Feminist Review: Journal,Issue 49

FEMINIST POLITICS – COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL WORLDS CONTENTS

Women on the March: Right-wing Mobilization in Contemporary India Sucheta Mazumdar Colonial Encounters in Late-Victorian England: Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage 1883–6 Antoinette Burton A Social Theory of Gender: Connell’s Gender and Power Zarina Maharaj My Discourse/My-Self: Therapy as Possibility (for Women Who Eat Compulsively) Catherine Hopwood Poems Laura Donohue

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27 47

63 79

Review Essays Maxine Molyneux and Deborah Lynn Steinberg on Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva

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Sue O’Sullivan on Sex, Art, and American Culture by Camille Paglia

103

Reviews Kathryn Perry on White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness 109 Devaki Jain on Gender, Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training

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Alison Diduck on Postmodern Legal Feminism

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Melissa Leach on Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis; The Power to Change: Women in the Third World Redefine Their Environment

116

Rebecca D’Monté on Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801

118

Janet Rachel on Gender and Technology in the Making

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Letter

123

Noticeboard

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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 by a collective based in London. The Collective: Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Nel Druce, Sue O’Sullivan. Corresponding editors: Kum-Kum Bhavnani (USA); Ann Marie Wolpe (South Africa). Correspondence and advertising Contributions, books for review and editoral correspondence should be sent to: Feminist Review, 52 Featherstone Street, London EC1Y 8RT. For advertising please write to: Journals Dept., Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Subscriptions Please write to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants SP 10 5BE. Contributions Copy should come to us in our house style (style sheet supplied on request) with complete references. All contributions are subject to a process of external refereeing. Please submit four copies of your manuscript. Bookshop distribution in the USA Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY10001, USA. Copyright © 1995 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review . Copyright © 1995 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. ISSN 0141-7789

ISBN 0-203-98999-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-12375-5 (Print Edition)

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The Feminist Review office has moved. Please send all correspondence to: Feminist Review 52 Featherstone Street London EC1Y 8RT

WOMEN ON THE MARCH: Right-wing Mobilization in Contemporary India Sucheta Mazumdar

Whenever among our friends young boys get angry and start a fight we say, ‘Bhai [brother], don’t fight with another Hindu. Go and beat up or kill a Mussalman and cool your anger.

(Kishwar, 1993:24). Hum Bharat ke nari hain. Phool nahin chingari hain [We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of fire].

(Ayodhya 1992, right-wing women volunteers, Basu et al., 1993:86). The rise of fascism in contemporary India has been noted in the Western press primarily as ‘communalism’ as yet another riot [as pogroms are called in India] has devastated the Muslim community. However, as I hope to illustrate in this essay, what we are confronting bears a chilling resemblance to Italian and German fascism.1 I am using the term ‘fascism’ consciously to define an ideology and social movement which has ideological links and parallels to Italian and German fascism, including anti-Semitism (Semite in the sense of both Muslim and Jew), a politics which posits an organic unity of race, religion, culture and nation, a movement which has the style and methods of European fascism: ‘the unshackling of primitive instincts; the denial of reason, the spellbinding of the senses by pageantry and parades’ (Nolte, 1965:39); and is above all an anti-communist, anti-Marxist movement supported by the middle classes and the petit bourgeois. The Indian movement is deliberately modelled after the European fascist movements and although much that is deemed ‘Western’ is rejected by the Indian movement, the Nazis remain figures of admiration in the writings of the main ideologues. The goal of Hindu fascism is to seize political power and redefine India, not as a secular state, but as a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu Nation. In this formulation of the nation-state no identity other than the Hindu identity can be allowed to exist. Annihilation of Muslims (12 per cent of the population of over 850 million) and obliteration of all traces of Indo-Islamic culture and identity are its immediate goal, closely followed by the elimination of other undesirables such as Christians and those tainted by Western ideologies. During the course of the last decade, and with

Feminist Review No. 49, Spring 1995, pp. 1–28

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increasing frequency, the operations of the national government have come to a standstill as yet another round of pro-Hindu activism has been launched by the fascist groups. In the innumerable riots and bloody encounters between Hindus and Muslims that have accompanied the growth of this movement throughout the nation, thousands have been killed and maimed, livelihoods and entire neighbourhoods destroyed. Armed with the addresses of Muslim families and the locations of Muslim businesses, Hindu fascists have gone from house to house killing Muslims. During 1989–92, the scale of confrontations and riots increased markedly as the fascists sought to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque (a monument under state protection) and build a Hindu temple to the mythical god-king Rama. Finally, in December 1992 militant Hindus were successful in demolishing the mosque. While it has long been known that segments of the army and police supported the fascists, these sympathies became eminently clear as government troops and police disobeyed orders and walked away from their positions leaving the Hindu mobs to demolish the mosque. This event was followed by widespread pogroms against Muslims in several Indian cities. In Bombay, a city where the fascist group Shiv Sena has had control over the metropolitan administration, pogroms continued in January 1993. At least six hundred people were killed according to government estimates in the week-long January riots; independent witnesses put the toll at 2,000–4,000 killed. Over two hundred thousand people were dislocated and became refugees as their homes and shops were burned. Rape, the age-old weapon of fear and coercion has acquired a new dimension—public rape. In December 1992, after the anti-Muslim riots following the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya, thirteen Muslim women were raped under floodlights in Surat, Gujarat, and the rapes recorded on video. Seven of the women were then burnt alive. These videos are now making the rounds as pornography (Shah et al., 1993:50–8; Phulwani, 1993). The Nazis, one may recall, also took pictures of their victims. Throughout these riots Hindu women have played a highly visible and vicious role. Women led mobs and dragged Muslim women and children into the streets, applauded their gang rapes and joined men in stoning Muslim women and setting them on fire (Kishwar, 1993:23).2 Nationally, women engaged in the front ranks of the Hindu fascists have increased dramatically in recent years. At demonstrations, remnants of the feudal aristocracy from metropolitan centres march shoulder to shoulder with upwardly mobile women from district towns. Female religious preachers, draped in saffron robes, defy the judiciary and police and hold forth on why the temple to Rama must be built, ‘even if the waters of the Saryu (local river) turn red with our blood’ (Bharati, 1992:14). Cassette tapes with passion-filled narratives and songs spewing forth their incendiary messages of hate ring out in the voices of female acolytes. In this essay I am concerned not only with the role of these highly visible women but also with the ordinary female citizen who believes in ‘the cause’ and becomes its foot-soldier. A door-to-door strategy of ‘spreading the word’ is increasingly used by the women’s networks of the Hindu fascists. What are the ways in which gender ideology is recast and manipulated to aid the growth of this political movement? While progressive Indian women’s organizations have floundered in their search for a ‘nationalist feminist’ strategy, why has the call of Hindu religion struck a more responsive cord for the majority of women than the call for feminist struggles? Beginning with a look at aspects of the nationalist movement which privileged Hindu religious culture and, I argue, laid the groundwork for Hindu

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fascism, the essay focuses on the contemporary mobilization of urban Hindu women in the fascist cause.

From Hindu nationalism to Indian fascism: organizing the masses/engendering the nation The division of the Indian polity into two discrete and fixed religious communities, i.e., Hindu and Muslim, and the assumption that all aspects of life were to be shaped by this exclusive and unitary religious identity was a process first implemented systematically under British colonial rule. Indian history came to be periodized as ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim India’,3 the legal structure was demarcated into ‘Hindu personal law’ and ‘Muslim personal law’, jobs and electoral seats were reserved on the basis of religious representation. Colonial tendencies emphasizing communal politics were undergirded by the various emerging Hindu religious revivalist movements in north India and Brahmanical caste-revivalism in Maharashtra and Bengal. Communal identities were further reified during the Indian nationalist movement.4 In 1885, seventy-two men came together to form the Indian National Congress and took it upon themselves to ‘represent’ some 250 million illiterate and impoverished peasants, women and workers. The vast majority of the founders of the Indian nationalist movement were comfortable with upper-caste Hindu identities and ‘each took pride in his Hindu culture as faith’ (John McLane, 1988:54). Alliances soon emerged between members of this group and the contemporary popular mobilization in north India under the auspices of the ‘cow protection league’. This movement was explicitly anti-Muslim. In a twist on the age-old Sanskritization process of upper-caste Hindus turning to vegetarianism to distinguish themselves from meateating Untouchables and Muslims, the cow protection league made meat-eating into an anti-Hindu position (John McLane, 1988:55–7). The rallies of the cow-protection league provided ready audiences for the fledgling nationalists. By the turn of the century the prominence of Hindu conservatives like B.G.Tilak in the Congress further determined the direction of the nationalist movement. West coast (Poona) Brahmanical revivalism provided support for other explicitly anti-Muslim activities. Religious festivals were promoted by Hindu landlords and converted into sites for mass political rallies; religion, nationalism and antiMuslim activism became one and the same. As a song from the Ganapati festival of 1894 declared:

Oh! why have you abandoned today the Hindu religion? How have you forgotten Ganapati, Shiva and Maruti? What have you gained by worshipping the tabuts [emblems taken out in procession during Muharram] What boon has Allah conferred upon you That you have become Mussalmans today? Do not be friendly to a religion that is alien Do not give up your religion and be fallen

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Do not at all venerate the tabuts The cow is our mother, do not forget her. (Cashman, 1990:41–42) As the freedom struggle intensified, both the Indian Congress and the Muslim League increasingly mobilized along lines of religious community identity; even the theme song of the National Indian Congress Party was selected from a tale of Hindu anti-Muslim struggle. There was little effort by either community to forge a national secular culture. Since the vast majority of the leadership came from upper-caste Hindu backgrounds, Hindu religious culture was effortlessly equated with Indian culture. In a process of ‘resacralization’, modernity, instead of separating the secular from the sacred, drew the two together into a new synthesis (Uberoi, 1990). Women from the two communities came to symbolize two distinct faces of the nation: the bold Hindu woman with her face uncovered, wearing the national dress of the ‘traditional’ sari, marching for the nationalist cause, and the burqa-clad Muslim woman excluded from public space by her community who seemed suspended in a web of religious conservatism (Mazumdar, 1992:6).5 In rural Hindu India seclusion was the norm for women from both Hindu and Muslim communities; among Hindus there had been separate spheres of women’s rituals and men’s worship. Modernization and urbanization changed both the space and contents of Hindu religious rituals and the ways in which seclusion for middleclass Hindu women was organized. For the men, who had to go out to work for the colonial state, a degree of Westernization in appearance and education were deemed necessary for career mobility. In many instances middleclass professional men retreated from overt religious practice. Going to the temple, assuaging the deities and keeping the faith became part of the wife’s responsibilities. Women, as the guardians of the hearth, were also seen as the preservers of national (Hindu) culture as the nationalist movement coalesced (Mazumdar, 1992:1–24; Sarkar, 1991). From preserving traditional styles of clothing to learning rituals specific to caste-class status, women were to become the defenders of all that was Hindu. When educating middle-class girls became the norm, there was great concern that such education should not ‘denationalize’ the women (Ray, 1931; Sarkar, 1991). The educational curricula of many Hindu girls’ schools sought to provide a large portion of religious teachings to counter-balance the supposed negative effects of education on women. Girls’ schools gave prizes for conducting the ‘best ritual worship’ (puja); books on great Indian (Hindu) women were produced for schoolchildren. With literacy becoming increasingly common among urban women, they were now encouraged to read the new editions of the religious mythologies such as the Ramayana printed in the vernacular languages. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates depicting the more dramatic moments of the stories, the gods and goddesses became historical figures with whom generations of middle-class women could identify. Goddesses and heroines of the epics draped in elaborate Indian costumes were depicted in all too familiar circumstances: the tearful goddess Durga bidding farewell to her near and dear and leaving her natal home for her husband’s abode; Sita waiting faithfully for Rama; Nala abandoning the sleeping Damayanti in the forest; a maternal Yashodha suckling Krishna (Guha Thakurta, 1991: WS91–9). As

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oleography printing became prevalent, paintings with religious themes became available as single prints for decorating the house. Religion as art moved from the altar into the living-room and the bedroom. This domestication of religion also fitted in well with the Gandhian model of a softer, more accommodating reformist Hinduism. While many Hindu goddesses and Hindu mythology were invoked in the nationalist cause,6 the elevation of the epic Ramayana and the central figure of Rama to national prominence was very much the contribution of Mohandas K.Gandhi. Public readings from the Ramayana were prevalent primarily in Gujarat province and parts of northern India as the cult of Rama was part of popular Hinduism in this region. Gandhi’s patronage of Rama, however, was based on more than just familiarity. As a figure drawn from folk-lore rather than Brahmanical Hinduism, Rama better served the political purposes of the Gandhian populist approach. The epic of Rama and his supposedly moral polity of Ramrajya became a convenient symbol, a millenarian vision of post-independence India. The tale of the Ramayana further served many mortal needs. Of the numerous versions of the Ramayana epic that exist, Gandhi selected one particular north Indian version for propagation. This was the version that stressed the chastity of Rama’s wife Sita, and showed her waiting in captivity for the day when she would be reunited with her husband. The battle waged for her freedom by the heroic Rama against the evil Ravana became a metaphor for the nationalist struggle itself. Stoic Sita was upheld as the national ideal of Indian womanhood; rather than live with a husband who queried her chastity she chose to mount a burning pyre; the gods saved her and thus proved her chastity (see Figure 1). For Congress Party activists being bundled off to prison, the reiteration of Sita’s unyielding defence of her chastity despite temptations was perhaps a comforting thought! Utilizing prayer meetings replete with Hindu devotional songs for rallying people to the nationalist cause, Gandhi synthesized personal upliftment and national salvation. Independence saw the Hindu bourgeoisie coming to the fore, claiming both public space and national culture with the confidence of a hegemonic class. The presence of religion in daily life was heightened by the cultural practices of this newly independent bourgeoisie who, in rejecting imperialist cultural hegemony and by extension everything Western, sought to create a ‘national culture’ by reaching back into the imagined glories of pre-colonial times. Sanitized variations of temple dances such as bharat natyam found their way into the curriculum of girls’ schools; young women learned to sing the Hindu devotional songs (bhajans) mass produced on cassettes and long-playing records; art classes at school taught students how to make reproductions of temple art. On the one hand the urban élite seeking upward mobility through necessary attributes such as fluency in English sent their children to Catholic and Protestant missionary schools and comparable non-denominational Englishmedium schools. On the other, while educating their children in English, the mothers made sure that the children, particularly the girls, were brought up Hindu and knew the relevant mythology. Urbane Hindus did not display elaborate religious altars at home; the ‘puja room’ became a discrete closet while oleography prints gave way to tastefully carved icons decorating the living-rooms. Such symbols sufficed as a testimony of one’s adherence to ‘Indian’ culture while creating a façade of secular civil space.

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Figure 1 A contemporary depiction of Sita with a beatific smile immolating herself as a test of her chastity while her husband Rama and his brother look on along with the monkey god Hanuman; the gods above, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and Indra, shower blessings. Both Rama and Hanuman have been appropriated as patron gods of the right wing. Popular illustrations like this are sold in the thousands on sidewalks and streetcorner shops.

The mothers had done their work well. In the 1970s when these ‘daughters of independence’ started going out to work in larger numbers than ever before, they also started going to temples with increased frequency (Ramu, 1989:44–6; Liddle and Joshi, 1986:72). Sponsoring particular religious functions and readings from the epic Ramayana had been the indicators of social and economic standing in north India; performing the satyanarayan puja was an indicator of the family’s financial success. With dual incomes the frequency of such functions increased in the middle-class and lower middle-class neighbourhoods in hundreds of Indian cities. These overt religio-cultural practices of the Indian Hindu bourgeoisie further segregated social space along religious lines. Practitioners of other religions were increasingly excluded. Simultaneously, there was a further change in the political

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culture of the country. While pogroms against the Muslims were not unknown in the 1950s, the shrill government propaganda which accompanied the wars with Pakistan in the 1960s began to give a certain patriotic legitimacy to anti-Muslim actions and pogroms. With Indira Gandhi, an ardent and overt practitioner of Brahmanical Hinduism and promoter of all sorts of right-wing forces despite rhetoric to the contrary, the use of Hindu symbolism in the name of Indian culture increased dramatically in government functions.7 The familiar image of the deified Bharatmata (Mother India) now took on a new face; Indira Gandhi deified as the goddess Durga. By the 1980s the government-owned-and-operated television stations started serializing Hindu mythologies with all the drama and pathos of American soap operas. As the economic crisis deepened and separatist movements proliferated, the government increasingly resorted to using well-worn nationalist strategies to forge a sense of national unity. Communalized nationalism had given Hindu supremacist groups legitimacy; in the post-independence period the attempts to develop a political Hinduism as a vehicle for nation-building, coinciding as they did with the peculiar uncertainties of capitalist growth, ultimately created a fertile ground for the growth of Hindu fascism. The family of the Hindu fascists today consists of dozens of different organizations. The primary national organizations are the BJP, (Bharatiya Janata Party), the most important of the fascist political parties participating in electoral politics, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925) which is the ideological and organizational backbone of the movement and the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) the cultural arm of the movement. Each of them have active women’s organizations, and they all share personnel and resources at various levels, although the BJP as the ‘law-and-order party’ with electoral goals in mind has had to distance itself marginally from the other two at times when court rulings are deliberately violated. The ideological premises of these three organizations were laid out through the writings of ideologues like V.D.Savarkar starting in the 1920s, followed by those of K.B.Hedgewar and M.S.Golwalkar. Savarkar considered both Jews and Muslims treacherous for ‘the tie of a common Holyland has at times proved stronger than the chains of a Motherland’. Required reading for members of the three parties today, Savarakar’s essay Hindutva is replete with sentiments such as: Let this noble stream of Hindu blood flow from vein to vein…till at last the Hindu people get fused and welded into an indivisible whole, till our races get consolidated and strong and sharp as steel…Thirty crores of people, with India as their basis of operation, for their Fatherland and for their Holyland,…bound together by the ties of a common blood and a common culture can dictate terms to the whole world.

(Savarkar, 1949:108–16). The RSS, activist in orientation, was established with a mandate of ‘cultural Hinduism’; its stated purpose was to inculcate ‘Hindu’ pride, through prayers and recitations and through knowledge of Indian (Hindu) history. According to Golwalkar, who succeeded Hedgewar as executive director of the RSS in 1940, all Muslims were by definition traitors to India and not even deserving of citizenship

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rights (Golwalkar, 1939:52). Golwalkar was an open admirer of Nazi Germany, and argued for the exclusion of Muslims on the grounds that ‘Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by’ (Golwalkar, 1939:35). By the late 1930s the sight of RSS men practising their daily drill wearing uniforms of khaki shorts and white shirts, waving the saffron flag, reciting Sanskrit prayers and sloganeering about ‘Victory to Mother India’ was noticeable in most of the major cities throughout India and even in the small towns of north India. The RSS drills were intended to give the upper-caste Hindus combat skills through paramilitary training so that they could better defend themselves, their homes and their women. There were also body-building classes for young men for the purposes of producing a tough new Hindu male, implicitly challenging the Gandhian image of the non-violent gentle Hindu male. From its inception, the RSS developed numerous links with organizations which sought to recapture the ‘purity’ of Hinduism such as the Hindu Mahasabha (the Great Hindu Society), the Sanatana Dharma Sabha (the Association of the Eternal Hindu Religion) and the Arya Samaj (Society of the Aryans). Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj in the mid nineteenth century, had already developed notions of the ‘Aryavarta’ (Land of the Aryan, i.e., the Noble Ones). Dayanand believed that a primordial loyalty was owed to this land because one had partaken of its food and water and declared those ‘inclined to alien faiths’ (such as Muslims and Christians) treacherous.8 By the first decade of the twentieth century Arya Samajis were articulating the logical extension of this world view—an exclusive and exclusionary Hinducentric consciousness based on religious identity rather than national affiliation. As Lal Chand declared, The consciousness must arise in the mind of each Hindu that he is a Hindu, and not merely an Indian’ (Sarkar, 1983:75). The idea that the ‘Hindu way of life’ was under threat became a theme common to both the RSS and the Arya Samaj. Shraddhanand, the Arya Samaji leader entitled his 1926 pamphlet Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of a Dying Race and called upon dedicated young Hindu men to take up arms, to protect and ‘restore to the ancient pinnacle of glory’ the Three Mother Spirits’—the gau-mata (Mother Cow), Saraswati-mata (the Hindu Goddess or Mother of Learning) and the Bhumi-mata (Mother Earth, i.e., the Nation) (Shraddhanand, 1926:140–1). While the British colonial government had wasted very little time in repressing the communists—the Communist Party of India was declared illegal as early as 1934—the Hindu fascists received little attention from the colonial state. Could it have been because the Hindu fascists, the British Government and the Indian National Congress Party were in agreement on some points? As Sardar one of the Congress leaders declared in 1938, ‘Comrade Lenin was not born in this country and we do not want a Lenin here. We want Gandhi and Ramchandra. Those who preach class hatred are enemies of the country’ (Pandey, 1988:129). The major thrust of recruitment efforts by the RSS from the 1920s to the 1940s was directed at urban teenage boys, ‘not yet corrupted and made timid by family concerns’, university students, and the lower middle classes such as shopkeepers and clerks (Basu et al., 1993:24).9 Although the focus of activities was clearly men, given the general mobilization of middle-class women in the Gandhian Congress Party-led nationalist movement during this period, some RSS organizers also wanted

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a women’s wing. The Rashtrasevika Samiti (Women’s National Volunteer Associations), initiated by Laxmibai Kelkar in 1934, became a functioning organization by 1936. Though stressing virtues such as physical courage and strength and providing paramilitary training for some women, the major objective was to inculcate the ideals of Hindu womanhood (Jayaprasad, 1990:91). Since the dominant patriarchal ideology of the parent organization saw the role of women as primarily limited to Kinder und Küche, the women’s organization was delegated to a low profile until the early 1960s. This may have been also a result of the slower growth of the RSS and similar organizations in the 1950s. The assassination of M.K.Gandhi in 1948 for being soft on Muslims by a former RSS member and an active proponent of Hindu nationalism had outlawed the most aggressive of the Hindu right-wing groups; the brutal communal violence which accompanied Indian and Pakistani independence had perhaps sated even the most blood-thirsty communalist. All that had changed by the 1980s. By the mid 1980s the RSS had 25,000 shakhas or branch associations organized as cells of the parent body; it is estimated that there are at least 2.5 million core members (Bonner, 1990:352–3; Bacchetta, 1993:14). Active members of the cells participate in daily drills; men in white shirts and khaki shorts and saffron-coloured caps go through a series of drills and exercises which begin with a Sanskrit prayer and conclude with a speech, generally warning of threats to Hinduism. Participation in the daily drills increased from one million in 1979 to 1. 8 million in 1989. There are similar drills for young women. In addition to the cells, the RSS has thirty-eight front organizations with an additional membership of five million. Some twenty million volunteers have been called upon to distribute copies of an anti-Muslim, anti-Christian leaflet entitled Warning: India in Danger. This was done simply by using the concept of a chain letter. Each reader was asked to photocopy and distribute twenty copies of the text. Visions of expanding the borders of India through great and glorious conquest abound; the RSS branch in Delhi has sold 5 million postcards and envelopes showing India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh all under a saffron flag (saffron was selected in the nineteenth century as the colour of militant Hindu nationalism). The headquarters of the RSS in Nagpur displays a ‘cultural map’ of India which includes not only all of South Asia but also Lhasa (Tibet). The VHP has 3,500 branches, numerous front organizations and over one million members (Bonner, 1990:352–3; 362–3). Compared to these enormous numbers, it might be worth noting that the Communist Party of India (CPI) had 480,000 members in 1985 and the Communist Party Marxist (CPM) 367,828 (Nossiter, 1988:32).10 The main mechanism for political mobilization of the RSS-VHP-BJP in the 1980s has been marches from one end of India to another. With Toyota vans camouflaged as ‘chariots of the gods’ to evoke Hindu religious sentiment, massive parades with hundreds of thousands in tow have crisscrossed the country with their message of ‘Hindutva’. As many as 1,200,000 volunteers have been mobilized for these events (Ghimire, 1992:31). There is a glorification of blood and violence throughout the parades; young men offer up bowls of their blood to the leadership as proof of their commitment to the cause; volunteers at Ayodhya have ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Victory to Rama) written on their skins with their own blood (Basu, 1994:33).11 Each segment of the march concludes with Hindu sacrificial rituals honouring Mother India (Bharat-mata) deified as a modest sari-clad goddess seated on a lion holding a saffron flag (see Figure 2 ). The RSS-VHP-BJP organizations have also developed

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Figure 2 A postcard depicting Bharatmata or Goddess Mother India. Sold by both the RSS and the women’s wing Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the goddess is shown holding a saffron flag—the chosen colour of the right wing Hindus. The goddess is riding a lion and the depiction bears a resemblance to the Goddess Durga who came to earth on a lion to destroy demons. The map shows all of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, much of Tibet and Pakistan under the saffron flag. The slogan below reads, ‘May your glory be immortal Mother, whether I live or die!’

sophisticated use of audio-visual media, much of it targeted towards youth. A vast array of popular magazines, books, music cassettes with catchy tunes, and video films on religious themes and ‘Hindu history’ have been produced to attract new recruits.These songs, along with the speeches of the leadership and exhortations to rise up and experience ‘Hindu pride’, are widely circulated on tapes sold at nominal prices throughout India.12 The BJP-VHP-RSS version of history is propagated through the use of popular comic and cartoon magazines as well as collections of essays, stories and poetry (see Figure 3).Combining the call for a modern vision with a cry for the preservation of ‘traditional values’, the message is always the same: India is in crisis, sons of the soil are being short-changed, Muslims are treacherous imperialists and are multiplying, Hindus need to organize and come to the defence of Hindu religion and the Motherland. Saturating the media with their message is an

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important strategy; in one state recently after the BJP came to power, ten new RSS-BJP publications have been started up with state government largess (India Today, 1992b: 34).13 In all the states in which the BJP has come to power in the legislative assemblies, one of the priority projects has been the rewriting of Indian history textbooks. The narratives focus on violent antagonism between Hindus and Muslims; RSS historians equate Islam with destruction and vandalism (e.g., Goel, 1989).

Figure 3 A sample of the publications and cassette tapes distributed in the millions by the BJB-RSS-VHP. The pamphlets give the impression of erudition and are replete with footnotes as well as warnings like ‘Christianity has become a danger and a threat to the safety, security and freedom of India, and ‘Islam is an alibi for Arab imperialism.’ The back cover of each publication carries an ‘appeal to every Hindu’ for ‘Hindu society and culture are faced with a crisis’.

As a mass movement the Hindu fascists have drawn on a variety of stratagems; building a temple to the mythical god-king Rama in his supposed birthplace has become the rallying symbol of the Hindu Nation as political Hinduism has catapulted on to the national centre stage. The present implacable mobilization in the service of Rama is a new Hinduism, bent and moulded into conformity with the ideology of the right wing. There is an effort to create a pan-Hindu identity and the slogans declare ‘All Hindus should unite against the Vidharmis’ (i.e., Muslims and Christians). Allegiance to Rama has become the litmus test for patriotism and rights of citizenship (Shah, 1991:2922); cassette tapes circulate with the ominous message, ‘Five years from now all those who tried to prevent the construction of the Rama temple will be sought out’ (Bharati, 1992). In the most recent national elections (1991) the BJP emerged as the second largest party in Parliament capturing 119 seats. It nearly doubled its share of the national vote from 11 per cent in 1989 to 20 per cent in 1991 (India Today, 1991:22).14 As Barrington Moore wrote many years ago, ‘fascism is inconceivable without democracy’ (Moore, 1966: 447). Even though the party has not fared so well in the

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state-level elections in 1993, its vociferous oppositional politics have been adequate to the purpose of shaping national politics. Fascism is also a product of the intrusion of capitalism into the rural economy and the tensions arising in the post-competitive phase of capitalist industry (Moore, 1966:448). And the rise of fascism in India today cannot be understood in isolation from this conjuncture of crisis in capitalist development. If economic development had indeed taken off in post-independence India, as in East Asia or South-east Asia, a large proportion of the population would have probably turned to the business of making money and enjoying the fruits of consumer capitalism. But while capitalism has made sharp inroads into the economy and dissolved the patron-client relationships and hierarchies of social and economic control that sustained the old social order, the painful transition to a new set of social relations is still in the making. And the transition has been a particularly long-drawnout one in India. By the 1980s the gains of the Green Revolution were dissipated; the growth rate in agriculture has remained around 2.4 per cent per annum; the average annual rate of population increase on the other hand has been around 2.1 per cent. Double-digit inflation is an ever present spectre; in the urban sector prices for rice, meat and vegetables have increased 50–75 per cent in the last five years. The volume of registered urban unemployed in 1992, which does not count those who have stopped looking for work, stands at 35 million, a rise of over 6 per cent in the last two years; over three million of those unemployed hold graduate or postgraduate degrees. Forty-two per cent of the population of 853 million is below the age of 14 and another 120 million between the ages of 15 and 24. It will take more than a miracle for the economy to produce enough jobs to provide for even one in every twenty in the 1990s (Baig, 1990:77; Economic and Political Weekly, 1992:378; Bonner, 1990:308; Vanaik, 1990:269–70; Almanac, 1991:206). In this intensely competitive environment, a well-funded political party like the B JP and organizations like the VHP with funding from expatriates in the US and Britain can provide job opportunities and connexions in return for loyalty. Millions of others, young men and women, find they have no future ahead of them. They too are available to march in the parades, join the RSS/Shiv Sena paramilitary forces, die for the cause of Rama and help rid the country of identifiable minorities in order to build the Hindu Rashtra. Support for the fascists has also emerged from the ranks of the beneficiaries of capitalist development. With increased mass mobilization there have been changes in the class-caste composition in the membership of right-wing organizations (Sarkar, 1991; Banerjee, 1991; Dutta, 1991). Initially, between the 1920s and 1960s, the RSS was an organization of high-caste Hindus from major urban centres in the western and central Indian provinces and Hindus displaced by partition from Pakistan. Most were white-collar professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers and businessmen. Now the movement has added activists drawn from the petit bourgeois of small towns and newly urbanized youth from the ranks of kulaks. Uncomfortable with the cosmopolitanism of the metropolitan élite, thwarted by the class arrogance of the older bourgeoisie, newly rich traders, shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs, bank clerks and office-workers in hundreds of small towns have all found the culture of Hindutva attractive. Upwardly mobile Green Revolution beneficiaries share their sentiments. With stickers proclaiming, ‘Hello nahin, bolo Jai Sri Rama’ (‘Don’t say “hello” but say “Victory to Rama”’) on their telephones and cars and on their

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bicycles and scooters, they can now proudly identify with the ostentatious Hindu religious symbolism of the movement. Support for the VHP has also come from overseas Indians, particularly in the United States and Britain. Faced with the loss of patriarchal control within the family as rebellious teenagers reject the homeland cultural norms of their parents, immigrants have turned to youth summer camps run by the VHP and to Hindu temples in an attempt to re-establish cultural and ideological control. Culturally marginalized by the white majority society, such immigrants also take pride in their solidarity with the rising tide of Hindutva in India. Millions of dollars have been raised by the overseas Indians in Britain and the United States in the cause of building the Rama temple at Ayodhya (India West, 1991b: 63; 1993:38). The B JP has also penetrated labour unions in India with the stated goal of building ‘harmony’ between employers and workers. It has 81 registered unions in 61 towns and cities and 1,725 affiliated unions. With its platform of ‘Right to Work’ as a fundamental right, the RSS controls the country’s second largest trade union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (Shah, 1991:2921; Jayaprasad, 1990:78–90). Nor is their support among women lagging behind. Although men still hold most of the powerful leadership positions, women are on the executive committee and several women are prominent spokespeople for the movement. Both young men and young women in the hundreds and thousands have become the storm-troopers of the movement.

The new women of the Hindu Nation? In the 1980s as the BJP-RSS-VHP launched the most aggressive phase of the movement, among the millions who participated a core of committed women activists emerged in local and national leadership positions. This is a new development. As noted above, the Rashtrasevika Samiti (Women’s National Volunteer Associations) though established by the RSS in the 1930s, had had a low profile. Then in the mid 1960s women began appearing in the movement’s marches in large numbers when the pro-Hindu political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh (later renamed BJP) led the agitation for a constitutional ban on cow slaughter. Today thousands of women are mobilized in a well thoughtout strategy which spans much more than agitation for a ban on cow slaughter. The Rashtrasevika Samitis have been revived with gusto; all the women BJP Members of Parliament are members of the Samiti. The Bharatiya Mahila Morcha is the women’s wing of the political party and has full-time women cadres working for the BJP to help the party make inroads among groups targeted for election votes. Mahila Mandals (Women’s Associations) of the BJP and the VHP are bringing in new recruits while the Durga Vahini (The Army of the Goddess Durga), a VHP mass paramilitary organization exclusively for women, is reaching out to volunteers who will fight on the front lines as in Ayodhya. The women come from both upper class and middle-class backgrounds as well as from middle-ranking service sector and trading families. As many as twenty thousand women participated in a single day in the demonstrations at Ayodhya (Basu et al., 1993:79). To prepare women for such large-scale political confrontations, the RSS has a grass-roots approach for training unmarried women with leadership aspirations. The concept of female preachers and teachers (pracharikas and adhyapikas) was first used by the revivalist Arya Samaj in the late nineteenth century to carry their word to

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secluded women. Based on the model of Christian missionaries, the Arya Samaj trained and educated female preachers who then held meetings in private houses as well as in pubic halls to promote the Arya Samaji way of thought and lecture about female education, calling upon ‘men to uplift the condition of women’ (Kishwar, 1986: 151–86). This model has been adapted to present-day needs. The RSS preachers, as members of its Women’s Association (cells which are parallel to the brotherhood cells) are given a thorough ideological training as well as rigorous physical and military training. The women learn to speak in public and conduct meetings. There are ‘intellectual sessions’ where the RSS version of Indian history is taught, religious sessions where particular hymns and prayers are recited, as well as lessons in yoga, judo, and the uses of the sword and gun (Sarkar, 1991:2059). Then, dressed in the Association’s regulation white sari with purple borders, the women are sent out to set up new branch associations and bring in recruits from their neighbourhoods. They even provide ‘correspondence courses’ for women who are interested in the religious and cultural tenets of Hindutva but are unable to travel to the Association’s offices. Much of the fascist literature on women focuses on the theme of a glorious Hindu past ‘when women were worshipped’. And although the official journal Jagriti (Awakening) by and large still glorifies ancient Hindu Indian womanhood, there are indications that a ‘new woman’ is gaining recognition. A recent cover of the journal portrays two helpless women crouching against a dark background; in the foreground is a young woman dressed in a sari in the colours of the movement. She stands with her head raised exuding strength and self-confidence (Basu et al., 1993:43–4). Other women dress in the saffron clothing of the Hindu novitiates and ascetics. Declaring they are ‘sparks of fire’ they dedicate their lives to struggle on the front lines as at Ayodhya to build the temple to Rama. These soldiers of Hindutva are not women awaiting protection and rescue; their icon of choice is the ‘eight-armed Durga’ (ashtabhuja) with all her weaponry intact. Invented by Laxmibai Kelkar as a symbol of the RSS women’s organization, ashtabhuja is supposed to ‘symbolize the qualities necessary for an ideal Indian woman’, a ‘co-ordination of Strength, Intellect and Wealth’ (Bacchetta, 1994:41). She also happens to be armed to the teeth (see Figure 4). Rather than identify with the passive Sita of the epic, some of the activist women use the term ‘Sitaram’, Sita thus becomes an integral dimension of the martial Rama. Militant and committed to the ideal of a Hindu nation, many of the women activists have a millenarian vision with Rama the new messiah. When interviewed, one of them passionately responded: The Hindu is the beginning and the end of all creation’; ‘when Ayodhya is liberated and the temple built, the whole world will change and a new order will be created’ (Sarkar, 1991:2057).15 This infatuation with the Hindu past is also a means of denigrating Muslims through a blend of racism and supposed concern for Hindu women. For the convenient chronology is that ‘Women lost all their glory and liberty in the dark period of history when India was invaded by barbarians’ (Joseph and Sharma, 1991: 80). This anti-Muslim message is reiterated at every opportunity. At the recent confrontations in Ayodhya, when the court order prohibiting public meetings was defied by the Hindu fascists for 18 days, a female acolyte, Rithambara, with a particularly resonant and fiery style proclaimed race war. She told the enraptured audience from the pulpit, ‘Fourteen hundred years ago Hazrat Mohammed created a race that can never be happy nor can they see anyone else happy’ (India Today,

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Figure 4 A contemporary poster of the goddess Astabhuja (literally the eight- armed one) selected as the patron goddess of the women’s wing of the RSS. Holding weapons in six of her arms, including a very prominent trident which is the symbol of the BJP, in one of her other hands she holds a lotus, the electoral insignia of the BJP. In the background is a Rama temple.

