bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Suite justice or sweet charity?
Authors: Levi Michael
Published: July 2003

This article examines the use of shaming and stigma against financial criminals and evidence for and against their impact. It first reviews the extent to which fraudulent behaviour attracts shaming responses - which depends partly on the nature of the frauds committed - and then the extent to which fraudsters are likely to care about the shame that is sought to be imposed upon them. It suggests that potential damage to business prospects is probably more salient than shame per se to impact of informal sanctions, but that culture is an important component of the process of shaming, and that further research is needed before we can be confident about the effectiveness of shame in this area, quite apart from the difficulties of applying it in practice.
Atlantic crossings
Authors: Newburn Tim
Published: July 2003

It is increasingly recognized that factors beyond the nation state are influencing and shaping domestic crime control policies. Much discussion takes place under the general rubric of ‘globalization’. This article looks at the more specific issue of ‘policy transfer’: the way in which ideas, ideologies, practices and policies are transported from one jurisdiction to another. More particularly, the focus here is upon the recent influence of the United States on areas of crime control policy and rhetoric in the United Kingdom. The article explores some of the apparent areas of influence and outlines a framework within which a substantive account of policy transfer in the crime control arena might be developed.
The punitive consequences of consumer culture
Authors: Vaughan Barry
Published: July 2003

This article takes as its starting point a public punitiveness that is novel in its lack of sympathy for and stridency against offenders. It is suggested that this punitiveness can be partly explained by the ascent of consumerism as an axial principle of life today. The ideas of René Girard are used to elaborate upon this suggestion. Girard argues that disputes emerge within cultures when there are no public prohibitions on consumption. Desires converge on the same objects, producing conflicts that can only be resolved by a scapegoating mechanism. Although markets have always threatened to deregulate desires, there have usually been countervailing movements. The novelty of the consumer society is that while few goods are prescribed by custom, they no longer possess stable values. This exacerbates the anxiety predicted by Girard and scapegoating becomes more intensive in an effort to ground the value of objects of desire.
Capital punishment as moral imperative
Authors: Lynch Mona
Published: July 2003

Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I examine these messages in part because they seem to reveal, rather explicitly, the affective, symbolic nature of popular support for capital punishment in the USA. I suggest that the death penalty becomes an unproblematic, indeed, preferred method and symbol of justice in this venue through a discursive process which reduces the underlying social issues to a battle between good (i.e. the innocent victims) and evil (i.e. capital murderers). Once so reduced, no costs of capital punishment can outweigh the justice achieved by state executions in the rhetoric of pro-death activists and pundits. Ultimately these communications reveal a set of sensibilities about crime and punishment which seem to long for a detour from the civilizing path, in that the communicators seek to deny any interdependencies or empathies with those who commit violent crime, while working to unleash punishment from its institutional restraints.
Legitimacy, accountability and private prisons
Authors: Genders Elaine
Published: July 2003

HMP Dovegate, which opened in 2001, is one of the latest in what is fast becoming a long line of privately managed prisons. But Dovegate is no ordinary prison: within its walls it accommodates a therapeutic community for 200 prisoners. This development calls for a critical appraisal of the predominant view that privatization seals the demise of the rehabilitative ideal (Beyens and Snacken, 1994), and a re-examination of the argument that it constitutes a means of breathing life back into the doctrine (Taylor and Pease, 1989). In a liberal democracy, the potential for the private sector to deliver rehabilitative regimes depends on its ability to demonstrate that it can do so effectively and efficiently while meeting the requirements of openness, accountability and legitimacy. Although much headway has been made in assuaging concerns about issues relating to accountability and legitimacy in the context of the private management of prisons generally (see Institute for Public Policy Research, 2001) these matters take on a special significance in the specific context of the private administration of a therapeutic community prison. Some of the problems raised in this article exist only because of certain idiosyncratic features of the organization and operation of the therapeutic community model of treatment. However, other difficulties are more generally applicable and need to be addressed in relation to any privately managed prison that has the declared aim of rehabilitation. The article begins with a brief description of the growth of prison privatization and of how it has flourished in the wake of a return to a ‘just deserts’ philosophy and an expansionist penal policy. This is followed by a discussion of the ideological objections concerning the legitimacy and accountability of prison privatization; how these matters have been addressed, in practice, by the state; and what residual problems remain for the private contracting of a therapeutic community prison like Dovegate in particular, and for the private management of a rehabilitative system more generally.
Selling ‘securityware’
Authors: Lynch Mona
Published: July 2003

