In this article, I examine the legal position of those who perform caregiving work within the context of a cohabiting relationship through a novel relational vulnerability lens. I argue that the state, through privatising and devaluing caregiving labour, situates carers within an unequal and imbalanced relational framework, exposing them economic, emotional, and spatial harms. Unlike universal vulnerability, which is inherent and unavoidable, relational vulnerability can be avoided and reduced if the state were to acknowledge that humans are embodied and relational (...) rather than self-sufficient and rational. Law’s treatment of cohabiting carers reflects the state’s broader tendency to value economic self-sufficiency, while confining caregiving to the private family. I argue that the state has a duty to respond directly to relational vulnerability and should aim to make cohabiting carers resilient. Resilience must involve the provision of material resources but should also have a normative commitment to achieving autonomy and equality for those marginalised by law and state policies. (shrink)

Examining Turkey’s Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a representative case of the globally surging protest movements since 2011, this study claims that the basic aim of the protests is to contest the foundational rationality of the modern state, which, I argue, is based on a patriarchal social contract that empowers the state with the authority to represent the interests and speak on behalf of citizens using a logic of protection, and to construct, enforce, and monitor a regime of citizenship (...) where citizens can only function as emasculated subjects who are dependent on the protection of the state. Based on an analysis of the use of gender metaphors and familial tropes by the AKP government, and the subversive use of humor and irony by the protestors, this article demonstrates that the protests target the patriarchal premises of modern statehood, both in its democratic (fraternal patriarchy) and authoritarian (paternalistic patriarchy) forms, and the state’s disciplinary, regulatory, and remedial interventions toward the interpellation of the citizen as an infantile or feminine subject who is not capable of meeting their needs and interests on their own, and whose life, therefore, needs to be continually monitored, controlled, and regulated by the state. Drawing on criticism brought to the contractual foundations of the modern state by feminist political theorists, this study makes use of the notion of modern patriarchy as a story told by social contract theories, which generates a power relationship between the state and the citizen based on the projection of threat where the state assumes the role of the protector. I conclude that objecting to these modern forms of subjugation, the Gezi Park protests call for a post-patriarchal state where it no longer resorts to a patriarchal protectionist logic that is justified through the claim that it represents the interests of its citizens. By envisioning such a post-patriarchal state, I interpret the protests as a call for the renegotiation of the foundational premises of modern statehood such that the state-citizenship relationship is radically reformulated to enable a more empowered and autonomous citizen. (shrink)

Ovaj je zbornik nastao kao rezultat istraživanja provedenog unutar istoimenoga znanstveno-istraživačkoga projekta na kojemu su urednici istovremeno bili i glavni istraživači, a ostali autori članovi istraživačke skupine. Kao svjedoci različitih vrsta otklona od prevladavajućeg, uobičajenoga, normalnoga, pozitivnog ili ponašanja koje se karakterizira kao asocijalno, zapitali smo se – što postojeće čini normom, treba li odstupanje od norme nužno smatrati devijacijom i kakvi su poželjni društveni odgovori na odstupanja od normi. Često se smatra ispravnim upravo ono što je prevladavajuće, a ono (...) što predstavlja otklon označava se kao devijacija u negativnome značenju onoga što nije ispravno, nije posve ispravno, ili čak onoga što treba sankcionirati. Naš je početni stav bio da ono što prevladava ne smije biti neupitna norma, kao što ni ono što je otklon nije po automatizmu devijacija. Međutim, ne smatramo ni da prevladavajuću normu, samom tom činjenicom što je prevladavajuća, nužno treba kritizirati te da je svaki otklon po sebi poželjan. Cilj našeg istraživanja bio je istražiti različite oblike deficita i devijacijau u domeni formiranja vjerovanja individualnih, grupnih, kolektivnih i institucijskih epistemičkih aktera (socijalna epistemologija) i u domeni društvenog i institucijskoga djelovanja (filozofija politike i filozofija psihijatrije). Nastavno na to, pokušali smo identificirati vrijednosti postojećih normi, koliko odgovaraju poželjnim vrijednostima te koji su poželjni društveni odgovori na otklone od normi. (shrink)

…Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work and eat as much as a man-when I could get to it- and bear de lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a (...) woman? Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as man, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman…. (shrink)

