The South West African People’s Organisation delivered Namibia from South African apartheid rule in 1990. Namibia’s democratic future began with the promise of equality. In 1995, however, SWAPO initiated a campaign of political homophobia. In this article, I make a case for viewing SWAPO leaders’ deployment of political homophobia as a gendered political strategy. I draw on a qualitative analysis of 194 articles from Namibian newspapers published between 1995 and 2006. My analysis illustrates two features of political homophobia. First, I (...) demonstrate how political homophobia stifled political dissent and enhanced SWAPO leaders’ masculinist position and legacy as liberators. Second, I show how SWAPO leaders used political homophobia to expel gender and sexual dissidents from official accounts of history. (shrink)

This article offers a nuanced analysis of identity reconstitution in transnational gay relations. Drawing from critical ethnography, the author focuses on Filipino gay-identified hosts, who remain invisible in global analyses of sexuality and tourism, as they create a gay space in Malate, an ex-sex and current tourist district in the city of Manila. Challenging the perception that gay identity is Western made, the author focuses on how gay host identity is constituted through hosts’travel/mobility and in relation to urban place. She (...) discusses place-making as a strategy that allows gay hosts to see their identities transformed in Malate despite their social exclusion in the process of urban gentrification. (shrink)

The proponents of critical pedagogy criticize the earlier Neo‐Marxist theories of education, arguing that they provide only a ‘language of critique’. By introducing the possibility of human agency and resistance, critical pedagogists attempt to develop not only a pedagogy of critique, but also to build a pedagogy of hope. Fundamentally, the aim of critical pedagogy is twofold: 1) to correct the pessimistic conclusions of Neo‐Marxist theories, and 2) to transform a ‘language of critique’ into a ‘language of possibility’ . Then, (...) what political projects do critical pedagogies present to us? What alternative visions of schooling do critical pedagogies offer against the mainstream pedagogy? The purpose of this paper is to identify main projects of critical pedagogy, and to explore overarching politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy. Although there are diverse theories and approaches in critical pedagogy, three overarching projects can be identified, which I call: 1) the project of experience, 2) the project of anti‐system, and 3) the project of inclusion. Based on an examination of the general trends and characteristics of these three projects of critical pedagogy, I argue that three prominent politics that underlie the field of critical pedagogy are culturalist politics, self/identity politics, and grassroots politics. In trying to better understand why and how critical pedagogy has developed the political stances as it has, the last part of the paper links these three politics to the historical developments of the New Left and the New Social Movements. (shrink)

Systematic analysis of 25 contemporary North American feminist memoirs reveals the significance of this kind of cultural production in the life of the women's movement. In memoir, feminists contest dominant movement narratives, recast and reclaim conventional gender stereotypes, and use their experiences to refine movement ideas and goals. Combining sociological aggregation and pattern identification and interpretivist understandings of memoir's empirical significance, this research indicates that feminists have spent considerable energy focused on transforming not just relations between women and men but (...) among women themselves. To this end, they assert that feminists must acknowledge two difficult “truths”—women are emotionally damaged, and women are not as socially capable as convention would suggest. By analyzing such arguments, this article indicates feminist memoir is a vehicle through which actors do not simply uphold but also contest movement narratives, refining or abandoning movement frames that wear thin as lived experience contradicts them. (shrink)

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive (...) sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement. (shrink)

This paper will analyse what it takes to conduct feminist and sensitive research in countries that have seen mass human rights violations. Transitional justice research involves critical examination of difficult topics which raises a number of ethical and methodological issues for both the participants and the researchers. Although empirical research has been a facet of the studies produced in the field, researchers’ accounts of undertaking research in often politically sensitive environments is largely missing from published books and research reports. This (...) paper is informed by personal experiences of doing research in wartime rape in the ethnically and politically divided country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the researcher’s profile and positionality directly affects the fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the wider political processes in the country. (shrink)

This case study of the feminist drag troupe the Disposable Boy Toys examines the relationship between drag and gender identity. Drawing on multiple methods, the author explores the range of gender identities that emerged through participation in DBT. Members saw DBT as the central catalyst for their own identity shifts. The author suggests that these identity transformations occurred through four collective mechanisms: imaginative possibility, information and resources, opportunities for enactment, and social support. The author finds that DBT served as an (...) identity incubator in which participants were able and encouraged to interrogate, play with, and sometimes adopt new gender identities. The author concludes that context is critical in understanding the meaning and importance of drag. Performing gender in this politicized, feminist context shaped the gender identities of the troupe's members in fundamental and varied ways, suggesting that oppositional communities can be an important venue for identity work. (shrink)

