It is erratic in its organization—hops, skips, dips and dabs from one era, one society, one theory to another, putatively tracing a historical trajectory of ideas with no apparent sense of need for chronology, consistency, specificity or context. Biological theory, religious texts, ancient figurines are all lumped together without distinction, treated as interchangeable examples, all of which illustrate the same processes. Moreover, the book neither understands nor is in dialogue with the bodies of literature to which it refers and the key anthropological, archaeological and critical feminist debates from which it takes its evidence.

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Idols revolves around three themes. The first is that reproduction theory is both a window on and, quite significantly, a determinant of gender relations. Thus, how a society understands reproduction and the role of men and women in it not only has implications for but, indeed, impels the relative social status of men and women. The gross simplicity of Stonehouse’s understanding of power relations underscores the considerable flaws of historical and textual inquiry that follow, into the reproductive theory that, Stonehouse posits, ‘caused’ first matrilinial/matriarchal then patrilinial/patriarchal social orders. The second guiding theme of the book is that reproduction theory in human society can be understood as having evolved through four stages (or ages), which Stonehouse traces in reverse order The first epoch (part 3 of the book) is that of ‘the parthenogenetic woman’ (pre-8000 BC)—where women were seen as ‘creatrix’, the relationship between intercourse and procreation was not understood and all societies were matrilineal and matriarchal. Woman the seed, man the stimulator (8000 BC–3000 BC), constituted the second age of reproductive theory which, Stonehouse posits in part 2 of her book, was a transition phase in which the link between intercourse and reproduction was made; but the male role was seen as only animatory of women’s procreative powers, and societies continued to be matrilineal. The third revolution in reproductive theory, discussed in part 1 of the book, was, in Stonehouse’s terms, the age of ‘man the seed, woman the incubator’ (3000 BC–1900). In this era, Stonehouse posits that the role of sperm was discovered and mistakenly theorized to be the active agent of reproduction. Women were conceptualized as soil rather than seed and this heralded patrilinial inheritance and patriarchal social relations. The modern scientific era, according to Stonehouse, is the era of correct, scientific facts of human biology which reveal that egg and sperm have an equal role in reproduction and therefore undermine the incorrect philosophy on which patriarchy has been built. In order to construct this taxonomy of reproductive theory from prehistory to the present, Stonehouse draws erratically on an eclectic set of anthropological and archaeological studies (including a number of feminist studies), which are taken out of context and used only to cull for evidence that support her claims. Here Stonehouse often uses her sources in ways that expressly contradict the arguments made in the text. Indeed, it is often difficult to establish whether the speculative analysis provided by Stonehouse is her own or (mis)taken from her sources. Examples taken from the anthropological literature almost invariably refer to non-western cultures which are held up both as illustrations and proof of the existence of ‘earlier’ phases in the evolution of reproductive theory. What emerges here is a picture of, on the one hand, ‘noble savages’ (here Stonehouse centres on Malinowski’s study of the Trobriand Islanders) who, she posits, exemplify the matrilineal phase of reproductive theory and ‘ignoble savages’ (Stonehouse uses Delaney’s study of a ‘rural Turkey’, as well as innumerable examples of African, Indian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish cultures) who manifest


the ‘man-as-seed’ phase. Indeed, the racialized Other of Orientalist discourse pervades the text of this book, from its preoccupation with barbaric (non-western) patriarchal practices accruing from the ‘man-as-seed’ theory, to the use of evolutionary metaphor to classify the reproductive beliefs of non-western societies (indeed, links between monkeys, ‘pigmy’ and Trobriand cultures feature explicitly in chapter 14 and implicitly throughout the book) to crass exclamatory comments distinguishing ‘us’ from the ‘Other’. Consider this typical comment: This [the supposed law of patrilinial ownership of children in rural Turkey—an example that Stonehouse takes from Delaney’s study] may seem unfair to us but our western culture was, until very recently, much the same’ (p. 9). The racialized subtext of Idols is reinforced through its pervasive heterosexism. Stonehouse is clearly fascinated with the supposed sexual promiscuity (‘deviant’ but desirable heterosexualities) of Trobriand and ‘pigmy’ cultures. Not only does she entirely ignore the (hetero) sexual politics of the reproductive theories and gender inequalities she examines, but her text is peppered with crass romanticizations of heterosexuality. For example: ‘As it is an actual penis that usually goes into the vagina. It makes sense to make the ritual defloration object look like a penis. Why not? Sex is heaven on earth and one of the deity’s greatest gifts to men and women alike, and available to any young girl who no longer has a hymen’ (p. 167—an interpretation of a figurine featuring what appears to be a representation of female genitalia at the end of a shaft. Stonehouse infers that this figurine was used for ‘ritual defloration’—in ‘parthenogenetic woman’ society where the hymen was supposedly perceived as the only barrier to birthing.) The third significant theme of Idols revolves around the supposed liberatory properties of modern biology or, more specifically, the modern understanding of the ‘equal’ role of sperm and egg in reproduction. Stonehouse posits that incorrect understanding of the mechanisms of egg and sperm in reproduction have had dire implications for women and specifically underpin the third (‘manof-the-seed’) epoch of reproductive theory. Patriarchy and patriliniality are the results both of not having the ‘facts’ about gamete function and of the male insecurity about paternity which results. That is, man’s inability to prove that his children are ‘really’ his underpins underpinning his ‘need’ to control women. Modern science not only gives us what Stonehouse refers to as ‘equalist’ biological theory, but genetics gives us the ability to prove paternity. Thus, she argues, the ‘mortar of patriarchy’ is crumbling. The notion that there is a relationship between understandings of reproduction and gender relations is certainly not a new insight but is, nevertheless, an interesting starting point for a historical survey of shifting ideas about women’s bodies and women’s procreative processes and a tracing of reproductive theory in religious and scientific discourses. A re-evaluation of existing literature which theorizes matrilineal and patrilinial patterns in various historical contexts is also a valuable project. These intentions are undermined, however, by Stonehouse’s

