Feminist political economies of care: Young people, masculinities and de-industrialisation in a former shipbuilding community

\ua9 The Author(s) 2024. The paper explores how ideas of masculinity are currently configured in a former shipbuilding community. Derived from ethnographic research with 120 young people from three schools, the study makes a critical intervention into gender and work through a focus on masculinities and economies of caregiving. The paper contributes to emerging work on gender, work and care in four ways. First, highlighting a contingent relationship between local political economy, place and the production of masculinities. Second, demonstrating how the inclusion of young people’s perspectives and experiences of male caregiving extends existing feminist care geographies. Third, by exploring how care is gendered, ‘regendered’ and ‘degendered’ in young people’s accounts, prising open possibilities for ‘undoing’ patriarchal masculinities and reworking the gender order. Finally, it is argued that such practices may inspire new economic ontologies of care, pluralise masculinity and enhance the transformation of gender relations at local and global scales

Killing the angel, in the mind, body and home

There is something reassuring about belonging to a space. In patriarchal societies, there is a perceptible manifestation of gender that is constructed into spaces. The street and a public life contain within it the notions of movement that is unrestrained and free. These are attributes of a space that men identify with and an unintended consequence has resulted in public spaces being demarcated as male domains. This notion is embedded in how women experience life everyday, as they are accustomed to the idea that public spaces and streets are only spaces they pass through to reach destinations and not enjoy as a flâneuse . To me, a site must establish human relationships and human contact. Without it, it is meaningless. The site is a condition that exists both in the conscious and in the unconscious. The program addresses the relationship between the genders and attempts to dismantle the biases. It challenges the construction of gender in 3 scales BODY HOME STREET How can boundaries of social construct be pushed to liberate women through their bodies, their homes and their streets? How can women claim spaces and legitimate their right to belong in society as equals? How can space be reconstructed to allow for changed perceptions to take over

Competitive Mothers: An Experimental Study of Female Competitiveness and Polygamy in Togo (West Africa)

Are women in a patriarchal society like Togo as competitive as men? How does being a parent, in a polygamous vs. monogamous marriage and having high income affect one’s willingness to compete? With an incentivized experiment, we explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments, especially when the incentives switch from cash to voucher. This experiment is conducted in Togo, West Africa, with 428 subjects including females-males, parent-non parent. Overall, the findings reveal no significant differences between the females and males’ willingness to compete. Female parents are more competitive than male parents regardless of the incentive. Subjects in polygamous marriages are competitive relative to subjects in monogamous marriages. Finally, we found no evidence of a differential effects of income on the willingness to compete of subjects

Abolishing gender registration: A feminist defence

This article argues in favour of the abolition of gender markers on identity documents. Its main goal is to assess the emancipatory dimension of such a proposition not only for gender minorities but also for individuals who recognise themselves within traditional gender identities. I first discuss the discriminations resulting from the practices of binary gender registration for intersex children, trans persons, and non-conforming individuals. Then, I look at the different deadlocks ensuing from the most popular remedy to those discriminations that loosen gender binary by adding one or more registration options. I go on to argue that those should lead us to advocate for the abolition of gender registration as a “transformative remedy” (Fraser, 1995) for the harmful consequences of normative gender regulations and as a way to integrate the queer conception of identity within a debate about institutional change and public policy. Such a proposition however raises question for feminist politics, since identity categories are also tools to achieve rights, equality and reparation on the basis of group oppression and specific shared situations. Yet, degendering civil registration could be part of a broader claim to a renewed conception of neutrality, not the liberal gender blindness, famously criticised by feminists but a neutrality critically reconstructed as non-assignation. This alternative neutrality would ask the collective not to assign its members to predetermined identities, to try and suspend the will to institutionally identify individuals according to collective categories and to construct distinctive groups

Rehabilitation II

This text discusses rehabilitation in relation to prosthetics by focusing on the artist Lorenza Böttner. Lorenza’s refusal to use prosthetics provides an example for the argument concerning the manner in which rehabilitation operates within a context of gender and sexual conformity

Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Biologies: Gender and the Promises of Biotechnology

Three decades of work in the feminist studies of science and technology have shaped our evolving understandings of the relationships between sex, gender, and biotechnology. Sex, and gender are most often reduced to binary categories, severely limiting our conceptions not only of human diversity, but those of science and technology. Using two case study set in India, transnational surrogacy and the Indian Genome Variation Project, this paper explores how popular positions around biotechnology are reduced to binary positions promoting and opposing biotechnology as the solution for the economic and social development of India. By locating surrogacy and genomics within the larger geopolitical, historical, economic and cultural transformations of postcolonial India, the paper argues that both technologies are far more complex in their impact on women and gender. Why does technology become the major site of hope for the future? Why does genomics become the site for the promises of good health? Why has India become a site for reproductive tourism, and transnational surrogacy in particular? Drawing on the social studies of science, the paper argues that technology and human bodies are never neutral but always prefigured with a gender, race, caste and sexuality. Surrogacy and genomics should be understood within these colonial and postcolonial histories of science and technology