In this article, I examine how the marketing of penal commodities and the use of ‘security’ as a selling point has developed and proliferated over the past 50 years in the US corrections market. Using data obtained from a contextual analysis of display advertisements from the correctional trade periodical, Corrections Today and its predecessors, I trace the transformation of the major message modes of the sales pitches, from how the promoted products and/or services can benefit inmate moral and rehabilitative efforts to how they can enhance institutional security. I conclude by discussing the current state of marketing security in the penal realm, and how it appears to shape the nature and quality of institutional life, as well as its theoretical implications in terms of what this aspect of the penal enterprise might tell us about of the state of contemporary punishment.
Entrepreneurs of punishment
Authors: Feeley Malcolm M.
Published: July 2003

Privatization of corrections is problematic in large part because advocates claim that private contractors can provide the same or better services at less cost than public agencies. This article argues that there is another, even more important issue: privatization is fostered by entrepreneurs who do much more than provide alternative sources of services; they create demand for and then supply new forms of social control. Indeed, the history of modern criminal justice is to some extent the history of the success of entrepreneurs in generating new or significantly expanded forms of social control. The article examines the history of entrepreneurs in establishing transportation in the 18th century and the modern prison in the 19th, and then draws parallels to contemporary efforts to provide private prisons, ‘community-based’ juvenile facilities, and electronic monitoring programs.
Race, crime, and forprofit imprisonment
Authors: Hallett Michael A.
Published: July 2003

This article explores the racial dynamics of contemporary prison privatization in the USA from the perspective of social disorganization theory. It relies particularly on the concepts of ‘social’ and ‘human’ capital to suggest that, due to late 20th-century imprisonment policies, a renewed understanding of prisoners as commodities has emerged. While the nature of prisoners’ commodity-value has changed somewhat in modern times - prisoners are no longer profitable solely for their labor, but also now for their bodily ability to generate per diem payments for their private keepers - the historical pattern of racially distinct commerce in imprisoned human beings, most of whom are poor, non-violent, minority offenders, has returned. This article first explains the re-emergence of privatized control over prisoners in contemporary times, then moves on to examine the ‘social capital’ implications of prison privatization as it relates to public policy.
Sentencing Trends in Britain
Authors: HOUGH MIKE , ROBERTS JULIAN V.
Published: July 2003

Research on public opinion over the past three decades has consistently established that the British public are critical of sentencers, and that this criticism exists independent of crime trends and even dramatic changes in criminal justice policies. This finding points to the possibilities that the findings are an artefact of the approach used by these surveys or that public opinion is formed in ignorance of actual practice. The 1996 British Crime Survey (BCS) contained a section of questions designed to test these hypotheses. Respondents were asked a series of questions about their knowledge of, as well as attitudes towards, sentencing practice and sentencers. Results indicate that judges received significantly more negative evaluations than any other group of criminal justice professionals. The public systematically under-estimate the severity of sentencing patterns, and this is significantly related to attitudes to sentencers. When asked to provide a sentence in a specific case of burglary, members of the public favoured sentences that were on balance little different from, and if anything more lenient than, current sentencing practice. Discussion focuses on the policy implications of these findings, as well as their relation to research in other jurisdictions.
Penal Communities
Authors: DUFF R. A.
Published: July 2003

I suggest that we should take the currently pervasive political rhetoric of `community' seriously, and ask whether criminal punishment can be consistent with community - can it treat those who are punished as full members of the political community? To give that question bite, I sketch a conception of a political community structured by the liberal values of autonomy, individual freedom and privacy: a community in which the criminal law will have an important but limited role in defining a range of `public' wrongs and providing for a formal response to such wrongs. A deterrent system of punishment is not, I argue, fully consistent with the values of such a community: but a communicative system of penitential punishment, which aims to persuade wrongdoers to repent and to reform themselves, is consistent with those values; and it can be defended against the liberal charge that it violates offenders' autonomy and privacy.
Appreciative Inquiry and Relationships in Prison
Authors: LIEBLING ALISON , PRICE DAVID , ELLIOTT CHARLES
Published: July 2003