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assertive insistence on a unidirectional, deterministic and ludicrously simplistic relationship between reproductive theory and gender inequality, and by the crass positivism of her view of the liberatory power of western science and its evolutionary superiority over (and balance of) the reproductive ideas of both egalitarian and inegalitarian (early and contemporary) Others. I find it hard to understand how a book so profoundly flawed in its structure, premisses and exposition; so obviously dated and so shockingly crass in its approach to questions of gender, reproduction and power; and that so aggressively ignores contemporary critical debate about reproductive technologies, science and questions of Othering came to be published. Deborah Lynn Steinberg Gender, Drink and Drugs Maryon McDonald (ed.) Berg: Oxford and Providence, 1994, 271 pp £14.95 (Pbk) £34.95 (Hbk) As the title suggests, this edited volume covers a range of topics in the general area of gender, drink and drugs. However, the focus is predominantly on alcohol. Malcolm Young’s account of the gendered nature of police practices is concerned with illegal drug use, while Roland Littlewood offers an interesting account of the relationship between tranquillizer use and gender differences in suicide rates. The remainder of the articles are concerned with the nature of drinking as a cultural activity. The approach taken is broadly a social constructionist one, with most of the authors identifying anthropology as their main disciplinary affiliation. Maryon McDonald lays out the conceptual framework of the book in her introductory chapter. She stands back from the ‘moral panic’ often surrounding these issues to plot the history of the ‘alcohol problem’—to ask ‘what all this fuss is about’ (p. 1). Her analysis traces the development of ideas about alcohol consumption in both Britain and the United States, highlighting the need to understand patterns of substance use and misuse within their social and cultural context. She uses this historical account to present a critique of the medicalization of both drinking and drug consumption. This is complemented by a useful review of the anthropological literature, showing the tremendous diversity in patterns of substance use across societies and communities. People consume alcohol at different times in different places for different reasons with different companions and different consequences. And, within these cultural variations, gender remains one of the central factors mediating alcohol and drugrelated behaviour. According to McDonald, gender is at last moving on to the anthropological agenda, with the ethnography of drinking offering an important illustration of the social processes inherent in the creation of maleness and femaleness. She


stresses the variation in gender divisions between societies, and explores the resulting differences in some detail. She notes, for example, that in the north of Europe drinking norms give women responsibility for maintaining social propriety while in the south it is given to men. The broad message then is that both patterns of substance use and gender itself are socially constructed and the interaction between them is complex and constantly changing. McDonald’s account of these issues is coherent and incisive, offering a valuable introduction to the articles that follow. However, her overwhelming concentration on culture and diversity sometimes leads to a denial of biology and similarity—a point to which I return later. The articles making up the remainder of the book cover a huge distance in both time and space. Nicholas Purcell offers an introductory essay on women and wine in Ancient Rome while Betsy Thom’s contribution is an interesting account of the historical development of concern about women’s drinking. Her interpretation of feminist intervention in alcohol services in Britain in the 1980s is a provocative one. Indeed she describes some of this work as a ‘rhetoric of woe’ and expresses some ambivalence about its value. Drinking and drug cultures are explored in articles about the developed world (France, Scotland and Japan) and about ‘third world’ countries (Fiji, Peru, Sudan and Ethiopia). Even the former Soviet Union is covered in a short piece by Tamara Dragadze. Though this is understandably sparse in its empirical content, it is a welcome addition to the literature on a region where the ‘problem’ of alcohol has been widely publicized. Despite the obvious diversity so effectively demonstrated in this collection, the similarity between some societies is also striking. This is especially evident in Maryon McDonald’s own account of drinking and social identity in the West of France and Sharon Macdonald’s description of whisky consumption in the Scottish Highlands. Both emphasize the very close relationship between drinking practices and the construction of both masculine and national identities. As Maryon McDonald says of French culture, ‘after the First World War wine was increasingly assimilated at national and local level into ideas of manliness’. This trend is highlighted in Brittany where the culture and patterns of agricultural labour require regular and substantial consumption of alcohol. At the time of any collective work—weeding, harvesting or silage-making for example—bottles of red wine litter the edges of fields. Wine has to be served regularly to each worker using the same glass and filling it to the brim. (p. 108) Under these circumstances women are clearly defined as the guardians of morality. Though things are now changing, women still bear responsibility for maintaining propriety—for deciding when ‘the boundaries of social incapacity or dysfunction have been reached’ (p. 114).