1992a: 14). At other times the Muslims are branded as ‘the descendants of Babur’ (Babur ke aulat); Babur was the founder of the Mughal dynasty in 1526. All Muslims in India, as his supposed descendants, are declared collectively guilty of the invasion. And if one had any doubts that the social vision of Hindutva is fascist, the romance of blood and violence evident in the literature and among the activists should dispel them. Violence is considered important by the movement, the shedding of blood a noble necessity for the cause. A popular tape of the speeches of Uma Bharati, one of the most prominent women acolytes, declares: ‘If needed we will make bricks out of our bones, and our blood will be the mortar to build the temple’ (Bharati, 1992). The major publication of the VHP on Rama and Ayodhya is entitled The Blood-anointed History of Rama’s Birth Place’ (‘Sri Rama Janam Bhoomi ki Rakt Ranjit Itihas’). A

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totally mythical history is served up in this ‘blood anointed history’, but dressed with a handful of historical names and personages so that to the uninitiated the text can be understood as ‘real history’. It is the saga of how Hindus had driven out the Muslims from Ayodhya in the past by destroying their houses, and killing all the men. Other women activists in Ayodhya proclaim: ‘we have come here to shower blood’, ‘for each volunteer killed we are going to kill a thousand’ and ‘blood in return for blood’. When an American researcher, Paola Bacchetta asked Kamlabehn, an engineer turned high-school science teacher and RSS activist pracharika, about the fate of Muslims in a 1986 riot, Kamlabehn replied with visible anger, ‘Why do you ask about them? Look at what they have done to our people. They deserve to die. They should all be killed. They spill our blood. They rape our women. Let their blood be spilled, the bloody bastards. Just as Kali [the goddess] did not spare even one rakshas [demon]’ (Bacchetta, 1994:50). Not only are goddesses invoked as models, the desire for Muslim blood becomes divine desire. As one pamphlet declares, ‘the Goddess of War (Ranchandi) is roaming the lanes with her blood-thirsty sword unsheathed’ (Basu et al., 1993:73). Prior to every meal the women recite, ‘Our limbs and bodies have been nurtured by our Motherland and we must give them back to her in her service alone’ (Sarkar, 1991:2061). And when they do give their ‘limbs and bodies’ or get arrested by the police, the RSS-VHP machinery is ready to turn them into instant martyrs with elaborate pamphlets on ‘Histories of Martyrs’. Women creative writers and poets are also engaged in this process. A pamphlet by women poets, entitled Shraddha Suman Mala (A Garland of Elegies) celebrates the sacrifices by the wives and mothers of the martyrs (Basu et al., 1993:79–80). Urns with the bones and ashes of the RSS volunteers are carried around in procession; they elicit an outpouring of public sympathy and hatred of the state (Banerjee, 1991:99). Hatred is also directed at the Muslims who, it is argued, have no right to the mosque in the first place and are therefore responsible for the deaths. Like the Nazi women who risked arrest, were courageous and spirited in supporting Nazi activities, and rejected the stereotype of the meek and submissive woman, the RSS-BJP-VHP women too are on the move (Koonz, 1977).

‘Start with the cradle and the ladle’ The RSS-BJP-VHP women or their leadership have probably not heard of Gertrud Stoltz-Kling, the chief of the Women’s Bureau under Hitler. Stoltz-Kling’s analysis was that mobilizing ‘average housewives’ and recruiting them to the Nazi cause could only be done through validating their lives and ‘influencing women in their daily lives’; in order to be successful one had to start ‘with the cradle and the ladle’ (Koonz, 1987: xxv). This is a strategy also being followed in India. Motherhood and the importance of the mother in raising brave and heroic sons is reiterated at every turn. A lengthy taped message from the ‘battlefront’ at Ayodhya by Uma Bharati sums up the theme. She begins her message with the story of how a brave Rajput woman found her son had run away from battle. This puzzles the mother until she recalls that once as a child the son had been nursed by a woman from an inferior caste; for after all how could a child fed only on a Rajput mother’s milk fail to be brave? (Bharati, 1992).

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Teaching the children the right prayers, taking them to participate in the Association’s ceremonies and teaching them about Hindutva is the primary responsibility of the BJP-VHP-RSS wives. A number of new nursery schools have been built in middle-class neighbourhoods; other schools have been connected through the existing networks of the Arya Samaji schools. The schoolteachers hired are recruited from families known for their RSS-VHP sympathies. For teachers who are ‘outsiders’ there is strict supervision and they have to attend teacher-training camps where they can be taught the ‘correct’ history (Basu et al., 1993:42–3). In addition to the curriculum, the layout of the schools promotes the BJP-VHP-RSS ideology. Instead of illustrations of nursery rhymes and fairy-tales, the walls of these schools display frescos of heroic Hindus locked in battle with Muslims, and Hindu freedom-fighters. Maps of ‘Undivided India’ (akhand Bharat i.e., denying the existence of Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh) grace the walls and drape the statue of Bharat mata (Mother India) in the assembly halls (Sarkar, 1991:2059). The women also have other well-defined roles and responsibilities within the home and in the neighbourhood. The Matri Mandal (Association of Mothers) involves many women who are married and have young children and therefore spend more time at home. For these women the Association’s work entails developing householdcum-neighbourhood circles. Some of the wives of the BJP-RSS-VHP do not formally join the Association, but nevertheless promote its ideology. Using traditional roles but imbuing those roles with a new political and ideological import has been a key to the success of the BJP-RSS-VHP at many levels and the women’s household-cumneighbourhood circles are no exception. From helping a new bride settle in, to acting as advisers to families facing a range of problems, to assisting with cooking and nursing whenever there are major illnesses in a member’s house, and giving blood for medical emergencies, such activists make sure that the ideas of Hindutva are spread through regular discussions in these informal networks. A new bride who has had training as a RSS Woman’s Association member is told to teach women relatives in the husband’s family if they are not already converted to the cause, promote particular rituals and establish herself as the family counsellor. In rapidly urbanizing India where economic insecurities and anxieties have mounted, the RSS-BJP members have emerged as the new extended family providing a helping hand. And when called upon, such ‘friends of the family’ also organize fellow-workers and the neighbourhood to participate in political marches and provide the BJP with votes at election time (Sarkar, 1991:2060). In the Bombay riots of January 1993 when several thousand Muslims, including women and children, were killed, Muslim women gang-raped and between 2,000 and 4,000 Muslim homes and shops burnt down, the role of Hindu women’s neighbourhood organizations became brutally clear. Women from the ultra rightwing fascist organization, the Shiv Sena, came and sat down in the streets to prevent fire trucks from reaching Muslim neighbourhoods. When a Shiv Sena leader was arrested for carrying a carload of weapons during curfew hours, women from the organization came and lay down on the streets to prevent the removal of the arrested man. Women also surrounded police stations where arrested fascists were being held and got them released (Kishwar, 1993:24). Does the training in the use of automatic guns and the seeming support for a public role for women portend a new role for them? There is little evidence that the RSSBJP-VHP intend to transform patriarchal relations in the long term. Even in the

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training camps, patriarchy remains sacrosanct; the ideal woman is one who has ‘intellectual grasp of the values of Hindu culture and devotional attachment to the ideals of Hindu womanhood’. Preserving the family is deemed all-important. The women’s organizations do not provide legal counselling; nor are there any shelters for victims of domestic violence. Conflicts between husband and wife are supposed to be resolved through arbitration and discussion with Association members. As Mridula Sinha, national president of the BJP women’s organization noted, ‘For Indian women, liberation means liberation from atrocities. It doesn’t mean women should be relieved of their duties as wives and mothers’ (Basu, 1994:33). Others talk of the ‘pride of place’ that the Indian woman has always had within the household and therefore no fundamental change in values is necessary, only their reaffirmation (Kapur and Cossman, 1993: WS39). The rhetoric of the family is repeated throughout the organizational structure; the RSS calls itself the parivar (family) rather than a political organization. Donating blood for use of member families in medical emergencies serves to further this metaphor (Sarkar, 1991:2061). And while there is a sense of heady enthusiasm among the women who were at Ayodhya facing down the government and courting arrest, the older leadership may not see this as a role for women who are married with children. The contradictions between supporting motherhood and family while drawing on the energies of youthful volunteers is evident in the vocabulary used. The party manifesto of the BJP evokes ‘matri shakti’ (the power of the Mother) as its position on women (India West, 1991a: 14). And as would be expected in a fascist movement, there is no tolerance of homosexuality. Lesbianism is branded as ‘too vulgar and irrelevant in the Indian context’ (Kapur and Cossman, 1993: WS39). Officials with RSS-BJP-VHP sympathies have much in common with the comments made by a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India on 18 November 1990. In a lecture on the Indian Constitution and its guarantee of equal rights to women, the Judge, positing a mythical past when women were ‘superior’ to men and given the status of ‘goddesses’, concluded: (1) Let us not think of the articles in the Constitution and let us not try to implement those parts which give equality to women. (2) In accordance with the religious scriptures and the tradition of this country…women ‘certainly’ have to be given an acknowledged role of superiority ‘in playing their role as ladies, as mothers, sisters’ (3) ‘What is necessary is that there must be a switchover (of women) from the office to the house.’ (4) If it is necessary for economic reasons to work outside the home, the women should put in ‘extra labour’ for it.

(Choudhary, 1990:2770) Though younger women do not support sati and the immolation of a wife on the funeral pyre of her husband, senior BJP women like Vijayraje Scindia have suggested that there is nothing very wrong with this ‘glorious tradition’ (Basu, 1994:30). The RSS historian, Sita Ram Goel takes umbrage at the press for reporting ‘only stories of brideburning without caring to find out what is happening to old parents in many modern homes under the impact of an imported culture which places an exclusive premium on what is described as youth’ (Goel, 1983:3; emphasis in original).

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As kulaks have gained political clout in north India, it is their vision of the appropriate role of women that is coming to dominate the social agenda of most political parties. In the state of Bihar, for example, where the literacy rate for women is still barely over 10 per cent in the countryside and the seclusion of women persists, the only positive feature of the 1980s had been the slight increase in the rate of female literacy and signs that an increasing number of girls were being permitted to go to schools as long as the teachers were women. But recently the quota of reserved teaching positions for women in primary schools has been slashed from 50 per cent to 3 per cent. The chief minister of the state is advising women to stick to household chores, raise their children and focus on knitting and sewing (Chaitanya, 1991:2925). And catering to the fear that 700 million Hindus can become a minority in their own country because the Muslims are supposedly having more children, graffiti on the walls of Delhi declare, ‘agla baccha abhi abhi; aat ke badh kabhi kabhi’ (have the next child right away, and an occasional one only after the eighth).

Concluding comments The promised ‘tryst with destiny’, with which Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated India’s independence in 1947 had an unspoken promise: a resolution to avoid class war. Now part of the Communist Party of India’s faded history, the Telengana movement (1946–51) was then still active; peasant rule had been established in 2,000–3,000 villages; a guerrilla army of 10,000 defended the newly won rights. The RSS leadership was quick to point out their own usefulness to Nehru in 1948 and to offer their services: We do not think the Communists can be beaten by any political or economic programme and propagandas for they can easily mislead the masses by holding out to them promises of a debasing nature. Repression will only give a fillip to the Movement. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the only way to meet the challenge of Communism and it is the only ideology which can harmonise and integrate the interests of different groups and classes and thus successfully avoid any class war.

(Graham, 1990:47–8) The tacit pact that Congress entered into with the RSS has been kept. Though the Hindu Mahasabha was barred from electoral politics for their role in M.K.Gandhi’s assassination, an electoral party called the Jana Sangh (renamed the BJP in 1980) was founded with many of the Mahasabha’s members, and the RSS was born in 1951. The first of many front organizations of the fascists, the Jana Sangh was dependent on the RSS for funds and the RSS leadership shaped its politics. The Congress Party also continued to have RSS members among its rank and file as well as sympathizers among the Congress leadership (Graham, 1990:19–21; 56–68). The rise of Hindu fascists, though seemingly dramatic, is therefore a process that has been going on for several decades. The RSS has enjoyed the overt support of several political figures including prime ministers. L.B.Shastri, Prime Minister of India in the mid 1960s, was a RSS patron; Indira Gandhi courted the right wing and RSS

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volunteers repaid her by working for her during the elections of 1971 and 1984; she was proclaimed the reincarnation of the Goddess Durga by the Jana Sangh leadership. Perhaps the threat of communism was more imagined than real. The left political parties, mired in nationalism, have had little to contribute to the shaping of an alternative culture or critical discourse. Nor have they been able to articulate a critique of patriarchy or even confront violence against women (Basu, 1989). Concerns raised by the women’s movement have passed them by; for example, after the 1991 gang rape of three women in CPM-controlled West Bengal, the chief minister only noted that ‘such things happen’ while the general secretary of the CPM women’s organization (a woman) read the party statement on the violent incident which elaborated on the ‘past histories’ of the women and pointed out that they were mere prostitutes (Pati, 1991:219). On the defensive for being ‘foreign’ in their inspiration, the left allowed themselves to be overtaken by nationalism. Then, lured by the temporary advantages of state power, the left parties have long since settled for the ‘dictatorship of the bureaucracy’ (Harris, 1990:285). After the 1991 elections, in the face of the rising tide of Hindutva and their own electoral losses, the 1992 Congress of the Communist Party of India declared that it hopes ‘to eventually arrive at an Indian model of socialist development suited to Indian conditions’. In preparation for this historic event, cadres will now read not only Lenin, Marx and Engels, but also Kabir, Guru Nanak and Swami Vivekananda, the latter a Hindu revivalist (India Today, 1992b: 26). Funds are being raised to build a statue to Savarkar, the founding father of the Hindu Mahasabha. Not to be left behind, the Communist Party (Marxist) in Bengal is incorporating Sri Aurobindo and Vivekananda into their curriculum and is planning to celebrate the latter’s centenary in style. The VHP-BJP-RSS have, however, beaten them to it and have already held elaborate centenary celebrations. Resistance to the fascists has emerged almost exclusively from the ranks of independent progressives. In the wake of the Ayodhya riots, which seemed to break through the stupor of many progressives, dozens of grass-roots organizations have tried to organize and educate the public. Feminists and women’s rights activists and civil rights groups have documented riots, formed local support groups for the riot victims, sought to move the legal machinery to bring Hindu rioters to justice in addition to supporting secular and humanitarian efforts. Individual journalists and photographers, particularly those writing for the English language press, have attempted to conscientize their readers. Some artists, actors, dancers and musicians with support from academics have formed SAHMAT, an organization focusing on bringing the message of secular culture to a broad range of audiences. They have mounted free performances, plays and exhibits and toured the country (and the expatriate community). However, the efforts of such organizations remain fragmented and vulnerable while disillusionment with electoral party politics has thus far precluded a concerted national effort by the various progressive organizations. The sheer reach and power of the BJP-VHP-RSS combine, with its massive war-chest and ready volunteers, can scarcely be matched by a few dozen secular-minded individuals. A couple of examples suffice to illustrate the limits of local resistance. As one longtime progressive and activist from the Women’s Initiative, a well-known feminist organization, found, community support for a Women’s Initiative sponsored programme to get something as essential as more water for the community

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evaporated at a crucial moment in the face of BJP inducements; the programme would have shown up some BJP partisans.16 SAHMAT’s exhibit on Ayodhya which sought to point out the diverse origins of the Ramayana (thus challenging the fascist appropriation) was vandalized by fascists; the BJP, as the chief opposition party, mobilized the Parliament and state machinery against SAHMAT. The issue was debated in Parliament for a week and the organizers of SAHMAT had to come to the conclusion that ‘there was not, perhaps for obvious reasons of political discretion (and expediency?), the will and the desire to resist the BJP—even among the more left, liberal, and secular parliamentarians’ (Kapur, 1994:70). SAHMAT was consequently designated a ‘criminal organization’, those who helped with the exhibition and participated were made liable to arrest. Ultimately, the power of the Hindu fascists may come not just at the polling booths but also from the support they enjoy from the three most powerful institutions of the state—the military, the police and intelligence agencies. All three, established by the British, drew on the most conservative elements in society; after all, their function was to help the colonial government maintain its hold. The ultra-conservatism of the Indian army officers had been noted even by their British peers; in these military circles it was not unusual for both Nehru and M.K.Gandhi to be referred to as ‘traitors’ for their position on Muslims and Untouchables (Hiro, 1976:192–3). In the post-independence period not only have the army, police and intelligence services increased enormously in size, but their right-wing political proclivities have been strengthened with state support. Some army officers were fired merely for attending a Communist Party (Marxist) public rally during home leave; officers from states which had communist party organizations have been routinely subject to undercover intelligence surveillance by the central government (Hiro, 1976:199). Beginning in 1962, when in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War the defence budget increased by 261 per cent in one year, the Indian military budget has steadily grown. India has the fourth largest armed force in the world. The police, organized like an army infantry, are overwhelmingly from the Hindi-speaking areas of North India. Drawn from the ranks of middle-caste Hindus and often recent immigrants from the countryside, the police serve as the storm-troopers of rightwing politicians and the landed upper castes. Police gang rape of socialist and feminist activists, ‘uppity’ tribals and Untouchables is rife.17 As one progressive journal described it, The police in India consider the right of raping women as one of the perks of an underpaid job’ (Bonner, 1990:184). And over and over again civil rights organizations have found that the police sent in to maintain order in Hindu-Muslim riots have fired indiscriminately into Muslim crowds and at Muslim houses. In the first round of riots in Bombay in December 1992, the vast majority of the dead were Muslims killed by police bullets aimed at the heads and torsos of the victims (Mann, 1992:175–7; Gargan, 1993: A8). The proliferation of separatist movements and other forms of social strife has been paralleled by an increase in the size and powers of the repressive machinery of the state; in many cases now they run the state. Though some Hindu fascists have visions of an impending apocalyptic war and others are distressed that ‘Hindu society’ has not already risen up en masse against the ‘Muslim-appeasing government’, they will probably not come to power in such a dramatic fashion. The chances are that they will be elected. In the war of position the Hindu fascists have already acquired hegemony.

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Notes Sucheta Mazumdar, assistant professor, Duke University, teaches Chinese history and Asian-American history. Co-founder and co-editor of South Asia Bulletin, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, she has published articles on nationalism and Indian women. She is on the editorial collective of Gender and History and co-edited Making Waves: Writings by and About Asian American Women (Beacon Press, 1989). Her monograph, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology and the World Market, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press East Asia Council, and she is currently preparing a study of women in the global economy. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the South Asia Bulletin and Social Scientists Association sponsored conference, ‘Critical Perspectives on Crisis and Political Mobilization in Sri Lanka and India’, Colombo, January 1990. I would like to thank the participants for their comments, and in particular Vasant Kaiwar. 1 Grappling with the definition and usage of the term ‘fascism’ and its applicability to what is happening in India today requires a separate project of its own. Though social movements acquire specific characteristics based on particular time and place, and not all right-wing movements emerge as fascist movements, along with many other observers of contemporary India cited here, I believe this is the most appropriate term. On the one hand the term has been used most frequently in its particularistic sense of developments in Europe in the era between the two world wars; e.g., the classic study of Ernst Nolte (1965). On the other hand, there has been a tendency, particularly among left and communist circles, to use the term as a weapon against all opponents. In an intellectual climate where ‘difference’ of peoples and histories has become enshrined, using a term born out of the history of Europe may seem odd to some readers. However, I think it is necessary to recognize socio-political movements for what they are rather than romanticize the uniqueness of India. 2 Kishwar (1993) is based on extensive interviews. Several Indian newspapers and other eyewitness accounts corroborate Kishwar’s findings. Bacchetta (1994) points out that in Ahmedabad women have been participating in violence against Muslims since 1969. 3 James Mill’s A History of British India, published in 1817, was the first effort to write a comprehensive account of Indian history; Mill developed a periodization based on religious categories. Many Indian textbooks to this day use Mills’s chronological periodization which feeds into the nationalist and fascist mythography of a ‘golden age of Hinduism’ overshadowed by ‘Muslim conquest’. 4 I have dealt with these issues at some length in my article ‘Women, culture and politics: engendering the Hindu nation’ (Mazumdar, 1992). 5 The sari was draped differently in the various regions of India; originally there was no petticoat and blouse worn underneath and élite women wrapped themselves in large shawls when they went out in public. This presented problems of modesty and mobility as new social relations evolved in the late nineteenth century. The bourgeoisie modified/Indianized the Victorian dress by adding the sari cloth over the blouse and petticoat. The most commonly used style of draping the cloth as

RIGHT-WING MOBILIZATION IN INDIA 23

6 7

8

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

seen today is a twentieth-century urban modification and was called the ‘dress style’. The burqa is a tent-like cloak which covers the women from head to toe. For example, Sarla Devi, a prominent India nationalist figure, even dressed like Kali. For example, the use of incense and the lighting of the multi-tiered ritual lamps instead of ribbon-cutting ceremonies; using priests to inaugurate buildings and having government officials touch their feet in the ritual Hindu obeisance while the scene was broadcast on national TV; cabinet ministers appearing on TV and in photographs wearing the ceremonial vermilion on their foreheads which indicated a visit to the temple, etc. According to him, the ancient language of Sanskrit, the Vedas, and the sages of early India were the fount of all that was worth knowing and preserving (Saraswati, 1960). See in particular pp. 548–9 where he is criticizing the Brahmo Samaj and the Prarthana Samaj and the xenophobic tone of the discourse. Much of this section on RSS history, and subsequent sections draw on Basu et al. (1993). I am much obliged to Tanika Sarkar for giving me her personal copy of the book. Though there have been slight increases since, and the CPM claims to have added another 200,000 members, the growth is far from spectacular and the CPI has lost both members and seats in parliament. Numerous such photographs showing uses of human blood have appeared in various issues of India Today since 1989. The cassette entitled ‘Jai Shri Ram’ for example has songs such as ‘Aya samay jawano jago’ (the time has come for the martial youth to arise), ‘Ram ji ki sena chali’ (the army of Rama is on the move), etc., all set to lively Hindi film-music tunes. These new publications were funded by the state of Madhya Pradesh. It takes 40 per cent of the national vote to gain a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of the Parliament. ‘Hindu hi adi ant hai’ ‘poora vishwa badal ho jayega, ek naya shristi ka nirman hoga’. Author’s interview with Gauri Chaudhury, 6 July 1994. Total figures on rape are not readily available in any country; less so when the guardians of law and order are the rapists. But some well-known examples suffice: in the state of Haryana, a November 1983 report of the Central Reserve Police Force found records indicating 828 women were raped in their police custody between 1966 and 1980. Of these 210 women were from the Untouchable caste. Only one constable was ever charged in all those years. Four policemen were involved in the rape of Guntabhen, three in the case of Maya Tyagi, and in 1988 in Pararia 40 police (from inspectors to watchmen) joined together to rape 14 women between the ages of 13–50; in March 1989 all 8 policemen and 6 watchmen who had been identified by the women were acquitted by the judge. Several of these cases have been discussed in Bonner, 1990.

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References ALMANAC (1991) Boston: Houghton Mifflin. BACCHETTA, Paola (1993) ‘Muslim women in the RSS discourse’ in Bulletin Committee on South Asian Women Vol. 8, Nos.3–4. —(1994) ‘All our goddesses are armed: religion, resistance, and revenge in the life of a militant Hindu Nationalist woman’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Vol. 25, No. 4. BAIG, Murad Ali (1990) ‘Victims of education’ India Today 30 September. BANERJEE, Sumanta (1991) ‘Hindutva—ideology and social psychology’, Economic and Political Weekly 19 January. BASU, Amrita (1989) ‘Democratic centralism in home and the world’ in Kruks, Sonia et al., editors, Promissory Notes New York: Monthly Review Press. —(1994) ‘Feminism inverted: the real women and gendered imagery of Hindu Nationalism’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Vol. 25, No. 4. BASU, Tapan, DUTTA, Pradip, SARKAR, Sumit, SARKAR, Tanika and SEN, Sambuddha (1993) Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags New Delhi: Orient Longman. BHARATI, Uma (1992) Interview, India Today, 15 August. —(1992) Taped speech ‘Jai Shree Ram’. BONNER, Arthur (1990) Averting the Apocalypse, Durham: Duke University Press. CASHMAN, Richard (1990) ‘The political recruitment of the god Ganapati’ in Jeffrey, Robin et al., editors, India Rebellion to Republic Selected Writings, 1857–1990 New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. CHAITANYA, Krishna (1991) ‘Government’s discrimination against women teachers’ Economic and Political Weekly 21 December. CHOUDHARY, Kameshwar (1990) ‘Debunking the call for women’s slavery’ Economic and Political Weekly 22 December. DUTTA, Pradip K. (1991) ‘VHP’s Rama at Ayodhya’ Economic and Political Weekly 2 November. ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY (1992) 22 February. GARGAN, Edward A. (1993) ‘After Bombay’s violence, fear and finger pointing’ New York Times 19 November. GHIMIRE, Yubaraj (1992) ‘Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh: shift in strategy’ India Today 31 January. GOEL, Sita Rama (1983) Defence of Hindu Society New Delhi: Voice of India. —(1989) ‘Some historical questions’ Sunday Express 16 April. GOLWALKAR, M.S. (1939) We, or Our Nationhood Defined Nagpur. GRAHAM, Bruce (1990) Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. GUHA THAKURTA, Tapati (1991) ‘Women as “calendar art” icons’ Economic and Political Weekly 26 October. HARRIS, Nigel ( 1990) National Liberation Harmondsworth: Penguin. HIRO, Dilip (1976) Inside India Today New York: Monthly Review Press. INDIA TODAY (1991) ‘Newsnotes’ 15 July. —(1992a) ‘Bharatiya Janata Party: politics of opportunism’ 15 August. —(1992b) ‘Newsnotes’ 15 May. —(1992c) ‘Lotus lure’ 15 August.

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INDIA WEST (1991a) 24 May. —(1991b) 4 June. —(1993) 26 July. JAYAPRASAD, K. (1990) RSS and Hindu Nationalism New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications. JOSEPH, Ammu and SHARMA, Kalpana (1991) ‘Between the lines: women’s issues in English language newspapers’ Economic and Political Weekly 26 October. KAPUR, GEETA (1994) ‘SAHMAT performance and exhibit for cultural understanding results in criminal charges’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Vol. 25, No. 4. KAPUR, Ratna and COSSMAN, Brenda (1993) ‘Communalising gender/engendering community’ Economic and Political Weekly 24 April 1993. KISHWAR, Madhu (1986) ‘The daughters of Aryavarta’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review Vol. 23, No.2. —(1993) ‘Safety is indivisible—the warning from Bombay riots’ Manushi Special double issue, Nos. 74–5 reprinted in Bulletin, Committee on South Asian Women Vol. 8, Nos. 3–4. KOONZ, Claudia (1977) ‘Mothers in the fatherland: women in Nazi Germany’ in Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia, editors, Becoming Visible: Women in European History Boston: Houghton Mifflin. —(1987) Mothers in the Fatherland New York: St Martin’s Press. LIDDLE, Joanna and JOSHI, Rama (1986) Daughters of Independence London: Zed. McLANE, John (1988) ‘The early congress Hindu populism and the wider society’ in SISSON and WOLPERT. MANN, E.A. (1992) Boundaries and Identities Newbury Park: Sage Publications. MAZUMDAR, Sucheta (1992) ‘Women, culture and politics: engendering the nation’ South Asia Bulletin Vol. 12, No. 2. —(1994) ‘Women’s culture and the internalization of dominant Hindu ideology in contemporary India’ in Moghadam, Valentine editor, Women and Identity Politics Boulder: Westview Press. MOORE, Barrington (1966) The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. NOLTE, Ernst (1965) Three Faces of Fascism New York: New American Library. NOSSITER, T.J. (1988) Marxist State Governments in India New York: Pinter Publishers. PANDEY, Gyanendra (1988) ‘Congress and the nation, 1917–1947’ in SISSON and WOLPERT. —(1991) ‘Hindus and Others: the militant Hindu construction’ Economic and Political Weekly 28 December. PATI, Biswamoy (1991) ‘Women, rape and the left’ Economic and Political Weekly 2 February. PHULWANI, Jyoti (1993) ‘India searching for answers in the wake of religious violence’ Ms. Vol. 4, No. 1. RAMU, G.N. (1989) Women, Work and Marriage in Urban India New Delhi: Sage Publications. RAY, Motilal (1931) Bharatlakshsmi Calcutta. ROY, Bhaskar (1991) ‘Bharatiya Janata Party: strident change’ India Today 31 January. SARASWATI, Dayanand (1960 edition) The Light of Truth (Satyartha Prakasha) trans. Ganga Prasad Upadhyaya, Allahabad.

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SARKAR, Sumit (1983) Modern India 1885–1947 London: Macmillan. SARKAR, Tanika (1991) ‘The woman as communal subject’ Economic and Political Weekly 31 August. SAVARKAR, V.D. (1949) Hindutva 4th edition, Poona: S.P.Gokhale. SHAH, Ghanshyam (1991) ‘Tenth Lok Sabha elections: BJP’s victory in Gujarat’ Economic and Political Weekly 21 December. SHAH, Kalpana et al. (1993) ‘Nightmare of Surat’ Manushi Nos. 74–5; (Jan-April). SHRADDHANAND, Swami (1926) Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race (np). SISSON, Richard and WOLPERT, Stanley (1988) editors, Congress and Indian Nationalism Berkeley: University of California Press. UBEROI, Patricia (1990) ‘Feminine identity and national ethos in Indian calendar art’ Economic and Political Weekly 28 April. VANAIK, Achin (1990) The Painful Transition London: Verso.

COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN LATE-VICTORIAN ENGLAND: Pandita Ramabai at Cheltenham and Wantage 1883–6 Antoinette Burton

Scrutinizing the nature, dynamics and political ramifications of the colonial encounter is a characteristic preoccupation of postcolonial studies. Feminists committed to rematerializing encounters between English women and the British Empire have concentrated on examining them either in distant colonial locales like India, Nigeria or Egypt (Callaway, 1987; Chaudhuri and Strobel, 1992)—where English women encountered indigenous peoples in their capacity as officers’ wives, missionaries, social reformers and adventurers—or in Victorian women’s ‘domestic’ literary production—where, as in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the figure of an ambiguously racialized feminine Other (Bertha Mason) helps to structure the novel and, with it, the English heroine’s fate (Spivak, 1989; Azim 1993; Sharpe, 1993). Examining the historical variety of colonial encounters among women is crucial political work if we are to appreciate, among other things, the historically situated relationships of Western women to imperial ideologies and practices. As Jenny Sharpe has written with regard to British India, understanding the ways in which ‘Englishwomen’s bid for gender power passes through a colonial hierarchy of race’ is a precondition for such critical appreciation (Sharpe, 1993:12). Pandita Ramabai’s time in England illustrates how Victorian women’s relationships to colonial power were staged in imperial culture at home in Britain, and, most significantly, how they could be contested by an Indian woman at the very heart of the empire. Ramabai (1858–1922) was a Marathi educator and social reformer who came to England in 1883 seeking a medical education through the good offices of sympathetic English women. Her initial contacts were with the Anglican Sisters of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, whose connexions with the educator Dorothea Beale in turn enabled her to study at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, of which Beale was then headmistress (Raikes, 1909). Although deeply influenced by her relationships with English women, Ramabai’s conversion to Christianity and her subsequent struggles with the Anglican Church hierarchy over doctrinal matters caused her ultimately to break with both of the women’s communities, religious and educational, in which she had resided. When she left England in 1886 she had not fulfilled her intention of becoming a medical doctor and, indeed, had found more sympathy and financial support among American women reformers than among her British ‘sisters’. Despite the considerable rhetoric about British women’s responsibility for Indian women among Victorian feminist activists, as well as a

Feminist Review No. 49, Spring 1995, pp. 29–49

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growing organizational commitment to improving women’s conditions in India in late Victorian Britain, Ramabai returned to India without having found the kind of sisterly solidarity she had expected from British women (Hoggan, 1885; Balfour and Young, 1929; Burton, 1992). Nor did Pandita Ramabai’s particular sojourn produce the kinds of permanent personal connexions with British women which their own apparent concern for colonial womanhood might suggest (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Ware, 1992; Burton, 1992 and 1994). Her travels to the metropole reveal, then, some of the limitations placed on women’s international solidarity by the constraints of imperial power relationships on the one hand, and by some Western women’s collaboration in the ideological work of empire, on the other. Ramabai was not able to ‘wander all over the map’, as it were, without facing the barriers thrown up by the exigencies of Britain’s role as an imperial power and, more specifically, by the dictates of the civilizing mission which Christian women at home believed to be their special gift to ‘Indian womanhood’. To paraphrase Liz Stanley, the map of the British Isles, historically speaking, ‘encompassed the colonial power of Britain’—a power consequential not only in terms of its economic and political impact, but also in its effect on relations between women in Britain and their colonized ‘sisters’ (Stanley, 1990). Pandita Ramabai’s encounters with English women in England signal, if not the impossibility of women’s international solidarity, then certainly some of the contradictions inherent in the ideal of international sisterhood1 which emerged in the historically imperial context of late-Victorian Britain (Ware, 1992; Burton, 1992).

Encountering sisterhood in imperial culture When she first came to England in the spring of 1883, Pandita Ramabai was already well known in Indian and British reform circles as a Sanskrit scholar and a proponent of women’s education (Shah, 1977:7; Kosambi, 1988:41–2). Born in 1858, her early life was marked by tragedy. She was orphaned at the age of 16 and lost her only remaining sibling, a brother, in 1880—at which point, according to Ramabai, ‘I was alone in the world’ (17). Six months later she married a man outside her caste, but within less than two years he too had died of cholera, leaving her a widow at the age of 24 with a young daughter. As a high-caste Brahmin woman, Ramabai was technically forbidden to read the Vedas. However, her father, himself a learned man, taught both Ramabai and her mother to read, and she later recalled how she had learned the Vedic texts by listening to her father and brothers reciting them and repeating them to herself (Tharu and Lalita, 1991:244). Mostly self-taught, she became a Sanskrit scholar in her own right before her marriage and was recognized by the titles ‘Pandita’, meaning eminent scholar/teacher, and ‘Saraswati’, a reference to the Hindu goddess of learning. Ramabai was an unconventional woman in late-nineteenth-century India and, indeed, recent Indian historians have called her ‘a legend in her own lifetime’ (Tharu and Lalita, 1991:243). Her challenges to contemporary Hindu tradition were predictably unpopular among conservative Hindus. According to the Times of India:

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She had before her marriage suffered much persecution on account of her advanced views about female emancipation, while the mere fact of her remaining unmarried was calculated to shock the orthodox.