Staff-prisoner relationships are at the heart of the prison system and a stable prison life depends to a large extent on getting these relationships right, particularly in long-term maximum security establishments in the UK. Despite their significance, few studies have explored empirically how these relationships develop and operate. Understanding staff-prisoner interactions requires a detailed and firmly grounded appreciation of the broader tasks prison officers carry out and the nature of prison officer work. Staff-prisoner relationships are invested with an unusual amount of power. This power is, however, `held in reserve' most of the time, as Sykes argued in 1958. Previous studies have generally regarded prison staff superficially and critically. The study reported in this article employs an innovative `appreciative' methodology, seeking to allow staff to focus on the best aspects of their work and role, and the conditions in which they function especially well. Two important features of their work - the peacekeeping aspects and the use of discretion - must be considered in any attempt to describe how staff-prisoner relationships are accomplished.
The Impact of `Three Strikes and You're Out'
Authors: AUSTIN JAMES , CLARK JOHN , HARDYMAN PATRICIA , HENRY D. ALAN
Published: July 2003

Over the past few years, over 24 states and Congress have passed legislation under the slogan of `three strikes and you're out'. As part of the general political thrust to mandate increasingly tougher prison terms for repeat offenders, this form of legislation seeks to ensure that habitual offenders receive the toughest sentence available to the state absent the death penalty - life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In this article, a review of what has been the impact of these laws is made. Surprisingly, with the noted exception of California, there has been virtually no impact on the courts, local jails or state prisons. Nor does there appear to be any impact on crime rates. Even in California, where the law was expected to have a major impact, it appears that all of the projections were in error. The article concludes that this form of legislation was carefully crafted to be largely symbolic. However, the gross errors in predicting the impact of these and other laws by some of the most prestigious researchers underscore how little we know about change within the criminal justice system.
The Rise and Rise of Supermax
Authors: KING ROY D.
Published: July 2003

In the last decade there has been a dramatic growth in the use of so-called super-maximum security custody in the United States. At the end of 1998 some 20,000 prisoners or 1.8 percent of all those serving sentences of a year or more in state and federal prisons were accommodated in such facilities. Most supermax facilities, including the Federal ADX at Florence Colorado and those in 30 states, have been newly constructed although some states have retro-fitted existing buildings either instead of, or in addition to, new build. In such facilities prisoners who loosely defined as the `worst of the worst' are kept in near total lock-down situations, sometimes for very long periods and often without clear entry and exit criteria, ostensibly to protect staff, other prisoners and the public. This article examines the origins and proliferation of supermax custody in the United States, and identifies some of the problems that are associated with its use and abuse, which will be explored in greater depth in subsequent papers. On the basis of comparisons with European experience, where resort to such levels of restrictive custody has been typically on a much smaller and more time limited scale, and has involved little new building, this article questions whether the development of supermax custody in the United States is either a necessary or a proportionate response to the problems actually experienced.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Centenary
Authors: FELD BARRY
Published: July 2003

Within the past three decades, legal changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative social welfare agency into a second-class criminal court for young offenders. The migration of blacks from the rural south to the urban north that began more than three-quarters of a century ago, the structural transformation of cities and the economy over the past quarter of a century, and the current public and political linkages between race and serious youth crime provided the impetus for recent punitive juvenile justice policies. Two competing conceptions of young people - innocence and responsibility - have facilitated the juvenile court's metamorphosis from a welfare into a penal organization as policy makers selectively manipulate these competing social constructs to conduct a form of `criminological triage'. At the `soft end', states have shifted non-criminal status offenders out of the juvenile system into a `hidden system' in the private-sector mental health and chemical dependency industries. At the `hard end', states transfer increasing numbers of youths, disproportionately minority, into the criminal justice system. In the `middle', states' sentencing policies escalate the punishments imposed on those delinquents, again disproportionately minority, who remain in an increasingly criminalized juvenile justice system. These changes in youth sentencing policy reflect both a change in the social construction of adolescence and in strategies of social control. As a result, very little remains of the Progressives' idea of a rehabilitative juvenile court.
Theory counts
Authors: Reyna Stephen P.
Published: July 2003

This article argues the virtues of a particular research methodology, the confrontational stance, for making theory count by helping it to formulate approximate truths of some rigor. Argument proceeds by first showing how a particular anthropological tradition, social anthropology, achieved success by haphazardly adopting such a stance; and then by suggesting certain requirements needed to systematically adopt such a stance.
Counterfactuals and revisionism in historical explanation
Authors: Hassig Ross
Published: July 2003

