Not Making A Virtue Of A Necessity: Nancy Fraser On 'PostSocialist' Politics

A new politics is growing in influence and power across the industrialised world. Active but decentred, rebellious but non-programmatic, influential but not state-centred, this new politics is redefining radicalism. Raising issues around sexuality, gender, drugs, transport, the environment, ethnicity, computers and communication, democracy, music and the future of socialism, the new politics ventures into areas the timid political establishment does its best to avoid. Activists are beginning to reflect on their struggles, as journalists and intellectuals are recognising the importance of new politics. Storming the Millennium is the first book to bring a range of activists and intellectuals together in one volume. It provides first histories of new movements that are at the core of new politics and grapples with the important political and theoretical issues raised by new politics through interviews and analyses. Bringing together new and established writers, it discusses crime and justice, disabilities, bisexual, gay, lesbian and transgender politics, race issues in 1990s Britain, activism on the Internet, gender politics and the relationship between new politics, the New Left and socialism. Nancy Fraser, one of the most influential voices of contemporary Anglo-American feminist theory, has worked in the encounters between socialism and postmodernism and between feminism and postmodernism. Her work has been key in the development of feminist theoretical perspectives that are not immobilized by critiques of 'big sister' feminism or 'big brother' socialism. Rather, she has articulated a feminist position that remains productive for political critique, retains some kind of feminist or critical project and finds a way beyond the impasse. Here she is interviewed about her critique of old-style socialist politics for their lack of feminist and ecological analyses, and on her views of new forms of activism

“How come I fell pregnant?”: Young mothers' narratives of conception

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 A B Academic Publishers.The spontaneous narratives that a small group of English young mothers gave of their unintended conceptions are my focus here. Young mothers' accounts were gathered for research on sex and relationship education (Alldred and David 2007). They had been asked their views on school sex education, on early childbearing and about the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, an outgoing and much criticised UK policy for “social inclusion” (see Kidger 2004, Harris 2005; Alldred and David 2007; Duncan et ah, 2010). For this analysis, however, the interview transcripts have been revisited to explore narratives that were not invited. The fact that nine of the ten young mothers gave accounts of how they came to be pregnant is interpreted as indicating their desire to explain themselves or their perception that they were expected to account for their situation. The dominant cultural narratives and stereotypes that their accounts seek to counter are identified. It is argued that this perceived need to account for their pregnancy offers an insight into the UK's harsh cultural politics, but also highlights ethical issues for research with teenage mothers internationally as well as in the UK context

Alldred, P. (2003) Globalno razmisljanje, lokalno delovanje: price aktivistkinja, TEMIDA, 4 (6) p23-31

Anti-globalisation activists have been thoroughly demonised in the UK national media in the past year, receiving the kind of coverage usually reserved for ‘anarchists’ in the tabloid press. That is, the ‘mindless thugs’ caricature of young white men in black ‘hoodies’ intent on violence. Needless to say, this type of coverage isn’t often accompanied by any representation of protestors’ own views. In fact, when reports of protest can focus on ‘violence’, actual political grievances – the issues and the need for direct action responses to them - are ignored. Even more rare is the chance to hear women’s anger at the injustice of global capitalism and frustration at the broken promises of democracy. This piece presents the accounts of UK-based women activists against global and globalising capitalism. Contested though they are within ‘the movement’, at least the terms ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-capitalism’ say something about what is protested against, and understood together best represent the perspectives of women such as these

Making a Mockery of Family Life? Lesbian Mothers in the British Media

In Britain, the legal treatment of lesbian mothers and co-parents has improved considerably over the past 15 years (Harne et al, 1997). Despite this, they are still vilified in occasional outbursts in the popular press. This article identifies arguments against lesbian parenting employed in a recent front-page ‘fury’ article in a British daily tabloid newspaper, The Sun. Encouragingly, of the five arguments about the ‘dangers’ of lesbian parenting that can be identified in earlier legal battles (such as the ‘risk’ that children grow up gay, or become ‘gender confused’), the only one which this article manages to present very convincingly is that of social stigma. Concern that the children of lesbians may experience name-calling or exclusion is, of course, a problem of discrimination and not a problem that is intrinsic to lesbian parenting (in contrast, say, to an argument about ‘the psychology of lesbianism’). The rhetorical force of the piece comes from easily deconstructed journalistic techniques rather than coherent arguments. The sharpest condemnation of these women is actually for having a child whilst on welfare benefits. It is, therefore, economic concerns about ‘state dependency’, rather than sexuality per se, which fuel the attack. The imagined financial self-sufficiency of heterosexual families which underpins this argument is outdated in its presumption of a bread-winning, male head of household. The fact that two days before the UK’s 1997 General Election, the birth of a baby to a lesbian couple was granted front-page coverage is a sobering reminder of the hostility that lesbians still face through the scrutiny of their ‘fitness to parent’ and the intrusive condemnation of non heterosexual domestic arrangements and relationships

