Editorial: African women's struggles in a gender perspective

International audienc

Gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances

Close encounters: researching intimate lives in Europe

This research note aims to extend the discussion on the methodological implications of doing research on intimacy and personal life. Drawing on a comparative study concerned with the intimate lives of those who live outside the conventional, modern western nuclear family, it reflects on the processes of gaining access to often hard-to-reach populations which informed and influenced the empirical work that we carried out in four European countries

Pulling together in a crisis? Anarchism,feminism and the limits of left-wing convergence in austerity Britain

In this article, we examine three key, recently emergent sites of anti-austerity activism in Britain – Left Unity, the People’s Assembly and Occupy – in order to explore to what extent and in which ways the traditional British left is in the process of reconfiguring itself. More specifically, we explore the ‘points of contact’ being developed, or not, amongst feminist, anarchist and Marxist/socialist activists. We argue that if we are seeing a mutation of the left at present, it concerns a noticeable (if partial and contested) ‘feminist turn’ in terms of the composition, ideas and practices of these sites

‘The Muslim woman activist’: solidarity across difference in the movement against the ‘War on Terror’

Feminist scholars have widely noted the centrality of gendered discourses to the ‘War on Terror’. This article shows how gendered narratives also shaped the collective identities of those opposing the ‘War on Terror’. Using interview data and analysis of newspaper editorials from movement leaders alongside focus groups with grassroots Muslim women activists, this article demonstrates how, in responding to the cynical use of women’s rights to justify war, participants in the anti-‘War on Terror’ movement offered an alternative story. Movement activists deployed representations of Muslim women’s agency to challenge the trope of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’. I argue that these representations went beyond strategic counternarratives and offered an emotional basis for solidarity. Yet, respondents in the focus groups illustrated the challenges of seeking agency through an ascribed identity; in that they simultaneously refused and relied upon dominant terms of the debate about Muslim women