This article addresses the role of counterfactuals in historical and ethnohistorical explanation. Drawing primarily on examples from the Conquest of Mexico, it argues (1) for a useful role for counterfactual analysis, not in writing fiction, but in assessing pivotal causation and proofing causal arguments; (2) for a clearer understanding of causation in historical records, especially of ethnohistorical subjects; and (3) for a way in which this perspective can be employed to argue for solidly grounded revisionist interpretations of events.
Money in an unequal world
Authors: Hart Keith
Published: July 2003

Humanity is caught between the institutions of agrarian civilization and a machine revolution whose implications we barely understand. In consequence, the world is becoming rapidly more unequal as we grow closer together. As a result of digitalization, the dominant economic form of the 20th-century, state capitalism, is giving way to a new phase, virtual capitalism. The struggle for value on the internet is analysed with reference to the categories of classical political economy. The key to economic democracy is to focus on the money instruments themselves, which are changing in response to the repersonalization of economic life in a world of cheap information. The article reviews the evidence for such change and considers the future of money. If we are to displace the old regime of agrarian civilization, the middle-class revolution with which the modern age began needs to be revitalized.
Inequality and exclusion
Authors: Humphrey Caroline
Published: July 2003

This article concerns the generation of a particular kind of inequality through social practices of inclusion and exclusion. It argues that we need to examine political as well as economic motivations to explain inequality, and it shows, using the case of Russian history, how political anxieties about the integrity of social groups and their governability has served to create inequality by disadvantaging those excluded. The theoretical approach taken is a dynamic and social one, taking up Dunn's observations on the continued salience of Hobbes in today's world and Kharkhordin's Foucauldian analysis of 20th-century Russian collectivism. Inequality, in this light, is seen as something that can be produced by political emotions and discursive practices, rather than as a fixed situation to be explained in terms of income disparities, unequal rights, or structures of exploitation. The intention is not to displace these other accounts but to supplement them by drawing attention to the ways in which a political impulse for the preservation of society constantly reviews the criteria of conformist unity and thus continually resets the boundaries for defining insiders against the outside. Variegated categories of the dispossessed are thereby created historically, and they form multiple sediments at the ‘bottom’ or the ‘peripheries’ of the wider polity. Among ordinary people, fear of being excluded, and ambivalent sentiments to those who have been expelled, give rise to volatile judgements about the legitimacy of inequality – especially when (as in the contemporary turmoil in Russia) certain of the previously dispossessed suddenly take their chance to grasp wealth.
Relational origins of inequality
Authors: Tilly Charles
Published: July 2003

Transformations of credit in 16th-century England illustrate how interpersonal transactions cause changes in inequality. Despite the efforts of such outstanding scholars as Eric Wolf, Don Kalb, and Timothy Earle, inequality has lost the prominent position it once occupied among anthropological concerns. As a result, anthropologists are missing the opportunity to intervene in important debates about inequality in history and the social sciences. A primitive general theory of inequality centering on the dynamics of interpersonal relations identifies one way in which anthropological investigation can contribute to those debates.
Inequality as temporal process
Authors: Verdery Katherine
Published: July 2003

How is inequality related to time? This article explores some temporal coordinates of newly emerging unequal land distributions inTransylvania (Romania), in the wake of socialism's collapse. Building on a notion of temporally based strategies, it examines both temporal conceptions and temporally based practices to describe how time entered into the initial conception of the land restitution process, how achieving ownership was itself a time-intensive activity, and how the government's economic policy has inadequately supported the time-horizons appropriate for new owners. In each respect, time tends to work to the advantage of the former holders of political and social capital as they seek to convert those forms of privilege into control over land.
Imagined Communities reconsidered
Authors: Wogan Peter
Published: July 2003

This article critically evaluates Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(1991), arguing that the book's popularity partly derives from its resonance with widespread, deep-seated western notions of language, especially oppositions between print and orality in terms of their relationship to cognition, emotion, history, and nationalism. The article gives reason to reconsider reactions to Anderson's book and argues for a more sustained focus on the relationship between nationalism and linguistic ideologies.
Nation and decolonization
Authors: Kelly John D. , Kaplan Martha
Published: July 2003