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In the Highlands too, alcohol plays an important part in the construction of identity. As Sharon MacDonald describes it, whisky is much more than a drink or a means of getting drunk. It is also a vital ingredient in various rituals and a symbolic distillation of many images of Scottishness especially hospitality, camaraderie, joviality and masculinity. (p. 125) Again, women bear the major responsibility for identifying and dealing with ‘problem drinking’. Though a high degree of latitude is allowed to men in Highland culture, ‘alcoholism’ is seen ‘more or less as an occupational hazard of being male, particularly of being unmarried and male’ (p. 138). This book offers a stimulating read with some excellent ethnographic material that I would recommend to anyone wishing to explore further the relationship between gender, drink and drugs. However, I did have concerns about some of the underlying implications of the social constructionist paradigm that it espouses. In particular, there appears to be considerable reluctance on the part of several contributors even to acknowledge the potentially damaging effects of excessive alcohol or drug consumption. As someone who is currently responsible for an elderly relative with severe dementia resulting from chronic alcoholism, I am constantly made aware of the purely biological effects on the brain of too much alcohol and too little food. As a women’s health activist (and regular wine drinker) I worry about the growing evidence implicating very small amounts of alcohol as a significant risk factor in breast cancer. Of course, we need to understand drinking—and all other human activity—as a cultural phenomenon. However, this should not lead us to deny the physical and psychological damage that excessive alcohol consumption may cause. We do not do it with smoking and lung cancer, so why should we treat alcohol differently? Lesley Doyal International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology Nicole Hahn Rafter and Frances Heidensohn (eds) Open University Press: Buckingham, 1995 ISBN 0 335 19388 9, £13.99 (Pbk) ISBN 0 335 19389 7, £40.00 (Hbk) This is a book to be welcomed; it is an important addition to the body of literature that now exists on feminist perspectives in criminology. Bringing together a number of contributors from various countries—Australia, South Africa, Britain, Italy, Poland, the USA and Canada—it attempts to assess the influence of feminism on criminology from an international perspective and


includes pieces by well-known academics such as Frances Heidensohn, Tamar Pitch, Kathleen Daly and James Messerschmidt. The majority of contributors begin by providing a useful overview of the development of criminology in their particular country. This clearly demonstrates that what constitutes criminology varies markedly from country to country and is shaped both by specific academic lineage and by political conditions. Thus Tamar Pitch shows how criminology in Italy is predominantly clinical, associated with forensic psychiatry, and, as such, focuses on the individual, while in much of the rest of Europe and in Australia the academic base is the law department. In Britain and North America criminology is much more sociologically orientated. The influence of political context is particularly clear in Poland, as Monika Platek indicates, where establishment criminology was a vehicle for extolling the ‘crime-free’ nature of Communist societies and still presents a hangover inhibiting the development of a more radical criminology. In South Africa, however, the influence of left realism in the shape of ‘progressive realism’ becomes apparent as the country faces up to fundamental political and economic upheaval. For each country the book considers the role of feminist scholarship within the discipline. It asks whether criminology can be engendered and documents the range and volume of work. Feminists have provided a critique of conventional criminology for failing to include women in its analyses; their work has made the woman offender visible, offered explanations for the difference between male and female crime rates and revealed the institutionalized sexism of the criminal justice system. But it is perhaps in the area of violence against women that it has had the greatest impact both in criminology and outside the discipline. Here it is important to remember that much of the work that has transformed public opinion on issues such as rape, domestic violence and child sexual abuse was activist led. It did not come from inside the academy. Indeed, it was these campaigns which shaped academic feminism which in turn seeks to influence establishment criminology. As well as a coverage of these key areas, this volume also reveals a fascinating diversity of debate. For example, Christine Alder alerts us to the interest of Australian feminist criminologists in representations of women in crime fiction. Tamar Pitch includes a particularly thought-provoking piece on the influence of feminism on organized crime in Italy. She highlights the emergence of women’s voices and women’s groups against the Mafia and the impact this has had in terms of stimulating new ways of looking at the phenomenon. And there is much self-critique: Alder reveals the frequent neglect of race in Australian writing. The situation of Aboriginal women, she notes, has seldom been considered and Patricia Easteal’s book The Forgotten Few: Migrant Women in Australian Prisons (1992) is a rare example of a study on the criminal justice experiences of women from non-English speaking backgrounds. There is, however, a central limitation to this book. For, despite purporting to be international and having excellent contributions on Italy, Australia and South Africa, it is dominated by North America. A third of the book is on