(CCLM, 1884:116) Pandita Ramabai’s reform convictions grew out of a deep personal commitment to improving the condition of Indian women. Her concerns about Indian women’s ‘uplift’ were shared by a growing number of late-nineteenth-century Indian social reformers (Heimsath, 1964; Mani, 1989). She travelled widely in India, observing the conditions of women and, after her husband’s death, spoke at various gatherings and meetings, giving publicity to the cause of girls’ and women’s education throughout India (Dyer, 1911; Shah, 1977; Kosambi, 1988). By the time she was asked to testify for the Government of India’s Commission on Education in 1882 (referred to also as the Hunter Commission), Pandita Ramabai had, therefore, gained considerable notoriety for her views on the need for reforms for women and children. She told the Commission that India’s women needed both teacher training and advancement to positions such as Inspectress of Schools—the personnel and the bureaucratic structure, in other words, which were necessary to guarantee both the permanence of women’s educational reform and the government’s sustained commitment to it. And no doubt to the chagrin of some Indian male reformers, she told the Commission that 99 per cent of the male population in India was opposed to education for women. Ramabai also spoke to the issue of ‘lady doctors’ in India, advancing what was to become a central claim in English reformers’ arguments about the need for a programme of all-women’s medical aid to Indian women: namely that native women refused to be attended by male doctors and hence required the services of trained women physicians (Beale, 1889). According to Ramabai’s testimony, this want of lady doctors was the cause ‘of hundreds of thousands of women dying premature deaths’, and she called on the government to make provision specifically for the medical education of Indian women (IMAR, 1882). Her concern for healthy conditions among Indian women undoubtedly prompted her own desire to become a doctor. In her travels throughout India she had been repeatedly moved by the sufferings of Hindu women; her goal, as she put it, was ‘to fit myself for a life of usefulness, in order to benefit my countrywomen’ (Shah, 1977: 18). Like several of her Indian women contemporaries, it was the quest for a medical education which brought Pandita Ramabai to England in the first place, since before the mid-1880s there were no facilities for would-be women doctors to study in India except in Madras.2 She knew the work of the Sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Poona, whose efforts on behalf of Indian women had greatly impressed her, and arrangements were made from Poona for her to stay at Wantage (Shah, 1977: 7, 73–4). According to several sources, Ramabai wanted assistance but was wary of accepting charity (Shah, 1977: xii; Tharu and Lalita, 1991:243). Consequently, she undertook to write a book, Stree-Dharma Neeti,3 and used the proceeds from its sale to finance her passage to England. Ramabai’s determination to be self-supporting led Sister Geraldine of Wantage to characterize her as wilful and proud, but it is clear from Ramabai’s own testimonials that self-sufficiency was the only condition under

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which she was prepared to accept the generosity of communities like St Mary’s and Cheltenham (Shah, 1977:71–2). Characteristically, when she decided to make a trip to the United States in 1886, she wrote what remains her most famous book in the West, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, in order to underwrite the cost of her own expenses (Chakravarti, 1989:68–72). The implications of Sister Geraldine’s reading of Ramabai is something I shall return to, but it is worth remarking that her insistence upon financing herself enabled her to become ‘one of the few nineteenth-century women who were able to support themselves with their writing’—either in India or outside it (Tharu and Lalita, 1991:243). Soon after her arrival in England Ramabai converted to Christianity and was baptized in the autumn of 1883 at Wantage, with Sister Geraldine of the Sisters of St Mary the Virgin (SMV) acting as her spiritual guide and mother (Shah, 1977:xvvi; Dyer, 1923:35). Her conversion caused quite a sensation in India, and later prompted severe criticism of her by certain Indian reformers, Tilak among them (Tharu and Lalita, 1991:245–6; Shah, 1977: xxii-iv; Kosambi, 1988:44). Once she had established her own institutions, like the widows’ home at Poona (1890), Ramabai found herself trying continually to balance the competing claims of religious and secular education for Indian women, at odds with both the missionary and the Hindu communities in India—so much so that she came to refer to herself as a ‘Christian outcast’. Shortly after her conversion (that is, by January of 1884), Ramabai was in residence at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, under the care and guidance of its head, Dorothea Beale. Looking back on Ramabai’s time at the college over thirty years later, Sister Geraldine explained that she sent Ramabai to Cheltenham because ‘I would say that intellectually I was not equipped for such work as instructing’ her and because, although she had spent time in India, ‘my work had almost wholly been in a

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European and Eurasian high school, and so I had had no experience in native work’ (Shah, 1977:7). There is no evidence in the correspondence to suggest that the SMV sisters sent Ramabai to Cheltenham for any other reason except that they wished her to pursue her education. It was not theological differences, in other words, which prompted Sister Geraldine to send Ramabai to Cheltenham; these came later, if almost immediately. Even in their most disputatious moments, Pandita Ramabai and Sister Geraldine kept up a vigorous correspondence which was virtually uninterrupted for several years. Their letters, as well as those between Ramabai and Beale, Beale and Sister Geraldine, and each of the women with Anglican clergymen, provide first-hand evidence of how imperial power relations intruded on personal relationships and, more specifically, how the exigencies of an imperial Christianity intervened to prevent (or at least to imperil) the possibility of international sisterhood (Burton, 1992). At issue initially was the question of whether or not a cross should be displayed on the SMV premises in Poona. In spite of the fact that Father Goreh and Sister Eleanor of the Poona Mission House both wanted it, Ramabai appears to have been against it. Conceding to Sister Geraldine that a cross might be instructive, Ramabai insisted that it be inscribed in Sanskrit rather than in Latin. Her reasoning on this point was as follows: Do you think that [the] Latin language has something better in it than our old Sanskrit or have you the same feeling for the Latin as the Brahmins have for Sanskrit (i.e. to think it to be the Sacred Language and spoken by God and Angels)? I stick fast to Sanskrit, not because I think it to be sacred or the language of the gods, but because it is the most beautiful, and the oldest language of my dear native land. And, therefore, if I must have a Cross, I should like to see Sanskrit words written upon it instead of the Latin words.

(Burton 1992:27–8) Ramabai’s concern was for the successful transmission of Christianity to Indian soil, and her objection to the Latin inscription was, as she indicates, that most Indians, and Indian women in particular, would be mystified by its meaning. I do not myself understand the Latin, neither [do] my countrywomen (with some exception). And even also Latin is not the mother tongue of the Marathi [people], so our Indian sisters will not find a single word in it that they know or is like to some word that is known to them. Then why should we be kept in ignorance of our professed text?

(Burton, 1992:27–8) For Ramabai it was a question of evangelical strategy, perhaps even a lesson in cultural literacy. She informed Sister Geraldine that she was going to write and tell Father Goreh that ‘in some things I cannot agree with him’. As she did in the case of other theological issues, Sister Geraldine interpreted Ramabai’s stance as wilful disobedience, telling her bishop that: ‘I…tried to make the difficulty which arose an opportunity for showing her that she could not act independently but must defer in her judgment to those in authority.’ Ramabai, in contrast, viewed the cross incident with

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the intellectual curiosity of an enthusiastic convert. She referred to her own discussion of the inscription as ‘my argument’ and closed her letter to Sister Geraldine with the hope that ‘you will of course write to me what you think’ (Shah, 1977:29). As time went on the doctrinal conflicts became more detailed, more acrimonious, and more polarizing. Ramabai raised objections to the doctrine of the Trinity, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian creed, and the deity of Christ (88–9). It is important to note that these were not concerns mentioned in passing; nor did they arise casually in the course of epistolary conversation. Both Ramabai and Sister Geraldine wrote pages and pages delineating their respective positions, quoting extensively from scriptural texts, and invoking contemporary theological authorities to reinforce or legitimate their points. Their exchanges embody the kind of genuine spiritual anguish for which the Victorians are so well known, and which at times seem inaccessible to modern sensibilities. For Sister Geraldine the difficulty was particularly acute, since it became clear by the autumn of 1885 that Ramabai had been baptized while still in doubt over the nature of the Trinity and (a related issue) the divinity of Jesus. She lectured Ramabai on the dangers of heresy, asking, ‘is the Church wrong in not allowing into her Communion those whose teaching and practice is not in accordance with that given to us by our Lord?’ (103). As A.B.Shah has written, Ramabai’s interpretations struck at the heart of the ‘the Church’s insistence on unquestioning uniformity.’ It was a uniformity to which Sister Geraldine equally unquestioningly adhered. In her capacity as Ramabai’s spiritual mother in England, she felt responsibility for her charge’s religious education. As she herself readily admitted, ‘I will not ask you to take this on my authority’, since for Sister Geraldine, it was the Church and Holy Scripture that together dictated the conditions of faith. Ramabai’s own spiritual doubts notwithstanding, Sister Geraldine clearly wished to fashion Ramabai’s Christianity in her own image (104). As Ramabai was quickly to discover, Sister Geraldine was not the only one with an interest in developing her religious life. Dorothea Beale was equally involved in shaping her spiritual direction, and she shared Sister Geraldine’s concern that Ramabai was being unduly influenced by other religious viewpoints, most notably some local ‘ladies of the Unitarian interest’. Whether Ramabai’s interest in contemporary Nonconformity was the product of her own theological inquiries or of the influence of friends in Cheltenham and environs is not easily discernible from the correspondence. Most likely it was both. What remains certain is that Beale saw herself as the one to step in and clarify Ramabai’s views on Christianity. Writing to assuage Sister Geraldine’s doubts, Beale assured her that Ramabai would in the end be ‘firmly established in the Christian faith’ and fully able to preach conversion upon her return to India, but only if she could be persuaded to study Christianity ‘as a philosophy’. Beale continued: She cannot receive it merely as an historical revelation, it must also commend itself to her conscience…If she does not find someone to whom she can speak freely, she will be silent, and might easily pass into Unitarianism…I cannot help thinking that God has given me some preparation of mind and heart to help her with.

(Burton, 1992:32)

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Beale’s allusion to her own spiritual crises (to which she made reference more than once in correspondence with Sister Geraldine) was intended to reassure the Sisters about her capacity to help Ramabai. Needless to say, her view of Christianity as a ‘philosophy’ can hardly have comforted Sister Geraldine, and indeed, Beale later proffered her opinion that it was not prudent ‘to try to keep her away from people, who think differently. She has gone through so much already, and now she has got her feet on a Rock, these currents will not sweep her away, I am persuaded.’ In fact, it was always Beale’s position that Ramabai was eminently ‘teachable’. ‘We must not be anxious,’ she wrote, ‘but really trust God with that wonderful mind and character that He has fashioned for her’ (62–3). Ramabai’s spiritual education became something of a contest of authority between Beale and Sister Geraldine. In the wake of a letter from Ramabai in which she had detailed her difficulties in accepting the doctrine of the perfect nature of the Saviour, Sister Geraldine wrote anxiously to the Bishop of Lincoln about the effects of Ramabai’s time at Cheltenham on the direction of her spiritual life: Miss Beale hardly recognizes the position she is placing herself in. She is undoubtedly misunderstanding and mismanaging Ramabai—and when Ramabai has thrown us off [as] she is certain to do if Miss Beale continues the attitude she is at present taking with her, Ramabai will at the first rub with Miss Beale throw off her authority too. This will cause an open scandal, and it will not reflect well on the part Miss Beale has played in the matter. She did distinctly say to me and others [that] she considered a year at Cheltenham enough, and now recalls her words.

(Shah, 1977:72) At one point both Ramabai and Beale believed that Sister Geraldine wanted Ramabai to leave Cheltenham on account of their differences, despite Sister Geraldine’s reassurance to Ramabai that ‘money is no consideration where your welfare is concerned. We wish only to do the very best for you’ (64–5). Beale, for her part, apparently felt threatened enough by the insinuation that Ramabai’s experiences at Cheltenham were responsible for her ‘straying’ to write to Canon Butler to dissuade him from making a similar conclusion (77–8). In any event, both Beale and Sister Geraldine felt that their reputations were on the line. At stake in their determination to control and monitor Ramabai’s spiritual progress according to their own lights was their authority as ‘professional’ Christian women—as well as the professional reputation of the institutions which they oversaw. Neither Beale nor Sister Geraldine was, of course, able to act as free agent. Although the all-women communities which they supervised are both examples of what some enterprising English women were able to achieve under the constraints of late-Victorian social and political structures, each one was accountable ultimately to the patriarchal institutions which governed even (and perhaps especially) in ‘progressive’ late-Victorian England (Vicinus, 1985). It might be argued that given the basically secular character of Cheltenham, Sister Geraldine was more vulnerable to her Anglican superiors than was Beale. Beale, however, was not without her own worries. In August of 1885, when Ramabai declined an invitation to a retreat at Wantage, Beale regretfully endorsed Ramabai’s choice, apparently to avoid a

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confrontation with her own superior. ‘I don’t think the Dean will enter into her difficulties,’ she wrote to Sister Geraldine, ‘and if he expects her to bow down, and she will not, then the breach will be widened. I am so sorry’ (Shah, 1977:35). Both women corresponded with higher-ups in the Church, and each was concerned that she might be held responsible for what was considered by 1885 to be Ramabai’s virtual apostasy. Their concerns were very real. For as Ramabai’s ability to articulate her dissension—her determination to speak in ‘a voice of my own’ (Shah, 1977:50)— became more and more clear, it appeared to those involved that the ‘eclipse’ of her religious faith was endangering what the Anglican Church intended to be Ramabai’s true purpose: namely, that she return to India in an evangelical capacity and convert natives in her homeland to Christianity. If the church officials with whom she corresponded understood that her original intention was to become a medical doctor, they had to be reminded of it (40). From their point of view she was to be schooled in the correct forms of Christianity. As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, the late nineteenth century was ‘the classic age of massive missionary endeavor2 (Hobsbawm, 1987). Pandita Ramabai had to be set straight at least in part because she was intended to be a soldier of the vast missionary army which advanced the spread of Christianity in Britain’s empire. The bishops of Lahore and Bombay, with whom Beale, Sister Geraldine and Ramabai all corresponded, believed that Ramabai’s religious ‘wanderings’ endangered her evangelical potential in the mission field. For the most part, Sister Geraldine concurred with the sentiments expressed by the bishops. She framed the problem as one of disobedience not simply to religious authority, but to imperial authority as well. Of Ramabai’s frustration, she wrote to Beale: She has to learn that as a Christian, she is bound to accept the authority of those over her in the Church. She is a little inclined to take too independent a line, and though this is but a temporal matter [the issue of public lecturing], yet she should be willing even in this, to accept the opinion of those, who from their position in India and from their experience had a right to speak.

(Shah, 1977:47) She moreover urged Beale to use the occasion to ‘give her a little teaching on submission to authority’, in order that Ramabai might derive a ‘fruitful’ lesson from the incident (47). Ramabai’s actual deafness undoubtedly seemed more than a little ironic to Sister Geraldine, symbolizing for her as it must have the Indian woman’s apparent inability to hear the messages of the ‘true faith’. Beale’s reactions were on the whole more sympathetic—a sympathy which she and Ramabai both attributed to the spiritual crises which had beset Beale in the 1870s (Raikes, 1909:179–81, 191–4). Beale wrote to Sister Geraldine that she could understand why Ramabai considered her right to public lecturing ‘a matter of principle’. According to Beale, ‘It seems a matter in which we ought not to bind her conscience, indeed she feels she could not be bound.’ To Canon Butler, however, she wrote apologizing for Ramabai’s angry tone and trying to present Ramabai’s position in the best possible light:

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Dorothea Beale. Women’s Penny Paper, No. 31, Vol. 1, 25 May 1889: The Fawcett Library, London Guildhall University.

She will never perhaps think exactly as we do, but if she did, she would not so well be a teacher for India. I am now beginning to see, for instance, why she does not so readily accept sacramental teaching as we do. She is afraid of its being confused by native thought with their own pantheism.

(Shah, 1977:78) In what was perhaps her most welcome gesture to Ramabai, Beale wrote that ‘we can object to everything because we can fully understand nothing’. Ramabai took great comfort in Beale’s willingness to engage her in constructive dialogue, and at one point called her ‘a fellow-labourer with me’ for truth (Shah, 1977:130–5). Beale, it must be said, had her own priorities: she was as concerned as the Anglican clergy that Ramabai not be spoiled for work in India. Like many women reformers of her generation she believed that Indian women as a whole were helpless and degraded, and, again, like many of her contemporaries, she hoped to be able to contribute to enterprises which would, in her words, help Indian women in India ‘to lead a life of usefulness…instead of the life of degradation and uselessness that makes them regret the times of Suttee’ (Shah, 1977:31). She viewed Ramabai’s residence at Cheltenham as an encouragement to young college girls interested in working on

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behalf of Indian women—an interest which Beale was eager to cultivate through the person of Ramabai herself. She hoped in a letter to Sister Geraldine in 1885 that Ramabai might eventually found ‘some sort of college for teaching the widows’, presumably prompted by the sample of her own establishment at Cheltenham. Moreover, gifts from the Royal Bounty Fund and from Prime Minister Gladstone towards Ramabai’s stay at Cheltenham gave the College something of a public profile, connecting Cheltenham with the growing philanthropic commitment to Indian women’s education which was of special interest to Queen Victoria (St Aubyn, 1992). None of this suggests that Beale’s sympathies with Ramabai’s spiritual crises were anything but genuine, only that Beale anticipated that Ramabai’s success and happiness in England might have some material benefits for Indian women and, not incidentally, for her own educational institution and its reputation as well. Her biographer Josephine Kamm later recalled that when Ramabai returned to India, ‘she founded a mission school and a training college which faithfully reflected much of Dorothea’s teaching’ (Kamm, 1958:207). Neither Beale nor Sister Geraldine necessarily agreed on the form of Christianity which Ramabai should adopt, on how to ‘manage’ her, or, for that matter, on what the exact nature of her ‘mission’ to India might be. And yet they both attributed what they perceived as her slippage from Christian orthodoxy to the fact that she was Indian and, more specifically, to Brahmoist influences in India. Beale felt that a residual Brahmoism had ‘developed [in her] a feeling against the miraculous element’ (Shah, 1977:33). ‘A little impatience on our part,’ she feared, ‘might throw her back into the Unitarian teaching of the Brahmo Samaj’ (78). This was a concern shared by Sister Geraldine, and may account for their shared paranoia about Unitarian influences in and around Cheltenham. As Sister Geraldine wrote to Reverend Gore sometime in the summer of 1885: From what I saw of Ramabai during the Easter vacation, I feel that her tendency was to take up an independent line…I fear the love of popularity is a very great snare to her, and that she has been of late in correspondence with some of her old Brahmo friends and has some idea of working with them in the future. A diluted Christianity without Christ is what I feel she is in danger of drifting in to.

(Shah, 1977:82) Years later, Sister Geraldine attributed Ramabai’s theological ‘drifting’ to a ‘great want in the Hindu mind’: Its pantheism makes it illogical and this lack of logical reasoning doubtless hinders the reception of the thought of the Kingdom of Heaven extending and embracing earth.

(Shah, 1977:404) Although Sister Geraldine’s mistrust of Ramabai, her conviction that her background was a perpetual threat to her Christian orthodoxy, should be read as concern for her charge’s spiritual health, it is also true that Sister Geraldine harboured conventional Victorian notions of what Indian, and more specifically, what Hindu women were

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capable of. As she wrote to Dorothea Beale in December of 1883, ‘In committing her to your care, we desire to do so from the standpoint that a parent places a child with you for education.’ And again later: ‘We feel she needs as careful guarding and as much holding in as those who are much younger in point of age than herself’ (Shah, 1977:21–2, 54). As time went on, the twin characterizations of childishness and vanity dominated Sister Geraldine’s explanations of why Ramabai failed to embrace certain orthodox precepts. She had reason, one imagines, to emphasize Ramabai’s essential Indianness’ over the apparent failure of her own spiritual influence. In any event, the more trenchant Ramabai’s challenges to authority, the more ‘native’ she became in Sister Geraldine’s eyes. Applying her most savage characterization to Ramabai’s criticisms of the Indian government’s famine relief policies in the 1890s, she labelled her ‘disloyal’, ‘childish, sensational and seditious’ (343, xxix). Such allusions to the childishness, untrustworthiness and vanity of Indians are typical instances of late-nineteenth-century European orientalism, and are thus perhaps not surprising in this context. That said, they clearly structured Sister Geraldine’s entire relationship with Ramabai. Because she could only view Ramabai’s informed resistance as prideful and vain—the tantrums of an ignorant child—she dismissed Ramabai’s doctrinal quarrels as ‘fictions residing in the manifold recesses of…[her] fertile brain’ (Shah, 1977:4). This was precisely the attitude which eventually alienated Ramabai from Wantage and, finally, from Sister Geraldine herself. Most significantly, these orientalist prejudices, reinforced by the belief that Hinduism constituted a continual temptation to Indian Christian converts on their native soil, ultimately prevented Sister Geraldine from having much confidence in Ramabai’s abilities to work at what the Church intended to train her for—evangelization of one sort or another in colonial India. For a time, Sister Geraldine seemed to think Ramabai’s wilfulness in matters theological might be cured. Thus she wrote to Father Gore in 1885: ‘I think England is better for Ramabai in her present state of mind. Were she now to return to India, Christianity would, I fear, lose its hold of her entirely.’ Gradually, however, she began to have less faith in Ramabai’s potential as an instrument of Christianity in India, possibly because she began to realize that Ramabai’s tendency toward spiritual independence was not temporary in nature. Ramabai’s estimable reform career in India would compel Sister Geraldine later to admit that her ‘independent mind has brought her into… prominence with the whole civilized world’ (398–9). In the 1880s, however, she confided to Dorothea Beale that while Ramabai might be capable of organizing missionary efforts in India, she was not capable of running a mission herself (62). As Sister Geraldine’s correspondence with Ramabai suggests time and again, she believed that wilfulness in doctrinal matters presaged disaster in the mission field, and might even endanger the whole British missionary enterprise. What is revealing here is not so much Sister Geraldine’s convictions—they are what one might expect of a late-Victorian Anglican nun—but rather the authority which she claimed, and which she attempted to exercise, over Ramabai herself. Although she readily ceded doctrinal authority to Scripture, and her own authority to that of her ecclesiastical superiors, she was not willing to relinquish what she believed to be her final authority on what Ramabai’s apostasy meant. The following passage underlines precisely what Sister Geraldine believed to be at stake in Ramabai’s challenges to Anglican orthodoxy:

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You think the Church uncharitable because it does not allow that those who have broken away from her are still to be accounted as part of her. But look at the question from another point of view. Take for example a corporate body of any kind. It may be either a nation, a municipality, a regiment, school or anything you like to name. It must have its rules, officers and disciplines. If any member, or members, refuse to submit to its officers or otherwise set discipline at nought, they would be free to give up the rights and privileges of membership and go elsewhere. Now the Church is an indivisible Kingdom and delegated Government. Christ is its King, and the Government which He has ordained for His Kingdom is that of Apostles or Bishops. We as members of Christ’s Kingdom are not free to choose any other form of religious Government than this.

(Shah, 1977:103–4) As her choice of language indicates, Sister Geraldine saw in Ramabai’s ‘heresies’ a threat to the entire imperial order—a ‘corporate body’ bound together by rules apparently agreed upon through a consensus which was both fore-ordained and legitimated by the Church. For Sister Geraldine Christ’s earthly kingdom was coterminous with British government world-wide; Ramabai’s challenges to one signified disobedience to both. As such they were literally untenable—which is to say, Sister Geraldine invested so much time and energy in trying to refute Ramabai’s arguments because she could not conceive of a world in which they might logically exist. Despite Ramabai’s protestations to the contrary—despite her attempts to read her own resistance as respectful if tenacious difference, rather than as rejection or disobedience—Sister Geraldine insisted until the end of her life that Ramabai had been wrongheaded and prideful and that consequently her time in England remained one of the most ‘painful episodes’ in the conversion of India. Long after Ramabai’s international reputation as social reformer was well established, and in marked contrast to the hagiographic outpourings about her life by British, American and Indian evangelicals, Sister Geraldine produced a critical view of her as a quasisuccessful Christian missionary, insinuating that she remained vulnerable to ‘native’ influences in India and was easily manipulated as a ‘catspaw’ by a variety of self-interested parties (Shah, 1977:343). To be sure, Ramabai’s attitudes did imperil the imperial missionary cause as Sister Geraldine understood it. ‘We grieve,’ she wrote in the autumn of 1885, ‘that one of India’s daughters whom we hoped God was training to carry a ray of light back to that benighted land should be returning to that darkness without the light of Truth.’ But Sister Geraldine’s real anguish stemmed from the fact that ‘you seem to be following a self-chosen path’ (Shah, 1977:106, 107). That choice, that autonomy upon which Ramabai insisted, struck at the heart of Sister Geraldine’s authority to claim the universal truthfulness of Anglican Christian orthodoxy and, by implication, Britain’s moral and cultural hegemony as well. It goes without saying that Sister Geraldine’s authority itself was one which depended entirely on the cosmology of Christian imperialism which she described above. To balk at it, for whatever reason, was to reject the spiritual authority of the Mother Church, of the Mother country, and, not least of course, of Mother Geraldine herself.

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It is in this context, the context of a Church and an empire which were both conceived of as feminine, if not maternal (‘those who have broken away from her’, ‘the Mother country’, etc.), that Ramabai’s experience of ‘sisterhood’ during her time in England must be grounded. These are the terms which dictated—although in the case of Ramabai, they did not necessarily determine—the contours of sisterhood between Indian women and English women in the late nineteenth century. The relationship between Sister Geraldine and Ramabai, and to a lesser degree between Dorothea Beale and Ramabai was, in short, less a question of sisterhood than a struggle for authority—authority over which version of reform for women would prevail in India. It might be even more accurate to say that sisterhood itself in this historical particular instance became a contest for authority because of its imperial context. Solidarity between women of different nations, religions and cultures was not given by virtue of a common gender but could be, as Ramabai’s own eloquence attests to, the product of self-determination, personal integrity and negotiation (Rupp, 1990).

Negotiating resistance in the Motherland As time went on, and Ramabai felt her interpretations of India, of social reform, and of her role in it resisted in England, her doubts about the truths of Anglican doctrine multiplied. By 1885 she regretted that ‘I cannot induce myself entirely to believe the miracles of the Bible’ or the Apostles creed. She told Beale: ‘I have no doubt that Jesus is raised by God from the dead; but I doubt the resurrection of his earthly body’ (Shah, 1977:155). Nor did she limit her questioning to her correspondence with Sister Geraldine. As her doctrinal doubts became more acute, she felt less and less comfortable confiding in Sister Geraldine. She experienced the Sisters at Wantage as a community whose ‘whole tone is that they are right…and if I ask a question they are apt to say: “You sin against such and such commandment of God”’ (135). There should be no doubt about the basic sincerity of Ramabai’s conversion, nor about her fundamental desire to understand and embrace the message of Christianity. Her insistence on following her will and her instincts must be read in the context of her overarching belief that even and especially her own will was subject to the authority of God (134). Contrary to Anglican teachings, however, she also believed that ‘yet we have the great gift from God, i.e., our own free will. By it we are to decide for ourselves what we are to do, and fulfill our intended work.’ For Ramabai it came down to a question of whose authority was to determine her spiritual direction. ‘Is Christianity the teaching of Christ or the teaching of a certain body of men?’ she asked Sister Geraldine in one of the last letters she wrote her in England. I should like to know. If it is taken as the teaching of a certain party, I can with good conscience say that I have never believed in that teaching, and am not bound to accept it.

(Shah, 1977:151) What her questions reveal is her sensitivity to the coercive aspects of Anglican (and for that matter, of any) orthodoxy. Given that such orthodoxy was considered to be the formula for the civilizing of India, Ramabai’s rejection of it was, as Sister

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Geraldine sensed, a challenge to the whole Christian imperial project. Let us be absolutely clear on the implications of this gesture. Ramabai did not merely question the rationale for Britain’s imperial presence; her critique was much more thoroughgoing than that. By articulating resistance to the authority of the Church in matters doctrinal and matters Indian, she pointed to the orientalist basis of the Church’s social mission. And, by demonstrating that she was not prepared to work within its parameters, she contested the Church’s claim to exercise a monopoly on evangelical and social reform strategies in India. Pandita Ramabai recognized that, in the struggle for reform in India, evangelical orthodoxy was a metaphor for imperial authority. Her ‘apostasy’ was, in a very real sense, the grounds for constructing an alternative feminist reform consciousness in the context of late nineteenth-century imperial Britain. I have suggested that Sister Geraldine, Dorothea Beale, and the Anglican bishops were evidently correct when they discerned that Ramabai’s experience in England was endangering their plans for her evangelical work in India. What they did not realize was the extent to which their own insistent exercise of authority prompted her doctrinal challenges and pushed her toward what was, in the end, an eloquently articulated critique of the liberal-imperial social reform programme. This is not to say that Ramabai’s critique was simply the product of her conflicts with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rather, it suggests that she used the clashes over religious orthodoxy as an opportunity to contest the terms of Western Christian colonial reform and to free herself from the authorities, both religious and cultural, through which her English friends were trying to discipline her. That she exploited the discourses of evangelical Christianity does not diminish the incisiveness of her critique. As Edward Said has so aptly written, The power of discourse is that it is at once the object of struggle and the tool by which struggle is conducted’ (Said, 1990:15). Significantly, Ramabai was not prepared to break with either the community at Wantage or at Cheltenham simply because she did not agree with the particular brand of orthodoxy which the Anglican Church required of her. Although she was troubled by the rifts which her own doubts caused, especially in her relationship with Sister Geraldine, she recognized that members of the clergy were as compelled by their own consciences as she was by hers—conceding to Canon Butler that it was ‘quite natural’ that the Sisters at Wantage ‘should think anyone who questions the truthfulness of their beliefs is sinning’ (Shah, 1977:135). What drove her to leave England ultimately was not doctrinal differences per se but a conflict with Sister Geraldine over the fate of her daughter, Manorama. Sometime in the fall of 1885,4 Ramabai began to express concern that the Sisters at Wantage (where Manorama was boarded while Ramabai attended Cheltenham) were taking over Mano’s religious education. As her letters indicate, she clearly feared that they were trying to instill in the daughter the orthodoxy which they had been unable to effect in the mother. In particular, Ramabai was wary of the Athanasian creed, evidence of which she thought she could detect in Mano’s prayers. Also of concern was the doctrine of the Trinity, with Ramabai making it quite clear to Sister Geraldine that since it was not a doctrine to be found in Scripture, she did not want her child brought up a Trinitarian (84–6). Without minimizing too much the substantive theological import of these disputes, the dispute involving Mano represents another clash over authority. This one was to prove final. For Ramabai’s objection was not just to Sister Geraldine’s teaching Mano how to pray; she also resented the nun’s telling her daughter that her mother’s

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prayer ways were not necessarily the best, since she herself was still in the process of learning them. This was a clear breach of Ramabai’s maternal authority, and it marks the turning point in her relationship with Sister Geraldine. Ramabai moved quickly to remove Mano from the care of the Sisters at Wantage, and resisted all attempts to persuade her from leaving England altogether. To Sister Geraldine she wrote: As I know you are doing right according to your faith, I cannot blame you… And if I were to take my child with me to stay at Cheltenham, a great confusion would befall my study; besides there is a great scarcity of time and money. Then when I am caught between two impossibilities, there remains but one thing for me…and that is to leave Cheltenham. I shall be very sorry to do so, for it is my greatest happiness to study under Miss Beale. But my duty to my God and to my child is greater than any of my own happiness.

(Shah, 1977:89) Sister Geraldine’s response was equally uncompromising: she told Ramabai that she was ‘spiritually not in a condition to judge in spiritual matters for your own child.’ Her concern was real since in her view on this particular question of authority rode Mano’s salvation. ‘You say Mano ought to obey you,’ she wrote to Ramabai. ‘God grant that you may never give her cause to feel that your authority is contrary to that of her Heavenly father’ (93). Ramabai’s concerns were of course equally real. She wanted Mano’s final authority to be her own mother and her God, it is true, but she also wanted it to be India itself: My heart is full of gratitude to those who have been kind to us, but dear Ajeebai, I cannot make up my mind to leave Mano in England…I want her to be one of us, and love our countrypeople as one of them, and not a strange or superior being. We are not as refined and lofty as the English people are, and if she is brought up in England, she will surely be an Englishwoman. Even if she comes to me in after days, she will be a foreigner and can never occupy the same place in our countrypeople’s hearts as if she had been one of them. I do not want her to be too proud to acknowledge that she is one of India’s daughters. I do not want her to blush when our name is mentioned, such being often the case with those who have made their homes in foreign lands.

(Shah, 1977:199) If this was an acknowledgement of the power which Sister Geraldine—together with English culture and evangelical Christianity—might have on Mano and her mother, it was also a statement about the power which Ramabai herself possessed to contest the reach of that authority. And, given Mano’s later role in her mother’s reform projects in India, it may be taken as further indication of Ramabai’s determination to control the agenda of reform for women in India in the next generation, for Mano was instrumental in helping her mother with her work in India in the 1890s and after (Dyer, 1923). Clearly, for both Sister Geraldine and Ramabai the battle for Christ and for ‘civilization’ was ultimately also a battle for personal and cultural authority (Tyrrell, 1991:212). As for many women reformers concerned about India in the late

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nineteenth century, it was a battle with gendered meanings, one which revealed that the ‘family’ dynamics between English women and Indian women in the imperial context were shaped as much by maternal authority as sisterly solidarity, if not more. Ramabai clearly recognized not just the stakes of authority, but also of authorship itself. Speaking of Christian apologists, she remarked that ‘they all more or less fall into the same mistake, namely when they want to establish the doctrine which they think is right, they will give any text a meaning which perhaps was not meant by the author’ (Shah, 1977:169). Although she was here referring to Scripture, this might be taken as a comment on Ramabai’s own experience in England. She understood that experience as a story whose meanings she wished to interpret, against the various meanings that were being read on to it for her. Just as she fought to author the history of her time in England, so too she authored her own explanations about the methods and the purpose of women’s reform for women in India. Hers was a useful narrative for the conversion and reform of India for any who cared to read it. She wrote: Missionaries who want to convert the Hindoo to their own religion would do well to take care not to call themselves the only inheritors of truth, and all others ‘the so-called false philosophers,’ for the Hindoo as a rule will not be content to look or hear only one side, and it is quite natural that they should not.

(Shah, 1977:170) It was perhaps as didactic in its own way as the instruction sanctioned by the Church, but it was none the less a reading which challenged the efficacy and the disinterestedness of the imperial power relationships in situ in India which Ramabai herself had resisted during her time in England. She also, tellingly, worked to author her own resistant reading of international sisterhood. Despite the fact that after she left England in 1886 she was never to return to Wantage,5 she remained grateful to both Beale and Sister Geraldine for all that they had taught her. Among the lessons she learned was that ‘the religious belief of each individual should be independent of anyone’s teaching, and that no one has a right to load an infant mind with things that even the teacher cannot understand’ (Shah, 1977:196). For Ramabai, articulating her differences with Sister Geraldine was not a sign of personal disobedience, although it was certainly painful on both sides. Nor did speaking her mind and acting accordingly necessarily mean that Ramabai rejected Sister Geraldine’s friendship. It meant that differences could coexist, and that those who differed might too. ‘We may more than a thousand times differ in our opinions and must be separated by unavoidable temporal difficulties,’ she wrote to Sister Geraldine, ‘but it does not in anyway follow that we must be enemies of or indifferent to each other’ (59). In the end, as Ramabai’s departure from England indicates, peaceful coexistence was not in her case possible at close proximity. To return to the dynamics of the colonial encounter at home with which I began this essay, it seems clear that although she may have initially hoped to be able to wander ‘all over the map’ in pursuit of her emancipationist goals, Pandita Ramabai could not comfortably remain at the heart of the empire. Imperial England proved to be inhospitable ground for her developing reform consciousness. That she chose to leave and seek support elsewhere is not evidence of failure, but rather of informed and critical resistance—a gesture remarkably free of bitterness or recrimination on

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her part. Ramabai’s attempts to negotiate sisterhood from within the confines of imperial culture in Britain, to determine her personal role and to respectfully differ with the terms outlined by Christian imperial and feminine authority, constitute in no small measure a self-conscious reworking of an imaginative geography of the world of women. As Meera Kosambi has noted, Ramabai’s motto would become ‘self-reliance for women’—a maxim whose value she no doubt came to appreciate at least in part because of her struggles for autonomy at Cheltenham and Wantage (Kosambi, 1988:47). Ramabai’s time in England thus demonstrates that feminist consciousness can develop not only within the context of ‘sisterhood’, but often does so in spite of it. Her particular history is equally compelling evidence that in the geopolitical context of imperialism, encounters between women could not, and indeed cannot, be totally free of its ideological effects.