The anthropology of nationalism following Anderson's Imagined Communitiesdepicts nationalism as the culture of modernity, and punctuates time with emphasis on 1776, 1789 and (say some) a contemporary postmodern or millennial crisis. We argue instead that the era of nation-states begins in 1945, an era of formal horizontal symmetries and nations imagined as communities, dominated in fact by American power and its exigencies of ‘self-determination’, ‘open doors’ and multilateral trade. Scholarship that projects the nation-state back to the Enlightenment has occluded imperial history, just as depictions of American power as ‘neo-imperial’ depict it too vaguely, and fail to capture the dilemmas in political dialogics in many localities created by the exigencies of the United Nations era. We seek to relocate ethnographic and critical study of nationalism away from concern with impasses of ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘the West’, and ‘modernity’, in favor of attention to the Second World War as a watershed and decolonization as a beginning, not an end, exit from empires but also entry into a world newly ordered by American power.
Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’
Authors: Zack Naomi
Published: July 2003

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter(1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the ANdiscussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the public's ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.
`Migrant labour'
Authors: Bowman Glenn
Published: July 2003

This article uses case studies of the 6th-century BCE return of the Babylonian exiles to Judea and of the 19th century elaboration by Theodor Herzl of the project of Zionism as means of examining the wider issue of the relation of identity to the experience of exile. It argues that persons and communities which perceive themselves as displaced construct their `authentic' identities in terms not of some sort of originary culture but with defensive reference to experiences in exile which they consider antagonistic. `Identity' is a mobilization of some elements of a cultural repertoire against a threatening other and that antagonism — although nominally to be purged when the full identity it impedes is realized — remains fundamental to identity. As a result, I contend, exiles who return to their `homelands' must, if they are to there find the identities the idea of return promises, `discover' suitable surrogates for the antagonists they have left behind.
Capitalizing on memories past, present, and future
Authors: Bendix Regina
Published: July 2003

This article argues that narratized experience has been the key ingredient in the emergence of tourism as a modern industry. Starting with published travelers' reports, narrative has shaped and structured touristic experience and, in turn, the narratized memories of travelers have stirred the desire for touristic exploits of one generation after another. Clarifying the non-industrial nature of the tourism `industry', the article explores the `aura' of the tourist experience, the ways in which tourists seek to harness it into their narration, and how tourism providers, in turn, are compelled to commodify and sell potential narratable memories to travelers.
Review article: Empire: A dazzling performance according to a simpleton
Authors: Reyna Stephen
Published: July 2003

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published Empire in 2000. A year later it had gone through its seventh printing. One reviewer on the book's back cover, in a quotation from the centrist journal Foreign Affairs, called the text `a sweeping neo-Marxist vision'. A second back cover reviewer from the leftist New Left Review proclaimed it had `visionary intensity'. Unfortunately, I do not `get' the `vision thing', though I do appreciate that Empire does make some claims that will be treasured by reactionaries. I find my lack of vision disturbing because, like the authors, I am of the left, and would prefer to strengthen Marxist tradition. Probably my lack of vision results from the fact that I am a simpleton, who did not `get' it because you could not get it. Permit a few paragraphs outlining the views of a simpleton, which will guide analysis of imperial visionary claims.
Thinking Feminism with and against Bourdieu
Authors: Lovell Terry
Published: July 2003

This article argues that a positive engagement between Bourdieu’s sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable. It compares Bourdieu’s account of the social construction of the human subject through practice with Butler’s account of subjectivity as performance. While the one, through the concept of habitus, tends towards an ‘overdetermined’ view of subjectivity in which subjective dispositions are too tightly tied to the social practices in which they were forged, the other pays insufficient attention to the social conditions of performative subversion. The second half of the paper looks at feminist studies of the relationship between class and gender which have drawn fruitfully on Bourdieu’s work, particularly on his concept of ‘cultural capital’, such as those of Moi and Skeggs.
‘Outsider within’
Authors: Jaschok Maria , Jingjun Shui
Published: July 2003