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developments in Canada and the United States. Eight of the thirteen contributors are from North America. Although the editors acknowledge the book’s cultural limitations, ‘we solicited chapters on Asian nations, central and northern African countries, and Central America and the Caribbean, but without success’ (p. 11), European feminism is also poorly represented. There are no contributions, for example, from Spain, Belgium or The Netherlands. Indeed the weakest contribution is by Marie-Andrée Bertrand, a Canadian, who attempts to cover Germany, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Her piece is a personal account of her impressions and conversations with a few women academics from each of these countries concerning the place of feminist criminology. Her astonishment at her discoveries is often well meant but really only surprising for someone immersed in North American criminology. Thus she expresses surprise at the absence of feminists among the authority figures in academic criminology, and that a department had only one course on ‘female crime’ in an academic year. This is obviously deplorable but not so strange when viewed from a British context. More seriously, although mentioning that at one faculty she presented a study on women’s prisons and discussed such topics as abolitionism and the feminist critique of penology, there is no mention of the key and wide-spread nature of European debates on these subjects. This is despite the fact that, in this volume, Tamar Pitch, a leading figure in this area, refers to the discussion between those who argue for law reform and those who consider law to be detrimental rather than helpful in the development of women’s individual and collective autonomy, for it constructs women as ‘victims’, as weak, and, therefore, in need of protection. It is extraordinary that the extensive debate over abolitionism and feminism in Europe is not touched upon. This would seem to reflect the common ignorance in North America both of abolitionism in general and the way in which many European feminists have found its arguments of great interest. This can be seen in the recent work of Tamar Pitch, Encarna Bodelón in Spain, Jolande uit Beijerse and Renée Kool in The Netherlands, and Gerlinda Smaus in Germany, to name but a few. Bertrand’s dismissive attitude is illustrated by her comment on Belgium: ‘the long history of very close links between the Montreal and Belgian schools of criminology allows me to say that feminist criminology is absent from Belgium’s criminology curriculum and research programmes’ (p. 108). In fact, while it is indeed marginal, it is unfair to say that it is absent. The Critical Criminology ERASMUS programme, of which my institution is part, brings me regularly in contact with students from Belgium who are well informed both in terms of feminist literature and debates in criminology. On a more positive note the book contains throughout a clear awareness of the need to provide a multi-dimensional approach to criminology which refuses to allow the discipline to be reduced to gender, or to class, or to race. The articles by Kathleen Daly and Deborah Stephens and James Messerschmidt are exemplary on this issue, but it is important to stress how tackling this problem is not equivalent to producing a genuine international criminology. To do this necessitates awareness of the distinctly different political and academic


trajectories of the various countries and to acknowledge the idiosyncratic nature of North American social science both in terms of its achievements and limitations. But overall this book will be invaluable to postgraduate students of criminology and will help to cater for the way in which feminist issues, largely because of the efforts of activists outside the academy, have become such popular topics within criminology courses in many parts of the world. Jayne Mooney Reference EASTEAL, P.W. (1992) The Forgotten Few: Migrant Women in Australian Prisons Canberra: Bureau of Immigration Research, Australian Government Printing Service.

Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham Sasha Roseneil Open University Press, Buckingham, 1995 ISBN 0 335 19 057 X, £13.99 (Pbk) ISBN 0 335 19058 8, £40.00 (Hbk) In recent months we have seen nuclear issues return to the central political arena. For many feminist peace activists, it is with a heavy heart that we start to address battles that we thought we had already fought. Consequently, this book, Disarming Patriarchy by Sasha Roseneil, was timely. It was with great anticipation that I opened it and started to read, and I was not disappointed. However, I have to admit that I came to the book as a biased reader. I was a peace activist for six years too and a ‘camper’ at Greenham (a woman who sometimes stayed and sometimes visited the peace camp), thus my own reflections on this work are positioned. In the introduction Roseneil clearly defines her book within feminist frameworks, stating that she is ‘less interested in the routine actions by which women contribute to the reproductions of patriarchy, than in non-routine, extraordinary political action, through which women seek change’. Indeed, this is one of the great strengths of her work. It is through the ethnographic insight into the daily lives of thirty-five Greenham women that Roseneil manages not only to highlight the personal and political issues enmeshed in their daily lives, but also analyses the larger contribution that Greenham made to the peace debate. The author is not afraid to highlight some of the ideological and personal tensions at Greenham as well as identifying the resolutions reached by the women.

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However, there are two areas in the book which need to be addressed. Methodologically, the book was confusing and sometimes contradictory. Using a combination of her own experience and in-depth interviews with some of the women who lived at Greenham, Roseneil appears to take an interpretive position, looking at the meanings that the women gave to the experience. However, this approach sits uneasily with the almost positivistic stance she takes to the material that her interviews generated. For example, the chapter on ‘the making of Greenham’ contains a number of tables such as ‘sexuality at the time of getting involved’ and ‘number of children at the time of getting involved’, implying some kind of measurable reality. If this approach was to be ‘valid’, a sample size of thirty-five was hardly representative of the hundreds of women at Greenham. It might have been better to have focused on the rich material generated from her interviews, together with her own experience. The other area which needed more reflection was Roseneil’s contribution to social movement theory. I agree with Roseneil that the processes and activities at Greenham can offer a critique of contemporary social movement theories, particularly from a feminist perspective. Unfortunately, this area tends to be under-theorized in her work. Having drawn your attention to two of the weakness of the book, I wish to comment that this is a significant work; the book is richly woven and analytical. Roseneil manages to look not only at Greenham on the level of the activists but locates them in wider relations of power. In particular, she addresses the gender dynamics of the systems that women were working within. She suggests ‘Women protesters were, overwhelmingly, arrested by policemen, sentenced by male magistrates, and acted against by local authorities, government departments, and civil courts run by men’ (p. 119; italics in original) as well as gendered military practices. What is apparent from Roseneil’s work is that Greenham cannot be seen merely as an isolated peace protest but as part of the continuing processes of defining and redefining what ‘feminism’ is. What is distinctive about the book is that it does make the links between feminist theory and practice while addressing wider social debates. Pauline Lane Labour Women: Women in British Working-class Politics 1918–1939 Pamela M. Graves Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1994 ISBN 0–521–41247–1, £37.50 (Hbk) ISBN 0–521–45919–2, £13.95 (Pbk) One of history’s mysteries is how assumptions which appear self-evident in one era can be incomprehensible to the next. The perfectly conceivable passes into the inconceivable before you even notice, and it is often the most obvious of