Marriage promotion is a government strategy aimed at ensuring that children are raised in married, heterosexual families, preferably by their biological parents. This article places critical heterosexuality studies in dialogue with feminist state theory to examine marriage promotion as a reaction of the gendered and sexualized state to crisis tendencies of institutionalized heterosexuality. Drawing on the first in-depth study of marriage promotion politics, the author examines polycentric state practices that seek to stabilize the norm of the white, middle-class, heterosexual family. (...) While explicit policy concerns focus on race and class, state-sponsored marriage workshops teach about gender hierarchy to rehearse an implicit ideology of marital heterosexuality. In contrast to feminist state theories that present a monolithic, top-down model of state control, the author offers a more nuanced examination of the relationship between macro and micro levels of power and their uneven consequences for social change. (shrink)

European prostitutes occupied an important intermediary status in colonial Bombay’s racially stratified sexual order. In this article, the author offers a transnational feminist analysis of how the colonial state managed its racial and spatial location. The colonial state individuated, fostered, and monitored European prostitutes much more closely than others involved in the sex trade, and “coercive protection” by the police and brothel mistresses kept European brothel workers within their assigned spaces. Paradoxically, international antitrafficking efforts in colonial Bombay consolidated, rather than (...) undermined, these relations of coercive protection. The League of Nations’ antitrafficking measures in the 1920s encouraged the police to focus on cross-nationalcases andthird-partyprocurers andto overlook women who were deemed insufficiently pure. Comparing police, missionary, and social workers’ records, the author offers a critique of both international antitrafficking discourses and the Indian colonial state’s interests in sustaining the sex trade. (shrink)

A fundamental debate within feminist scholarship and activism centers on what relationship feminism should have with the state. This article explores this debate empirically by examining differences in the emotion cultures of a state-dependent and an autonomous feminist organization in postsocialist eastern Germany. The comparative analysis demonstrates how organizations construct specific emotion cultures in response to emotional opportunities and constraints created by their relationships with state institutions. The state-dependent organization adopts a less expressive emotion culture that assures broad public appeal (...) and future state support, but does not build critical consciousness among participants. In contrast, the autonomous organization encourages displays of feelings as part of consciousness raising, creating an emotion culture that reduces public appeal but produces especially loyal and active constituents. (shrink)

Engaging with the work of C. Wright Mills and Eve Sedgwick, in this article I theorize how homoerotic relations facilitate the flow of global capital into risky market economies. Drawing on interview data with more than 60 financial professionals managing foreign investments in Vietnam, I examine the co-constitution of gender and global capital by identifying three categories of deal brokers. System maintainers are men and women who accept that women’s bodies are necessary for male homosocial bonding between political and economic (...) elites. System transformers are men and women who disrupt the status quo and develop alternative ways of deal brokering outside of erotic spaces. System defectors are those break the triangle altogether and work to create new markets. (shrink)

The crucial problem in the philosophy of psychiatry is to determine under which conditions certain behaviors, mental states, and personality traits should be regarded as symptoms of mental illnesses. Participants in the debate can be placed on a continuum of positions. On the one side of the continuum, there are naturalists who maintain that the concept of mental illness can be explained by relying on the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience. On the other side (...) of the continuum, there are normativists who maintain that the appropriate characterization of the concept of mental illness cannot avoid reference to epistemic, moral and other social values. Although, this article is primarily an introduction to the debate, we stress the importance of the normativist positions. (shrink)

: This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid "feminine" can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation with gun carriers in Michigan to examine how socioeconomic decline shapes the appropriation of guns by men of diverse class and race backgrounds. Gun carriers nostalgically referenced the decline of Mayberry America—a version of America characterized by the stable employment of male breadwinners and low crime rates. While men of color and poor and working-class men bear the material brunt of these transformations, this narrative of decline impacts how both privileged and marginalized (...) men think of themselves as men because of the ideological centrality of breadwinning to American masculinity. Using Young’s “masculine protectionism” framework, I argue that against this backdrop of decline, men use guns not simply to instrumentally address the threat of crime but also to negotiate their own position within a context of socioeconomic decline by emphasizing their role as protector. (shrink)

