Real or imagined women? Staff representations of international women postgraduate students

In Australia\u27s globalising universities many support staff and teaching staff now work with international women postgraduate students. But are they aware of the issues facing these women, and is their understanding of them adequate? Indeed, how do they represent them? In this paper we draw on a small-scale pilot study involving key university personnel. We argue that the ways in which such staff represent this group of students is problematic. Focusing primarily on academic issues and on the literature on learning styles, we analyse these staff members\u27 representations of international women postgraduate students from a postcolonial perspective. We explore the extent to which such representations, and the learning styles literature that reflects and informs them, are what Edward Said calls \u27Orientalist\u27. In so doing, we point to both the constitution of the international woman student as postcolonial female subject and show how this situates her in relation to the prevalent learning styles discourse. Further we argue that such representations of the students differ in crucial ways from the students\u27 self-representations, suggesting that in certain subtle ways such staff members are engaging with \u27imagined\u27 rather than \u27real\u27 women. <br /

Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War.

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded

'It's not about race. It’s about the community': New Labour and 'community cohesion'

‘Community cohesion’ is widely regarded as the ‘new’ framework governing race relations policy in the UK. It emerged in government discourse following the civil disturbances that occurred in several northern UK towns in 2001, and has rapidly become absorbed within local government and related organizations to replace previous attempts of multiculturalism. This paper examines several key characteristics of this agenda. In particular, I explore ‘slippages’ in language within and around discourses of ‘community cohesion’. I demonstrate how ‘community’ is central to the community cohesion agenda, and suggest that whilst the concept of ‘community’ is highly ambiguous, it has continuing resonance in New Labour policymaking. The concept of ‘community’ has particular implications for processes of race and gender. Talking about ‘communities’ enables for language to become deracialized, whilst at the same time the language of community cohesion draws upon earlier discourses of assimilation through notions of ‘integration’. The community cohesion agenda is also gendered, and as suggested in this paper, has specific implications for women and the construction of ‘cultures’