Ethnography And Discourse Analysis: Dilemmas In Representing The Voices Of Children

How can researchers produce work with relevance to theoretical and formal traditions and requirements of public academic knowledge while still remaining faithful to the experiences and accounts of research participants based in private settings? Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research explores this key dilemma and examines the interplay between theory, epistemology and the detailed practice of research. It does this across the whole research process: access, data collection and analysis and writing up research. It goes on to consider ways of achieving high standards of reflexivity and openness in the strategic choices made during research, examining these issues for specific projects in an open and accessible style. Particular themes examined are: the research dilemmas that occur from feminist perspectives in relation to researching private and personal social worlds; the position of the researcher as situated between public knowledge and private experience; and the dilemmas raised for researchers seeking to contribute to academic discourse while remaing close to their knowledge forms. This chapter examines these themes in particular relation to representing children's accounts in the public sphere

The sexuality assemblage: Desire, affect, anti-humanism

Two theoretical moves are required to resist the ‘humanist enticements’ associated with sexuality. Post-structuralism supplies the first, showing how the social produces culturally-specific sexual knowledgeabilities. A second anti-humanist move is then needed to overturn anthropocentric privileging of the human body and subject as the locus of sexuality. In this paper we establish a language and landscape for a Deleuze inspired anti-humanist sociology of sexuality that shifts the location of sexuality away from bodies and individuals. Sexuality in this view is an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Assemblages territorialise bodies’ desire, setting limits on what it can do: this process determines the shape of sexuality, which is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We illustrate how this anti-humanist ontology may be applied to empirical data to explore sexualityassemblages, and conclude by exploring the theoretical and methodological advantages and disadvantages of an anti-humanist assemblage approach to sexuality

Conclusions: Getting real about sex - embedding an embodied sex education in schools

GET REAL ABOUT SEX: The Politics and Practice of Sex Education explores how cultural ideas about gender, sexuality and parenthood play out in the sex and relationship education classroom. It presents new material from a detailed study and analyses the struggle to raise the status of sex and relationship education against academic and market-driven priorities. It locates the dynamics of the classroom within those of the school and asks: What do the different parties in teaching and learning - both staff and pupils - say about how sex education is and should be taught in the classroom? How do ideas about masculinity, femininity and parenthood operate in the classroom and in policy? What different agendas and professional perspectives are revealed in the views of teachers, PSHE coordinators, school nurses and head-teachers? The complex picture that emerges of forces at work within a single school is, in turn, situated within an analysis of the broader cultural forces at work in contemporary Britain. It considers how young people negotiate intensified pressure on them regarding academic attainment in an increasingly sexualised culture, and it develops a critique of the Achievement Agenda in education policy, contributing another arm to the critique of market rationalities in education. This book analyses the challenges facing the provision of quality sex and relationship education at the classroom level and at the political level, and makes sometimes provocative suggestions for changes at both these levels

Analysing children's accounts using discourse analysis

Discourse analytic approaches to research depart from understandings of the individual and of the relation between language and knowledge provided by positivist and post-positivist approaches. This chapter sets out to show what this might mean for studying children’s experiences through, for example, interview-based research, and how a discourse analytic approach may bring into play conceptual resources that are particularly valuable for research with children. First and foremost, discursive approaches highlight the interpretive nature of any research, not only that with children. As a consequence, they challenge the conventional distinction between data collection and analysis, question the status of research accounts and encourage us to question taken-for-granted assumptions about distinctions between adults and children. Hence our emphasis in this chapter is on the active and subjective involvement of researchers in hearing, interpreting and representing children’s ‘voices’

Measuring What’s Valued Or Valuing What’s Measured? Knowledge Production and the Research Assessment Exercise

Power is everywhere. But what is it and how does it infuse personal and institutional relationships in higher education? Power, Knowledge and the Academy: The Institutional is Political takes a close-up and critical look at both the elusive and blatant workings and consequences of power in a range of everyday sites in universities. Authors work with multi-layered conceptions of power to disturb the idea of the academy as a haven of detached reason and instead reveal the ways in which power shapes personal and institutional relationships, the production of knowledge and the construction of academic careers. Chapters focus on, among other areas, student-supervisor relationships, personal PhD journeys, power in research teams, networking, the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, and the power to construct knowledge in literature reviews. This chapter does not address which mechanism of research assessment provides a more truthful account of the value of a set of ‘research outputs’. Instead, it focuses on the power of any such mechanism to reinforce particular values and to inscribe hierarchies regarding knowledge. Regardless of what replaces it, the UK's RAE will have been productive, not just reflective of academic values. Some of the negative consequences of the RAE for UK academic life are considered, focusing on the operation of power through processes of knowledge production

'Sexuality in Europe: A twentieth-century history' by Dagmar Herzog (book review)

Copyright @ 2014 The Authors