attitudes which prove the most elusive as these are the ones that nobody bothered to explain at the time. In the case of groups who are hidden from history, the puzzle deepens and Pamela Graves’ Labour Women has a sleuth-like quality common to women’s history which takes on class as well as gender. Her study of women in British working-class politics between 1918 and 1939 pieces together consciousness at the grassroots by combining oral interviews with fifty women and fifty men, biographical manuscripts and local labour records. In 1918 traces remained of the pre-war labour suffrage alliance forged by women like Lancashire’s indefatigable Selina Cooper and Hannah Mitchell or the forthright Jessie Stephen from Glasgow. The vote for such campaigners meant wider reforms in maternity conditions, birth control, divorce law, equal pay, housing and education. Gender and class equality alike were inseparable from a vision of a radically transformed society based on co-operation not competition. During the 1920s Pamela Graves shows that it was harder for labour women to hold on to the idea of changing social relationships as a whole. None the less, they focused locally on immediate needs, their perseverance bequeathing the playgrounds, mother and baby clinics and council laundries that later generations were to take for granted as part of the built environment. They campaigned in the Labour Party for birth control in maternity welfare centres and for child benefits. Avoiding overt conflict over gender relations, they were inclined to take the status quo as given and seek to better women’s lot from an assumption that the sexes had essentially different roles. Their ambitions and achievements in the most adverse circumstances were none the less impressive. Used to managing tight budgets they compared their work on local councils to their domestic lives. They knew the inestimable value of small pleasures, seeking not only better things but a better way of life. Hannah Mitchell, on the parks committee, thought of ‘tired mothers who have trundled prams all afternoon’ who might want to have a cup of tea and a rest. Mrs Grundy in Shipley, Yorkshire fought for women’s access to the turkish baths at the same price as the men. They possessed, moreover, a faith in social citizenship; unmarried mothers were not to be stigmatized in the workhouse, every child’s development was a collective not just a parental responsibility. The redistribution of wealth was to be accompanied by a more generous culture and an enriched humanity. The 1930s saw a shift from ‘women’s issues’ in the response to the Means Test, anti-fascism and support for Republican Spain. Instead of engendering citizenship, younger socialist women were more likely to interpret their emancipation as equality in class struggle. Pamela Graves shows how none of these strategies was able to tackle the subordination of women which existed in the Labour Party itself as well as in capitalism. She gives a balanced assessment of the constraints under which Labour governed, but also notes how the denial of the creative potential in ‘the

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women’s side of the movement’ and their lack of power in the party lost Labour a valuable political asset. Some gains were won piecemeal but the implications of challenging the discontents of class and gender were never integrated into a wider concept of socialism. Histories of the Labour Party have tended to follow the tram lines set out by male political and trade union leaders rather than the trails uncovered by women’s history. Labour Women draws on a great number of neglected sources and the interview material provides a corrective to viewing class consciousness as some kind of economic reflex. It was also a matter of personal culture and moral choice. Nellie Logan told how her father taught her that in the First World War one class got the crosses and the other the profits. Marge Tierney watched a family being evicted in the rain as a child and was never able to forget. ‘Somebody had to care’, said Lucy Thirkell. I think however, that she lacks a nose for the trails which got submerged and seemed to lead nowhere during the 1930s. After all, individuals did not entirely forget their former politics and many of them were still around. Jessie Stephen, for example, lived to chair the first meeting of the Bristol Women’s Liberation Group. The written record is also affected by the Communist Party’s influence not simply in terms of a specific political line but in conventions about the boundaries between the personal and the political. The earlier struggles to link class and gender were stranded between a rock and a hard place as unemployment rose and the fascists began to recruit. Changes on the right perhaps are a key to the tendency for the 1930s’ left to take up new ground. After all the fascists were recruiting women with equal but different slogans. Less dramatically there were already some moderate social reforming strands in the Conservative Party, prepared to give working-class women an inch of welfare if it would help to take a yard from the trade union movement. If the ‘women’s side of the movement’ came to seem rather tame to young socialist women in the 1930s, it was to be excavated with enthusiasm by socialist feminists in the 1970s. We too hoped that relationships and society might become more equal and that socialism might be made anew. Our feminism was not about individuals getting on but linked to greater choice and democracy in daily life and work. The prevailing meaning of ‘feminism’ shows few traces of this in the 1990s and it would appear to historians from the written record that awareness of gender now was remote from class. This would be to ignore the impact of the women’s movement upon the labour movement in the last twenty years. Consciousness is a slippery substance. Virginia Woolf asked a question in her introduction to life histories by women in the Women’s Co-operative Guild, ‘Life as we have known it’, in 1931. ‘It was hard enough for middle class women with some amount of money and some degree of education behind them. But how could women whose hands were full of work, whose kitchens were thick with steam, who had


neither education nor encouragement nor leisure, remodel the world according to the ideas of working women?’ The steam might have gone but the endeavour is as vital as ever if labour women are to have a future as well as a past. Sheila Rowbotham