Notes This essay has profited from the comments of Nupur Chaudhuri, Jeffrey Cox, Gary Daily, Chandra de Silva, Darlene Hantzis, Philippa Levine, Lynn Lees, Margaret McFadden, Arvid Perez, Barbara Ramusack, George Robb, Hannah Rosen, Deb Rossum, Mrinalini Sinha, and readers in the Feminist Review collective, with special thanks to Dot Griffiths. Jan Paxton and Veronica Perkins were both generous and invaluable in the final stages. I am also grateful to Uma Chakravarti, who made some very helpful corrections just as this essay was going to print. A summer grant from Indiana State University helped to make the research and writing possible. Antoinette Burton is a senior lecturer in women’s studies and history at Johns Hopkins University, USA and is the author of Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (1994). She is currently working on a book about Indians in nineteenth-century Britain entitled At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Diaspora in Late-Victorian Culture. 1 I am grateful to the Feminist Review collective for urging me to use the term ‘sisterhood’ advisedly. As employed here I mean it to refer to the presumption of international solidarity which underlay the Victorian women’s movement in Britain and whose limits have been and still are sorely tested by the realities of global capitalism and modern imperialisms. 2 Possibly too she did not want to return to Madras because of trouble she had experienced there over her views on female education. Rukhmabai, a child-wife who was taken to court by her husband because she contested his conjugal rights, came to England in the late 1880s and eventually got her medical degree at Edinburgh. See Rukhmabai (1890). 3 Shah translates this as The Duties of Woman’ while Lalita and Tharu translate it as ‘Morals for Women’. 4 The letters on pp. 150–4 of Shah (1977), which concern the controversy over Mano’s prayers, are not dated. 5 She left to make a trip to the United States to seek financial support for the widows’ home she planned to establish in Poona. See Ramabai (1984: i-xxiv).

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References AMOS, Valerie and PARMAR, Pratibha (1984) ‘Challenging imperial feminism’ Feminist Review No. 17 . AZIM, Firdous (1993) The Colonial Rise of the Novel London: Routledge. BEALE, Dorothea (1889) The Marchioness of Dufferin’s report’ Englishwomen’s Review 15 April . BALFOUR, Margaret and YOUNG, Ruth (1929) The Work of Medical Women in India Oxford: Oxford University Press. BURTON, Antoinette (1992) ‘The white woman’s burden: British feminists and Indian women, 1865–1915’ in CHAUDHURI and STROBEL . —(1994) Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. CALLAWAY, Helen (1987) Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria London: Macmillan Press. CHAKRAVARTI, Uma (1989) ‘Whatever happened to the Vedic Dasi?’ in SANGARI and VAlD . CHAUDHURI, Nupur and STROBEL, Margaret editors, (1992) Complicity and Resistance: Western Women and Imperialism Bloomington: Indiana University Press. CHELTENHAM COLLEGE LADIES’ MAGAZINE (CCLM) (1884) ‘Ramabai Sanskrita’ September . DYER, Helen (1911) Pandita Ramabai: The Story of her Life New York: Fleming H.Revell Co. —(1923) Pandita Ramabai: A Great Life in Indian Missions London: Pickering & Inglis. HEIMSATH, Charles (1964) Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform Princeton: Princeton University Press. HOBSBAWM, Eric (1987) The Age of Empire 1875–1914 New York: Pantheon Books. HOGGAN, Frances (1885) Medical work for women in India’ Parts I and II Englishwomen’s Review 15 April and 15 May . INDIAN MAGAZINE AND REVIEW (IMAR) (1882) ‘The Education Commission’ November: 639–41 . KAMM, Josephine (1958) How Different From Us London: Bodley Head. KOSAMBI, Meera ( 1988 ) Women, emancipation and equality: Pandita Ramabai’s contribution to women’s cause’ Economic and Political Weekly 29 October . KUMAR, Radha (1993) The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 London: Verso. MANI, Lata (1989) ‘Contentious traditions: the debate on Sati in colonial India’ in SANGARI and VAID . RAIKES, Elizabeth (1909) Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd. RAMABAI, Pandita (1984) The High-Caste Hindu Woman New Delhi: Inter-India Publications; first published 1888. RUKHMABAI (1890) ‘Indian child-marriages: an appeal to the British Government’ The New Review September: 263–9 .

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RUPP, Leila J. (1990) ‘Conflict in the international women’s movement, 1888– 1950’ paper presented at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, New Brunswick, New Jersey, provided courtesy of the author. SAID, Edward (1990) ‘Figures, configurations, transfigurations’ Race and Class 32(1) . SANGARI, Kumkum and VAID, Sudesh (1989) editors, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History New Delhi: Kali for Women. SHAH, A.B. (1977) The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture. SHARPE, Jenny (1993) Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. SPIVAK, Gayatri (1989) Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism’ in Belsey, Catherine and Moore, Jane, editors, The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism New York: Basil Blackwell. ST AUBYN, Giles (1992) Queen Victoria: A Portrait New York: Atheneum. STANLEY, Liz (1990) ‘British feminist histories: an editorial introduction’ Women’s Studies International Forum 13 . THARU, Susie and LALITA, K. (1991) editors, Women Writing in India, 600 BC to the Present Vol. I: 600 BC to the Early Twentieth Century New York: The Feminist Press. TYRRELL, Ian (1991) Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective 1880–1930 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. VICINUS, Martha (1985) Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 University of Chicago Press. WARE, Vron (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History London: Verso.

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A SOCIAL THEORY OF GENDER Connell’s Gender and Power Zarina Maharaj

Introduction Some feminists have resisted postmodernism in the belief that rejecting the traditional Enlightenment ‘transcendent metanarrative’ of absolute truth or ‘foundation’ of androcentric science implies abandoning all social theory. But postmodern feminism, as a discourse quite distinct from postmodernism, has criticized and modified several of postmodernism’s core assumptions. For example, while accepting the postmodern critique of metanarratives that ‘employ a single standard and make a claim to embody a universal experience’ (Giroux, 1991:38), a feature of Enlightenment metanarratives shared by much feminist theorizing of the 1970s and 1980s (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990:27; Barrett and Phillips, 1992:4) postmodern feminism does not regard all large or formative narratives as ahistorical and essentialist. Modes of feminist theorizing that are attentive to differences and to cultural and historical specificity do not imply an acceptance of the postmodern view that rejects wholesale all forms of metanarrative (Fraser and Nicholson, 1990:33). Postmodern feminism recognizes the importance of grounding narratives in the context and specificities of peoples’ lives and cultures, but supplements this distinctly postmodern emphasis on the contextual with an argument for metanarratives that employ forms of social criticism that are dialectical, relational and holistic (Giroux, 1991:39). Metanarratives play an important theoretical role in placing the particular and the specific in broader historical and relational contexts: to reject all notions of totality is to run the risk of being trapped in particularistic theories that cannot explain how the various diverse relations that constitute larger social, political and global systems interrelate or mutually determine and constrain one another. ‘Post-modern feminism recognizes that we need a notion of large narratives that privileges forms of analyses in which it is possible to make visible those…interrelations and interdependencies that give shape and power to large political systems’ (Giroux, 1991:40). The rejection of a foundationalist philosophy does not entail abandoning social criticism. Indeed, Fraser and Nicholson claim that a ‘robust postmodern-feminist paradigm of social criticism without philosophy is possible’ (1990:34). Fraser and Nicholson then set out the criteria that feminist theory consistent with such a postmodern-feminist paradigm would have to satisfy. Such theory, rejecting the Feminist Review No. 49, Spring 1995, pp. 50–65

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ahistorical features that much essentialist, ethnocentric feminist theories of the past two decades have shared with traditional metanarratives, would be explicitly historical, attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods, and to that of different groups within societies and periods. Thus,…gories…would be inflected by temporality, with historically specific institutional categories [inimical to essentialism]…taking precedence over ahistorical…categories like reproduction and mothering. Where categories of the latter sort were not eschewed altogether, they would be… framed by a historical narrative and rendered temporally and culturally specific…. When its focus became cross-cultural or transepochal, its mode of attention would be comparativist rather than universalising.

(Fraser and Nicholson, 1990:34, my emphasis) R.W.Connell’s social theory of gender, explicated and discussed in this paper, satisfies all these criteria of postmodern-feminist theory. It is a response to those, like Nancy Hartsock (1990), who refuse to adopt a postmodern feminism on the grounds that postmodernism a la Lyotard is dangerously inviting to the abandonment of theory; to those, like Susan Bordo (1990), who correctly believe that reality itself may be relentlessly plural and heterogeneous but human understanding and interest cannot be. It is a response, too, to those, like di Stefano (1990), who believe that a coherent politics is incompatible with a postmodern position which destroys the unified notion of the subject ‘woman’. As Fraser and Nicholson indicate, the most important advantage of this sort of theory is its usefulness for contemporary feminist political practice which ‘is increasingly a matter of alliances rather than one of unity around a universally shared interest or identity’ (1990:35). As a theory that shares a paradigm with and is underpinned by Foucault’s discourse theory of knowledge, Connell’s is a ‘theory of political opposition…[which] provides a strategy [for feminists] that deconstructs masculinist discourse/power without attempting to resurrect the Enlightenment project’ (Hekman, 1990:188). It is a theory consistent with the claim that postmodern feminism’s assertion of ‘the primacy of social criticism…has redefined the significance of the postmodern challenge to founding discourses and universal principles in terms that prioritise political struggles over epistemological engagements’ (Giroux, 1991:34).

Connell’s systematic framework for the social analysis of gender The ‘historicity of structure’: R.W.Connell vs. Anthony Giddens The notion that social structure is historically composed has implications for the possibility of different ways of structuring gender, reflecting the dominance of different social interests. It is in fact only in terms of such a notion that a political agenda for changing the status quo makes any sense. A social theory of gender with subversive intent must therefore be underpinned by such a concept of social

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structure. It will be argued in this section that the notion of structure espoused by Anthony Giddens, which has enjoyed enormous currency, does not meet the requirements of a social theory of gender whose aim is transformative, whereas that of R.W.Connell does. According to Connell: ‘Structure’ is more than another term for ‘pattern’ and refers to intractability of the social world…It reflects the experience of being up against something, of limits on freedom…The concept of social structure expresses the constraints that lie in a given form of social organisation…these constraints on social practice operate through a complex interplay of powers and through an array of social institutions. Accordingly, attempts to decode a social structure generally begin by analysing institutions.

(Connell, 1987:92) This conception of social structure, as the pattern of constraint on practice inherent in a set of social relations, is not new. Gramsci, Williams, Said and Foucault, for example, share the belief that ‘a collective culture sets limits and exerts pressures on thought and action’ (Cocks, 1989:40–2) through what Gramsci calls ‘hegemonic forms of cultural organisation’ (Connell’s ‘structures’) or what ‘discourse theory’ would call ‘discursive forms’ or ‘discursive structures’. The gendered division of labour, for example, counts as a social structure precisely because, operating as it does through institutional mechanisms like the differential skilling and training of women and men, it forecloses a whole range of job options to women: it limits or constrains their economic and other social practices in significant ways. Skilling and training is just one of the institutional mechanisms by which the gendered division of labour is made a powerful structure of social constraint. By constraining practice through institutions, it would appear that structure is not immediately present in social life but underlies the surface complexity of interactions and institutions. But this fails to capture the concept of practice as the substance of social structure. The idea of a sharp separation between underlying structure and surface practice must be overcome, a more active connexion between structure and practice must be made. Connell’s example of how such an active connexion can be made refers to a work on kinship which describes a matrifocal kinship structure in a working-class London family: the mother is the core figure and mother-daughter relations are such that they pop in and out of each other’s houses up to twelve times a day, exchanging services such as care in sickness and negotiating about other family relationships, including the daughter’s marriage. Here is an example of a ‘structure being shown in its very process of constitution, constantly being made and remade in a very active social practice…. The notion of “structure” here is not abstracted from practice’ (Connell, 1987:93). Giddens could not agree more with Connell about the idea of an active presence of structure in practice and an active constitution of structure by practice. In fact, he long ago formalized this idea theoretically in his concept of the ‘duality of structure’, explaining this concept of duality in his more recent work (Giddens, 1986) as the ‘double involvement’ of institutions and individuals. He says, in Chapter 1:

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To speak of institutionalised forms of social conduct is to refer to modes of belief and behaviour that occur and recur, or as the terminology of modern social theory would have it, are socially reproduced across long spans of time and space…societies only exist insofar as they are created and recreated in our own actions as human beings…We have to grasp what I would call ‘the double involvement’ of individuals and institutions: we create society at the same time as we are created by it. Institutions, I have said, are patterns of social activity reproduced across time and space…It is very important indeed to stress this point.

(Giddens, 1986:4, my emphasis) More formally, Giddens’ ‘duality of structure’ refers to ‘the essential recursiveness of social life as constituted in social practices: structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of…social practices and “exists” in the generating moments of this constitution’ (Giddens, 1975:5, my emphasis). Clearly, Giddens is making it a logical, definitional requirement of ‘structure’ that the practice that constitutes it is socially reproduced. Connell sharply differs here: By making the link of structure and practice a logical matter, a requirement of social analysis in general, Giddens closes off the possibility that its form might change in history. This is the possibility raised…explicitly by the practical politics of liberation movements; its significance of the analysis of gender is evident.

(Connell, 1987:94) The point that Giddens has missed is that, being constituted by everyday practice, structure is vulnerable to major changes in practice. In this sense, ‘practice can be turned against what constrains it; so structure can be deliberately the object of practice’ (Connell, 1987:95). Sexual minorities, for example, are currently challenging the cultural hegemony of heterosexuality by challenging its structures. Gay marriages, or the raising of children by gay parents, or gay discourses themselves, for example, pose such a challenge. It is this vulnerability of structure to practice that is what makes us agents of history. As structures become modified by human practice so the experiences and options for people these emergent structures generate, change; the cultural ‘limits and pressures’ that bound people’s practices change, what counts as ‘common sense’ changes. In this sense ‘practice cannot escape structure, cannot float free of its circumstances…It is always obliged to reckon with the constraints that are the precipitate of history. For example, Victorian women rejecting marriage were not free to adopt any other sexual life they pleased. Often the only practicable alternative was chastity.

(Connell, 1987:95) Gidden’s model, then, needs an ‘opening towards history’. It needs to recognize that, rather than being a logical requirement of structure that social reproduction occurs, it

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is simply a possible empirical outcome. But it is an important one, and the cyclical practice which produces it is what is meant by an institution. In this sense ‘institutionalization’ is the creation of conditions that make cyclical practice probable. It is in the interests of dominant social groups to create the conditions for cyclical practice (Connell, 1987:141). Giddens’s ‘theory of structuration’, then, is incompatible with a thoroughgoing historicity in social analysis. In his terms, a politics of transformation becomes irrational (141). Given that much of structuration theory is about finding ways of releasing the ‘transformative capacity’ of agents, this is a damning criticism of much of Giddens’s work. Then what of the politics of gender transformation? No framework for the social analysis of gender that is not founded on structure as historically composed can claim to understand the world in order to change it. The accolade of ‘praxis’ applies only to theories that recognize us, people, as the shakers and makers of our history. In this sense, in the terms of many of the major frameworks for the social analysis of gender that emerged in the 1970s, political action for change was also irrational. Of liberal, radical, Marxist and socialist feminisms, liberal feminism was perhaps the least enamoured of social structural explanation, tending to emphasize the power of prejudice, irrationality and discrimination. Women’s oppression was typically conceived in terms of female socialization into a limited range of roles and assumptions, and the way these social roles were then reinforced by a cultural tradition that persisted in viewing women as very different from men.

(Barrett and Phillips, 1992:3) Such implicit and explicit individualism was contested by the other feminisms. Marxist feminists argued, for example, that the key problems lay in a system that actively benefited from women’s oppression. Their analysis stressed exploitation rather than sexist prejudice, the structure rather than the individuals who operated in it, and more specifically the material benefits that capitalism derived from women’s position and role…(R)adical feminists stressed not capital but men…as the ones who got the good deal…in the ensuing arguments,…(these) feminists were concerned…with what to pinpoint as the crucial source of women’s oppression.

(Barrett and Phillips, 1992:3) Socialist feminism, by contrast, recognizes not only class but also race, gender, age, religion, etc., as social features structuring women’s oppression. Unlike Marxist feminism, which seeks to understand women’s position in society from a class-based perspective, socialist feminism sees not only class but also race and gender (and other structural features of society) as conditioning women’s experience. Moreover, race, class and gender are seen as autonomous, though intertwined, structural features through which power relations are generated to shape the subordinate status of women. In this sense, unlike the other feminisms of the 1970s, socialist feminists were not involved in disagreements about what to pinpoint as ‘the crucial source’ of women’s oppression.

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Such disagreements revolved around the deeper question of whether the main determinant of gender inequalities was to be found in direct power relations between men and women (the assumption of radical feminists) or somewhere else. As the previous passage indicates, Marxist and liberal feminist theories lacked this focus on power. Liberals focused rather on custom as the determinant of women’s oppression, while Marxists focused on class relations, the capitalist system or the ‘relations of production’ (understood in class terms) as underlying women’s oppression (Connell, 1987:41–2). So does it make sense in the terms of these three feminisms to talk of a feminist politics of transformation? Take radical feminism, which focuses on the social categories of men and women ‘as units rather than on the processes by which these categories are constituted’ (Connell, 1987:54). Different brands of radical feminism propose different theories of the power relations between these categories, including for example innate male dominance and aggression. With all the brilliance of radical feminism’s insight that direct conflicts of interest and power relations between men and women are the key to women’s oppression, a programme of political action to change these relations makes no sense in the terms of this theory, since human agency in structure does not feature here. Again, in the terms of Marxist feminism, a feminist political strategy for change has no place: implementing the proletariat’s strategy to overthrow the ruling class will automatically bring about the emancipation of women. As for liberal feminism, with its emphasis on female role socialization, women’s liberation will flow from a politics of reform of our expected roles. Gayle Rubin, recognizing the need for a structural analysis of the power relationships by which women are subordinated to men (she focuses on the institution of kinship as the basis of gender inequality in her attempt to explain gender relations as a social structure) sums up some of the shortcomings outlined in the previous paragraph in her 1975 paper The Traffic in Women’: If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist programme would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalism’s relentless appetite for profit, then sexism would wither away in the advent of a socialist revolution. If the world historical defeat of women occurred at the hands of an armed patriarchal revolt, then it is time for Amazon guerrillas to start training in the Adirondacks.

(Rubin, 1975:157–8) As already noted, 1970s feminisms were largely concerned with what to pinpoint as the crucial source of women’s oppression. The diversity of [their] answers helped conceal the consensus in the[ir] questions; yet behind all the sharp disagreements over what was primary or secondary, feminists united in the importance they attached to establishing the fundamentals of social causation…This consensus has since broken up.

(Barrett and Phillips, 1992:4)

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One reason for this has been the impact on feminist thinking of postmodernist ideas that developed as a reaction to the ‘belief in reason and rationality…in the possibility of grand schemes of social reform’ (Barrett and Phillips, 1992:4), based on a rationalist model for understanding the world revealed in the thinking of philosophers like Hegel, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza. The realization that the search for ‘the cause’ of women’s oppression was leading up a blind alley was based on the realization of a deeper, more general misconception of social reality as in some sense monolithic. Postmodernist feminisms of the 1990s are characterized by their rejection of the tenets of rationalist world-views wherever and however these raise their heads in the context of thinking about women in society. Connell, a postmodern socialist-feminist, attempts to account for gender relations in terms of historically specific social structures, dismissing as misleading unanswerable questions about ultimate origins, root causes or final analyses, questions rooted in essentialist assumptions. His attempt poses instead the answerable question, albeit a very difficult one, of how gender relations are organized as a going concern; a question which, in terms of identifying oppressive structures conceived as historically mutable, offers us the hope at least of fighting our way out of our current gender orders.

The ‘holistic’ approach to the structures of women’s subordination This approach sees women’s specific experiences as generated by intersecting structures which may derive from any social realm, be it the realm of culture, economics, politics, religion or ideology. What the generating structures are and from which realms they derive depends on the specific experience under analysis. Women’s experiences in Hispanic societies, for example, derive as much from culture (the ‘macho’ of Latin American men, for example) as it does from the Catholic religion, the class position of the women being analysed, their ethnicity, their age, the status of their economies in global terms. Ideologies of gender, race, class, ethnicity and other relevant ideologies of superiority or systems of social stratification intersect with each other in specific ways in specific contexts to generate specific gendered experiences. With regard to the Third World’ Beneria and Roldan, the Latin American GAD feminists, have this to say: The assumption [is false] that capitalist penetration into Third World countries has a dynamic of its own, independent of its socioeconomic and historical context. In our view, each development process has to be understood in conjunction with pre-existing patterns of accumulation and relations of subordination/domination that have conditioned and are in turn conditioned by that process.

(Beneria and Roldan, 1987:7, my emphasis)

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Again: The differing experiences of women in the Third World derive not only from gender-related factors but from a pattern of growth that systematically generates acute class differences and social hierarchies.

(Beneria and Sen, 1992:3) This holistic view of the structures of women’s oppression, long ago espoused in the classic from the Institute of Development Studies, Of Marriage and the Market (Young et al., 1981), stands in marked contrast to reductionist views which seek to identify oppressive structures in one specific realm. Marxist-feminists, for example, posit structures in the economic realm as the cause of the very different experiences of women both within and across societies. As already indicated, this form of cultural essentialism shares with other early feminisms a belief, now rejected, in a ‘cause’ of female oppression. Heidi Hartmann, in recognizing that something was amiss in this assumption, postulated an account of women’s oppression in terms of the dual, semiautonomous structures of class and patriarchy. But even here, ‘patriarchy’ is used ahistorically, and the attempt to study the interplay between it and class missed the fundamental point that ‘real life does not present itself in a dualistic manner but as an integrated whole, where multiple relations of domination/subordination—based on age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual preference—interact dialectically with class and gender relations’ (Beneria and Roldan, 1987:10). These multiple relations reflect the ‘multiple axes on which power in society inevitably turns…This principle of power’s fragmentation leaves us no reason to suppose that all of those axes are reducible to one or logically primary or a cause of others…there is [no] single centre to the life of social power’ (Cocks, 1989:50). These statements constitute a direct challenge to the racism and ethnocentric assumptions of white, middle-class feminists, sealing the fate once and for all of the original sex-and-class debate. From the point of view of setting limits to human experience, structures from any realm may be relevant. What is more, within any realm, a structure may be ideological or material in nature. Women’s relatively low salaries, for example, a material economic structure, becomes part of the ideology of women and work (which reinforces and is reinforced by other material structures of women’s work). In the sense, then, of structuring (women’s) experience, ideological and material structures are on an ontological par with each other. ‘Cultural factors’ is a shorthand for these jointly, and captures the idea of hegemonic power being transmitted through culture, a notion which traditional political theory has failed to capture. It is clear from the foregoing that Connell’s attempt to produce a systematic, formal theoretical framework with transformative potential for gender relations has taken openly and freely from the best insights of other theorists. What makes his contribution original is the way he has combined these insights with his own to realize such a theory.

‘Pattern of constraint’ as ‘structural inventory’ The idea of structures working together, intersecting with each other within a specific configuration of social relations to constrain and shape experiences into what they

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are, has been made explicit and formalized in the notion of ‘structural inventory’. The ‘pattern of constraint on practice inherent in a set of social relations’ is made specific through the idea of a set of structures in a specific configuration with each other generating specific experiences by setting limits to, boundaries around, social practice. The shape of the boundary constitutes the pattern of constraint. What is bounded is the experience. In the examples above, specific patriarchal relations intersecting with specific pre-existing modes of accumulation generate specific boundaries of experience, set specific limits to social practice (including thought). As Connell’s following definition shows, ‘structural inventory’ operationalizes the abstract ‘pattern of constraint’, turning it into a formal and explicit tool of social analysis, one which social theorists like Beneria have in any case been using, as he himself indicates: Structural inventories push towards a[n]…. exploration of a given situation, addressing all its levels and dimensions. There is nothing arcane about this. Any historian reviewing the background to a particular event, any politician scrutinising the current state of play or balance of forces, is compiling a structural inventory. Any attempt to grasp the current moment in sexual politics, to define where we have got to, any attempt to characterize the gender relations of another culture, likewise involves a structural inventory.

(Connell, 1987:98) Note that this definition by example as it stands is not really helpful as it does not make at all clear and explicit the importance of specifying the particular configuration of the structural features of a situation in analysing how those features shape that situation. His emphasis is on ‘compiling a list’ of structural features, a necessary but not sufficient condition of structural analysis. His examples, though, implicitly assume such a configuration. Where the ‘situation’ under (inventory) analysis is a gendered experience, i.e., Ann Whitehead’s ‘substratum’ requiring explanation (Whitehead, 1979), the list of relevant structural features always includes, according to Connell, specific structures of labour, power and cathexis (Connell, 1987:99) to be discussed in the following section. Where the gendered experience under analysis occurs in a specific institution like the home, workplace, the school, the street, he calls the relevant structural inventory its ‘gender regime’. The ‘gender order’ of a society is a historically constructed pattern of power relations between men and women and definitions of masculinity and femininity. It is, as I understand it, a concept which is meant to capture the gendered dimension of all social experience. Connell therefore uses the term ‘gender order’ to refer, rather abstractly at this point, to the structural inventory generating gendered experience at the level of an entire society (Connell, 1987: 98–9). What he is driving at is the dynamic relationships between the institutions of society in shaping gendered experiences across society. The state, the family, and the institutions of capitalist industry, for example, are structural features acting together in concert to produce the gendered experiences of the labour market. Women’s part-time employment, or the ‘reserve army of labour’ are cases in point. But such action in concert is not necessarily deliberate, nor always harmonious. For example, the emotional relationships of the family and the demands

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of a state at war create unavoidable conflicts. Another example of ‘institutional abrasion’ is the terms of the relationship during times of economic recession among state, family and labour market: during times of increasing unemployment deliberate cuts in welfare benefits occur, increasing the economic disadvantages of women and accelerating the feminization of poverty (Connell, 1987:134–6). To say that structures of labour, power and cathexis are the major structural features of any gender regime and of any gender order is to specify a framework for the structural analysis of women’s experience of oppression in any institution of any society at any time. In this sense, Connell’s framework for the social analysis of gender amounts to a meta-theoretical framework: it suggests identifying the culturally specific structures of labour, power and cathexis at play in order to understand and analyse the gender relations in any institution in any socio-historical context.

Structures of labour, power and cathexis I will concentrate here on those points about these structures which I consider sufficient to illuminate the framework for analysis mentioned above. Labour

There are substantially different social structures which condition the relations between men and women in quite different ways. One has to do with the division of labour, the organization of housework and childcare, the division between unpaid and paid work, the segregation of labour markets and creation of ‘men’s jobs’ and ‘women’s jobs’, discrimination in training and promotion, unequal wages and unequal exchange. (Connell, 1987:96). These are specific structures which are useful to regard as elements in a category of related structures constituting the gendered division of production, consumption and exchange in society that is the gendered division of labour. Power

Another has to do with structures of authority, control and coercion in relation to gender. Examples are the hierarchies of the state and business which virtually exclude women, institutional and interpersonal violence against women, sexual regulation and surveillance, domestic authority and the contestation of such authority (Connell, 1987:96). Again, it is useful to see these as elements of a category of related structures, labelled for convenience the ‘gendered division of power’. Cathexis

A third social structure has to do with the recognition that sexuality is socially constructed; that sexed bodies are perceived ‘ethnomethodologically’, through our particular conceptual lenses that derive from our society’s specific configuration of social structures. This means that the bodily dimension of sexuality does not exist before, or outside the social practices in which relationships between people are formed and carried on (Connell, 1987:111). Since such structures reflect and reinforce dominant interests, Foucault claims that ‘everything above and beyond the brute raw

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body that appears to be either some natural expression or extension of it…is in actuality a marking on the body made by power relations in a ‘political field’ (quoted in Cocks, 1989:56). The structure of sexuality recognizes ‘that the body…is an artefact of specific configurations of power…’(56). Sexuality, in other words, ‘is enacted or conducted, it is not expressed’ (Connell, 1987:111). ‘Cathexis’, in Connell’s terms, refers to the structure that constrains and so shapes people’s emotional attachments to each other. It refers both to the hegemonic ‘limits’ placed on practices that constitute emotionally charged social relationships in which the bodily dimension features and to the social practices which challenge such hegemony. Gay practices in this sense constitute a cathectic structure. Heterosexual practices another. These are related to another structure of cathexis, to do with sexual desire. The social patterning of desire is most obvious as a set of prohibitions… expressed in law…prohibiting sexual relationships between certain people…in our culture objects of desire are generally defined by the dichotomy and opposition of feminine and masculine; and sexual practice is mainly organised in couple relationships’ (Connell, 1987:112). Feminist arguments on sexuality as outlined in the previous paragraph, by challenging the ‘naturalness’ of hegemonic sexuality through emphasizing its social construction, constitutes in its own way yet another type of cathectic practice, that of cathectic ‘praxis’. ‘Cathexis’ refers, then, to the category of structures to do with sexuality. The practices which constitute these structures follow a social logic of their own, and are unaccountable in terms of the structures of the division of labour and power. To say that these structures are different is not to say they are separate: in practice they are inextricably interwoven. Indeed, in any social interaction between people they are present together, as coalesced ideas internalized in the minds of the interactors, ideas which (ethnomethodologically) influence the nature of those interactions, giving them their particular ‘vibes’. (It is in these very terms that one can make sense of Foucault’s remark that ‘the individual is the fine target of hegemonic power…that individuals are the capillaries through which power diffuses itself through culture’ (Cocks, 1989:44–5). Structures, lived as practices, are embedded in our minds as the ideas, and our hearts as the feelings, which constrain our practices; since power operates through structures (power does not exist apart from the structures through which it operates), and structures operate through us, as our practices, then we are indeed the targets and capillaries diffusing discursive power. Distinguishing the structures of labour, power and cathexis analytically is done merely to explain the logic of structural analysis. The three major elements in the structural inventory of gendered experience in any specific institution can be found from among specific structures in each of the three categories of labour, power and cathexis outlined above. The particular experience under analysis, say wife-beating, will have a context including at one level the race, class and nationality of the couple involved, and at another the economic contribution each member makes to that family, the sexual and social esteem in which they hold each other, and so on. These levels complement each other in the analysis, providing a context that suggests the structures from the three categories that are likely to be at play in this situation. But the guidelines for structural analysis offered by this framework stop here. Precisely how the suggested structures interweave to generate that experience is the next stage of the problem of analysis. It requires for its solution a creativity in thinking for which there are no guidelines. In his chapter ‘Gender

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regimes and the gender order’, Connell engages in just such creative analysis of gendered experience in specific Western institutions, rooting his analysis in the framework of structural inventory with labour, power and cathexis (constituted in Western terms) as structural features. Using this framework, we too could begin to engage in creatively analysing gendered experience in institutions, in whatever sociohistorical context.

The constitution of social categories The structures of labour, power and cathexis discussed above are all implicated in any society’s ideas of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. These structures ideologically construct ‘women’ and ‘men’ in terms of certain work-related characteristics, a certain type of sexuality and a certain possession or lack of authoritative, decisionmaking capacity of the sort necessary to control the levers of power in political and other institutions. These structures differ, then, in their effects in the shaping of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Structures being historically mutable, so are ‘men’ and ‘women’ who are constantly being produced by changing social formations. Given that ‘gender inequality’ is the structured (institutionally specified) inequality of access to social resources between the sexes, generating male privilege and domination and female subordination in society, then current inequalities of gender power are embedded in the very structures which define ‘men’ and ‘women’. Gender…so conceived gives rise to feminist politics that focus on long-run’ gender interests and goals to do away with male domination…Since, however, gender is constructed simultaneously with a multiplicity of relations—such as class, race and ethnicity—each historical analysis may show that women perceive long-run gender interests differently and according to their own life experience.

(Beneria and Roldan, 1987:12) This passage raises extremely interesting issues about social interests: how they are differently constituted according to the different cultural constructions of ‘men’ and ‘women’; yet within these historicized categories, the very facts of inequality and oppression provide a motive for collective action, the motive (or ‘objective interest’) in doing away with male domination; how these differ from interests that are articulated by processes of political mobilization that define collective goals and strategies relevant to the socio-historical context; who articulates these interests and how. But a discussion of these issues could form the subject of another article. The five elements discussed above constitute the main conceptual underpinnings of a practice-based theoretical framework for analysing and therefore understanding the social relations of gender.

Conclusion The transformative potential of Connell’s social theory of gender, explicitly recognizing and systematically rooting itself in the historicity of social structure, distinguishes it from all previous attempts at theorizing the social relations of gender.

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But what practical guidelines does it offer for realizing this potential, for changing the current gender order? Can we draw on any theoretical links suggested by this theory between structural analysis and the politics of our liberation? And if so, what would this mean in practice for our activism? Connell suggests that to identify arenas of struggle which will open up new historical possibilities for the gender ordering of societies, it is necessary first to identify the major structural features of the gender orders of those societies. In his view the major structural features of First World capitalist societies, for example, are institutionalized heterosexuality and the invalidation or repression of homosexuality; heavily masculinized core institutions such as the state; and the gendered separation of domestic life from the money economy and the political world. These patterns together sustain the overall subordination of women by men. Identifying the dynamics which have the potential to transform these features amounts then to identifying the conditions for changing in fundamental ways the conditions of future social practice.

(Connell, 1987:159) Given the role of the state in constructing the ‘ideal’ family form and hence domestic and public patriarchy, then any dynamics which will weaken the institutional order of family-plus-state to sustain the legitimacy of men’s power must count as progressive. Challenges to the legitimacy of the state posed by women’s demands for fair and equal treatment before the law on the basis of equal citizenship, such as demands for equal pay and equal opportunities in education, is a source of such family-plus-state institutional weakening: responding to such demands to maintain its legitimacy involves the state in strategies which inevitably weaken domestic patriarchy. Examples of such strategies include state funding of women’s education on a scale comparable with men’s, the training of police for intervention in domestic violence, the framing of laws which give women greater control over their reproductive capacity, changing the provisions about property, taxation and pensions which treat a married woman in her own right, etc. These all undermine the taken-for-grantedness of male authority in the home on which the reproduction of power inequalities rests. But this should not be taken to mean that in attempting to maintain its legitimacy in the face of challenge, the state deliberately sets out to undermine domestic patriarchy (Connell, 1987:159–60). As Connell is quick to point out, the result is not an automatic disruption of the institutionalized order of power: it is an increasing vulnerability to challenge. Whether and how such challenges develop is another matter. The ‘crisis of the family’ outlined above is just one type of challenge to the gender order of rich capitalist countries, a ‘crisis tendency’ opening up new historical possibilities. The emergence of alternative patterns of sexuality on a significant scale from hegemonic heterosexuality would amount to another such tendency. According to Connell, there is evidence for this possibility being realized (Connell, 1987:161). Similarly, the definition of a married woman’s interests as being essentially those of her husband and children is the hegemonic pattern: the definition of her interests as those of a group of exploited women in a factory, say, is subversive.