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, (...) I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the idea of the public in the US state processes of knowledge production and control. In it we take up questions of public and counterpublic political philosophical knowledge production and mediation in relation to an expanding state. Specifically, we examine the political philosophies of racialized counterpublics since the 1960s, considering the particular knowledge production genre of the political prison letter. We suggest that the philosophical principles of the dominant public in the (...) US have a proclivity to merge with state mechanisms of domination and to thwart counterpublics and their modes of political knowledge production. (shrink)

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althusser’s (...) concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of women’s welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed. (shrink)

Chicana feminist writers have written eloquently about the condition of women in their communities. Many of them have aligned themselves with and participated in various political movements. This practice has infused their theorizing with various influences which makes them similar to other feminist theorists but also different. This paper provides an overview of how Chicana feminist writings address the ethnic specific ways in which gender oppression is imposed on them and their proposals for liberation.

Chicana feminist writers have written eloquently about the condition of women in their communities. Many of them have aligned themselves with and participated in various political movements. This practice has infused their theorizing with various influences which makes them similar to other feminist theorists but also different. This paper provides an overview of how Chicana feminist writings address the ethnic specific ways in which gender oppression is imposed on them and their proposals for liberation.

This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid “feminine” can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

A central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical contradictions of liberal ideologies predispose states to institute unjust gender systems. I argue that postcolonial Caribbean states have inherited a complexity of social relations and structures from the Enlightenment discourses of Liberalism, yet they seem unaware that the discourses which created colonialism and Western expansion were themselves part of the Enlightenment project of modernity. In this paper I apply this theoretical framework to a historical analysis of gender systems in the (...) twentieth-century Caribbean. The paper examines three distinct periods: 1900–37, 1937–50s and 1950s-90s, the transition from colonial to postcolonial modernizing societies, and attempts to generate a gendered analytical model which can be widely applied both within and outside of the region. (shrink)

In this article I construct a feminist notion of social citizenship from early twentieth-century feminism in the United States. Arguing that there are four aspects to the interconnection between women's citizenship and social democracy-new modes of citizenship, a socialized view of rights, new spaces for participation, and a female-privileged definition of gender equality-I suggest that such a concept could help us move from a welfare state to a feminist social democracy.

Building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist antiviolence movements in the build-up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the Gender-Responsive Justice and Community Accountability movements as countervailing examples. Both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. Gender-Responsive Justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the American prison reformatory movement. Community Accountability stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are fundamentally at (...) odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the mainstream antiviolence movement. We argue that Gender-Responsive Justice is a form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision of social services, while Community Accountability advances a radically creative abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order. (shrink)

In this text we explore and present some elements that allow us to consider the elaboration of a feminist theory of the State. In principle, it is about starting from a materialistic philosophical perspective that provides us with a broad and rigorous framework for inquiry, which includes a consideration of the complex social topic in which our practices are inscribed and a special attention to the dynamics of affects that guide us in them. Based on this perspective, we propose the (...) concept of State of care. The logic of care to which we refer here is not limited to the problem of social reproduction but crosses the set of instances and practices, and simultaneously involves a way of knowing, a way of being and a way of constituting oneself. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate the state’s role in the reproduction of relations of male dominance between separated parents through custody law. We argue that three “logics” shape the current operation of family law—durability, gender neutrality and present/future temporality—such that custody law is not simply a mechanism of dispute resolution between parents; it is also a vehicle for the differential production, positioning, and regulation of mothers and fathers as postseparation parents. Drawing on interviews with 21 mothers, we show that the (...) outcome of the state’s governance of gender through custody law for women in dispute over care and contact arrangements is that nonresident fathers are able to engage in nonreciprocal exercises of power over resident mothers. The consequence for resident mothers is that nonresident fathers are able to legitimately use the law to threaten and coerce mothers, and to protect their interests and rights at the expense of mothers’ needs for and rights to security and autonomy. (shrink)

This article examines the Canadian case, focusing on the ways in which the political rationalities that have informed the Canadian variants of post-war social liberalism and neoliberalism have opened and then closed spaces for the articulation and institutionalization of gender-based equality claims-making. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick field of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node of social liberalism (...) became a critical field of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. The article describes a protracted war of position in which the gendered politics and identities of the 20th century have been displaced and marginalized, but not fully consumed by neoliberal idioms, representations and policy interventions. (shrink)