Noticeboard

Re-producing women’s history Working Seminars Across the Generations The Women’s History Faculty at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, invites proposals to re-examine existing paradigms and explore emerging ones in the field at a conference to be held in New York City, Friday and Saturday, 9–10 October 1998. To ensure a wide array of current scholarship, established scholars are urged to apply in pairs with a graduate student or recent PhD. Graduate students and junior faculty are encouraged to apply individually if necessary. Instead of panels where papers are read and critiqued, the format will be working seminars where the presenters discuss new issues and methodologies which have arisen in women’s history in the 1990s. The focus will be on recent scholarship and how it has changed previous conceptions or given rise to new concerns. We are especially interested in approaches which question accepted temporal and national historical divisions. Proposals should be sent to the PhD Program in History, City University of New York Graduate Center, 33 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036, Att’n Prof. Bonnie S.Anderson by June 1997. MA in Gender, Anthropology and Development This is a new degree starting in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London in September 1997. The course lasts for one year full-time, 2 years part-time. The core courses are Gender Issues in Development and Gender and Anthropology: Theory and Methods, and there is a choice of options in medical anthropology, sexuality and the body, urban issues, environmental anthropology, anthropology of the Caribbean, food and anthropology and many more. Teaching is through lectures, seminars, workshops, placements and film, and assessment through take-home papers, essays, and dissertation. For more information contact C.Brain, Postgraduate

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Secretary, Anthropology Department, Goldsmiths College, Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, Tel. 0171 919 7806. e-mail: [email protected] or visit our Home Page on hhtp://www.gold.ac.uk/academic/an/home/htm. For a Postgraduate Prospectus and application form, contact The Registry, Goldsmiths College, London SE14 6NW, Tel. 0171 919 7537.

Back issues

1 Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practice, Davis & Goodal. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh. OUT OF PRINT. 2 Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. 3 English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. 4 Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. 5 Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell. Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. 6 ‘The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska. The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay. 7 Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell. Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson. 8 Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley. The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble. 9 Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall. 10 Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, Weir & McIntosh. Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The

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Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. 11 Sexuality issue Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Holli baugh & Rubin. Jealousy and Sexual Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. 12 ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, Mc Robbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. 13 Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. 14 Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie. The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell. Teaching Film, Clayton. 15 Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles. Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval- Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurst field. 16 Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn. Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Inter view with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and The Family’, Caldwell. 17 Many voices, one chant: black feminist perspectives Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection. 18 Cultural politics Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry, by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. 19 The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Refuges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. 20 Prisonhouses, Steedman. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh. What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. 21 Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in


Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. 22 Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ram azanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. 23 Socialist-feminism: out of the blue Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Camp bell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming Socialist-Feminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. SocialistFeminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle. Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. 24 Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim. 25 Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. 26 Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The0 Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Clément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir. 27 Women, feminism and the third term Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips. Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Rereading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughts on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt & Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. 28 Family secrets: child sexual abuse Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Wood craft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Con sultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes.

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Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills. Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. 29 Abortion: the international agenda Whatever Happened to ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman. Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the Realm of Necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey. 30 Capital, gender and skill Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty. Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. 31 The past before us: 20 years of feminism Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret. Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of ‘88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. 32 Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The ‘Dark Continent’: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott. Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick. 33 Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. 34 Perverse politics: lesbian issues Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsburgh, Italy, Fiocchetto. The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez & Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the Issue: Lesbian Fashion for