Our conversation stems from a collaborative, fieldwork-based project on Chinese Islam, and on Chinese Muslim women’s rights, within a secular political ideology and legislative rights framework. Dialogue was a defining feature throughout the years of field investigation and research, fusing autobiographical and cultural trajectories in what the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup calls the ‘betweenness’ of intersubjectively created experience and knowledge. The premise for our conversation lies in the claim that insufficient attention has been paid to developments, which suggest alternatives to the near-axiomatic ethnographic relationship of outside researcher and native informant. In foregrounding the cross-cultural relationship between two researchers, we explore how in the course of fieldwork interaction, boundaries of self and familiar ‘standpoints’ are redrawn. We ask how the history of this collaborative relationship across cultures might question and redefine the classic ethnographic binary of inside and outside, the centre and the margin, the universal and the particular, the ‘western feminist’ and ‘other women’.
Protesting like a Girl
Authors: Parkins Wendy
Published: July 2003

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship.
Writing trash
Authors: Kennedy Kathleen
Published: July 2003

This article focuses on Dorothy Allison’s novel Trashto map how truth functions in the so-called ‘sexual outlaw’s’ efforts to establish a legitimate subject position within lesbian feminism. It suggests that truth is the most valued commodity in establishing that position regardless of one’s position(s) as a sexual outlaw. Sexual outlaws use truth to move from arguing that their sexuality is one of many legitimate expressions of desire to contending that they have developed a more truthful representation of the lesbian than have ‘cultural’ feminists that dominated lesbian feminism in the late 1970s.
Thinking through breasts
Authors: Bartlett Alison
Published: July 2003

This article begins by wondering how the writer’s transformation into motherhood affects her practice of reading, writing and research: how maternities are made academic. Specifically, this article is interested in thinking through lactating breasts, as a particularly complex and potentially subversive ‘performance’ of maternity. In addition, this article reframes ‘maternal thinking’ through 1990s theories of embodiment and corporeality, and asks how embodied practices like breastfeeding might be theorized, as well as how ‘embodied theory’ might be practised. In looking at various cultural texts about breasts and breastfeeding, the article is scripted into a series of connective and reflexive scenes around performance, space, language and knowledge, coming to rest in the imaginative project of an epistemology of breasts. It sets reflexive accounts of lived experience alongside theoretical reflections to create a dynamic and thoughtful reading of breasts, entwining personal and public discourses, maternal and academic writing, theorizing and cultural practices.
Beyond the Politics of Location
Authors: Walby Sylvia
Published: July 2003

Within recent feminist theorizing the significance of social location has been overestimated, while the power of argument has been underestimated. We do not need to retreat to notions of ‘story-telling’ as the strongest claim to knowledge possible by feminist analysis. Rather, we should draw on the power of argument. This article addresses some dilemmas in debates around the projects of recognition, redistribution and transformation, and the claims to knowledge made in each. Further, it argues for the integration of the concerns of equality and difference. The theoretical argument is supported by examples drawn from practical politics, including the development of democratic procedures, postcolonialism, the UNDP indicators sometimes used in development policy and suffrage movements.
More Power to Argument
Authors: Knapp Axeli
Published: July 2003

This article comments on Sylvia Walby’s critique of the politics of difference and the relativist tendencies she sees represented in some contemporary feminist positions. While the general direction of Walby’s intervention is not disputed, the theoretical architecture of her text as well as the way she develops her argumentation are critically assessed. Problems in the architecture of the text concern the unclear interconnection between epistemological questions, questions of moral philosophy/political theory and practical politics. The critique focuses on three aspects: on problems connected with Walby’s use of the Habermasian notion of ‘argumentation’, on difficulties related to an incoherent use of the notion of ‘difference’ and on the inadequate way in which she constructs oppositions between theories. The article lays out some of the theoretical backgrounds of the debates Walby refers to, in order to enhance a more specific comparison and critique of positions.
Beyond identity
Authors: Hekman Susan
Published: July 2003

This article is a critique, first, of the theory of identity advanced by Judith Butler and many of the feminist critics of identity politics, and, second, of identity politics itself. I argue that Butler's rejection of the modernist subject for its opposite, the fictional, substanceless subject, is untenable. Looking to object relations theory, I argue instead for a concept of the subject as an ungrounded ground, occupying a middle ground between the postmodern and the modern subject. With regard to identity politics I argue that instead of populating the political realm with multiple identities, we should instead remove identity entirely from the political realm.
Reconceiving citizenship
Authors: Reiger Kerreen
Published: July 2003