This article explores sex selective abortion as a form of structural violence within the broader notion of women's ‘protection’ in contemporary India. While SSA tends to be framed more generally within ethical and choice-based frameworks around abortion access and reproductive ‘rights’, and specifically in India around preference for sons as a discriminatory, cultural, technological misogyny, this article argues that sex selective abortion in India needs to be understood as an outcome of broader systemic economic, political and social processes. The deepening (...) of neoliberal values through state policies has impacted significantly on social relations, shaping SSA as a manifestation of structural violence. State-driven policies in India reflect a neoliberal governmentality through state patriarchy that is implicit within the neoliberal developmental, governmental and capitalist paradigm of contemporary India. This article argues that SSA is structurally produced and therefore cannot be remedied through awareness-raising strategies such as beti bachao or financial inclusion as a means to ‘protect’ or ‘save the girl child’. Indeed, it is neoliberal economic forces that actively, though seemingly inadvertently, promote anti-women, sex selective abortion as a reproductive strategy, which is then disciplined through neoliberal governmentality. This highlights SSA as a form of gendered and structural, rather than discriminatory, violence. (shrink)

In examining the practice of power in the Birth Planning Policy of China, the author argues that the theorizing of the public-private frame and public patriarchy based on the welfare state in the West fails to capture the specific gender and state relations in the Chinese socialist context. With the convergence of the traditional familial order and the development of a modern nation-state, the “public” sphere of the Chinese socialist state is a disrupted space where the “state” still calls for (...) its people's sacrifice for the collective good and yet at the same time, a terrian where citizens can claim their rights. It is also a domain where Chinese women's reproduction is collectivized for the cause of socialist modernization and yet a realm where they claim their voices. In the conclusion, the author addresses the question of Chinese women's agency in maneuvering through the patriarchal system and using the policy as a springboard to effecting changes in it. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, Mexican feminists mobilized transnationally to demand state accountability for the feminicidios of women in Ciudad Juarez. Feminicidio refers to the misogynous killing of women and the state’s complicity in this violence by tolerating it with impunity. Drawing on debates of the Mexican Federal Congress and interviews with feminist state and non-state actors, I examine feminist legislators’ response to transnational activism, which was to pass the “General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence” and (...) to create the penal-type code of feminicidio, which includes provisions to punish negligent state actors. These laws make the state a target of its own punitive power. To pass these acts, feminist legislators faced resistance from male legislators and the Federal Executive. I build on feminist institutionalism to theorize this resistance as gendered. Gendered state resistance was pervasive because feminist legislators practiced accountability by identifying the complicity of state institutions, including Congress, in perpetuating feminicidio. As part of the process, they built alliances with other female legislators and framed their arguments with notions of modern statehood. Although this framing strategy resulted in innovative legal change, I interrogate the assumption that modernity is the solution to feminicidio, because it can lead gendered state resistance to manifest as a simulation of accountability. (shrink)

La recherche sur le genre de la nation faite aux États-Unis, même si elle ressemble beaucoup à la recherche faite en Europe, est aussi originale par des particularités liées soit à l’histoire du pays, soit aux structures de recherche. La première spécificité se voit surtout par l’intérêt porté aux questions de race ; la seconde se voit surtout par l’importance de l’interdisciplinarité, de la recherche sur la masculinité, et de l’ interaction des recherches féministe et gay. Ces trois effets...

This article analyzes gun carry licensing as a disciplinary mechanism that places African American men in a liminal zone where they are legally armed but presumed dangerous, even as African Americans now experience broadened access to concealed pistol licenses amid contemporary U.S. gun laws. Using observational data from now-defunct public gun boards in Metropolitan Detroit, this article systematically explores how CPLs are mobilized by administrators to reflect and reinforce racial/gender hierarchies. This article broadens scholarly understandings of how tropes of criminality (...) shape racialized men’s encounters with the state beyond nonvoluntary, coercive settings and unpacks how race and gender interlock to shape these encounters. I extend insights from intersectionality scholarship to examine gun board meetings as degradation ceremonies whereby African American men are held accountable to controlling images of Black masculinity in exchange for a CPL. This article sharpens the conceptual apparatus that accounts for marginalized men’s subordination vis-à-vis the state by focusing on the provision of legitimate violence and revealing the persistent, if paradoxical, mobilization of legitimate violence in the reproduction of racial/gender hierarchies. (shrink)