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As already noted, it is a further question whether these possibilities are realized, whether new groupings are formed to take these challenges further. But these examples of crisis tendencies (another important one surrounds the problems of childcare, women’s employment and fathering, but there are many, many more) point to a rational link between structural analysis and women’s liberation politics, a link which provides the framework for guiding political action: creating or identifying crisis tendencies amounts to identifying arenas of political struggle, where conditions for structural change are emerging; political activism is about expanding then exploiting those conditions. How? By working to construct majority groupings around the crisis tendencies which make radical majorities conceivable in the first place. Majorities matter if the process of social change is to come under conscious human control…(S)tructures cannot be levered into new shapes without mutations of grassroots practice. But majorities do not fall from heaven. They have to be constructed…The lion in the path is the calculus of interests…In a gender order where men are advantaged and women are disadvantaged, major structural reform is, on the face of it, against men’s interests…Whether the gender order’s tendencies towards crisis have gone far enough to provide a basis for majorities committed to major structural reform is perhaps the key strategic question radical politics now faces.

(Connell, 1987:285–6) To gain such insights as this theory provides is to my mind the right and duty of every political activist engaged in gender studies. These insights provide the rationale for our activism, equipping us both to defend our belief that social change is in principle possible through our efforts, and to make us realize just what we are up against in the analysis and practice involved in trying to bring about such change.

Note Zarina Maharaj worked as a research mathematician in the UK and lectured in mathematics in southern Africa. She studied Gender and Development at the Institute of Development Studies and now works as a Senior Gender Researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She has been an activist in the ANC for over twenty years.

References BARRETT, Michèle and PHILLIPS, Anne (1992) editors, Destabilising Theory Cambridge: Polity Press. BENERIA, Lourdes and ROLDAN, M. (1987) The Crossroads of Class and Gender University of Chicago Press. BENERIA, Lourdes and SEN, Gita (1992) ‘Class and gender inequalities and women’s role in economic development’ Feminist Studies 8(7): 157–76 .

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BORDO, Susan (1990) ‘Feminism, postmodernism and gender scepticism’ in NICHOLSON . COCKS, J. (1989) The Oppositional Imagination London: Routledge. CONNELL, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power Cambridge: Polity Press. DI STEFANO, C. (1990) ‘Dilemmas of difference: feminism, modernity and postmodernism’ in NICHOLSON . FRASER, Nancy and NICHOLSON, Linda (1990) ‘Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism’ in NICHOLSON . GIDDENS, Anthony (1975) Central Problems in Social Theory London: Macmillan. —(1986) Sociology: A Brief But Critical Introduction (2nd edition), Cambridge: Polity Press. GIROUX, H.A. (1991) ‘Modernism, postmodernism and feminism’ in Giroux, H.A. (1991) editor, Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries State University of New York. HARTMANN, Heidi (1981) ‘The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union’ in Hartmann, H. (1981) editor, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: a Debate on Class and Patriarchy London: Pluto Press. HARTSOCK, Nancy (1990) ‘Foucault on power: a theory for women?’ in NICHOLSON . HEKMAN, Susun (1990) Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism Northeastern University Press. LUKES, Steven (1974) Power: A Radical View London: Macmillan. NICHOLSON, Linda (1990) editor, Feminism/Postmodernism London: Routledge. REITER, Rayna Rapp (1975) editor, Towards an Anthropology of Women New York: Monthly Review Press. RUBIN, Gayle (1975) ‘The traffic in women’ in REITER . WHITEHEAD, Ann ( 1979 ) ‘Some preliminary thoughts on women’s subordination’, Institute of Development Studies Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 . YOUNG, Kate , WOLKOWITZ, Carol and McCULLAGH, Ros (1981) editors, Of Marriage and the Market London: CSE Books.

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MY DISCOURSE/MY-SELF: Therapy as Possibility (for Women Who Eat Compulsively) Catherine Hopwood

Contemporary culture promulgates almost impossible standards of feminine beauty and it is (still) rare for young women not to be obsessed with having a beautiful body and not to feel conflicted around food. Here three helping discourses—NutriSystem, feminist psychoanalytic therapy and Overeaters Anonymous—are analysed from Foucauldian-feminist perspective and differences in the way they empower women are illuminated.

Introduction It is well known that the cultural ideal of the attractive woman has changed dramatically in the last thirty years (Seid, 1989). Whereas at one time a woman might have gotten by with a good face or legs, now only perfection will do. Indeed, women still associate thinness with beauty, success and happiness (Wolf, 1990) despite knowing that an obsession with body size could lead to an eating problem rather than the ‘good things’ in life. Today, too, the dominant discourses (e.g., advertising) still link all that’s good for women with slender idealized feminine images. What effects do these discourses have? How might women resist them? Foucauldian feminism understands discourse as ‘ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and the power relations which inhere in such knowledges and the relations between them’ (Weedon, 1987:108). For a discourse to have effects on subjects, it need only be circulated and met with credibility. Women experiencing difficulties with compulsive overeating and/or obesity may turn to any number of weight-loss programmes. Here empowering and disempowering effects of three programmes—NutriSystem (NS), a commercial system with a cognitive-behavioural psychoeducational component; feminist psychodynamic therapy, as developed at the London Women’s Therapy Centre (WTC); and Overeaters Anonymous (OA), a spiritually based self-help programme— will be described. Taking up a position within these (or other) discourses has implications for consciousness, consciousness typically being fractured due to the numerous, even contradictory subject positions one may hold. Discourses help when they give subjects access to aspects of lived experience which otherwise go missing. The discourses to be considered here Variously privilege rationality, science, Feminist Review No. 49, Spring 1995, pp. 66–82

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common sense, superstition, religious belief, intuition and emotionality’ (Weedon, 1987:95). Despite subjectivity being socially constituted, a subject still exists as a thinking, feeling subject and social agent, capable of resistance and innovations produced out of the clash between contradictory subject positions and practices. She is also a subject able to reflect upon the discursive relations which constitute her and the society in which she lives and is able to choose from the options available.

(Weedon, 1987:125) Discursive effects cannot be the same for everyone, because there are mitigating or enhancing influences from the other subject positions with which an individual identifies.

Women and the dominant discourses Shaping women’s wants Mass mediated images of women shape women’s desires. Indeed: Representations of female pleasure and desire…produc(e) and sustain… feminine positions. These positions are neither distant roles imposed on us from outside which would be easy to kick off, nor are they the essential attributes of femininity. Feminine positions are produced as response to the pleasures offered to us; our subjectivity and identity are formed in the definitions of desire which encircle us.

(Coward, 1984:16) Contemporary culture, dominated by the visual media, print, television, video and cinema, is replete with images of female bodies. However, because forms of popular representation (e.g., advertising) utilize the same photographic codes as pornography (Coward, 1984), images available for general consumption tend to share pornography’s ‘obsessive representation of the body of woman as sexualized difference, structured by and for male looking’ (Knight and Kaite, 1985:64). Indeed, it is this form of femininity which is associated with success and the ‘good things in life’ and which women are invited to find credible. It is hardly surprising, then, that women associate femininity, sexual attractiveness, success, and power with their physical appearance; not surprising, too, that many women are anxious about their bodies, hyperconscious of their physical appearance and insecure about their attractiveness. Given that dominant discourses reflect and promote particular interests, it might seem obvious that, in contemporary consumerist society, mass-mediated discourses serve the interests of the male, business community although they are concealed within forms which imply that women’s interests are being served. Why, given that women perceive the selfinterestedness of commercials, do they continue to be influenced by them?

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Overall, cultural messages to women convey that you can be in control of your life and destiny with the right appearance—and to some extent that is true. Ultimately, however, identification with mass-mediated images evokes anxiety rather than pleasure because the messages imply that unless we measure up, we won’t be loved and certainly won’t qualify for the ‘good things in life’ (Coward, 1984). Then, too, visions of unselfconscious, picture-perfect models cavorting on beaches, city streets or runways may only heighten the selfconsciousness of those women who lack the confidence to cavort (Bordo, 1988). Readily playing on women’s fears, advertisers implant guilt- and shame-inducing messages if this is what it takes to sell products. Who’s in Control? Berger wrote that according to social conventions: The social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man… (typically) men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

(Berger, 1972:45)

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Visual representations pervading contemporary culture constitute one important way women come to internalize the male gaze. While feminists have been challenging these conventions for twenty-five years, only recently have poststructuralist feminists changed the terms of the questioning and examined processes underlying the micropolitics of feminine appearance and sexuality (e.g., Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1988, 1990). This has been motivated by a concern with understanding why women submit to practices which seem inimical to their best interests. Indeed, Foucault noticed it was the emergence of disciplines with specific discourses and apparatuses of knowledge and rules which made it possible to govern subjects in modern individualistic societies; the rules referring to natural rules, ‘the code…not that of law…but normalisation’ (Foucault, 1976b: 106). Although power is dispersed through a number of mechanisms, hierarchical observation is central and Foucault (1977) used Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon to explain it. This structure, with rings of backlit cells encircling an observation tower, isolates prisoners in individual cells and renders them continually and unidirectionally visible to the supervisor in the tower above. This visibility generates conscious and permanent anxiety—and the prisoner’s co-operation. Using this model, Bartky suggests that ‘a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women’ (1988:72) who stand perpetually before his gaze and judgement.1 It is for this reason, then, that young women tend to comply with practices designed to produce docile and disciplined feminine bodies. Although Foucault stressed hierarchical observation as the crucial mechanism by which discourses exert power over subjects’ actions, he noted the model had a utopian element and that individuals could resist the impact of the gaze (Foucault, 1976a). Moreover he ascribed ‘a diabolical aspect’ to the idea of hierarchical observation, because: One doesn’t have…a power which is wholly in the hands of one person who can exercise it alone and totally over the others. It’s a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised.

(Foucault, 1976b: 156) Once the machinery of contemporary culture has been put in place, then, it generates effects independently of individual intentions (but this machinery may, of course, be exploited for particular ends).

Women, therapy and empowerment? Therapies generate new forms of subjectivity the same way they are created in the first place, by providing a framework of interpretations and implicit responses, in terms of which individuals may orient and articulate themselves;…thus giv(ing) them a ‘position’ within the discourse, in which to exist as subjects.

(Ingleby, 1984:52)

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Various therapeutic programmes for women with food and weight problems tend to interpret problems differently though all connect with a larger discursive field relating to the general phenomenon. Textual materials are legitimate representatives of such discourse because they ‘attempt to position readers…as subjects of meaning’ (Knight, 1989:99). A full analysis of the texts is beyond the scope of this paper (this would reveal what the texts enable one to say as well as what they exclude) (Henriques et al., 1984). For present purposes, two themes have been selected: the ‘end’ of therapy and the way this (re)organizes women’s wants; and the possibilities each discourse affords for freeing women from the internalized male gaze, thereby providing a basis for resistance.

Nutri/System Welcome to the Nutri/System family—the largest, most successful, professionally supervised weight-loss program in the world’, says a colourful pamphlet for wouldbe clients (Nutri/System, 1989a:2).2 Inside are photographs of successful clients, attractive and delicious foods, and staff members working with clients in clean settings. Foregrounding its link with medicine and science, a notice reveals that its Health Sciences Advisory Board consists of medical doctors, psychologists and nutritionists. The programme consists of helping clients achieve and maintain ‘goalweight’ (Nutri/System, 1988a). At the first visit, clients provide personal and health data, have ‘eating knowledge and behaviours’ assessed via a self-report inventory, and their goal weight and timetable for achieving it established via a ‘Nutri-Data Computer Analysis’ (Nutri/System, 1989a: 5). The strategy involves a special diet of flavourful and tasty low-calorie meals purchased from Nutri/System plus an exercise programme. This is complemented by cognitive-behavioural group work designed to retrain ‘belief and behaviour’. Clients attend ‘behaviour breakthrough classes’ weekly, weighing in and consulting the nutritional counsellor at the same time. Cost varies with the amount of weight to be lost (one client paid $300 to lose thirty pounds). Recent advertisements feature a flat rate of $199 but this does not include a $90 consultation fee and the cost of the required foods ($59 weekly). Having reached goal weight, clients may attend free for one more year to maintain the loss. What do women want? Clients come to NS to lose weight and change their eating habits. NS guarantees success by allowing conscientious clients who fail to reach their goal within the time allotted an opportunity to extend their programme at no further cost until they lose the weight (Nutri/System Weight Loss Centre Service Guarantee, 1988a). Indeed, NS reassures clients that: We know that losing weight isn’t easy. But you couldn’t have picked a more understanding partner to help you achieve success…And we’ll stick with you to help you keep the [weight] off and lead a happier, healthier life. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know what it’s like to be frustrated and discouraged…Our commitment…is to help you eliminate these feelings and keep you on the road to successful, permanent weight loss.

(Nutri/System, 1989a: 2)

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For clients with the ability to pay and the capacity to persevere, NS appears to guarantee permanent weight loss under ‘medically supervised’ conditions. A promise evident in the margins but not the official text relates to the transformation of physical appearance and self. Photos from a pamphlet are suggestive: juxtaposed with copy relating to ‘your first visit’ are ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of a woman who lost ninety-two pounds (Nutri/System, 1989a). The ‘before’ version features a shylooking, plumpish girl of about nineteen: she is facing the camera, smiling demurely, wearing a T-shirt and jeans with her hands joined in front at hiplevel. In contrast the ‘after’ shot exudes a sexual presence and sauciness totally absent before: now, wearing the latest fitnessfashion, she smiles boldly at the camera, hands placed defiantly on her hips. Besides her new size (body) and clothing, she has a new face (make-up), hair (colour, style) and…a new personality? If one photo can speak a thousand words then NS’s message is invariably the promise of total transformation, a promise which probably speaks to the desires and fantasies of those seeking help. Interestingly, another ‘after’ shot appears in this text: this one is of an older woman, equally glamorous in her fabulous fitness outfit. She smiles even more broadly (funny: she has her hands on her hips too!) Within the context of this discourse, then, what women want and (presumably) get is the body and physical appearance of the cultural ideal and—the confident personality to go with it? There is little room here to question the ideal: ‘thin’ is good. And the new personality—what types of personal changes are facilitated? NS’s ‘behavioural break-through program’ is designed to help clients control themselves around food, correct any irrational beliefs pertaining to food and eating and become a sophisticated and thoughtful rather than impulsive eater (Nutri/System, 1989b). In addition, information on communication and stress reduction skills is given; this could help some women to develop a greater awareness of themselves and some social skills. This discourse privileges rational and unified consciousness: irrational behaviours have no meaning. Feelings ‘are’ intrinsically irrational and the task is to become aware of and take measures to control them. To the extent that women experience difficult or intense feelings and find sustaining self-control problematic, this discourse provides no real opportunity to go beyond the behaviour to an underlying meaning. Although it affords some opportunity to identify contradictory or

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ambivalent feelings, it takes for granted that one is not ambivalent about losing weight and becoming the owner of a new ‘sexualized’ body. To the extent that the ‘problem’ is one of ignorance, poor habits and lack of self-awareness, this programme empowers by expanding one’s range of responses. Alternatively, persons whose eating problem communicates something not otherwise expressible may find this programme helpful in the short term, but disempowering in the long term— because clients blame themselves when they ‘lose control’ and fail to maintain their weight. NS’s promotion of dieting and deprivation to achieve weight loss, articulates with scientific and common sense approaches (‘no pain, no gain’). However, this is not the only model available of healthy, successful weight loss (see below) and, given problems with recidivism, nowhere mentioned in their materials, the deprivation model might prove aversive retrospectively. Women losing weight with NS will undoubtedly gain some gratification and perhaps a measure of sexual power from their new bodies. For some, achieving a particular body shape/size might be crucial for their health and occupations. One hopes, however, that they ultimately feel as empowered on the inside as they appear to be on the surface. Who’s in control? Whose gaze is perpetuated, whose perspective taken as reference? With NS’s commerce depending on women’s desire for bodies approximating the cultural ideal, there is little space to construct things differently, little reason to displace the ‘panoptical male connoisseur’. Regarding weightmanagement, NS would probably contend that clients learn to control their will power and develop the behaviours necessary to maintain their weight by themselves. But how do the practices endorsed by this discourse affect the client’s experience? First by promoting dependence on external sources such as scales, diets, and computer technology, clients learn to depend on outside sources for monitoring and confirming bodily changes. Although all relations with the body are culturally mediated, here a machine is given the power to dictate subsequent actions, thus externalizing the woman’s locus of control. Clients may learn to distrust ‘messages’ from the body. Further, insisting that clients eat only NS’s special foods would seem infantilizing, creating dependence on another external source and leaving little room to get used to living with food in the more usual way.

Feminist psychodynamic therapy This discussion refers to the approach used at the London Women’s Therapy Centre (WTC) described in texts written by therapists affiliated with the Centre (e.g., Epstein, 1987; Dana, 1987; Lawrence, 1987; Orbach, 1978, 1982; Rust, 1987; Selby, 1987). The WTC provides individual and group therapy, intensive workshops and facilitates self-help work (Lawrence, 1987). Although compulsive eaters are encouraged to form self-help groups—Orbach (1978, 1982) and Noble (1987) provide helpful guidelines in this respect—the client makes the decision about the type of help most appropriate for her (Dana and Lawrence, 1988). While the following discussion assumes individual therapy, group therapy and self-help work make use of the same principles and understandings. The approach focuses on severing the addicted relationship to food (Orbach, 1978). It is the compulsion to eat, not obesity which is the problem; there are no diets or weight-checks. Treatment consists of altering the psychology of the compulsive

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eater through the development of an intensive therapist-client relationship which lasts several months or years. Typically mother-daughter issues emerge in this encounter and analysis of that transference constitutes an important aspect of the therapy. In addition, fantasy work, exercises, weight histories and homework assignments (etc.) developed by Orbach (1978, 1982) are used. In the process, therapists encourage clients to ‘tune in’ to their bodies, distinguish ‘mouth’ from ‘stomach’ hunger and (especially) their need for food from the need for other forms of nourishment. Indeed, two levels seem to be involved: the psychological exploration of the woman’s internal world and her feelings about herself and behavioural work re-learning and re-educating herself about eating patterns (this includes attending to her body and giving herself respect in relation to eating). Here, there is no ‘goal weight’; therapy ends when the woman understands what lies behind the compulsion. What do women want? Women undertake this type of therapy desiring to lose weight. However, this wish will not be indulged per se: some clients gain before losing weight, some may not lose weight at all. Because therapy is oriented to revealing personal, unconscious meanings of compulsive urges, fat and body size, treatment can only be deemed successful when the woman integrates in her conscious understanding what food, eating and fatness has meant for her. This means, in part, integrating the messy and dangerous parts of themselves women typically find difficult to express (e.g., anger, sexuality, jealousy, envy, competition, loneliness, and sorrow). Without reappropriating undesirable, disowned parts of the self, the compulsion to eat just turns into a compulsion to do something else. Similarly, the meanings of body size and fat must be understood and integrated into the conscious self. These meanings may be contradictory and complex and may vary over time, but they invariably emerge in response to complicated and painful situations which women experience. Frequently extra pounds will be found to serve as a protection against sexual pressures. Hence many women may be quite ambivalent about becoming thin and more sexually attractive either because they fear the message this will send to others or fear becoming more vulnerable to their own sexual (‘promiscuous’) inclinations (Orbach, 1978). Female clients, then, inevitably come to learn more about how their particular psychology has developed in the contemporary patriarchal culture which sexually objectifies and commodifies women. The original motivation to become slim, then, is transformed into a desire to work on the self and a desire to understand their history and response to particular circumstances. This approach helps clients find out who they are. Female development being precarious in patriarchal society, mother-daughter relations are often problematic with boundary issues classic. Contradictorily, mothers both overidentify with yet find it difficult to meet daughters’ real needs (their own unmet needs get projected on to daughters); simultaneously daughters do not learn to distinguish between self and mother and experience confusion over their needs (typically seeking to meet others’ needs—often inappropriately—while denying/refusing their own) (Dana, 1987). Confusion over boundaries makes it difficult for daughters to acquire a separate sense of self (Orbach, 1978; Dana, 1987; Selby, 1987). Therapy provides a clearer understanding of that dynamic and, through reparenting, aids in the formation of an autonomous self. Indeed, the compulsive eater’s insatiable hunger is redefined as a need for human contact and intimacy (Selby, 1987) and it is only by completing the

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therapeutic process and reclaiming themselves that women can enter into mature, non-symbiotic relationships. While this approach corrects the patriarchal emphasis of classic psychoanalysis, repositioning women as mother’s daughters, it would seem to minimize the ‘forget the fathers’ (Sayers, 1988). Dana and Lawrence (1988) describe the fathers’ role in helping daughters separate from mothers, modelling ‘being-in-the-world’ and affirming their sexuality and femininity; yet family violence and incest are seldom mentioned. Selby (1987) mentions one case of incest. What could this mean? That an emphasis on pre-Oedipal issues makes it difficult to access Oedipal ones? If successful, this therapy ultimately invites a total revaluing of self and provides ‘a framework for entitlement’ (Epstein, 1987). Thus women will feel entitled to take up more psychological and social space, more entitled to the right to having their needs—in the family and workplace—met too. Such personal changes may put some

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women in heterosexual relationships at risk. An important aspect of this approach is its emphasis on the satisfaction of needs for food (and other things) rather than deprivation. By learning what their needs are, especially that they are not limitless, women may come to feel comfortable with food and personal relationships. This process of learning about the self and taking responsibility for needs may be long and difficult; this form of therapy is not for Everywoman. Who’s in control? Whose perspective do women use to judge themselves and others? Clearly clients come to a new way of understanding themselves, one differing from the dominant discourse as well as common sense. Almost certainly they will regard the patriarchal cultural ideal more critically and, not having had to weigh or count calories, now have a basis for reflecting upon the pronouncements of experts and others who assume there is only one way to lose weight. Because they have been encouraged to eat when hungry, to nourish and indulge themselves, they will come to experience themselves as safe with food and see food as a nurturing not dangerous substance—attitudes which are fairly anachronistic in diet-conscious cultures. This approach, then, gives women the opportunity to develop an internalized locus of control in respect to these issues. Women will also be likely to give real thought to what it means to be a woman and, with or without conscious identification as a feminist, develop the ability to see things from a feminist perspective. This female gaze will not totally displace her original perspective but it will provide other choices and options and, most importantly, provide a solid basis for resistance.

Overeaters Anonymous OA is a spiritual self-help programme, for compulsive eaters based upon the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) model.3 Unlike NS and feminist psychotherapy, there are no fees or dues, the only requirement for membership is ‘a desire to stop eating compulsively’ (Roxanne S., 1979:1). Meetings, held in church halls, hospitals and community centres, feature study of OA literature, open discussion on specific topics or speakers who share personal experiences. Typically, meetings are structured to emphasize quiet and courtesy: no cross-discussion is allowed and members talk without fear of ‘interruptions, comments, questions, or undercurrents’ (Roxanne S., 1979:7). Like other self-help groups, meetings are run democratically, leadership is rotated and administrative responsibilities shared. Like alcoholism, compulsive overeating is thought to be a disease or allergy: compulsive overeaters respond to specific ‘binge’ foods idiosyncratically while some foods, particularly sugar and white flour, are thought to induce cravings in some people. Like other addicts, compulsive overeaters have not learned to deal with life’s problems and have turned to food instead of taking responsibility for their behaviour. This discourse might well be deemed the ‘discourse of responsibility’ because its spiritual programme aims to get beyond the addiction to help develop the inner resources so necessary to deal with life’s challenges. What do women want? OA is not a ‘weight-management’ programme though it helps to free members from their food obsession, to accept and live with their compulsion, and lose weight. Working the steps’ and maintaining abstinence are absolutely necessary for recovery. Abstinence from compulsive overeating usually involves three moderate meals a day with nothing in between (low- or no-calorie

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beverages are advised). A daily food plan is suggested but not required: people choose foods on the basis of what is good for them, given past experience and health needs. Such food plans do not work, however,without daily practice on the spiritual and emotional programme of OA (Roxanne S., 1979:3). For example, it is only by acknowledging powerlessness over the compulsion and the need to ‘turn it over’ to a Higher Power, that continued abstinence is possible. The Twelve Steps’ help members to realize abstinence as well as the programme’s real objective: namely, how to live in peace with oneself and others (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1953). It does this by providing a way to identify and work on one’s character defects and make amends for wrongs done to others and self. The spiritual axiom on which this programme is based articulates with religious and moral teachings worldwide: namely that ‘every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us’ (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1953:50). One must take responsibility for one’s actions. An important aspect of the OA programme is its community of fellowship. This provides members with a strong base of support and friendship—though just ‘being with one’s own’ is experienced as liberating. Within the context of this discourse, then, women’s desires undergo a major shift: from wanting weight loss or the stereotypically ‘good body’, women come to desire spiritual progress where internal judgements of worth take precedence over superficial judgements relating to bodily appearance. This does not mean that weight losses are not valued, it does mean that physical changes are more likely to be appreciated within the context of other changes. How might this discourse empower? First, deliverance from the obsession with food and the compulsion to eat is liberating, freeing up time, energy and money for other pursuits. Second, there is an emphasis on action in this programme. While some energy will go toward spiritual pursuits (prayer, meditation and selfexamination) and some on service (e.g., OA events and sponsorship), some inevitably will go to work, parenting, personal relationships and community service. The Serenity Prayer (‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference’) is a strong reminder that there are things to be changed and a subtle form of encouragement to ‘get on with it’. While ‘Twelve Step’ programmes appear to have conservative effects, its effects are not ‘conservative’ if subjects move from passive (reactive) to (pro-)active positions. Indeed, this action-orientation is an important, oftenoverlooked dimension of the programme. With the assistance of sponsors (members with more experience of recovery) and OA friends, individuals may discuss and work out personal difficulties more privately. This is crucial because abandoning the use of food as a narcotic means that some problems will be confronted for the first time. Another dimension of empowerment comes from self-knowledge and selfacceptance. Through regular self-reflection and written inventories of feelings, character, faults and/or wrongs committed (plus any efforts to redress wrongs), members develop a capacity for being honest with themselves. Given that ‘the truth can set you free’, this opportunity is empowering. Further benefits can come from the kinds of responsibilities members play within the OA system: speaking in groups, assuming organizational responsibilities, speaking at OA events (etc.) may give some individuals opportunities to develop new skills and capacities.

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This discourse is not explicitly concerned with gender—there is an implicit emphasis on women’s and men’s similarities—yet women are predominant in OA. There is little space for discussing topics like sexuality or violence in regular meetings; though they come up regularly in conversations with sponsors and in ‘speakers’ meetings’ when personal stories are shared. Interestingly, this discourse embodies a weak social critique given its position on values characteristic of capitalism (greed, pride and egotistical behaviour are condemned, individualism frowned upon, and selfishness abhorred). Indeed, the community orientation of the AA system (Newsweek, 1990) must be seen in the context of the materialistic, individualistic culture of late capitalism which is driving people to escape via alcohol, food, sex, drugs, work, etc. Who’s in control? Whose perspective is privileged? Whose gaze has the power to judge and influence behaviour? This discourse provides at least two subject positions —one with and one without a religious basis—and both afford the possibility of autonomous behaviour. Clearly there is an emphasis on one’s Higher Power or ‘the God of one’s understanding’ (Step 3, AA, 1976:34) as the force underlying one’s better actions and judgements and the source of progress and achievements. Developing faith in a Higher Power is not easy for non-believers but given that persons are free to ‘invent’ a Power which is personally agreeable to them, most members manage to do it. There is a contradiction here, however, which relates to the fact that the literature makes frequent reference to ‘God’, many times without the qualifying phrase ‘of our understanding’. To the extent that individuals can act with reference to a power of their understanding, and turn to this Power to justify their actions, some real autonomy (and personal integrity) is possible. To the extent that they turn to the God of a particular faith, their autonomy could be compromised by the specific conditions of faith in that religion and/or the patriarchal assumptions associated with the term God. Notwithstanding, one’s relationship with God is a private thing, and this source can be empowering for many women—if they have seriously reflected about what this means for them. One doesn’t necessarily go around saying ‘My God gives me permission to do this or that’, but becoming spiritually grounded and taking actions strictly in accordance with one’s conscience could be a real source of power indeed.

Conclusion Therapies, then, (re)construct the subject, and (re)positioning within the terms of these weight-loss programmes has different implications for subjects. Indeed, these discourses have radically different effects though, to the casual eye, a loss of thirty pounds may be little more than that. To the inner eye, however, the ‘same’ loss is not the same at all, for NS, feminist psychodynamic therapy, and OA push the subject in different directions. Comparing them (in the order: NS, WTC, OA), one finds the compulsion to eat understood as: a behaviour to be controlled; a symptom of split-off part(s) of the self; or, a ‘gift’ to facilitate honesty. Eating itself may be: a controllable activity; a satisfying and pleasurable activity; or an indicator of abstinence and one’s relation to a Higher Power. So, too, the relation to the body varies. It may be perceived as: an entity to be controlled; a fundamental and expressive aspect of the self; or a temple to be honoured. Finally, relationships may be: transactions between

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Cathy © Cathy Guisewite. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved.

separate persons; connexions vulnerable to symbiosis; or, responsibilities to be honoured—their moral aspects being central (OA) or not (NS, WTC). As already indicated, women are not passive before agents of discourses. Rather, resources to resist come from those places where women cannot identify or, where effects are offset by contradictory or competing elements in the discourses women bring with them. Nevertheless, because help is typically sought when one is demoralized, women may be more open to influence than usual. Of course there are usually some options and women will rule out unsuitable sources of help. (In North America, OA seems to be a last resort, whereas diet centres and clubs like NS and Weight Watchers tend to be ‘first resorts’.) What makes a programme ‘suitable’ is probably some combination of: its availability and reputation, personal desperation, and belief (or hope) in its effectiveness. Women go to the WTC both because and in spite of its feminist philosophy (Lawrence, 1987) but often women may have little idea about what is involved. This paper has considered ways specific therapies empower women, empowerment being understood as an expansion of choices and an increased capacity to resist discursive effects. This may come from greater knowledge-about the self, the development of personal resources or skills, the opportunity for critical assessment of dominant discourses, and/or the presence of a supportive community. Subjective experience has no essential shape: we are being positioned and repositioned within discursive contexts all the time, subject to our capacity for making choices and resisting. Without ways to describe and interpret our experience, it is lost; discourses provide ‘the words to say it’ (Cardinal, 1983). Who we are, then, is related to the discourses available to us and their inherent possibilities. Given that we have choices, it is incumbent on us to choose and/or construct discourses which are true to our experience but which also bring out the best in us. Morality, love, honesty, care and respect for others will not necessarily take care of themselves, but must be continuously constituted within social discourses and related practices. Only then, perhaps, may they resonate with the most noble impulses in the human heart—and soul.

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Notes Catherine Hopwood is a graduate student in sociology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. She is interested in feminist social psychology and is currently exploring questions relating to the empowerment of women in the media. This paper is an abbreviated version of one presented at the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association’s Annual Meeting in Victoria, BC, May 1990. I thank Janet Hough, Graham Knight, Dorothy Pawluch and Jane Volk for helpful comments on an earlier draft; Valerie Plata, Jack Haas and Julia O’Connor for other assistance. 1 Although the gaze interiorized via dominant discourses may be male, it is a moot point whether lesbian women are less susceptible to ‘the gaze’ or less anxious about their bodily appearance. 2 This analysis is based on materials printed in the United States and used in Canadian Nutri-System Centres in 1990. Materials referred to include the following (note: no bibliographic information other than reference numbers and dates is available; see references): Nutri-System (1988a; 1988b; 1988c; 1989a; 1989b; 1989c; 1990); and ‘Health Sciences Advisory Board’ (undated) and the price list for Nutri-System foods (undated). 3 Texts examined for this section include: Alcoholics Anonymous (1953); Alcoholics Anonymous (1976); B., Bill (1981); L., Elisabeth (1982); and S. Roxanne (1979).

References ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS (1953) Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. —(1976) The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (Third Edition) New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. B., Bill (1981) Compulsive Overeaters: The Basic Text for Compulsive Overeaters Minneapolis, Minnesota: CompCare Publications. BARTKY, Sandra (1988) ‘Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power’ in DIAMOND and QUINBY (1988). BERGER, John (1972) Ways of Seeing London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin Books. BORDO, Susan (1988) ‘Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture’ in DIAMOND and QUINBY (1988). —(1990) ‘Reading the slender body’ in Jacobus, Mary, Keller, Evelyn Fox and Shuttleworth, Sally (1990) editors, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science New York: Routledge. CARDINAL, M. (1983) The Words to Say It Cambridge, Mass: VanVector & Goodheart. COWARD, Rosalind (1984) Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today London: Paladin. DANA, Mira (1987) ‘Boundaries: one-way mirror to the self’ in LAWRENCE (1987). DANA, Mira and LAWRENCE, Marilyn (1988) Women’s Secret Disorder: A New Understanding of Bulimia London: Grafton Books.

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DIAMOND, Irene and QUINBY, Lee (1988) editors, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance Boston: Northeastern University Press. EPSTEIN, Bunny (1987) ‘Women’s anger and compulsive eating’ in LAWRENCE (1987). FOUCAULT, Michel (1976a) ‘The eye of power’ in GORDON (1980). —(1976b) Two lectures’ in GORDON (1980). —(1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison New York: Random House/ Vintage Books. GORDON, Colin (1980) editor, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault New York: Pantheon Books. HENRIQUES, Julian , HOLLWAY, Wendy , UNWIN, Cathy , VENN, Couze and WALKERDINE, Valerie (1984) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity London: Methuen. INGLEBY, David (1984) ‘The ambivalence of psychoanalysis’ Free Associations Vol. 1, No. 1:39–71 . KNIGHT, Graham (1989) ‘Reality effects: tabloid television news’ Queen’s Quarterly Vol. 96, No. 1:94–108 . KNIGHT, Graham and KAITE, Beverly (1985) ‘Fetishism and pornography: some thoughts on the pornographic eye/I’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory Vol. IX, No. 3:65–71 . L., Elisabeth (1982) Twelve Steps for Overeaters: An Interpretation of the Twelve Steps of Overeaters Anonymous New York: Harper & Row (Hazelden Foundation). LAWRENCE, Marilyn (1987) editor, Fed Up and Hungry: Women, Oppression and Food London: Women’s Press. NEWSWEEK (1990) ‘Unite and conquer: America’s crazy for support groups. Or maybe support groups keep America from going crazy’, 5 February . NOBLE, Katina (1987) ‘Self-help groups: the agony and the ecstasy, in LAWRENCE (1987). NUTRI-SYSTEM, INC. (1988a) ‘Service guarantee’. Sheet No. 3001. Printed in the United States. —(1988b) ‘Client questionnaire’. Sheet No. 3502. Printed in the United States. —(1988c) ‘Guidelines for your special extension’. Sheet No. 3710. Printed in the United States. —(1989a) ‘Welcome to the Nutri/System Program: We succeed where diets fail you’. Booklet: 775716. Printed in the United States. —(1989b) ‘The Nutri-System Flavour Set-point Meal Plan’. Sheet No. 1007. Printed in the United States. — (1989c) Behaviour Breakthrough: Your Personalized Evaluation, Learning and Success Program (2nd Edition), Workbook No. 770615. Printed in the United States. —(1990) ‘Health history’. Sheet No. 3705. Printed in the United States. ORBACH, Suzie (1978) Fat is a Feminist Issue Feltham, Middlesex: Hamlyn Publishing. —(1982) Fat is a Feminist Issue II: A Program to Conquer Compulsive Eating New York: Berkeley Books. RUST, Mary-Jayne (1987) ‘Images and eating problems’ in LAWRENCE (1987). S.Roxanne (1979) I Put my Hand in Yours: A Loving Account of OA and Its Growth Guidebook for those who are starting new Overeaters Anonymous Groups, provided courtesy of Overeaters Anonymous.