the 1990s, Blackman &; Perry. Butch/Femme Obsessions, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian Tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality: An interview with Cindy Patton, O’Sullivan. Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Theory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn. 35 Campaign Against Pornography, Norden. The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes over ‘Mutterlichkeit’, Chamberlayne. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multi-National Reception, Mani. Cagney and Lacey Revisited, Alcock & Robson. Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Rolley. Deviant Dress, Wilson. The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980, Ross. Women in Professional Engineering: the Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values, Carter & Kirkup. Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression, Briskin. Poetry: Bufkin, Zumwalt. 36 The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair and Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The Woman In My Life: Photography of Women, Nava. Splintered Sisterhood: Antiracism in a Young Women’s Project, Connolly. Woman, Native, Other, Parmar interviews Trinh T.Minh-ha. Out But Not Down: Lesbians’ Experience of Housing, Edgerton. Poems: Evans Davies, Toth, Weinbaum. Oxford Twenty Years On: Where Are We Now?, Gamman & O’Neill. The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstockings Movement, Walter. 37 Theme issue: Women, religion and dissent Black Women, Sexism and Racism: Black or Antiracist Feminism?, Tang Nain. Nursing Histories: Reviving Life in Abandoned Selves, McMahon. The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam and the State in Bangladesh, Kabeer. Born Again Moon: Fundamentalism in Christianity and the Feminist Spirituality Movement, McCrickard. Washing our Linen: One Year of Women Against Fundamentalism, Connolly. Siddiqui on Letter to Christendom, Bard on Generations of Memories, Patel on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dos siers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman. 38 The Modernist Style of Susan Sontag, McRobbie. Tantalizing Glimpses of Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, Fraser and Boffin. Reflections on the Women’s Movement in Trinidad, Mohammed. Fashion, Representation and Femininity, Evans & Thornton. The European Women’s Lobby, Hoskyns. Hen dessi on Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran, Kaveney on Mercy. 39 Shifting territories: feminism & Europe Between Hope and Helplessness: Women in the GDR, Dölling. Where Have All the Women Gone? Women and the Women’s Movement in East Central Europe, Einhorn. The End of Socialism in Europe—A New Challenge For Socialist Feminism? Haug. The Second ‘No’: Women in Hungary, Kiss. The Citizenship Debate: Women, the State and Ethnic Processes, Yuval-Davis. Fortress Europe and Migrant Women, Morokvasíc. Racial Equality and 1992, Dummett. Questioning Perestroika: A Socialist Feminist Interrogation, Pearson. Postmodernism and its Discontents, Soper. Feminists and Socialism: After the Cold War, Kaldor. Socialism Out of the Common Pots, Mitter. 1989 and All That, Campbell. In Listening

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Mode, Cockburn. Women in Action: Country by Country: The Soviet Union; Yugoslavia; Czechoslovakia; Hungary; Poland. Reports: International Gay and Lesbian Association: Black Women and Europe 1992. 40 Fleurs du Mal or Second-Hand Roses?: Nathalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Elliott & Wallace. Poem, Tyler- Bennett. Feminism and Motherhood: An American ‘Reading’ Snitow. Qualitative Research, Appropriation of the ‘Other’ and Empowerment, Opie. Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda, Begum. Postcard From the Edge: Thoughts on the ‘Feminist Theory: An International Debate’ Conference at Glasgow University, July 1991, Radstone. Review Essay, Munt. 41 Editorial. The Selling of HRT: Playing on the Fear Factor, Worcester & Whatley. The Cancer Drawings of Catherine Arthur, Sebastyen. Ten years of Women’s Health 1982–92, James. AIDS Activism: Women and AIDS activism in Victoria, Australia, Mitchell. A Woman’s Subject, Friedli. HIV and the Invisibility of Women: Is there a Need to Redefine AIDS?, Scharf & Toole. Lesbians Evolving Health Care: Cancer and AIDS, Winnow. Now is the Time for Feminist Criticism: A Review of Asinimali!, Steinberg. Ibu or the Beast?: Gender Interests in Two Indonesian Women’s Organizations, Wieringa. Reports on Motherlands: Symposium on African, Carribean and Asian Women’s Writing, Smart. The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, Bruegel. Review Essay, Gamman. 42 Feminist fictions Editorial. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and the Decolonization of Feminine Sexuality, Makinen. Feminist Writing: Working with Women’s Experience, Haug. Three Aspects of Sex in Marge Piercy’s Fly Away Home, Hauser. Are They Reading Us? Feminist Teenage Fiction, Bard. Sexuality in Lesbian Romance Fiction, Hermes. A Psychoanalytic Account for Lesbianism, Castendyk. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery, Ferguson. Reviews. 43 Issues for feminism Family, Motherhood and Zulu Nationalism: the Politics of the Inkatha Women’s Brigade, Hassim. Postcolonial Feminism and the Veil: Thinking the Difference, Abu Odeh. Feminism, the Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy, Lewis. Feminism and Disability, Morris. ‘What is Pornography?’: An Analysis of the Policy Statement of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship, Smith. Reviews. 44 Nationalisms and national identities Women, Nationalism and Islam in Contemporary Political Discourse in Iran, Yeganeh. Feminism, Citizenship and National Identity, Curthoys. Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland, Nash. Rap Poem: Easter 1991, Medbh. Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family, McClintock. Women as Activists; Women as Symbols: A Study of the Indian Nationalist Movement, Thapar. Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities: Bellagio Symposium Report, Hall. Culture or Citizenship? Notes from the Gender and Colonialism Conference, Galway, Ireland, May 1992, Connolly. Reviews. 45 Thinking through ethnicities Audre Lorde: Reflections. Re-framing Europe: Engendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe, Brah. Towards a Multicultural Europe? ‘Race’ Nation and Identity in 1992 and Beyond, Bhavnani. Another View: Photo Essay, Pollard. Growing Up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood, Frankenberg. Poem, Kay. Looking Beyond the Violent Break-up of Yugoslavia, Coulson. Personal Reactions of a Bosnian Woman to the War