The resurgence of interest in the meaning of citizenship has encouraged debate on its gendered character, especially the relationship between public and private. Informed by such analyses, this article considers the political organizations, in this case in Australia, formed to reclaim maternity care from medical dominance and to promote women's choices as childbearers. As activists, mothers have carved out a new form of politics, transforming their ‘private’ experiences into issues of public contention. Challenging established categories, they have sought to improve their social rights through educating the public and changing professional and institutional practices – for example, asserting their ‘right’ to birth at home and breastfeed in public places. I argue that neither this project, nor that of feminism's emphasis on achieving equality in the public sphere, has been adequate, for gender equity requires intermeshed social, economic and political rights. By conceptualizing mothers as a political collectivity with distinctive, though not homogeneous, interests and needs, the article indicates ways to extend current theoretical frameworks, including postmodernist feminist debates on gender-justice and the politics of differentiated citizenship.
Feminist epistemology and value
Authors: Assiter Alison
Published: July 2003

This article discusses and develops some recent debates in feminist epistemology, by outlining the concept of an ‘emancipatory value’. It outlines the optimum conditions that a ‘community’ of knowers must satisfy in order that its members have the best chance of producing knowledge claims. The article thus covers general ground in epistemology. The article also argues that one of the conditions that any ‘emancipatory community’ must satisfy is that its underlying values should not oppress women. It is related to feminist debates, therefore, in two ways: first, it develops its arguments by drawing on those debates; and second, after developing the general concepts of emancipatory value and epistemic community, it argues that feminist values are one set of emancipatory values to which an epistemic community should pay regard.
Representing groups, deconstructing identities
Authors: Squires Judith
Published: July 2003

This article explores feminist arguments for group representation and suggests that there are three distinct theoretical frameworks on which these arguments are based: an equality perspective leading to a strategy of inclusion, a difference perspective leading to a strategy of reversal and a diversity perspective leading to a strategy of displacement. I focus in particular on the defence of group representation developed by Iris Marion Young, because this is made from a diversity perspective, which offers the most theoretically satisfying account of subjectivity but is (perhaps because of this) least likely to endorse group representation. Young’s thought is particularly interesting because it attempts to resolve some long-standing dilemmas in feminist political thought. In particular, Young aims to combine a deconstructive strategy of displacement with a model of group representation by developing a relational (rather than interest or identity-based) conception of social groups, by using theories of deliberative democracy. To do so she develops a second conception of objective judgement, which displaces the apparent dichotomy between impartiality and particularity. Although the concept of social groups is compelling, the concept of objective judgement is less so and further work could usefully be done to establish whether a diversity perspective can successfully displace the dichotomy between impartiality and partiality, and so offer a coherent defence of group representation.
The child as a feminist figuration
Authors: CastaÒeda Claudia
Published: July 2003

Who or what counts as a feminist subject? This article considers the place of the child, in particular, within the framework of feminist theories of the subject. Locating these theories in a framework of ‘oppositional’ theory, the article asks how and when the child appears in this field of theory. Although children’s oppression and representations of the child in culture have been continuously addressed in contemporary feminism at least since the 1970s, it is simultaneously the case that the child appears in feminism as well as other theories of the subject as the other to the presumed adult subject, even – and sometimes especially – when that subject is being retheorized in oppositional terms, that is, against a hegemonic order of things. The article focuses on instances of the child’s appearance as a resource in feminist theories of the subject, and particularly in feminist uses of psychoanalysis. After considering male poststructuralist or postmodern uses of the child, this article contrasts their generic use of the child with feminist uses of psychoanalysis in the work of Valerie Walkerdine, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis. Psychoanalysis, even in its feminist guises, emerges as a technology of childhood that figures the child as the adult’s ontological origin, and as such an origin that the adult theorist can claim to know by way of psychoanalysis itself. Frequently constituted as a not-yet subject, the child stands in for this ontological origin, from which theorists of the subject, both feminist and not, refashion theories of subjective resistance to the very forms of power that make us subjects in the first place. Working both with and against feminist and other appropriations of the child by way of its ontological positioning, this article attempts to offer an alternative theorization of subjects that accounts for the differences between children and adults. While undercutting the claims to knowledge of the child as the site of human ontology, this alternative theorization also makes a claim to the transformative possibilities that have been located in ontology itself. In addressing feminist uses of the child together with theories of the feminist subject, this article speaks not only to questions of the child, but to the possibility of a feminist politics that begins from a position of privilege – that is, one that does not require subordination as a condition of its own possibility.
Feminist ethical ontology
Authors: Borgerson Janet
Published: July 2003