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SAYERS, Janet (1988) ‘Feminist therapy—forgetting the father?’ B.P.S. Psychology of Women Newsletter 1988,2 (Autumn): 18–22 . SEID, Roberta Pollack (1989) Never Too Thin: Why Women are at War with Their Bodies Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. SELBY, Tamar (1987) ‘Compulsive eating: issues in the therapy relationship’ in LAWRENCE (1987). WEEDON, Chris (1987) Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory Oxford: Basil Blackwell. WOLF, Naomi (1990) The Beauty Myth Toronto: Random House.

POEMS Laura Donohue

Car Sick in Oklahoma We travel through dust that coats our teeth with that gritty feeling and our mouths are so dry as we cross the Mississippi that sips from the thermos evaporate on our tongues before we can swallow. Five days on the road in August, just to get to hell.

‘Daddy, please stop now.’ We take up the usual, tuneless refrain: ‘S-t-a-r-t looking for a mo-TEL!’ ‘S-t-a-r-t looking for a mo-TEL!’ He forgets to blow his cigarette smoke out the window and we whine and plead at being choked; but he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t answer; and I am in the backseat with my head on Amy’s lap, puking into a plastic bag because I can’t get the image of Mrs Morton’s Chicken Pot Pies out of my head even though we passed this horror on a billboard in Tennessee as long ago as yesterday; and Amy is whimpering, sick of my smell and my bony head; and Kitty sits quietly suffering, trying to make up for our unpleasantness; and we all three have our young hawks’ eyes on Mommy, who sits pale and still with apprehension because she, too, sees, without having to look, his knuckles clenched white on the steering-wheel, his wound-startled face staring straight ahead; and she, too, registers, with pounding heart,

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the sudden flickerings of hand to mouth and expulsions of breath that fill the car with smoke as his mind fights what will happen when we get there.

Worry Dolls I laugh at your funny hairband with its crude, bright thread-dolls tacked to a coarse, purple ribbon. ‘You tell each doll one worry at night and it helps—a little,’ you explain, laughing back. It seems to me a talisman that must come from your Costa Rican life, invested with some jungle peoples’ folklore for healing, but dates, you say, from a day of ‘retail therapy’ at a shopping mall near Rancocas Valley Hospital. Trust you to transcend the banal with the potent and magical. We wore each other out with sleep deprivation this visit, playing worry dolls until that dead time when it is quiet even on West Holly Avenue, - and it helped. And now you are back in Shy Town asking why visits have to mean a week of tired, and I am still here in limbo between worlds smiling at the bit of magic you take with you, and leave behind; and I remember us laughing, with some unease in our amazement, at my story of the old woman in her Sunday coat who spoke my thoughts out loud that day under the ‘L’ when I too inhabited the strange world you live in now: ‘I don’t like State Street.’ ‘I just don’t like State Street.’ Too much voodoo on State Street.’ I think of you there, a bird of paradise in a high-rise cage, cycling on your mountain bike after dark among demons of the city, and I send you some magic in return—some good voodoo vibes to balance the odds, to make you smile,

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to strengthen your power against the voodoo on State Street. The Healing Poem So many letters to write, so many chapters to write, so much clutter: newspaper scraps of other lives, mugs half-full and stagnant cold, a life’s work in splinters on scattered index cards, computer disks and opened books and pens everywhere; all this to put in order and all she can think of is something that happened when she was seven, so long ago and far away that nothing is clear except fragments of choking, hurting, outrage, in a haystack. They come out of nowhere like passing traffic, a ringing phone, a heart attack. Sometimes they flicker, then subside; sometimes they take hold like a new brutality and shake and shake until something detaches as in a death. Little girl, are you there? She sits calmly trying to expunge ghosts with carefully chosen, well-ordered words, but knows with a sinking sickness that this is another violation and feels herself cringing inwards to escape the made-for-television-movie triteness. Everyone is doing it these days. Everyone is a victim, and confessions sell.

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MIES AND SHIVA’S ECOFEMINISM: a new testament? Maxine Molyneux and Deborah Lynn Steinberg1

Introduction It is difficult to identify the boundaries of what constitutes ecofeminism as both a field of critical theory and as a politics. Ecofeminism is constituted by, and draws upon a diverse range of political and theoretical projects including environmental studies, critiques of science and modernity, development studies and a range of feminist critical writing and activism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that there are several common themes that run through most ecofeminist writing. These include: a critique of patriarchal science, a concern with the degradation of ‘nature’/the environment and the making of links between these two and the oppression of women. The publication of Mies’s and Shiva’s Ecofeminism (1993) marks a notable attempt to bring together these diverse strands, including those themes common to most ecofeminist texts, which the authors consider to constitute a definitive basis on which an ecofeminist politics can be constructed. Ecofeminism is a collection of twenty essays, some of which have been published elsewhere and most of which draw upon earlier work. The book has been widely reviewed, largely due to the international profile of its authors and their long history of engagement in feminist political debate. Maria Mies is perhaps best known for her book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986); Vandana Shiva has received much acclaim for her book Staying Alive (1989). These earlier works clearly inform the multi-stranded agenda of Ecofeminism. It is our view that Ecofeminism is an important collaboration at a number of levels. First, it represents an attempt to elaborate a dialogue between a Western feminist and ‘Southern’ feminist standpoint in which some differences and many commonalities emerge. Second, the themes of the book respond to the current and growing interest in how global or international processes are gendered. Third, the book embodies and extends the interdisciplinarity that constitutes the terrain of ecofeminism more generally. Here the authors make critical links among a number of areas of debate including: the violent, patriarchal character of Western scientific paradigms, their development within the project of colonialism and their part in environmental degradation, and the destructive character of capitalist development and the oppression of women. Specific chapters also deal with sex tourism, pornography, Feminist Review No. 49, Spring 1995, pp. 86–107

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colonialism and nationalism within the broader remit of the book. Ecofeminism therefore marks a significant moment in feminist debates not only about environmental issues but also about a number of broader concerns within feminism as a whole. As such it provides an important reference point both for an assessment of the character of ecofeminist thought and politics and of the various fields which constitute it. To appreciate both the contribution of this work and the problematic questions it raises, it is necessary to examine in some detail its standpoint and key arguments. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to consider the enormous range of issues addressed in this collection. We will therefore focus our reflections on two key dimensions: its critique of science and of capitalist development in relation to the formulation of an ecofeminist standpoint and politics. A core theme throughout Mies’s and Shiva’s Ecofeminism is a critique of modern science and Enlightenment thought. Indeed, it could be argued that Mies and Shiva’s interrogation of scientific epistemologies and practices is a linchpin which grounds what they have to say about ecological degradation, development, the position of women and ecofeminist activism. Given the centrality of Mies’s and Shiva’s perspectives on science to the breadth of issues considered in the book, it is necessary to contextualize them with respect to the broader field of feminist critique of science.

Feminist critiques of science and the enlightenment A critique of (at least some of) the underpinning assumptions of Western science has been a central, if not always explicit, element of much feminist political theory.2 Across disciplines, core elements of Enlightenment thought have been identified by feminists as underpinning the reproduction of fundamental social inequalities, particularly of gender. For example, feminists have questioned claims of objectivity, the notion and uses of the concept of rationality, the assumption of a universal subject, and the of knowledge from power (i.e., ‘truth’ from politics). At the same time, the ‘science question in feminism’ (Harding, 1986) has historically been a vexed one and a site of considerable debate. Thus some feminists, such as Lovibond (1989) have argued specifically for the value of Enlightenment epistemology, including the concept of rationality, as a necessary grounding for feminist theory, particularly in relation to the development of a materialist critique, and feminist politics. Ecofeminism has clearly emerged out of a long and diverse tradition of feminist critical engagement with these issues, particularly with respect to those strands which are more or less anti-Enlightenment. Mies and Shiva draw very eclectically (and selectively) on this body of critical literature, recasting as selfevident what have been highly contested approaches to the shared project of critique without, however, adequately identifying the origins of their own ideas. Thus, while it is clear that Mies and Shiva can be located broadly within a feminist critical tradition in relation to science, what is less clear is where more precisely they see themselves in relation to these debates. In addition to the diversity characteristic of the project of developing critiques of scientific values, the relationship between feminism and science has also been characterized by a marked ambivalence about the emancipatory potential of science. Indeed, alongside the production of a critique of science, much of the history of feminism has also revolved around a pursuit and advocacy of scientific literacy3 and

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an investment in the potential of scientific enterprise to remedy the burdens of inequality endured by women. This ambivalence about the value of science can also be played out in epistemological terms, that is, in the ways in which feminist epistemologies can constitute both a critique of and a reproduction of scientific rationality simultaneously. For example, within the context of feminist critiques of science, as Sandra Harding (1986; 1991; 1992) has pointed out, there are divergent investments in the value of modern science. Harding argues that what she calls feminist empiricist critics have evaluated the relationship between science and women’s oppression in terms of failures to adhere to the principles of scientific method—i.e., the problem is ‘bad science’. Feminist standpoint theorists, on the other hand, have argued that it is what is considered to be ‘good’ science (‘science-as-usual’) which is oppressive to women. Thus, feminist standpoint theorists have critiqued feminist empiricists for their explicit investment in the principles of modern science, arguing that the use/abuse approach to the critique of science privileges science as a sphere outside politics and fundamental inequalities which are seen to shape every other social enterprise and institution. Feminist Standpoint theorists argue that science is both a political enterprise and constitutes an epistemology and set of practices which are intrinsically oppressive in gendered ways. Insofar as the critique of science embodies a critique of Enlightenment rationality, a feminist standpoint approach can be taken as fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. However, it has been pointed out, explicitly by some feminists (e.g., Haraway 1989) that the feminist standpoint critique can be as contradictory in this respect as feminist empiricism though in somewhat different terms. While empiricists might state an explicit attachment to scientific rationality, standpoint theorists reproduce the essentialist and universalist assumptions about gender and power which are critiqued as the hallmarks of modern scientific thinking.4 It is in this context that the critique of modern science at the heart of Ecofeminism should be examined. Mies and Shiva articulate what may be seen as the ‘classic’ elaboration of a feminist standpoint epistemology (e.g., as in Merchant 1980) and one which is set explicitly in opposition to both empiricist and what they term ‘feminist theory of difference’ perspectives.

Ecof eminism as a critique of scientific rationality [M]odern civilisation is based on a cosmology and anthropology that structurally dichotomizes reality, and hierarchically opposes the two parts to each=other: the one always considered superior, always thriving and progressing at the expense of the other. Thus, nature is subordinated to man; woman to man, consumption to production and the local to the global, and so on. (Mies and Shiva, 1993:5) The central axiom of Mies’s and Shiva’s critique is that modern science is grounded in the linked material relations of patriarchal violence, capitalism and colonialism and that capitalism and colonialism, themselves, constitute (forms of) patriarchal

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violence. More specifically, they posit firstly that science and scientific rationality are both the core constituents and the driving motors of capitalist accumulation. That is, they argue that progress in scientific terms underpins ‘growth’ in capitalist terms. Second, they posit that the violence of scientific epistemology and practice has historically been constituted through the violence of colonial relations between industrialized and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The consequence of these linked relations, they argue, is that the destructive effects of science are felt most by women and children, particularly those living in the ‘underdeveloped’ South, and are reflected in the progressive destruction of ‘nature’. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the locus of these oppressions is seen to rest in the dualistic and reductionist nature of scientific thinking and in the simultaneous romanticization of what science destroys. Here, women and nature are constructed as the quintessential objects of men, male domination and scientific inquiry. Violence against nature, they argue, is intimately linked with violence against women in an objectifying scientific world-view premised upon supposed binary oppositions between man/woman; man/nature; north/south; industrial/indigenous; and organized around domination and capitalist accumulation. The scientific pursuit and production of universalized ‘truth’ is seen to be grounded in the exploitation of women, nature and the Third World’.5 At the same time, women, nature and indigenous ‘Third World’ peoples are romanticized objects of male (what Mies terms the ‘White Man’s’) desire. At all of these levels then, scientific rationality is seen as intrinsically the rationality of violence, desire and domination. Further, it is understood as an essentially male rationality. It is in and through their outline of what is axiomatically oppressive about science that Mies and Shiva posit ecofeminism as its obverse.

Critical contradictions: ecofeminism as standpoint In defying this patriarchy, we are loyal to future generations and to life and this planet itself. We have a deep and particular understanding of this both through our natures and our experience as women.

(Mies and Shiva, 1993:14) In a chapter entitled ‘Feminist research: science, violence and responsibility’, Mies lays out what she defines as the underpinning principles of feminist research generally and ecofeminist politics (including this book) more specifically. She begins with a set of ‘methodological guidelines for feminist research’. Here, in somewhat prescriptive fashion, she offers as generic a definition of feminist research methodology that derives expressly from a critique of the principles of scientific method and epistemology. Scientific method, she argues, constitutes a mythology of Value free’, ‘objective’ research which is shored up by the enormous social power and currency of scientific expertise and which constitutes a driving motor of male domination. She argues the need to replace the scientific standpoint, which she terms the ‘view from above’ with the View from below’, that is, the standpoint of those who are dominated. Referring to Freire’s concept of ‘conscientization’, Mies posits the View from below’ as the standpoint in which research that participates in a struggle against oppression (rather than in its reproduction) definitionally inheres. This

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standpoint, unlike science, is female, particularly ‘indigenous’, Third World’ female. Thus, if science is the seat of false ‘truth’, the View from below’ produces ‘real’ truth; if science is the epistemology of the status quo; the View from below’ is the epistemology ‘of the streets’. In a somewhat more rigorously argued way than Mies, Shiva presents a similar analysis. For example, in her chapter ‘Reductionism and regeneration: a crisis in science’, Shiva counterposes the mechanistic and reductive nature of scientific reasoning with an ‘organic’ generative standpoint which she specifically associates with non-Western, indigenous women. Here she argues that mechanistic ‘metaphor [ic]’ rationality has fragmented female bodies and nature and has progressively eroded biodiversity. She goes on, in a later chapter, to argue that diversity is the basis of women’s work and politics and the organizing principle of non-Western prescientific communities. These perspectives rely on a number of essentialist assertions.6 First is the monolithic construction of the enterprise of science. Mies, for example asserts in characteristic vein that: The feminist critique of science—particularly after Chernobyl—has made it eminently clear that all current science and technology is quite fundamentally military science and technology and not just when it is applied in bombs and rockets.

(Mies, 1986:51) While clearly Mies intends to emphasize the extensive power of modern science, it is strikingly reductionist and totalizing to say that all current science is ‘quite fundamentally military’. As many have argued, following Foucault, to posit science as a monolithically powerful enterprise not only misrecognizes the complexity of how power relations are lived out more broadly, but it also, paradoxically, underestimates how powerful science ‘really’ is. It seems more plausible that science is powerful precisely because its practices are contingent and its effects are partial rather than either being absolutely and categorically determined. Moreover, as stated above, central to both Mies’s and Shiva’s treatment of the power of science as monolithic is their identification of it as quintessentially male. Indeed, underpinning their analyses is an absolute and reified notion of male identity and power. Mies, in particular, speaks of the male, the White Man, the ‘famous male urge for omniscience and ominpotency [sic]’ (1986:51, emphasis ours), counterpointed implicitly and, at times explicitly with a similarly abstracted and universalized notion of the oppressed woman. We would suggest that there is an important difference between arguing that science is gendered, or is patriarchal (in the sense that it is ‘masculinized’ or expressive of the social relations of male dominance), and asserting that it is essentially male and the product of an ‘urge’. Indeed, the biological determinism of Mies’s and Shiva’s language seems a particularly ironic mode in which to critique the destructive (often biologically determinist) dualisms of science. For both Mies and Shiva, the totalizing and reductionist construction of science and scientific power is counterpointed by an essentialized and romanticized construction of female consciousness and experience and of ‘nature’.7 As a methodological principle, for instance, Mies posits that women (particularly

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indigenous women) and ‘nature’ are intrinsically interlinked as quintessential targets of scientific domination and as the loci of truth and (potential) conscientization. Not only does this formulation erase the considerable differentials of power, positionality and experience among women, but it also romanticizes ‘the other’ in terms which Mies later identifies as a characteristic component of scientific and colonial domination. Shiva’s version of this dualism revolves around her counterpoint of mechanistic versus ‘organic’ thinking. She cites the medicalization of childbirth, with its fragmentation and fetishization of the female body (Shiva, 1988:26), and biogenetic technologies, which ‘convert nature into a…genetic resource to be engineered, patented and owned for corporate profit’ (28), as particularly poignant examples of the mechanistic logic of modern science. ‘Formerly’, she asserts (without specifying when ‘formerly’ refers to), ‘the focus was on the mother and the organic unity of mother and baby’ (26) and on the sacredness of soil (soil as ‘sacred mother’); this alleged pre-scientific standpoint supposedly was in harmony with women and nature. The oppression of women and nature, Shiva asserts, began with Western scientific imperialism and, presumably ends with its repudiation; oppression is, apparently, an essentially modern invention. This approach to nature which sees the soil as the mother and people as her offspring, not her master, was and is universally shared even though it has everywhere been sacrificed as representing only a narrow, parochial viewpoint and approach. In its place has been introduced the culture of the white man, universalized first through colonialism and then development, which sees the soil only in terms of territory to be conquered and owned.

(Shiva, 1993:105) Thus, as with Mies, the romanticized, essentialist link between women and nature versus male culture is presented here implicitly as the basis for an alternative to scientific rationality; between benign/true and destructive/false universalisms.

Critical/questions Mies and Shiva are surely right to locate an analysis of science both in terms of oppressive power relations within and outside science, to develop a critical identification of the constituents of scientific epistemology and to make (or restate) links between scientific and colonialist politics and between science and oppressive social relations. However, as we have seen, their perspectives on science are characterized by a number of profound contradictions. Most disturbing perhaps is that it is exactly those elements they identify as the most damning indictments of modern science, i.e. dualism, reductionism, universalism and romanticism, which underpin Mies’s and Shiva’s own critique of science. Indeed, it is ironic that while both warn of the dangers of simply ‘up-ending’ the dualisms underpinning science (Mies and Shiva 1993:5), this self-same inversion is what seems to inform their definition of the source and character of the ecofeminist alternative. Also significant in this context are Mies’s and Shiva’s insistence that their ecofeminism constitutes a materialist critique and politics. This underpins the stress

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made not only on capitalist accumulation and patriarchal violence but also on the exploitation (and oppression) of women and on women’s resistance to these oppressive relations. Yet while both continually make reference to these relations, neither actually gets down to defining or tracing them as specific processes. This has the effect of essentializing capital, cash and patriarchy as disembodied/abstract agents with will, motive, feelings and drive. It also banalizes and elides (respectively) both the processes of oppression and the impetus for and character of protest. If one accepts (as one of us does) the standpoint that the dominant paradigm of science is fundamentally/ epistemically oppressive, is it not possible to develop such a critique through a recognition of and engagement with the highly diverse and contradictory theories and practices that constitute science rather than pretending that it is all the same thing? To refuse to be specific, or acknowledge partialities seems ultimately (and paradoxically) to deny, firstly, that science is socially constructed and, secondly, that feminists have any chance of changing the fundamental character of what we think of as science. It is, of course, for these reasons, among others, that some feminists have critiqued feminist standpoint approaches (or some versions of them)!

Ecofeminism as neo-universalism? The contradictory character of Mies’s and Shiva’s critique of science is, perhaps, most acutely reflected in their proposal for an alternative epistemology which, as mentioned earlier, they counterpose both to traditional scientific universalism and to ‘cultural relativist’ perspectives which they identify with postmodernism and, specifically with ‘the [sic] feminist theory of difference’. Mies and Shiva begin by stating that they share certain elements of what they identify (in blanket fashion) as postmodern critiques of universalist (Western) ideologies. They state that they agree, for example, ‘that the universalisation of modernization—the European project of the Enlightenment—has failed’ 1993:11). Mies and Shiva posit that, spurred by the demise of European socialism, there has been a growing movement to deconstruct ‘all universal ideologies based on a universal concept of human beings and their relation to nature and other human beings’ and to critique ‘the dualistic division between superstructure or culture and the economy or base’ (11). They argue, however, that this critique has given rise to ‘cultural relativism’ which they define as: (a) the focus on culture and difference at the expense of patriarchy and capitalism and at the expense of commonalities; and (b) the ‘suspension of value judgement’ with the consequence that patriarchal and violent practices are accepted as ‘cultural expressions’ of a particular people. Cultural relativism, they argue, destroys the basis for resistance and activism by denying the commonalities that characterize the View from below’ and the universality of ‘basic needs’ for food, shelter, affection…etc., ‘which are common to all people irrespective of culture, ideology, race, political and economic system and class’ (13). In other words, political resistance to scientific universalism necessarily has a universal base in (women’s) common experiences of patriarchal and capitalist violence and in essential needs. As with Mies’s and Shiva’s critique of scientific philosophy, their critique of cultural relativism, as its obverse, confusingly relies on a number of generalizations

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and odd elisions. While they rightly, in our view, identify relativist perspectives as fundamentally problematic, the terms in which they do so are also rather perplexing. For example, as noted above, they argue that relativism fails as an ‘alternative to totalitarian and dogmatic ideological universalism’ because it constitutes a ‘suspension of value judgement’ (12). This formulation implicitly locates ‘proper’ anti-Enlightenment critique in the realm of moral judgement rather than as an analysis of power. Indeed, we would suggest that the problem with cultural relativism is not a suspension of value judgement, but a focus on difference in the absence of an analysis of power relations (or, to paraphrase Catharine MacKinnon, the difference difference makes). In this context, Mies and Shiva seem to suggest that to focus on cultural (and implicitly other forms of) difference is relativist per se. This includes what they term ‘the [sic] feminist theory of difference’. A concentration on cultural differences is posited as a kind of intellectual indulgence8 which not only ignores the simultaneous fragmentation and homogenization of local cultures through international capitalism, but, indeed reaffirms these relations. They write: Cultural relativism is not only unaware of these processes [of fragmentation and homogenization] but rather legitimizes them; the feminist theory of difference ignores the working of the capitalist world system and its power to transform life into saleable commodities and cash.

(1993:12, emphasis ours) This seems to suggest that all feminist theory which considers difference amounts to one theory and contributes, definitionally, to the agenda of ‘liberalism which is rooted in colonialisation [and which] accords with the agendas of multinational corporations’ (12). In other words, Mies and Shiva appear to assimilate into relativism any concern with or consideration of difference. In so doing, they implicitly dismiss precisely those bodies of feminist critique which have problematized the racist, heterosexist and classist (to name a few) assumptions of dominant white Western paradigms of feminist critique as well as of dominant social institutions and relations. Would they argue, for example, that Black feminist perspectives, which have specifically been concerned to analyse what Patricia Hill Collins (1990) terms the ‘matrix’ of oppressions, constitute cultural relativism? Mies and Shiva propose that ‘the way out of relativism’ (12) is to be found in an alternative universalism which emerges from the allegedly intrinsic commonalities of grass-roots ecofeminist activism (the View from below’) and which is orientated to ‘real universal needs rather than abstract “rights”’ (13). They write: In dialogues with such grassroots women activists, cultural relativism does not enter. These women spell out clearly what unites women worldwide, and what unites men and women with the multiplicity of life forms in nature. The universalism that stems from their efforts to preserve their subsistence—their life base—is different from the Eurocentric universalism developed via the Enlightenment and the rise of patriarchy…[The] fundamental needs for food, shelter, clothing; for affection, care and love; for dignity and identity; for knowledge and freedom, leisure and joy, are common to all people,

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irrespective of culture, ideology, race, political and economic system and class.

(1993:13) The ironies of Mies’s and Shiva’s proposal for an alternative universalism are grounded in two significant assumptions about the character of ontology and epistemology—i.e., that ontology is essential rather than contingent (there are intrinsic commonalities in women’s experiences which override their differences); and that ontology equals epistemology (the knowledge of women emerges from/ equates with the be-ing of women). Yet we would ask: is the way out of both cultural relativism and scientific universalism through a new universalism and an assertion of ‘alternative’ essentialisms or might it be better addressed through an analysis of power relations. And we would ask if the basis of unity and resistance is to be found not in a presumed ontological commonality (as women, as victims, as colonized) but rather in a shared political agenda which is developed through a range of standpoints which, as Bina Agarwal (1992) has argued, are situational, located in specific and complex material relations of space, place and power. Ultimately, Mies and Shiva argue, the answer to universalism is universalism, the answer to determinism is determinism. Moreover as with the ‘old’ universalism of science, it is difference, not power, which is problematized in Mies’s and Shiva’s ‘new’ universalism. While Ecofeminism presents what may be a particularly striking example of these contradictions, nevertheless, the issue of how to develop a critique of scientific rationality which does not reproduce the assumptions underpinning it remains a vexed question. How, for example can we discuss power relations without making claims to ‘truth’. Indeed, what else is a ‘standpoint’ but an attempt to identify a relationship (without necessarily making an equation) between ontology and epistemology? Does the project of developing feminist forms of materialist critique inevitably recuperate the core assumptions of modernity?9 Finally, how in this context can we conceptualize differences and commonalities in ways which avoid the problems of both determinism and relativism? It would seem to us, that if an equation of ontology and epistemology constitutes a foundation for determinism, relativism emerges, at least in part, from seeing them as separate.10 The problem is not Mies’s and Shiva’s desire to acknowledge and hold on to common or related modes of oppression, experience and resistance among different groups of women, but rather their view of such commonalities in terms of transcendence. This is epitomized in their references to coming together despite our differences and in the positivist notion of an essential female consciousness. Ultimately, to equate ontology and epistemology, as Mies and Shiva do, seems to involve an erasure of precisely those power relations they seek to problematize in relation to science as well as in relation to relativism. As we shall see, the fundamental problems which characterize Mies’s and Shiva’s perspectives on science are extended to and through their perspectives on development, raising similar questions about the relationship between positionality and philosophy, critique and politics.

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Ecofeminism and the ‘Colonies of White Man’ Mies’s and Shiva’s critique of development is in terms which parallel their view of science, namely ‘development’ is essentially a Western concept, and realized as a colonizing project within power relations dominated by the West.11 Like science it embodies patriarchal assumptions and its masculinist logic is seen as radically opposed to what Shiva calls ‘the feminine principle’ under which ‘nature’, indigenous peoples and the Third World’ are variously subsumed, along with a range of values and practices which are held to be in opposition to what Western/capitalist/ patriarchal development stands for. If Western development is inherently destructive, it is ultimately Mother Earth, women and other embodiments of the ‘feminine principle’ which receive the full force of that destruction. The feminist kernel of ecopolitics is provided by this identification of women with nature, an alliance which is both strategic and essential, since by defending nature against the patriarchal depredations of development, women are not only defending their livelihoods but womanhood itself. Ecofeminism’s theoretical approach to development is an adaptation of that elaborated in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986). Here Mies produced a version of underdevelopment theory combining elements of the analyses of Samir Amin (1974), Gunder Frank (1971, 1978), Rosa Luxemburg (1913) and others, to argue that the concentration of science and technology in the core countries and the consequent international division of labour and unequal exchange between centre and periphery condemned the latter to progressive pauperization: ‘the relationship between these overdeveloped centres or metropoles and the underdeveloped peripheries is a colonial one’ (Mies, 1986:56). Moreover, Today, a similar colonial relationship exists between Man and Nature, between men and women, between urban and rural areas. We have called these the Colonies of White Man. In order to maintain such relationships force and violence are always essential’ (56). Mies’s analysis of the world capitalist system thus locates women within the broader processes of Western capitalism and colonialism. Just as underdevelopment theory depends on surplus drain as its core explanatory principle, a process in which the advanced capitalist countries siphon off, for their own advantage, the surplus produced in the Third World’, so women, too, have their surplus expropriated by men and by capital simultaneously, because the capitalist system is quintessentially patriarchal. The logic of capital is endless accumulation and from Luxemburg is derived the notion that capital depends for its survival on exploiting the natural economy. The natural economy is where women reside, both as subsistence producers in the Third World and as housewives in the advanced capitalist countries. The processes of capitalist development work to marginalize women but also to exploit their unpaid labour. Mies calls this the process of ‘housewifisation’.12 She sums up this relationship between the capitalist West and women thus: ‘women can therefore be called the internal colony of this system’ (58). Mies further identifies something she calls the ‘myth of catching-up development’ as a crucial ideological underpinning of the process of world accumulation. ‘Catching-up’ development, Mies argues, represents a kind of false consciousness on the part of its deluded supporters: it is an erroneous belief that development, defined in terms of Western models, is a good in itself and one that is universifiable. She

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posits, furthermore, that the Third World’ is itself captivated both by the desire to replicate the ‘success’ of the West and by a blind faith in ‘its’ science, technology and market system. Affluent Westerners exhibit a ‘collective schizophrenia’ in relation to unlimited consumption: this reflects a misguided belief that high material living standards make for a good life. Instead, she says, the reality for the West is a meaningless life while for the colonies ‘catching-up’ development is ‘a lost game’. She concludes that: the failure of ‘catching-up’ development to deliver this ‘concrete Utopia’ leads to frustration and despair, to waves of fundamentalism and nationalism, further destruction of the environment, further exploitation of the Third World’, further violence against women and militarization of men (Mies, 1986:64). On the basis of this theory, a new eco-perspective is erected as the categories of economy and ideology give way to a different discourse, one which places ‘nature’ at its centre and, in classic opposition, counterposes it to culture. Shiva’s concern, for example, is that the international processes of development cause a generalized human condition of ‘uprootedness’: Development has violently severed the sacred bonds between the people and the soil, yet ‘this approach to nature which sees the soil as the mother and people as her offspring, not her master, was and is universally shared even though it has everywhere been sacrificed.

(Shiva, 1989:104) Development and colonization, she argues, have led to the disappearance of the onceorganic ‘motherland’ and there has occurred instead a masculinization of state and society in the service of the market. This discourse has much in common with nineteenth-century romanticism in its critique of modernity and industrialization and in its reinvocation of the themes of the loss of community. Shiva goes further in seeing the rise of nationalism and of inter-ethnic violence as responses not so much to the failure of catching-up development but to the loss of the fundamental links to the soil that this entails. Mies adds that these political phenomena legitimize the militarization of men and identification with the fatherland through projecting a yearning for lost motherlands on to nation-states. This theme of yearning for what is lost (nature/rootedness authenticity) runs through the book. It is deployed to explain tourism—an activity engaged in by Westerners, depressed and alienated by urban living, but who also have the urge to return to nature—in a controlled way, while inevitably ‘destroying what they yearn for’. Yearning for nature and grief for its loss is also expressed by men through women’s bodies; pornography and ‘sex tourism’ are offered as examples of the connexion between male violence and desire, the latter expressive of colonial masterservant relations. Mies asks: ‘Why do these men want women whom they otherwise do not respect?…What, apart from the intoxication of power and dominance do these men want from those poor foreign, colonised women?’ The answer lies not in specific cultural constructions of racism, but in the fact that modern men have little physical contact with nature unmediated by machines…‘the more abstract becomes the relationship between man and nature, the more alienated man becomes from his own organic, mortal body’, ‘the sexual act has become virtually the only direct contact to nature available to the civilized man’ (Mies and Shiva, 1993:137).

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Thus, the more man appropriates and destroys women and nature the more he hungers for them. Once again, women and nature are the repositories of what is meaningful in the modern world. Moreover, there is an extraordinary implication here that male grief and alienation underpin, and render comprehensible, men’s sexual violence against and exploitation of women. In this context Mies seems to argue a version of ‘Oedipal conflict’ which sees the crisis of modern manhood in terms of loss of sex/woman/nature and women’s crisis as a loss of ‘generative potency’, i.e., motherhood/maternity. This dualistic equation of men with sex and women with reproduction is a classic cliché of dominant discourses of heterosexuality.

Critical in-distinctions The theoretical foundations of Mies’s and Shiva’s critique of development are somewhat eclectic if not contradictory. A Marxist economic analysis has been grafted on to an idealization of some essential, universal human inclination which is offered as a principle of explanation of phenomena as diverse as tourism, nationalism and colonialism. What these two elements share however is an underlying essentialism, which while perhaps less obvious in Mies’s account of the accumulation process is just as important to it as it is to the account of the natural world and its fascination for those alienated from it. It is to Mies’s characterization of the economic system to which we will briefly turn. There can be little doubt as to the dynamic force, destructive capacity and exploitative character of ‘really existing’ capitalism. The critique of ‘growth for the sake of it’ which Mies and Shiva share is certainly pertinent if hardly controversial even in less radical circles than those Mies and Shiva move in. But the breathless sweep of Ecofeminism’s polemic is based on a theory of the world system which fails to convince. It is indeed surprising to find at its heart an uncritical reinvocation of underdevelopment theory after more than twenty years in which it has been criticized (from all quarters) for lacking explanatory power, for its simple dichotomies of core and periphery, and for having its stagnationist assumptions contradicted by the facts of postcolonial development.13 The very diversity of economic outcomes in the postcolonial world suggest at the very least that surplus drain, the theoretical basis of the idea that the Third World can never develop or ‘catch up’ with the West, has been shown to be an insufficient basis for understanding the more complex processes involved in development. Nor is it adequate to deal with the question of the relationship between a putative ‘centre’ and a homogenous ‘periphery’ as ‘colonial’ as if this suffices to explain all the very real (and very diverse) problems associated with Third World’ development. In this approach Third World’ social formations, with their distinctive histories, state and cultural forms, class formations, divergent policies and natural endowments, all become the same eternal victims of the depredations of the West. South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil are no different really to Burundi, Timor or Yemen.14 Women’s oppression too, is conceived of in parallel terms, their unpaid work is both central to the accumulation process, and their sexuality and otherness acts to compensate modern men for their alienation from nature. Yet this whole account depends upon an idyllic reinvocation of pre-Enlightenment, pre-colonial, and

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pre-modern cultures which were supposedly based on the ‘feminine principle’ and on a natural order conceived of as essentially good. Such knowledge systems as existed, we are told, were expressive of a respect for nature, were often woman-centred and woman-friendly. Shiva even goes so far as to talk of pre-modern contraceptive techniques on this basis, calling for a return to these knowledges. Here again, a complex history is rendered universal and homogeneous; what occurs in this account is a simple inversion of the paradigm of civilization being achieved through the domination of nature which results in an equally crude romanticization of something imagined as ‘traditional nature-based society’, one which is free from male dominance and conflict, a pre-oedipal place of maternal nurturance. The reality of such societies and knowledge systems was often far more diverse than this picture allows and certainly, in many cases, rather far from this ideal type. While we would not dispute the validity of the project of reclaiming particular knowledges and practices by women and by some indigenous peoples, that have been erased, this process of recuperation must be based on an analytic engagement with the complexities of these histories rather than on an assertive idealization of ‘ancient wisdoms’. ‘Old’ knowledges, after all, were historically and politically constituted in often very contradictory ways. In sum, despite the appearance in recent decades of a rich source of information and debate, and a plethora of feminist writings on the issues discussed in this book, what it re-presents is a determinist, structuralist and ahistorical account of processes which are far more varied, complex and contingent. Indeed it could be argued again that Mies and Shiva reproduce precisely the reductionism which they themselves criticize in relation to science. This oversimplified account of the process and necessary effects of capitalist development also endows capitalism and the capitalist system with autonomous motives and agency; it too becomes a power monolith but, as with science, the actual relations and practices through which power is expressed and mediated are never explicated. Again, as with science, there is a metaphorical reference to violence, colonialism and patriarchy which implies material relations but does not ground the analysis in anything other than an expressive totality. Everything is the same as everything, everything expresses the same thing. The idealization of a necessary linkage between women and nature further operates to obstruct analysis of the ways in which women are differentially situated in relation to their environment and to environmental issues more generally. There is surely nothing given in this relationship, one which is contingent on a variety of social factors, not least among them class and social relations. The fact that many poor peasant women depend for their livelihood on preserving trees or brushwood tells us more about the social relations within which they live than about the essential character of women.15 As Jackson (1993) points out, we have to ask why women have come to be defenders of trees, and whether identifications of the woman-nature variety have more to do with the processes through which women become socially marginalized through the operations of the sexual division of labour and indeed of patriarchal power. Mies and Shiva simply never discuss how relations between the sexes are constituted and what specific ways these power relations might underpin women’s ‘special’ relationship with ‘nature’. This failure to address the question of power relations between men and women relates to what seems a more general assumption (and idealization) of heterosexuality underpinning the book. For example, while Mies and Shiva repeatedly refer to the

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rather reified notion of ‘man-woman’ relationship problems and to patriarchal violence, neither considers the specific social relations of men’s violence with respect to women. This is a striking absence in the discussion of fertility control, where it is assumed that the issue for women is one of re-appropriating traditional knowledges as if this were a matter of choice, whereas it is women’s capacity to exercise choice at all which is often in question. Mies’s description (discussed earlier) of sexual intercourse as (ideally) a celebration of nature seems to posit ecofeminism as a standpoint which is intrinsically and necessarily heterosexual.16 That is, the characteristic equation of nature not only with women but with heterosexuality carries the unfortunate implication that rescuing heterosexuality is central to the rescue of both ‘nature’ and women.17 This bias in Ecofeminism is shored up by Mies’s and Shiva’s continual romanticization of mothers and motherhood as characterized by an inherently radical consciousness. For example, in Mies’s chapter Who made nature our enemy’ on the lessons to be learned from Chernobyl, she writes: What purpose can be served by writing about [Chernobyl] now? Should we not rather emulate those feminists who say: ‘We are not responsible for this destructive technology. We do not want it. Let those men, or those patriarchs who are so enthusiastic about their technological dominance over nature now clear up the mess. We are fed up with being the worlds’ housewives.’ This reaction is understandable, but does it help us? Women don’t live on an island; there is no longer any place to which we can flee. Some women may feel that it is better to forget what happened at Chernobyl and enjoy life as long as it lasts since we must all die eventually. But women with small children cannot afford this nihilistic attitude.