in Bosnia, Harper. Serbian Nationalism: Nationalism of My Own People, Korac. Belgrade Feminists 1992: Separation, Guilt and Identity Crisis, Mladjenovic and Litricin. Report on a Council of Europe Minority Youth Committee Seminar on Sexism and Racism in Western Europe, Walker. Reviews. 46 Sexualities: challenge and change Chips, Coke and Rock-’n-Roll: Children’s Mediation of an Invitation to a First Dance Party, Rossiter. Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality, Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe, Thomson. Two Poems, Janzen. A Girton Girl on the Throne: Queen Christina and Versions of Lesbianism 1906–1933. Changing Interpretations of the Sexuality of Queen Christina of Sweden, Waters. The Pervert’s Progress: An Analysis of The Story of O’ and The Beauty Trilogy, Ziv. Dis-Graceful Images: Della Grace and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Lewis. Reviews. 47 Virgin Territories and Motherlands: Colonial and Nationalist Representations of Africa, Innes. The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt, Shukrallah. Mothering on the Lam: Politics, Gender Fantasies and Maternal Thinking in Women Associated with Armed, Clandestine Organizations in the US, Zwerman. Treading the Traces of Discarded History: Photo-Essay, Marchant. The Feminist Production of Knowledge: Is Deconstruction a Practice for Women?, Nash. ‘Divided We Stand’: Sex, Gender and Sexual Difference, Moore. Reviews. 48 Sex and the state Editorial. Not Just (Any) Body Can be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas, Alexander. State, Family and Personal Responsibility: The Changing Balance for Lone Mothers in the United Kingdom, Millar. Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education, Thomson. Through the Parliamentary Looking Glass: ‘Real’ and ‘Pretend’ Families in Contemporary British Politics, Reinhold. In Search of Gender Justice: Sexual Assault and the Criminal Justice System, Gregory and Lees. God’s Bullies: Attacks on Abortion, Hadley. Sex, Work, HIV and the State: an Interview with Nel Druce, Overs. Reviews. 49 Feminist politics—Colonial/postcolonial worlds Women on the March: Right-Wing Mobilization in Contemporary India, Mazumdar. Colonial Encounters in Late-Victorian England: Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage, Burton. Subversive Intent: A Social Theory of Gender, Maharaj. My Discourse/My Self: Therapy as Possibility (for women who eat compulsively), Hopwood. Poems, Donohue. Review Essays. Reviews. 50 The Irish issue: the British question Editorial. Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain, Hickman and Walter. Poem, Smyth. States of Change: Reflections of Ireland in Several Uncertain Parts, Smyth. Silences: Irish Women and Abortion, Fletcher. Poem, Higgins. Irish Women Poets and the Iconic Feminine, Mills. Irish/Woman/Artwork: Selective Readings, Robinson. Self-Determination: The Republican Feminist Agenda, Hackett. Ourselves Alone? Clár na mBan Conference Report, Connolly. Conflicting Interests: The British and Irish Suffrage Movements, Ward. Women Disarmed: The Militarization of Politics in Ireland 1913–23, Benton. The Crying Game’Z, Edge. 51 Beleagured but Determined: Irish Women Writers in Irish, Harris. In Love with Inspector Morse: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television, Thomas. Great Expectations: Rehabilitating the Recalcitrant War Poets, Plain. Creating a Space for Absent Voices: Disabled Women’s Experience of Receiving Assistance with their

124 BACK ISSUES

Daily Living Activities, Morris. Imagining (the) Difference: Gender Ethnicity and Metaphors of Nation, Molloy. Poems. 52 The World Upside Down: Feminisms in the Antipodes Feminism and Institutionalized Racism, Wilson. At the Back of the Class. At the Front of the Class, Behrendt. The Curse of the Smile, Ang. Mururoa, Brownlee. Of MailOrder Brides and ‘Boys’ Own’ Tales, Robinson. Warmth and Unity with all Women? Murdolo. The Republic is a Feminist Issue, Irving. Negotiating the Politics of Inclusion, Johnson. Gender, Metaphor and State, Sauver. Unravelling Identities, Genovese. Feminism and Sexual Abuse, Guy. Woman Ikat Raet Long Human Raet O No? Jolly. 53 Speaking out: researching and representing women Who’s Who and Where’s Where: Constructing Feminist Literary Studies, Eagleton. Situated Voices, Lewis. Insider Perspectives or Stealing Words out of Women’s Mouths: Interpretation in the Research Process, Reay. Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley 1940–43, Ellis. The Ambivalence of Identification: Locating Desire in Rebecca, Harbord. Poem, Nicol. 54 Contesting feminist orthodoxies Queer Black Feminism, Harris. A straight Playing Field or Queering the Pitch? Centring Sexuality in Social Policy, Carabine. Island Racism: Gender, Place and White Power, Ware. Poem, Cargan. All Het up! Rescuing Heterosexuality on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Epstein & Steinberg. 55 Consuming culture Managing Disorders of Transition and Consumption, Griffin. The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order, Harraway. Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption, McRobbie. Desperately Seeking, Gregory. Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery, Lewis. Gender, ‘Race’, Ethnicity in Art Practice in PostApartheid South Africa, Coombs. After the Ivory Tower: Gender, Commodification and the ‘Academic’, de Groot.


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