Philosophers exploring the ethical implications of closeness, or ‘given intersubjectivity’, favor an essential human predicament over an essential sexual dualism to explain their positions on responsibility for and response to the Other. This article proposes a feminist ethical ontology that rejects an essentialist base, turning instead to semiotics as a tool for describing the condition of human agency in a context of oppression. The discussion attends to the problems of downplaying the importance of difference and of blurring the distinction between necessary and accidental actions and occurrences. In challenging the contention that response to the Other is beyond the realm of choice and will, this article considers the ethical implications in how this givenness substantiates inequality and gendered embodiment. The effects of hierarchical ontological dualism should not be ignored or misconstrued in an effort to isolate the definitive nature of human response.
Ethical reading
Authors: Eagleton Mary
Published: July 2003

The focus of this article is two texts, ‘Advancing Luna – and Ida B. Wells’ (1982) by Alice Walker and Disgrace(1999) by J.M. Coetzee, both of which present ethical problems for the reader. The texts share a common event, an incident of black-on-white, male-on-female rape. In each case the white woman keeps silent about the rape and the narrative is troubled by that silence. I read the dilemma of these texts as at once ethical, political and aesthetic and I explore that multi-faceted problem through three perspectives – the issue of silence, the narrative structures of the texts and the impossibility of resolution. The texts repeatedly question my reading position, not least in that they both suggest that the silence of the white woman might, in certain circumstances, be a condition for political progress.
Flourishing
Authors: Jantzen Grace
Published: July 2003

How can feminist moral philosophy redeem the present? In this article I present the idea of a moral imaginary as the habitus of our ethical attitudes and actions, and argue that the moral imaginary of the West is preoccupied with gendered violence and death. I use a psychotherapeutic model of change through analysis and suggestion, and a Foucauldian account of the history of the present, to present the beginnings of an imaginary of natality centred in a symbolic of flourishing as a resource for discursive and material transformation.
Trope analysis of women’s political subjectivity
Authors: Zake Ieva
Published: July 2003

The article focuses on the narratives of women secretaries regarding their work experiences in private business in Latvia, and aims at understanding the barriers that prevent the formation of women’s political subjectivity in Latvia, by looking at why sexual harassment does not become a political issue for working women in Latvia. Using Hayden White’s theory of trope analysis, the article analyses the dominant tropes and the political results of their use in secretaries’ articulations and narratives about their experiences of sexual harassment. Additionally, the article provides a critical trope analysis of Western feminist theories of sexual harassment, thus pointing out their usefulness for women’s politics in Latvia. Finally, the article outlines the discursive strategies that women in Latvia could use in order to claim their own distinct and transformative political subjectivity in the newly independent, capitalist and highly nationalist post-Soviet Latvia.
(De)Sexing the family
Authors: Malone Kareen , Cleary Rose
Published: July 2003

Many legal arguments pertaining to equal rights for gay and lesbian families have relied upon empirical research on the `healthy' childraising environment of these families. While neither disputing recent legal gains nor diminishing their importance, this article looks at some of the conceptual categories that drive this research. The limitations of such research, as salutary as it is, are typically understood in terms of their obvious political context. Such research avoids highlighting any differences between gay/lesbian families and traditional families because an emphasis on such differences feeds cultural stereotypes that are damaging to non-traditional families. This article takes a different tack, looking at how the concepts that frame research are based in binaries and fantasies about families and sex that we argue are too limiting. It assumes that the elision of sexuality within such studies is symptomatic of a broader repression of a variety of meanings of family. In response, the article brings in queer theory and psychoanalysis to broaden our approach to understanding new forms of family and kinship initiated by gay and lesbian families. The article addresses single household lesbian families that are most frequently the object of empirical research.
Transnational feminisms in question
Authors: Mendoza Breny
Published: July 2003

The article interrogates transnational feminisms as a concept and as a practice. It frames its analysis using contemporary theories of globalization and the older concept of global sisterhood as a backdrop to the concept of transnational feminism. To assess the practical dimension of transnational feminisms, the analysis focuses on women's rights as a human rights movement and the transnationalization of Latin American feminisms. The article suggests that, although transnational feminisms (particularly feminist postcolonial theories) envision themselves in a new frame and see themselves as committed to intersectional analysis and transversal politics, there are important gaps between the intentions (theory, tactics) and outcomes of their theory and practice.