(1993:91, emphasis ours) In suggesting that there are good eco-minded mothers and ‘nihilistic’ and childless feminists Mies reinvokes a rather tired stereotype which impugns both ‘egoistic’ feminists and lesbians.18 The consequence of those formulations is the implication that the ecofeminist standpoint proposed by Mies and Shiva finds its impetus in (heterosexual) motherhood and its resolution in the repudiation of a patriarchal science which destroys not only mothers but Mother as icon and object of reverence.19 However, in the absence of an analysis of the complex power relations of and social conditions surrounding women’s experiences of mothering, Mies and Shiva seem to recuperate rather than challenge conventional heterosexist iconographies of Motherhood. While the heterosexist undertone of Ecofeminism may not have been intended, it is certainly problematic that in a book that is, in part, concerned to critique male violence with respect to reproduction, reproductive technologies and population control policies and to consider these in relation to the politics and philosophies of modernity and development, there is a pointed absence of an analysis of the relationship between compulsory heterosexuality, gender and the other forms of oppression acknowledged in the book.

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Back to the future? The common ground for women’s liberation and the preservation of life on earth is to be found in the activities of those women who have become the victims of the development process and who struggle to conserve their subsistence base. (1993:12) Given the various elements which make up the theoretical approach of Ecofeminism, it is hardly surprising that the vision it holds out as inspiration for the future is one which is based on a return to nature and to a society based not on accumulation/ growth but on production for subsistence. The governing principles of this society are participatory democracy, ‘de-linking’ from the world economy and ‘ethical decolonisation’, this latter concept inspired by Shiva’s extraordinary claim that ‘most non-Western cultures have been based on the democracy of all life’ (Shiva, 1989: 265).20 Once again a simple inversion is deployed in which real problems are wished away in favour of a series of clichés.21 The ecofeminist Utopia is one where there is no capitalism, no market, no state, no poverty, no science and no patriarchy (yet is still heterosexual). Whatever the attractions of some of these super-ordinate goals, the routes of transformation surely cannot come from a recovery of an imaginary past. Mies and Shiva assume that because subsistence economies are quintessentially ‘nonmodern’ they must ‘therefore’ be non-oppressive, hence there is no need for states, laws or for regulation; all will be achieved through co-operation and grass-roots participation. Quite how upwards of 6 billion people will manage to survive on the basis of subsistence production does not detain the authors of Ecofeminism, any more than such difficult questions as how we might reach this Utopian state do. Again, Mies and Shiva refrain from both acknowledging complexities and engaging in substantive consideration of social relations and processes of survival and democratization. In the meantime how does this vision inform the feminist agenda for political action in the present? The answer is given in grass-roots activism to preserve the environment, what Mies describes as the essence of ‘the subsistence perspective’. While all women have an interest in defending the environment, none the less some women have a privileged role in the struggle: The common ground for women’s liberation and the preservation of life on earth is to be found in the activities of those women who have become the victims of the development process and who struggle to conserve their subsistence base.

(Mies and Shiva, 1993:12) The Chipko movement of Uttar Pradesh is seen as a paradigm of ecofeminism in action, combining as it does ‘grass-roots’ struggles, by women apparently directed at preserving nature because it is upon nature that they depend for survival.22 Yet, how far can struggles waged by poor women (whose livelihoods are directly threatened by environmental degradation) serve as a model for ecofeminist politics in general?

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Surely ‘defending women’s place as subsistence producers’ is a rather limited goal and one which does not problematize gender relations at all?23 And do grass-roots struggles constitute the one possible form of ecofeminist practice? Besides this abstract treatment of activism, there are occasions when they are more concretely programmatic, such as in the proposals for forming urban collectives and practising what amounts to green consumerism. Yet it is surprising that having constructed a monolithic and over-determining model of systemic oppression, they imagine this can be challenged through opting out on the one hand and through alternative consumption patterns, on the other. The latter proposal embraces the ethos of Voluntary simplicity’ (Mies, 1986:251) by which is meant a Voluntary reduction in the living standards and a change of consumer patterns by the rich countries and classes’ (253). Mies calls for ‘consumer liberation’, whereby all rich consumers suddenly see the light and become ecologically conscious (which means restricting consumption). The implications for the ‘housewifised’ are clearly significant since what this proposal will in all likelihood involve is an intensification of their unpaid labour to substitute for environmentally unsound commodities. It is clear that the gender relations of consumption are not challenged by green consumerism alone (or even at all); if anything women acquire even more responsibility in this domain. Moreover, this attribution of power to consumers is striking for its liberal and individualized vision of change and also seems at variance with their own analysis of how patriarchal capitalism works.

Conclusion We began this review by recognizing the promise of Mies’s and Shiva’s project in Ecofeminism. In particular, it suggests the need to understand modern science, colonialism and development as interrelated processes. This is an important perspective for those working in the fields of feminist critiques of science and/or of development. However as is evident from the above, this promise remains unfulfilled. Ecofe minism is a patchwork of themes and insights many of which raise pertinent issues. But the underlying theoretical assumptions are deeply flawed and have the unintentional effect of depoliticizing the agenda of environmental feminism first by displacing the analysis of specific historically and socially constituted gender relations by a timeless and universal set of dichotomies of which the women/nature example is primary. This reduces feminist politics—including questions of strategy— to something given in the nature of women. Secondly, the assumptions underpinning Mies’s and Shiva’s Ecofeminism render it incapable of generating a politics adequate to the enormity of the threat to survival presented by environmental degradation. This is in part because Mies and Shiva rehabilitate and indeed celebrate the public/private split of classical philosophy in order to argue that the only meaningful politics for women is outside the sphere of male power, in women-centred spontaneous grassroots struggles.24 This not only operates with a reductionist extrapolation of what a feminist politics is but in leaving the central assumption of a dualistic arena for politics intact, Eco feminism fails to engage with the problem of how political power is organized, let alone offer a real challenge to it.

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Notes Maxine Molyneux teaches political sociology at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London; Deborah Lynn Steinberg teaches feminist studies in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, England. 1 We would like to thank Bina Agarwal for her comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 In an important article on ecofeminism, and critique of Shiva, Agarwal (1992) has analysed the different feminist positions which have emerged in relation to science. She has also examined the ways in which the woman/ nature link is constituted within ecofeminist discourse. 3 See, for example, Alic (1986); Harding (1986); and Kirkup and Smith Keller (1992). 4 This critique of feminist standpoint approaches specifically the contention that female ontology provides a quintessential basis for a critique of science as a male enterprise; hence the notion of a ‘woman’s standpoint’. However, not all standpoint theorists accept the essentialism implicit in this formulation, nor utilize a homogenous concept of ‘woman’ in their formulation of a critique of the normative practices and philosophies of science (see, for example, Harding 1991). 5 Mies and Shiva tend to use the generic ‘South’ in preference to Third World’. However both terms suggest a unity, similarity and ‘otherness’ with respect to the First World/North—none of which can automatically be assumed. We use the term Third World therefore with considerable reservations. 6 By ‘essentialism’ we refer to perspectives which construct social processes/ patterns in ways which suggest that they are fixed (often biologically fixed), immutable and inevitable. Essentialist approaches are associated with deterministic theories such as sociobiology and versions of structuralism. Feminism has been notable for critiquing biological (and social) determinist theories. However, many feminists have also pointed out that there are contexts in which it may be necessary (or unavoidable) to use a considered essentialism in order to formulate perspectives which challenge common senses. Epstein (1993), among others, argues that the use of racialized categories or identifications, for example, can be a necessary (though problematic) essentialism in anti-racist struggle. See also Lovibond (1992). 7 Although it is constantly invoked, neither Mies nor Shiva define what they mean by ‘nature’. 8 They write: While intellectuals may concentrate on culture and on differences, international capital continues with its expansion of production and markets, insisting on free access to all natural resources and life forms and to localized cultures and traditions and their commodification. (Mies and Shiva, 1993:12)

The implication here is that examination of culture and difference is fundamentally at odds with a materialist critique.

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9 It can be argued, in this context, that while classic feminist standpoint critiques of science may be legitimately critiqued for reproducing certain key essentialisms characteristic of science (e.g., in the notion of a unified female subject), it is not necessary (or possible) to abandon any claim to materially and positionally grounded analysis (see Harding, 1991). 10 The separation of knowledge from be-ing in this sense relates to the separation of public and private as a bedrock of classic liberal thought. 11 There are no significant differences between state socialism and capitalism as far as this approach is concerned. 12 For further discussion of the concept of ‘housewifisation’ see Mies, Ben-holdtThomsen and von Werlhof (1988). 13 For a critical resumé of this discussion, see, for example, Brewer (1980). 14 The divisions within the North and South are as important as those between them. Moreover, as Guha (cited in Jackson, 1993) argues, the construction of the South as a place of spiritual and ecological awareness is a form of orientalism whereby agency and rationality are then dichotomously seen as the preserve of the West. 15 Agarwal distinguishes ecofeminism from what she terms ‘feminist environmentalism’, an approach which is characterized by its analysis of the social relations within which women and men are inscribed in order to contextualise their different dependencies on particular resources. (This approach is also sometimes known as the Gender, Environment, Development approach). See, for example, Leach, 1991; Agarwal 1992; and Jackson 1993. 16 Heterosexuality emerges in this context as a rather reified and static construct. 17 Indeed, Ecofeminism seems to suggest that along with the Third World’ and women, capitalism has also ‘underdeveloped’ heterosexuality. This notion comes through with particular force in Mies’s chapter ‘White man’s dilemma’, discussed earlier, where she argues that alienation from nature, which she sees as characteristic of modern industrial life, underpins men’s sexual tourism and women’s investment in destructive reproductive technologies. The implicit heterosexism of this formulation has implications for Mies and Shiva’s later proposal for a ‘subsistence perspective’ as an anti-dote to the destructive character and products of modernity. In the absence of some close consideration of the relationship between patriarchal social relations and institutionalized heterosexuality, heterosexuality (restored to its ‘natural’ pre-modern form) seems to emerge as a subsistence principle and a site of potential resistance against oppression. 18 We would suggest that this formulation and the idealization of mothers more generally also ignores the power relations of and social conditions surrounding motherhood. The construction of a motherhood as an exalted state of political consciousness seems not far removed from iconographies of mother/Madonna as repository of spiritual virtue. 19 Mies and Shiva posit mothers and motherhood as a particular target of the destructive practices of science and of development at several levels including: (a) that mothers and their children are particularly undermined by the toxic products of modern industrial and technological ‘progress’; (b) that loss of motherland and of attendant reverence for motherhood and fertility is the paradigmatic feature of Western modernity; and (c) that the processes of patriarchal science and

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20 21

22

23 24

development have appropriated and undermined women’s reproductive autonomy and health. Bina Agarwal (1992), (among others), has critiqued the premise, which underpins Shiva’s earlier work, that all oppression emanates from the West. For example: Mies’s contention that affluence does not produce ‘the good life’ (money doesn’t make you happy); that we need to recover the ‘premodern’/‘preoppressive’ (back to basics) and that affluent countries should ‘reduce’ their levels of consumption (‘just say no’). There is considerable debate over how to interpret the significance of the Chipko movements. Guha, for example sees it as a defence of a conservative moral economy. See Jackson’s discussion of this (1993). Jackson (1993) notes that environmental protection and conservation are not necessarily woman-friendly in themselves. Pateman (1989) describes the fraternal social contract, for example, as being premised on a division between ‘civil society or the universal sphere of freedom, equality, individualism, reason, contract and impartial law’—the realm of men…‘and the private world of particularity, natural subjection, ties of blood, emotion, love and sexual passion—the world of women’ in which she adds…‘men also rule’ (Pateman, 1989:43, emphasis ours).

References AGARWAL, B. (1992) ‘The gender and environment debate: lessons from India’ Feminist Studies 18(1) Spring . ALIC, M. (1986) Hypatia’s Heritage: a History of Women in Science from An tiquity to the Late Nineteenth Century London: Women’s Press. AMIN, S. (1974) Accumulation on a World Scale New York: Monthly Review Press. BREWER, A. (1980) Marxist Theories of Imperialism London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. COLLINS, Patricia Hill (1990) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment London: Harper-Collins. EPSTEIN, D. (1993) Changing Classroom Cultures: AntiRacism, Politics and Schools Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. FRANK, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America New York: Monthly Review Press. —(1978) World Accumulation 1492–1789 New York: Monthly Review Press. HARAWAY, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science New York: Routledge. HARDING, S. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism London: Open University Press. —(1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? London: Open University Press. —(1992) ‘How the women’s movement benefits science: two views’ in KIRKUP, G. and SMITH KELLER, L. JACKSON, C. (1993) ‘Environmentalisms and gender interests in the Third World’ Development and Change Vol. 24 , London, Newbury Park and New Delhi: Sage: 649–77 .

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KIRKUP, G. and SMITH KELLER, L. (1992) editors, Inventing Women: Science, Technology and Gender , London: Polity. LEACH, M. (1991) ‘Locating gendered experience: an anthropologist’s view from a Sierra Leonean village’ IDS Bulletin Vol. 22, No. 1, January . LOVIBOND, S. (1989) ‘Feminism and postmodernism’ New Left Review 178 (special issue on Defending Enlightenment): 5–28 . — (1992) ‘Rorti and feminism’ New Left Review No. 193, January . LUXEMBURG, R. (1963) The Accumulation of Capital London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. MERCHANT, C. (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution New York: Harper & Row. MIES, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale London: Zed Press. MIES, M. , BENHOLDT-THOMSEN, V. and VON WERLHOF, C. (1988) Women: the Last Colony London: Zed. MIES, M. and SHIVA, V. (1993) Ecofeminism London: Zed Press. PATEMAN, C. (1989) The Sexual Contract London: Polity Press. SHIVA, V. (1989) Staying Alive London: Zed Press.

CAMILLE PAGLIA’S SEX, ART, AND AMERICAN CULTURE Sue O’Sullivan

Camille Paglia’s writing is often numbingly boring. The problem with reviewing her is that selective quotes make her appear snappy in a fashionably politically incorrect way. Then Camille the public performer and Camille the writer of books get all mixed up. Which is not to say reading Sex, Art and American Culture is only boring; it is also infuriating. I kept looking ahead to see how much more, oh lord, how much more to go before I was through? Then there were the moments of disgust and anger. And why didn’t anyone warn me in one of the numerous hyped-up articles I read about naughty Camille that her writing is repetitious and tediously predictable? I’m bewildered that Paglia has apparently captivated so many with so little, including a swag of gay men and lesbians. In a recent issue of the Australian gay magazine Outrage, Peter Blazey practically elevated our Camille to saviour status (Blazey, 1993). It just goes to show, yet again, that being queer is no indicator of political acumen. At least her first book; Sexual Personae—Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, no matter how nauseously undergraduate it tended to be, did focus on famous cultural artifacts and personalities. In it she tells us she is practically single-handedly rescuing us from the aridity of modernism and restoring the unity and continuity of Western culture in an approach which combines the disciplines of literature, art history, psychology and religion. Gee whiz. Her ‘method is a form of sensationalism: I try to flesh out intellect with emotion and to induce a wide range of emotion from the reader’ (1992: xiii). The aim is continued in this collection of essays, mostly written between 1990 and 1992 after the first book’s publication. In it she expounds ad infinitum on her main themes, including the news that rape is one of life’s little miseries, that paganism and astrology are deep and meaningful, that American academia sucks, French intellectuals suck, feminism sucks, lesbianism sucks, Madonna is fabulous and so is PAGLIA. But the focus is narrow and the weaknesses of her position in relation to popular culture are clearer than in Sexual Personae. Let me make it clear from the start that I am not opposed to Paglia because she: (a) is in favour of pornography; (b) supports sadomasochism but makes sure we know she doesn’t practice it; (c) adores gay men; (d) thinks Madonna is the bee’s knees; (e) wore Lauren Hutton’s Wonderbra for a photo opportunity; (f) is an academic; (g) can’t get anyone to fuck her; (h) calls herself a Freudian. All of these might form the basis

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for an energetic and humorous self-engrandizement. I loathe her because of the positions she takes about nature, society, men and women, politics, rape, sexuality, feminism, gay men, and religion and I am critical of Paglia’s world-view because of its incredibly reactionary basis. Paglia claims all sorts of (magnificent) things for herself. She is going where no one else has dared. She reveres Freud. She will reclaim ‘Catholicism’s ancient, latent paganism’ (42). She will persuade us (endlessly) of the inevitable ‘Apollonian versus Dionysian dichotomy in the West’ (151). She will restore the primacy of neverchanging Nature to our understanding of sex. She will ram common sense down our throats. She will make raucous fun of date rape. She will explain that rock and roll heralds democracy. She will extol her ‘Sixties generation’ (47) (over and over) and she will tell you often of Paglia’s unique greatness and astuteness when it comes to popular culture. She is also saving feminism from the spoilsport, whiny, middle-class women’s studies’ academics and their wussy male counterparts on campuses all over America. Each and every one of these places is apparently in the grip of a sorority of po-faced Lacanian, leftist, liberal, anti-pleasure women. Paglia is pissed off by wishy-washy Rousseauian humanists but she makes sure that we understand that being anti-liberal does not mean she is a neo-conservative. However, just because someone tells you something continuously does not for one second mean that they are telling the truth or achieving what they claim to. Paglia is transparently a libertarian conservative. She doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be pro sex, pro porn, pro abortion, pro prostitution and be a conservative. Has she never heard of libertarian Tories? Hasn’t she got a clue that her much vaunted voices of ‘realism’ and ‘common sense’ are exactly those of a variety of conservatisms. The woman is chillingly naive about politics—about political history, currents and analysis. Paglia is usually out of date, behind the times, and definitely not in tune with the streets. She wouldn’t know a street if it hit her in the face. It’s embarrassing. Her analysis of modern culture is banal and relies heavily on descriptive passages referring to theories, famous traditions, historical buzz words. Because it is posed as central to everything, culture tends to loom. She makes a meal out of how much perversity excites her. OK, OK. But she comes across as mean spirited, not as someone interested in taking wing herself. It’s as if she has watched American popular culture for the past two or three decades from a college room, from a distance, never from within it. You can imagine her in her student personae as the neurotic swot whose main social intercourse is always with ‘mentors’ and teachers, covering her needy arse with condescending dismissals of her peers. Yeah, maybe it is a bit sad, but Christ do we have to suffer her as a consequence? Camille is as vacuously reductive in her boring denunciations of ‘the feminists’ as any feminist has ever been in her denunciation of patriarchy. Both rely on blanket assertions which ignore the subtle and complex ways in which women have struggled with different feminisms for over ten or fifteen years, acknowledging and analysing the different ways feminists see the world and try to change it. But if she did that she couldn’t make the outrageous statements which send the press and anti-feminists into paroxysms of joy. Paglia’s style and content depend on selection and wilful ignorance. As far as Paglia is concerned, feminists make women into victims and attack her for giving women responsibility. ‘I am being vilified by feminists for merely having

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a common-sense attitude about rape’ (59). A big lump of this common-sense attitude includes the fact that, ‘We cannot regulate male sexuality. The uncontrollable aspect of male sexuality is part of what makes sex interesting. And yes, it can lead to rape in some situations. What feminists are asking for is for men to be castrated, to make eunuchs out of them. The powerful, uncontrollable force of male sexuality has been censored out of white middle-class homes’ (63). She finishes off this astoundingly silly section by throwing out a backhanded racist ‘compliment’ to two groups who she claims haven’t censored male sexual lust by saying, ‘But it’s still there in black culture, and in Spanish culture’ (63). Camille has long, recurring diatribes about hormones, biology and sex differences. She has the audacity to claim that as well as being a Freudian, she is not a biological determinist. Listen to the lady: ‘Dionysus, trivialised by Sixties polemicists, is not pleasure but pleasure-pain, the gross continuum of nature, the subordination of all living things to biological necessity’ (105). And, ‘My theory of nature follows Sade rather than Rousseau: aggression and violence are primarily not learned but instinctual, nature’s promptings, bursts of primitive energy from the animal realm that man has never left’ (105). She ruminates on why society ‘works’: ‘Despite crime’s omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it’ (107). Contrary to Paglia’s claims, she is about as Freudian as a fried egg. Quite the opposite: she has no deep understanding of those concepts and continuously misrepresents or contradicts her supposedly Freudian understanding of sex. For instance, in her rush to attack anything with a French whiff to it, from Rousseau to Lacan, she gives us an amazingly unreflective potted history: ‘At midlife, I now accept that there are fundamental sex differences based in hormones’ (107). As a ‘fractious adolescent battling the conformist Fifties’ she believed sexual differences were ‘nothing but convention’. However, ‘slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity’ (107). It is her earlier ‘noisy resistance’ which has brought her ‘full circle back to biology. From my militant history comes a conviction of selfknowledge: I can declare that what is female in me comes from nature and not from nurture’ (107). Like the hoary ex-communist of the Cold War, Camille trots out her surface ‘experiences’ to lend credence to her turncoat assertions; there is not a shred of evidence that she has explored the murkier aspects of her psyche. What would a true Freudian analyst make of her? I won’t quote the excessively long paragraphs about ‘woman’s maternal fate’ where I’m afraid that we all (with the exception of one, guess who?) end up in a swamp, engorged, immobilized, gurgling about racial memories while partaking of primal soup. ‘From puberty to menopause, women are hormonally mired in the liquid realm to which this book gives the peculiar name the “chthonian swamp”, my symbol for unregenerate nature’ (109). No such healthy diet for men! Paglia emotes that, ‘Male lust, I have written elsewhere, is the energising factor in culture. Men are the reality principle. They created the world we live in and the luxuries we enjoy. When women cut themselves off from men, they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy’ (24). After this description it is clear that feminists want too much. ‘But feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all”. It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on women. No husband or day-care center can ever adequately substitute for a mother’s attention’ (89).

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Paglia is a woman, but she clearly believes she is not like any other woman. She is more like a man. Except that she is a woman. Poor old Paglia. Now, at the middle point in her rather secluded life she experiences rampaging young men as moving and exciting. Did she ever really know any of the masculine jocks she loves to describe as inhabiting USA college campuses? Pre-feminism, in the same American 1950s and early 1960s she describes, I and my sexy girlfriends did. We avoided them like the plague—brains the size of peas, interests confined to football, and sexual desires about as dark and demonic as fish fingers. What is it in all this which attracts some gay men? Well, perhaps they are simply conservative. However, I also wonder if it is Paglia’s self-proclaimed love of gay men which gives the clue and the libertarian points of her politics. Describing the anti-porn positions of American feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon which Paglia has attacked, Peter Blazey in his Outrage article says: Paglia denounces both as Stalinists of political correctness, ‘fanatics, zealots and fundamentalists of the new feminist religion. Their alliance with the reactionary, anti porn far right is no coincidence.’ This is relevant to Australia, where feminism is becoming reflexively anti male, humorless and sexphobic; it is particularly suspect on the issue of pornography—which ought to alarm every gay male, since nothing decent ever came out of being in bed with Fred Nile.

(Blazey, 1993:44) I quote Blazey at length because he appears to buy into Camille because she loves gay men and makes convenient sweeping nasty statements about women and feminists. The irony of this is that there are large numbers of lesbian feminists in Britain, the United States and Australia who have fought long and hard and often successfully against Dworkinite-style politics. Does Camille’s supposed adoration of homosexuality hold up under scrutiny? What does she really have to say about them? On religion this: When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organised religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place. Hostile intrusions into church services, as undertaken by gay groups in New York and Philadelphia, are infantile, damaging the image of gays and bringing their cause into disrepute. All sacred places, pagan or Christian, should be honored…. Gays must face the fact that, unlike other minority groups, they cannot reproduce themselves. Like artists, their only continuity is through culture, which they have been instrumental in building. Therefore when, by guerrilla tactics, they attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.

(Paglia, 1992:36) How revolutionary. ‘Our problem is not patriarchy but, in the urban industrialized world, collapsing manhood, which male homosexuality properly remedies by its glamourous cult of the masculine’ (36). With a friend like this who needs enemies?

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Paglia refers admiringly to the work of John J. Money, an exponent of the ‘Born That Way’ school of sexual difference, who has been the subject of much detailed criticism. She sets him up in opposition to Foucault, her French bête noir: ‘For thirty years, the sexual territory between biology and psychology has been far more successfully and sensibly explored on American soil, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, by John J.Money’ (180). And later she asserts quite uncritically that The Seventies and Eighties have seen a worldwide resurgence of research into hormones, comparative anatomy, genetics, fetal development, and brain chemistry, and their relation to sex differences and even personality traits’ (185). This is a writer who maintains she is a Freudian. Paglia’s position on AIDS is quite similar to the one she holds on rape. The world is full of continuous and universal truths. Nature, dark and extremely messy, simply is, like it or lump it. Religion, ethical codes, morality, all are imposed by society. If you rebel against rigid or stultifying aspects of society, even if for ‘good’ reasons, well good luck, but don’t come crying and snivelling when you get serious flack, rape, pillage, lynchings, vigilantes—or AIDS—in response. What is society? Society simply is, hey nonny no. We asked why should I obey the law? and why shouldn’t I act on every sexual impulse? The result was a descent into barbarism…. And out of the pagan promiscuity of the Sixties came AIDS. Everyone of my generation who preached free love is responsible for AIDS’ (216). Later when our Pag is lighting into Foucault again she says ‘If what I have reliably heard about his public behaviour after he knew he had AIDS is true, then Foucault would deserve the condemnation of every ethical person’ (230). Paglia has no sense of today’s changing sexual scene except through the worship of Madonna. She claims that ‘Homosexuality, more common as well as more visible, is part of this movement for sexual self-knowledge and self-definition’ (99), in a paragraph which puts the boot into Seventies androgyny. But she has no understanding or knowledge of the new waves of sex and gender politics manifest in the groping but often wild and funny queer politics. Quite hysterically she criticizes the American Absolutely Queer posters of a few years ago. “‘Absolutely Queer.” Absolutely queer? I thought we got rid of absolutes!…Now we’ve got gay people talking about what is absolute? This is fascism! This is fascism!’ (276). She doesn’t seem to have a clue that the juxtaposition of ‘absolute’ and ‘queer’ contains quite wittily a critique of any notion of absoluteness. I cannot bear to go into Camille’s ludicrous ideas about lesbianism which leave dykes sunk ‘backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy’. Lesbian sex is ‘cozy’ and the girls often end up ‘in emotion without sex’. Paglia sometimes claims that she is playing games when she makes remarks like this. But I think it’s another instance of her wilful ignorance. Who on earth does she hang out with—if anyone? She whinges about the impossibility of having hot sex with lesbians. My guess is that Camille is incapable of having hot sex, full stop. Gay men on the other hand are ‘guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom’ (24). This is extremely tired, old stuff; there is nothing new in any of this crap. Paglia is prepared to extrapolate wildly on the nature of human existence, the meaning of sex, the causes of violence and rape, from an eccentric but selective look at art, writing and culture through history. It is the extrapolations which infuriate. The way they are juxtaposed is sometimes startling but there is nothing new in

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the content. And Paglia simply ignores huge chunks of history. She ignores the immensely important movements of women’s liberation and Black liberation in the 1970s. She rarely speaks convincingly or with any passion about race or class except to vilify white, middle-class women (she’s Italian so none of that counts for her), or to throw out condescending compliments to African-Americans and Hispanics (Paglia talking about rape as white middle-class women’s complaint: ‘I don’t notice so many Hispanic women and African-American women going around and carrying on like this’ (268)). They know what real sex is. They don’t complain about date rape. Anorexia doesn’t affect them. They like food. They’ve got such energy. Their music is so great. Surprise, surprise, these are Camille’s attributes too. Camille is loud; therefore she gets on with African-Americans. ‘Now I’m loud. Did you notice? I’m very loud. I’ve had a hell of a time in academe. This is why I usually get along with African-Americans’ (271). Wow—a new approach to race relations. Paglia’s own Pagliamania might be forgiven if she delivered the goods. Even her much touted cheekiness palls after the first chapters, especially as her deep conservatism reveals itself more and more. Surely not all her readers are so ill read and ignorant of history, feminism, politics, and popular culture that they see no flaws, hear no faux pas and smell no bullshit coming off her? Surely not all gay men, or pro pornography, pro abortion, anti-censorship readers will get cozy with Camille simply because she supports these things. In the end I am left with her monumental pretentiousness and bad style sense. Speaking for the nth time about ‘my Sixties’ Camille proclaims: ‘My generation, inspired by the dionysian titanism of rock, attempted something more radical than anything since the French Revolution’ (216). Please.

References BLAZEY, Peter (1993) Outrage Melbourne No. 116 January, 44–7 . PAGLIA, Camille (1990) Sexual Personae—Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Yale University Press. —(1992) Sex, Art, and American Culture London: Viking.

REVIEWS

White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness Ruth Frankenberg Routledge: London, 1993 ISBN 0 415 10511 0 £13.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 10510 2 £40.00 Hbk Whiteness, to a group of us who met briefly in the 1980s to discuss our racial identities, conjured a slightly sinister vision of Home Counties England. If I had read Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness I would have left the meeting fascinated by our revelation of whiteness instead of frustrated with our inability to name racial privilege. For other white feminist women who also failed to name whiteness in the 1980s, this book would have suggested a way beyond guilt over racism, anger over criticism, and, ultimately, withdrawal from anti-racist activism. Ruth Frankenberg argues that both white people and Black people live racially structured lives. Among the effects of race privilege and dominance on white people are their structured

invisibility, the illusion of living nonracial lives. From a location of structural advantage and race privilege, white women tend to see racism as a Black issue and thus anti-racism work as an optional project. They view racism as external to white people rather than as a system that shapes our daily experiences and sense of self. This book suggests (as indeed Black critics have argued) that there is cultural and racial specificity to white people, and that naming whiteness displaces it from its unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance. Through life history interviews with American white women diverse in age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation and political orientation, Ruth Frankenberg explores the interconnexion of material and discursive dimensions of whiteness. This is a feminist project, methodologically committed to transforming accounts of personal experience into political and theorized terrain. She reminds us of Black women’s criticism of the white centredness and false universalizing claims of much of this white feminist tradition. Her own study reminds us in turn of the importance of theory (particularly of race and colonialism) in conceptualizing women’s life experiences as they are mapped on to

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broader social processes. With race privilege a lived but unseen aspect of white experience, Ruth Frankenberg needed to strategically involve herself in the interviewing process, sharing elements of her own life or thinking about racism in discussions where privilege or particular discourses on race constructed silences and taboo. Thus she was able to defamiliarize that which is taken for granted in white experience in order to make visible the racial structuring of white experience. She needed to find other strategies to overcome difficulties in finding interviewees. Her desire to understand more about whiteness was frequently met with hostility, comprehensible only as race discrimination or a white supremacist gesture. Frankenberg’s clarity about the connexions between a discursive landscape and white daily lives is revelatory. She elaborates a universe of discourse present in the narratives of the women interviewed within which race is made meaningful. Essentialist racism— race difference, understood in hierarchical terms of essential, biological inequality—remains for many white people paradigmatic of racism. A second discursive moment she terms colour- and power-evasion has built directly on assimilationist theories to assert that we are all the same under the skin. A third, racecognizant moment, emerged out of the civil rights movements and articulates new characteristics of race difference in the cultural and economic empowerment of Black people. Last, she lists colonial discourses, central to which is the colonized subject as Other from the standpoint of the white self. It is at the intersection of discourse and materiality that the potential for change becomes evident. She explores the terrain of childhood, examining social geography in terms of a range of

relations with Black people as race privilege, social distance, explicitly articulated segregation, and specific forms of quasiintegration. She examines interracial relationships as idea and reality in terms of the discourse against them (she correctly emphasizes that there is no discourse for interracial relationships at present), exploring how gender and sexuality intersect with whiteness. Here I missed an account of Black femininity in her discussion about the social construction of masculinity and femininity along racially differentiated lines. Lastly, she considers constructions of culture and identity within which whiteness is experienced as amorphous and cultureless. She theorizes that whiteness is not so much void as norm; a relational category defined only by reference to those Other named cultures that it has flung out to its periphery. She argues against this dualism in favour of a broader definition of culture as the set of rules and practices by which a group organizes its daily life and worldview. With culture defined as such it would be ridiculous to suggest that anyone has no culture. Thus whiteness is shown to have content in as much as it generates norms, ways of understanding history, ways of thinking about the self and Other, and ways of thinking about culture itself. A great deal of work remains to be done in making visible how race shapes white people’s lives and undermining white culture’s links with domination. Frankenberg’s meticulous analysis of the connexions between white daily lives and the discursive repertoires of race is pioneering in highlighting the processes by which whiteness as a location of privilege and a culturally normative space is secured. To those white people who would call themselves white in a more celebratory fashion she asserts that it is not meaningful to reconceptualize

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whiteness outside of racial domination when in practical terms whiteness still confers race privilege. As an outstanding contribution to the more urgent priority of working for the creation of a different political reality, this book provides a means of engaging in more complex and sophisticated ways with white domination. Kathryn Perry

Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training Caroline O.N.Moser Routledge: London, 1993 ISBN 0 415 ISBN 0 415 05621 7 05621 7 £13.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 05620 9 £40.00 Hbk In this book Caroline Moser draws on her experience of planning—micro and macro—in developing countries, in The Third World’, to use her language, and then delineates a route, namely genderplanning, and offers it as a useful tool towards the purpose of women’s empowerment. Aware of the rich and continuously evolving discourse on the subject of women’s position and advancement in the developing countries, Moser takes considerable pains to address the subtle nuances that permeate the terminology. For example, she clarifies the difference between terms such as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, between ‘woman’ and ‘gender’, between household and family, between strategic and practical needs and between process and technique. This unpacking of terms, and their histories, especially in Section 2, Part II, is one of the most useful elements of this book and fills an important gap in the literature, especially as the subject and

constituency moves from the cognoscente to the development functionary. Moser’s basic proposal is that planning is a technique, an expertise, and that planners need to crossfertilize with those concerned with, and knowledgeable about, women’s emancipation and empowerment. She offers frameworks, case studies and training modules to illustrate how. She argues that, ultimately, planning is politics—both its content and delivery. Politics is pressure and power, and here is where she brings in women’s organizations, and the women’s movements, to provide the political vehicle for ensuring the launching pad for her concept of gender planning. This knitting of the movement into a technical framework fills another conventional gap or chasm—in this kind of technocrafting advice/or literature. However, Moser’s faith in and enthusiasm for gender planning, This book is the voyage of discovery I have made over the past decade, during which time gender planning has dominated my life’ (xi) leads to awkward—if not incorrect—reviews of ‘history’, for example when locating the birth of ‘WID’, which she describes as follows: The term “women in development” was coined in the early 1970s by the Women’s Committee of the Washington, DC, Chapter of the Society for International Development’ (2), or in her description or assumptions about shifts ‘in policy approach’ in the developing countries—‘from “welfare” to “equity” then from “anti-poverty” to “efficiency”, and finally to “empowerment”…moving from modernisation policies of accelerated growth, through basic needs strategies associated with redistribution to the more recent structural adjustment policies’ (55)—and now the Moser formula?

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These notions of time-set, Northern idea (or wisdom) led wagons to peace and justice, is no more feminist currency —North or South. It is embarrassingly like colonial discourse especially staking claim to ideas, locating birth, in specific places and people. Moser’s work is ‘based on the premise that the major issue is one of subordination and inequality, its purpose is that women through empowerment achieve equality and equity with men in society’ (p.4). However, today’s discourse on women and development would move away from making equality with men the goal, even if the route used is women’s empowerment, ‘Emancipation’ and its flip-side, namely the Victim’ connotation, is also out. Chaotic as the alternative to a single ‘mantra’ or schema might be, today’s mood and mode—and wisdom—is to give space to the myriads of energetic, brilliant, self-generated changes that are bursting on to the development landscape. It is to watch and maybe offer wide-spread solidarity to these quests. It is to crack even the subtlest of veiled but hard bureaucracies. It is to place the initiative in civic society. Moser distances herself from feminist research, saying at one point when she describes planning as a technique: ‘feminist academic research…has not been concerned to identify how such complexities might be simplified into methodological tools’ (5). The fact of the matter is that Feminist research challenges the technology of planning, its claim to complexity. Feminist advice emphasizes listening and drawing in, not training and emancipating. Another question: is the issue of emancipation and empowerment of women only a Third World’ issue? This whole notion, which alas pervades most of the centres of development in the North—that ‘development’ (and within

it uncovering the missing veiled woman) is the business exclusively of the South— is puzzling, if not unacceptable. Growth and development—however one wants to distinguish between them—is everybody’s business. Women are missing, uncounted, unheard and sequentially fed (i.e. eating last and least) or not feeding themselves, everywhere. Women of the North (in the USA) are struggling even for the right to abort and in Japan for the pill and IUD —so? Moser does refer to these commonalities, even quotes herself ‘women in the North only too easily think that women in the South have to catch up. Writing in 1989, I provocatively stated, “It may be that women in the UK can learn much from their better organized sisters in the Third World, who long ago learnt the limitations of relying on the State to reduce their dependence on men”’ (210). But these sensibilities are embedded only in the corners of her main programme. The constituency is clearly the Third World’ and its ‘planners’; its project managers (trainers) all needing training for their empowerment. Today’s discourse would talk of making space for women’s leadership. Even though Moser does bring in the distinctions between, and progress from, object to subject and subject to agency, the latest evaluations in understanding, the concept of leadership, learning from the significance of women’s’ lives, is missing from the book. Today, human resource development and training is seen as a panacea for all inadequacies and injustices by the funding and government community, and there is a felt need for manuals and for training modules. But in fact training is seen by the women’s movement as not only inappropriate but an obnoxious intrusion into the personal capabilities of

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women, especially of the poor women of the South, to handle gender relations and the other spheres of life. Today many countries—such as India, the Philippines, Cote d’Ivoire—are engaged in political restructuring, for example strengthening local selfgovernment with ensured participation of women. In India, onethird of the elected posts are reserved for women, ushering in 1 million women in politics by the end of 1994. It would certainly transform if not transcend gender planning of the Moser kind. Moser disapproves of the ‘adding-on’ approach of WID, and proposes ‘building-in’ through her Gender Planning approach. But what feminists in Development are proposing is ‘drivingover’. Driving-over is not the ‘alternative’ approach or ‘Exit’ as Moser calls it. It is driving-over, implying a dismantling, a bringing down of existing systems, while simultaneously overriding it with the groundswell of women’s leadership. The danger is that books such as Moser’s will be useful in supporting this fashion among the funders, for bringing in ‘gender’—and may add one more round of enforced training pressure from above against which the women’s movement is strug gling. Moser’s book, by catering to the one constituency goes contrary to the aspiration of those whom Moser hopes to serve. Devaki Jain

Postmodern Legal Feminism Mary Joe Frug Routledge: New York and London, 1992 ISBN 0 415 90620 2, £12.99 Pbk ISBN 0 415 90619 9, £35.00 Hbk

Each of the words in the title of this book suggests a field of scholarship wide ranging in thought, specialist in nature and sophisticated in detail. This collection of essays, written over a number of years by the late Professor Mary Joe Frug and edited and published posthumously, brings each of these areas of study together, however, in a rigorous and provocative way. Throughout, Frug’s style is wonderful. ‘Style is important in postmodern work’ (126) she reminds minds us, and although she confesses to some ‘performance anxiety’ about engaging with that style, there is no evidence of her lack of fluency with it. Both this style and her ideas are intensely personal and engaging, which ultimately makes this collection an inspiring read. I must admit that I approached this book with both excitement and ambivalence, on the one hand agreeing with Deborah Rhode’s statement The revolution will not be made with slogans from Lyotard’s The Post- modern Condition’ (1990:621), while on the other feeling that a critical analysis of language, discourse and ideas could be invaluable to that same revolution. I hoped that Frug would assist me in resolving some of that ambivalence. Frug seems to be aware of this potential scepticism in her readers and the book begins with her case for bringing together postmodernism and feminism in the study of law. Her postmodern feminist analysis, informed as it is by ‘the particular blend of psychoanalysis, linguistics and philosophy which is concerned with sexual difference’ (114) shows successfully that law is a crucial site for postmodern deconstruction and resistance; that it is ‘useful’ to ‘analyze the gender of legal discourse’ (113). To demonstrate that there is both theoretical and political value in a ‘marriage’

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between feminism and postmodernism, she uses as her first example the restrictive framework of what has become known as the ‘equality/ difference debate’. Specifically, Frug challenges the dualistic nature of the debate which she shows limits much feminist discourse, including analysis of legal decisions and readings of Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice. She offers multiple readings of these texts, and rather than accept essentializing or universal categories of ‘woman’, she states that feminists must ‘deliberately invoke differences among women’ (18). Only then can we ‘free ourselves from the belief that our selves are constructed by our sexual identities’ (107). Frug then is faced with answering claims of political paralysis seen by many commentators as inherent in a postmodern analysis of law. If we deconstruct away the category ‘woman’, the argument goes, we are left with no unifying collectivity from which to argue that gender oppression exists, and therefore the legal arena can be of no assistance in locating or eliminating it. Frug deals with this criticism by suggesting that rather than accepting law’s requirement to create its subjects as abstract, universal claimants who must ‘leave aside much of the multiplicity and complexity of our lives’, a postmodern analysis can be used to demonstrate how legal rules need to expand the ‘narrow and rigid character of the subject position they impose as a condition of admission to the legal arena’ (22). Having made her case first then, for the ‘marrying’ of feminism and postmodernism, she then does the same for law and postmodernism and the remaining essays contain her views of the insights these ‘marriages’ can offer. Frug’s final chapter is the one which, to me, most directly attempts to

demonstrate one of the successes of the marriage by providing for feminists a strategy for political action. By calling this chapter ‘A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto’, although she admits to some worry in doing so (125), Frug gives notice of her intention to connect symbolically Rhode’s ‘slogans’ with her ‘revolution’. One of the most significant differences between feminist theory and postmodern theory is the genesis of each. Feminism is primarily a political engagement with the world, and feminist theories emerged from activist political movements which in turn arose from the lived experiences of women. Postmodern theory began as a movement within the academy which then had to become politicized.1 The relationship has been uneasy, but in this chapter Frug suggests that it might be a fruitful one for subordinated groups to develop. She analyses how legal rules ‘permit and sometimes mandate’ the ‘sexualization’, ‘terrorization’ and ‘maternalization’ of the female body. Her point is to show that law is implicated in the ‘production of apparently intractable sex-related traits’ (128–9). She demonstrates that rather than merely accepting these seemingly natural constraints, there are multiple ways of understanding the meaning of ‘woman’ and the forces that constrain and create us, and I would add, liberate and emancipate us, so that ultimately we can transcend the restricting categories of male and female. Her conclusion is that ‘Only when sex means more than male or female, only when the word ‘woman’ cannot be coherently understood, will oppression by sex be fatally undermined’ (153). Frug’s analysis of law’s treatment of the female body challenges an essentialist view of ‘woman’. She is always sensitive to differences among women of class, ethnicity, sexual

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orientation and ability. In this way, her argument is important in exposing first the falsity and second the danger for women of universalized images. By allowing us to see the localized, transient nature of images of woman, we can find room for disrupting these images and further, can extend these disruptions to legal discourse. Frug takes inspiration for this project from sex-workers who appeal to a ‘fresh image of the female body based on a reorganization of the three images of femininity’ (137). This, to me, implies that that ‘fresh image’ is already within view, although she does not make it clear what it looks like. While Frug may have her own views of the new image, and where it takes us politically, she does not share them with us. Frug states that once the gendered nature of discourse is revealed we will be able to see important sites for new understandings of how language constructs who we are and our relations with one another. I agree with her, but see these understandings only as a crucial first step. While I and other readers may have our own ideas of what the next might be, I would have welcomed some indications of Frug’s. Although one does not have to be a lawyer to understand Frug’s theory or her approach, her discussion re remains primarily with ‘legal’ debates. Further, Frug relies almost exclusively in making her points on understandings of debates within United States feminism and on issues on the current American feminist agenda including African-American feminist debate around rap lyrics, interpretations of constitutional protections to equality and free speech, and the case-method style of legal education. Having said this, however, in the section of the book entitled ‘Rereading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook’, we see Frug’s

meticulous and often inspired exploration of gender-related ideas in contract law, and how they can be used to challenge gender constraints and generate re-readings of other, indeed, potentially all texts. Thus, while Frug brilliantly raises important questions, she does not, nor does she intend to, provide answers, and ultimately my mixed feelings about the political significance of postmodern theory are not fully resolved. One of the comments on the back cover of this book, however, states that after reading it we will never think about the debates over pornography, prostitution, ‘women’s difference’ or deconstruction the same way (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School). I agree. Whether one embraces wholeheartedly a postmodern approach to legal feminism or not, this book surely inspires thought and is an important contribution to legal and feminist scholarship. Alison Diduck

Note 1 See Rhode (1990), where she illuminates this difference between feminist theory and critical legal studies.

Reference RHODE, Deborah (1990) ‘Feminist critical theories’ Stanford Law Review Vol. 42: 617–38.

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Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler and Saskia Wieringa Zed Books in association with INSTRAW: London and New Jersey, 1994 ISBN 1 85649 184 6 £12.95/$19.95 Pbk ISBN 1 85649 183 8 £29.95/$49.95 Hbk

The Power to Change: Women in the Third World Redefine their Environment Edited by the Women’s Service Zed Books: London and New Jersey, 1993 ISBN 1 85649 226 5 £10.95/$17.50 Pbk ISBN 1 85649 225 7 £29.95/$49.95 Hbk Two years after UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) and with growing academic and policy attention on women’s relationships with the environment, these two important books offer timely opportunities for synthesis and reflection. At first sight they are very different. Braidotti et al.’s is by four European feminist academics, strongly intellectual in tone and theoretical in orientation. It aims to provide a state-ofthe-art review of debates on women, the environment and sustainable development, linking theory to

epistemology and policy, and steps towards an alternative framework. By contrast, The Power to Change is by women from the South, and journalistic in focus. Centring on a compilation of fifty recent articles by female journalists in Africa, Asia and Latin America, it describes women and communities engaging in practical environmental struggles. But beneath the differences lie solid areas of common ground. Both books see the subordination of women and of environmental concerns as linked to multiple crises in dominant models of development. In challenging these, the Women’s Feature Service book helps illustrate the kind of political strategy which Braidotti et al. suggest. Braidotti et al.’s book represents a serious, and to date unprecedented, attempt to untangle a complexity of positions and perspectives all too often confused in policy discussions. As such it will be immensely useful to students, researchers and practitioners alike. The book traces the emergence of two sets of responses to perceived connexions between the domination of nature and the subordination of women; ‘Women, Environment and Development’ (WED) strategies in development agencies and the South, and ecofeminism, as elaborated among Northern feminists and academics. Ideas in both contributed to the Women’s Action Agenda 21 at UNCED, which appeared to represent a united global sisterhood emphasizing women’s ‘special’ relationship to nature, giving them a ‘special’ role in solving the planet’s environmental crisis. In rendering explicit theoretical and epistemological questions informing this position, and exploring other fields of feminist, environmentalist and development knowledge which speak to it, the authors reveal it as problematic and contradictory. They challenge dominant development models and the

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science informing them, for example through feminist epistemologies and critiques of science, postcolonial and Black feminist theory, and strands of environmental thinking including deep and social ecology. Equally, they criticize reformist approaches to sustainable development, which paradoxically allocate roles in solving the environmental crisis to the same economic and political structures which produced it. But radical alternatives emphasizing a woman-nature connexion also embody different and conflicting positions. The book explores heated debates within feminism concerning women and nature, essentialism and constructivism. It shows how WED debates have variously depicted women’s environmental relationship as choiceless crisis victim, privileged environmental nurturer, economic manager, or dynamically conditioned by gender relations in resource access and use. Useful discussions of ecofeminism expose the dissolution of early theoretical promise into contradiction, and strongly criticize ‘cultural’ ecofeminism—the strand most influencing WED debates— for ignoring differences among women, as related for example to race and class. Braidotti et al. emphasize the political potential of unitary visions such as at UNCED, but also their dangers; not only of obscuring differences between women, but also of reproducing prevailing structures of omission, objectification and hierarchy: for example in idealizing the ‘poor third world woman’ as the source of alternative development vision. Instead, they draw on the work of Donna Haraway and Black feminist theorists to argue for a post-modern materialist perspective based on people’s critical analysis of their particular positions in wider power structures. This ‘situating of oneself becomes a basis for a political

strategy of temporary and mobile coalitions around specific issues, crosscutting divides of institution, ideology and gender. It is from this perspective that alternative cultural conceptions of progress, locally sustainable lifestyles, participatory democracy and the recovery of dominated people’s subjugated knowledges are seen as essential components of sustainable development in both North and South. These convincing arguments are made more so by the authors’ sympathetic revealing of their personal disciplines, standpoints and politics. This helps compensate for a certain abstraction and dryness in presentation, but more examples would have helped. The separate authorship of different chapters has also led to some repetitiveness and structural incoherence, at times obscuring the clarity of the argument. Abstraction is certainly not a problem in the case-study-focused Women’s Feature Service book. The introduction explains the aims of bringing a gender perspective and Southern groups’ priority issues to environment and development discussions. Evocatively describing crises engendered by international development, it sees emerging from them a climate of struggle and documents women and communities taking control over environmental issues, often challenging the status quo. The set of short features serve to illustrate Braidotti et al.’s coalitions in action. In many, women are acting as a group; whether finding technical solutions to peri-urban deforestation and soil erosion in war-torn Mo-zambique, or agitating against the destruction of traditional salt industries by multinationals in Colombia. But there are also place-based, crossgender coalitions, for example against industrialpollution hazards and large dams in

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India, and crossinstitutional ones, as exemplified in the uniting of a professional lawyer with shifting cultivators to oppose logging practices in the Philippines, or female technology entrepreneurs’ work with the support of sympathetic Non-Governmental Organizations. Engagingly written, the studies cover not only well-documented cases—such as Kenya’s Greenbelt movement—but also some fascinating lesser known ones: the Zambian woman who built an ‘appropriate technology’ incubator from local materials, for example, or the role of insects in local diets and environmental sustainability. While many of these are local struggles, careful attention is given to showing the regional and often global processes engendering them, whether involving militarism, debt or transnational corporations. This illustration of struggle over ecological processes and resources —both at micro and macro levels—is important and useful, showing in action the gendered political economy of environment and development which Braidotti et al.’s book only alludes to. Important, too, is the deconstruction of ‘environment’ into specific, differentially valued and often contested features; a perspective often absent in Braidotti’s book which often speaks uncritically of ‘nature’ and of ‘proenvironmental change’. While there is much diversity here, there are also common themes which regional overviews of Africa, Asia and Latin America attempt to bring together. These are the least satisfying parts of the book, tending to lapse into the kind of generalization about ‘women’ which the cases themselves avoid, and which Braidotti et al., warn against. The book is also unsatisfactory in its treatment of ‘science’. A number of cases focus on women’s struggles for recognition by

technical extension services. But there is very little about indigenous knowledges, concepts and solutions based on them, which research elsewhere now shows to be so significant. The book’s claim to illustrate ‘lived understandings’ of environment and development issues thus begs the question of their basis in anything but Western scientific rationalities. While this may reflect the journalists’ own formally educated, scientifically informed positions Braidotti et al.’s analysis shows the importance of making these explicit, and why a grass-roots focus does not necessarily avoid problems of objectification and power in representing others’ views and voices. Melissa Leach

Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 Emma Donoghue Scarlet Press: London, 1993 ISBN 1 85727 046 0 £12.99 Pbk ISBN 1 85727 051 7 £35.00 Hbk Donoghue’s book is an exhaustive account of relationships between women in early modern Britain. These range from romantic friendships and long-term partnerships, to women who cross-dress in order to gain access to other women. Donoghue has taken as her parameters the 1668 play by Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure, and the 1801 novel by Maria Edgeworth, Belinda. Between these two dates, she focuses on a variety of texts published by known and unknown, male and female writers, and includes newspaper reports, criminal records, diaries, letters, poetry and fiction. This range of sources allows Donoghue to consider the idea of female

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relationships in the widest possible sense, thereby redressing what she considers the damaging effect of narrow readings by other lesbian historians. Yet, the further one goes into the book, the more one becomes aware that here is an author in search of an argument. Inevitably, Donoghue ends up in a trap of her own making, with no place to go except the accumulation of yet more detail. This is accentuated by the fact that the book lacks any sort of conclusion, as if Donoghue herself was unable to analyse what she had unearthed. However, given this, admittedly rather large reservation, the book remains a goldmine of endlessly fascinating and original material. The book is structured around four primary topics which Donoghue sees as central to lesbian culture: gender blurring, friendship, sex and community. The confusions and contradictions which surround the figure of the woman who loved other women is particularly apparent in the chapter on female husbands. Eighteenth-century newspaper reports show that these women were often treated with indulgence, their behaviour being viewed as an eccentricity rather than a crime. Occasionally, clergymen recorded their suspicions that marrying couples were, in fact, both female, but went ahead and married them anyway! In some places cross-dressing was considered necessary, even desirable. Up to one quarter of all plays during this period involved breeches parts, designed to titillate the male audience. There is also ample evidence that women passed as men in the military, and that this involved erotic adventures with other women. Yet, particularly in the fiction of this period, women who displayed such passions are portrayed as ‘mannish’ and ‘unnatural’ characters who prey on vulnerable heroines, as in Samuel

Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Alternatively, they are caricatured as Amazons and Bluestockings, with a particularly good example of the comic lesbian figure appearing in Charlotte Lennox’s novel Euphemia (1790). Again, in Belinda (1801), by Edgeworth, this same figure is viewed as both compellingly attractive and contemptibly unhealthy. In the section on romantic friendship, Donoghue more than makes up for the 1991 (male) editors of the Oxford Book of Friendship, who regretted the lack of examples by female writers. We are, instead, supplied with many accounts of women’s friendships, from the idealized to the erotic. Donoghue also identifies a strand of ‘misogamist’ (marriage-hating) women’s writing throughout this period, which leads her to believe that the concept of spinsterhood was central to lesbian culture. Other historians have concluded that, due to financial constraints, some women were ‘unluckily’ consigned to spinsterhood. Donoghue probes the material further to show that a high rate of unmarried women was not merely an economic or demographic phenomenon, but, instead, ‘an index of women’s choices’. Indeed, many women, including the Bluestocking writers, Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot, deliberately resisted the institution of marriage, since it would mean the end of their female friendships. The book succeeds in its main aim to bring to the general reader a wealth of information about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian culture. This is particularly important for several reasons. By reading her material in such a wide-ranging and flexible way, Donoghue has supplied us with a substantial body of writings on relationships between women. Not only have these women been given the

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opportunity to speak in their own voices, but we discover that, far from the silences which were assumed to surround female same-sex relationships, there was in fact a rich language through which this could be communicated. Again, the book points out the necessity of treating lesbian history as unique, rather than looking for exact equivalents of gay men’s history. Donoghue thus raises timely and thought-provoking questions about how we ‘read’ the type of material handed down to us, and takes a stage further the recovery of ‘a shared history for all women who love women’. Rebecca D’Monté

Gender and Technology in the Making Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod London: Sage, 1993 ISBN 8039 8811 7 £11.95 Pbk Why pick this substantive topic: Gender and Microwave Ovens? Why choose this theoretical apparatus to apply to it: Sociology of Technology? Cockburn and Ormrod answer these questions by placing the political agenda right up front: ‘In so far as [the book] is about one artifact it is about microwave ovens. But one technology would do as well as another…It explores some technological processes in order to learn more about the disadvantage of women’ (2, my emphasis). But politicians must also attend to more than their moral values. They must address their technological apparatus and choose best where and how to use them. ‘Being technologically competent is a badge of masculinity, while the ideal of femininity involves being “hopeless with machines”’ says the cover note to the

book. By saying ‘one technology is as good as another’ and treating one theory as good as another, Cockburn and Ormrod are fulfilling their destiny in much the same way as the women they write about in the book. If you look into the word ‘technical’, you find its root technē from the Greek which denoted ‘skill, art, craft, trade’. A significant strand of Sociology of Technology puts this at the heart of its work to challenge the notion that Technology is something separate from Society. It implies that technologies are integral aspects of ourselves as human subjects as we act and operate in any aspect of our lives. We are brought to life, and bring ourselves to life, through technologies. From this starting point, then, it should come as no surprise to find that technologies in the forms of stereo equipment, cars and microwave ovens are part of the process which produce us as different kinds of beings, the terms woman, man and microwave being three small words available to describe these beings. My argument here is that this should have been the starting point for Cockburn and Ormrod, particularly as they choose to situate themselves in the Sociology of Technology. However, this book demonstrates that they have missed the opportunity, and instead they choose to ‘hang around’, repeating the complaint that it is ‘unfair’ to be constituted as a ‘woman’ in the social structuring of relations which counts for many of our ordinary mundane lives. Sociology of Technology starts from a simple and powerful question: how is it possible to think of technical things as something quite separate and distinct from social things? This direction of inquiry begins to bring to light the myriad social practices and discourses which are constantly in process of

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bringing us to life in various forms and in various relationships. The separation of technology from sociology, for example, is achieved through the discourses and practices of institutional forms which produce us as academics: funding bodies, faculties, departments, syllabi, library categorization schemes, research assessment procedures, etc., etc. These institutional forms, or technologies of knowledge, leave their mark on the substantive areas of study chosen and technologies of investigation (theoretical apparatus) used in these different domains; just as academics are produced in these institutional forms, these technologies, and not just by their ‘upbringing’. Cockburn and Ormrod say of their subjects that they ‘walk into our microwave story already-women and already-men, bringing with them the effects of a lifetime lived in the family, the street, the school, the shopping precinct, the pub’ (6). Whereas this is undoubtedly true, if the question how is not pushed further we could end up assuming that by the time they get to the factory, or the kitchen, the humans are fixed in their identity. All the shaping has been already done. No matter that the authors would want to disagree with this as a description of their stance (‘certain things about gender are constant across cultures, however: we can say, for instance, that it is universally a relation and a process’ (6)); because they have not attended to the theoretical implications of their beliefs and actions, this is the mess they are continually being caught in. It is not possible to have it all, one cannot claim both Harding and Haraway as equally relevant to the study, one must attend to the implications of the theoretical stances, recognize the capacities of the

technologies, if you like, if one wants to be competent and useful in one’s cause. The static theoretic can be seen in the way that the book places its three entities as already given (man, woman, microwave). Rather than asking what produces these three subjects as separate and distinct entities it has assumed that they all already pre-exist the study, and are treated as objects which merely revolve in each others’ orbit. The task of the researcher in this world-view is to track the orbit and record the progress. Not to analyse, explain, or offer a way of understanding. The data is presented as if it speaks for itself. But data doesn’t. At the end of the research period, one of the authors (Cockburn) returned to the site and took photographs. She cannot say why these photographs might be important, (‘No ambitious claims are made for the photographs from a sociological point of view’ (4) but leaves them there for the reader to make sense of. But it still takes the artistry of a skilled reader to make sense from these representations, and it is a competent theoretician who is also able to articulate how they achieve that reading. It is to these skills that we must attend if we are to be anything other than technically incompetent badge-wearing feminists. Janet Rachel

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LETTER

Dear Feminist Review I am writing to express my concern over an article in your recent Special Issue on ‘Sexualities: Challenge and Change’ (FR 46). This issue did not include any editorial introduction, so there is no ‘editorial voice’ to whom I can address my comments apart from the FR Collective as a whole. I imagine that only some of you will have been responsible for that particular Special Issue. The article which most concerns me is Amalia Ziv’s piece The pervert’s progress: an analysis of Story of O and the Beauty trilogy’. I have no objection to Amalia Ziv’s arguments about different ways of understanding female masochism, and the importance of locating these texts in historical and political context. What concerns me is that Ziv’s analysis is so non-racialized, especially since these texts deal with SM and forms of (sexual) slavery. The Beauty trilogy was produced in the USA during the 1980s, a country in which slavery (sexual and otherwise) has left a vivid and continuing legacy. Some white feminists make an erroneous distinction between ‘sexual slavery’ and slavery based around ‘race’, but in practice ‘race’, sexuality, gender, class, age and disability are all implicated in slavery systems of whatever kind, albeit in very different ways. There is one part of Ziv’s article where the silence over ‘race’ is particularly obvious, on page 70 (see also note 8 on page 75). Here she refers to a section of the text where ‘Beauty and five other slaves are kidnapped and brought to an Arab sultanate where the institution of sexual slavery is practised on an even larger scale’ (75). Ziv discusses Beauty’s relationship with Inana, the Sultan’s wife, in which ‘Beauty first encounters and is horrified by the fact of [Inana’s] clitoridectomy’ (70). Ziv identifies this point in the text as the only one where ‘any one at all experiences a political reaction to socio-sexual arrangements’ (70). This is then seen by Ziv to ‘open up a new dimension in the text by situating Beauty in a conflict between her sexuality as it has been constructed,

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founded on total unquestioning obedience and love for the master qua master, and her nascent political awareness which takes the form of hatred for the Sultan as the embodiment of the patriarchy, and of a singular outburst of generalized hatred for men: “nothing left but the portal that the man might enjoy. The filthy, selfish beast, the animal” (Roquelaure, 1985:99)’ (Ziv: 70). The last quote by Roquelaure is from the Beauty trilogy itself, and Ziv does not make it clear whether all men are referred to as ‘animals’ here, or only the Sultan. My concern is that there is no mention of the racialized dimensions of this portion of the text. It is surely no coincidence that a non-Western ‘Arab’ society is taken by Beauty to exemplify the horrors of patriarchal power, drawing on a powerful discourse of sexual slavery which constructs the East as the exotic but uncivilized Other. If the reference to the ‘animal’ in the text does refer to the Sultan, then remaining silent about the racialized—and racist—connotations of this association is inexcusable. I am not writing to Amalia Ziv in the first instance, because my concern is over the editorial practices of FR. To operate an editorial procedure which allows authors to remain so totally silent over ‘race’ and racism when discussing SM (as both Ziv and Lewis do in this issue) sits very uneasily alongside recent FR issues on ‘Thinking through Ethnicities’ and ‘Nationalities and National Identities’. Understanding the operation of power relations around ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, class and age means that we must notice where and how those relations of domination and subordination occur. Remaining silent lets them past us to continue their work. Feminism is about breaking these many silences, turning a spotlight on to oppressive discourses, practices and ideologies. I would hope that FR can develop an editorial policy which aims not to tell contributors what to write, but to encourage them (us) to address such questions of power where they are relevant in all issues of the journal. Christine Griffin University of Birmingham

NOTICEBOARD

Conferences Women/Time/Space Interdisciplinary Conference at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University, on ‘Women/Time/Space’, on Saturday 25 March 1995. Topics: Memory; Nostalgia; ‘Raced’ and sexualized space/time; Periodization; Tradition; Custom; Life Cycles; Generations; Inheritance; Routines; Work time/space; Housing; Turning points; Agoraphobia/claustrophobia; Architecture; Public space; Domestic space/ time; Cities; Landscape; Leisure; Institutional space/time; Transport; Tourism; Outer space/inner space; Utopias; Fantastic time/space; Nationalism; Regionalism; Globalization; Staging; Chronotopes; Visual space; Technology; Cyberspace; Sacred time/space; Virtual reality. Further details from: Conference Organizers, Women/ Time/Space, Centre for Women’s Studies, Cartmel College, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UK.

Women’s Rights are Human Rights: Focus on Youth The Centre for Feminist Research and the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University will be hosting an international workshop 6–8 March 1995 entitled ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights: Focus on Youth’. The rights of girl children and adolescents are an integral part of women’s rights globally. A principal purpose of the workshop is to establish a deeper understanding of issues concerning young women. Paper presentations and panel discussions, in English or in French, will address issues of a timely nature, and will stimulate broader cross-cultural analysis in this area. Subject areas may include: feminist inquiry into the rights of young women; young women as immigrants, migrants and refugees; family; health; sexuality; violence; race, class, ethnicity and religion; family law; the state; the politics of activism; the risk of being conceived female; the silencing of the girl child.

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Some travel funds will be available for presenters from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. Farhana Mather, Workshop Coordinator, Centre for Feminist Research, York University, York Lanes, 4600 Keele St, North York, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3. Tel: (416) 736 2100 ext. 20560; Fax: (416) 736 5837; e-mail: [email protected].

Memory and the Second World War in International Comparative Perspective The year 1995 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The occasion will be celebrated by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam with a three-day conference on ‘Memory and the Second World War in International Comparative Perspective,’ 26–28 April 1995. The conference is organized in collaboration with the Institute for the History of European Expansion (Leyden University), Women’s Studies (Utrecht University), and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (New Jersey, USA). Further information: Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation, Dr M.de Keizer, Herengracht 474, 1017 CA Amsterdam, Tel: 31 20 5233800; Fax: 31 20 6278208.

Call for Papers 1996 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women The 10th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, ‘Complicating Categories: Women, Gender, and Difference’, will be held on 7–9 June at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. The Program Committee welcomes proposals that address questions of identity and representation, regional and international perspectives on social difference and power, historical and historiographical authority, and changing disciplinary trends. The Conference encourages international participation. We prefer submissions of proposals for complete panels or roundtables. Individual papers will also be considered. Please submit proposals in triplicate, postmarked by 1 February 1995. Send proposals on U.S. and Canadian topics to: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University, 1430 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; on other than North American topics to: Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Center for Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201; comparative U.S./non-U.S. topics may be sent to either Program Committee Co-Chair. Please direct all correspondence to ‘ATTN: Berkshire Conference’.

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Announcements Tibet Support Group The Tibet Support Group was set up in 1988, as a membership organization campaigning for the right of the Tibetans to choose their own future; an end to the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the violation of fundamental rights. The year 1994 was designated the International Year of Tibetan Women by the Tibetan Government in Exile as a celebration of the role of Tibetan women in the non-violent protest movement and to provide a campaigning focus on the human rights violations suffered by Tibetan women. In Beijing in September 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women will raise many issues for Tibetan women. The Tibet Support Group is aiming to increase the profile of Tibetan women for the agenda of the conference. Louisa Waugh is currently co-ordinating a campaign on the issues affecting Tibetan women in Tibet. The issue of Tibetan women and reproductive rights has been very controversial; in order to qualify its position, the Tibet Support Group has recently produced a fact sheet, The quality baby: birth control policy in Tibet’. The Tibet Support Group is independent of all governments and is funded solely by its members and supporters. For further information contact Louisa Waugh on 071 359 7573 or write to 9 Islington Green, London N1 2XH.

New Edition of Encyclopedia of Homosexuality Garland Publishing of New York announces the beginning of work on a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990), the first book of its kind ever to have been produced. In addition to addressing ongoing developments in research, theory and politics, the new edition will offer greatly expanded coverage of women’s issues and of contemporary themes and figures. Scheduled to begin appearing in 1998, the work will be directed toward both the lay public desiring an overview of the subject matter, and scholars interested in expanding their knowledge of this complex field. The new work will appear in two volumes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality: Male Homosexuality, edited by Professor Wayne R. Dynes, and Encyclopedia of Homosexuality: Lesbianism, edited by Professor Bonnie Zimmerman. Inquiries should be addressed to: Professor Bonnie Zimmerman, Department of Women’s Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA and Professor Wayne R.Dynes, Department of Art, Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021, USA.

IQ The National Council for Research on Women announces the launch of a new popular-format quarterly, IQ, an innovative resource for information affecting the lives of women and girls. Aimed at a wide readership, IQ will serve as a forum in print for linking research, policy and practice, with the goal of expanding crosssector networks and encouraging cross-sector dialogue and exchange. Audiences

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include educators, funders, researchers, media, policy experts, activists-anyone who understands the importance of readable, quick access to cutting-edge scholarship, policy analysis, and effective practice. Each issue will have a core theme; the first focuses on the upsurge in sexual harassment among children and teenagers. For more information, call (212) 274–0730, fax to (212) 274–0821, or write to 530 Broadway, 10th floor, New York, NY 10012.

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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, Woodcraft. 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 Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. 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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim & Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939): The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. 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. 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. The Trouble Is It’s Ahistorical’: The Problem of the Unconscious in Modern Feminist Theory, Minsky. Feminism and Pornography, Ellis, O’Dair & Tallmer. Who Watches the Watchwomen? Feminists Against Censorship, Rodgerson & Semple. Pornography and Violence: What the ‘Experts’ Really Say, Segal. The

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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, Tóth, 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. 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, on Women Living Under Muslim Laws Dossiers 1–6, Poem, Kay. More Cagney and Lacey, Gamman.. 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. Hendessi on Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Iran, Kaveney on Mercy. SHIFTING TERRITORIES: FEMINISM AND 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 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. 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. 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,

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Smart. The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, Bruegel. Review Essay, Gamman. 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. 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. 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. THINKING THROUGH ETHNICITIES Audre Lorde: Reflections. Re-framing Europe: Engendered Racisms, Ethnicities and Nationalisms in Contemporary 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, Mladje novic & Litricin, translated by Renne. Report on a Council of Europe Minority Youth Committee Seminar on Sexism and Racism in Western Europe, Walker. Reviews. SEXUALITIES: CHALLENGE AND CHANGE Chips, Coke and Rock-’nRoll: 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. 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, Cladestine Organizations in the US, Zwerman. Treading the Traces of Discarded History: Photo-Essay, Marchant. The Feminist

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Production of Knowledge: Is Deconstruction a Practice for Women?, Nash. ‘Divided We Stand’: Sex, Gender and Sexual Difference, Moore. 48 SEX AND THE STATE Editorial. Legislating Sexuality in the Postcolonial State, 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.