SALMON A, BROWNE AJ, and PEDERSON A. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 336–345 ‘Now we call it research’: participatory health research involving marginalized women who use drugsIn this paper, we discuss and analyse the strategies employed and challenges encountered when conducting a recent feminist participatory action research study with highly marginalized women who were illicit drug users in an inner city area of Vancouver, Canada. Through an analysis of the political economy of participatory praxis within current neoliberal contexts, we focus on (...) three main areas: (i) reconceptualizing the pragmatics of participation; (ii) the microeconomic implications of participatory research, including ethical issues in payment for research participation; and (iii) the value and limits of using research as a tool for activism and empowerment. We conclude with a brief discussion of what we see to be some of the most salient social justice implications arising from feminist and participatory approaches to health research within neoliberal political spaces. (shrink)

This article contributes to discussions of methodology in gender studies by examining narrative analysis as a feminist method. Using direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry services as a case study, the author discusses the potential of narrative analysis in interrogating complex cultural phenomena. The analysis focuses on the commercial website of the UK-based genetics company Oxford Ancestors, which the author situates at the intersection of the cultural narratives of commercialization, scientific advance and personal quest. By interrogating the mutual embeddedness of these narratives, the (...) author demonstrates how narrative analysis moves across structure and context capturing the processes through which facts about gender come into being. The author suggests that this focus on the tension between the abstract and the specific in cultural phenomena is what makes narrative analysis a particularly effective tool for feminist cultural analysis. (shrink)

In developing strategies to contest the systematic efforts to dismantle progressive social and economic policies generated through decades of activism, it is important to understand how discursive frames that were significant in social justice organizing in the United States have come to be subjugated, delegitimated, or co-opted, and have lost their power for social justice activism. Using a materialist feminist approach, I first examine the processes of subjugation and explore how movement actors choose frames within bounded discursive fields that become (...) institutionalized, but lose critical feminist or progressive intent. I then discuss the delegitimation of a citizen’s right to government support and the co-optation of progressive movement frames by conservative groups. I conclude with a materialist feminist call to attend to the multiple institutions that contour the discursive field and the everyday practices of social movement organizations. This is a call for collective research, since no single case can attend to all of these dimensions and processes. (shrink)

Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that (...) “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books. (shrink)

This article uses elements of autoethnography to theorize an in/formal support relationship between a friend with a physical disability, who uses attendant services, and me. Through thinking about our particular “frien-tendant” relationship, I find the common scholarly orientations toward “care” are inadequate. Starting from the conversations between feminist and disability perspectives on care, I build on previous work to further develop the theoretical framework of accessible care. Accessible care takes a critical, engaged approach that moves beyond understanding “accessibility” as merely (...) concrete solutions to create more inclusive forms of care. Care, in this context, is positioned as an unstable tension among competing definitions, including that it is a complex form of oppression. Accessible care draws on feminist disability perspectives and the feminist political ethic of care to build bridges in four areas: from daily experiences of disability and support to theoretical discussions; across feminist care research and disability perspectives; across divisions and anxieties within disability communities; and from the local to transnational applications. These bridges do not aim to resolve debates but allow us to travel back and forth between differing perspectives and demonstrate the tenuous possibility of accessible practices and concepts of care. (shrink)

Within art therapy discourses there is a dearth of scholarly literature related to the dilemmas of voicing lesbianism and picturing lesbians. This is the result of sustained discrimination and censorship worldwide. In order to address this issue, a research study was designed to investigate this topic and its relationship to informing art therapy. There were two research methods and two research processes used in the project. Autobiography and art based research were the methods, and intertextuality and reflexivity were the research (...) processes. The methodology that underpinned the project was postmodern-feminism. Autobiographical material created through an art-based research method was reflexively viewed. The newly created visual texts stimulated intertextual links to past visual and written texts. These texts were used to map and track deeply held assumptions found embedded in essentialist, dualistic and modernist paradigms. By the use of postmodernfeminism deconstruction and reconstruction the investigation exposed and interrogated paradigm shifts resulting in subsequent personal transformations. The study revealed how past personal experiences of homophobia, lesbian invisibility and mental health treatment were deeply embedded in gender/sexuality norms, visual art discourse and social stigmatisation. These experiences impacted significantly on the ability to verbally and visually reveal both lesbian and lesbianism, and as such impacted on perceptual shaping of multiple selves within self. The study further demonstrated how the postmodern-feminist investigation destabilised dominant paradigms and subverted their location in “truth”, allowing for reconstruction of selves to be explicitly pictured. The significance of the findings for art therapy is three fold. Firstly, by offering a postmodern-feminist perspective through a lesbian lens, embedded modernist paradigms central to art therapy discourse are challenged. Secondly, the creative process of image making, within a postmodern-feminist frame is showcased. Within such a process change can be mobilised and self perceptions can be transformed. Thirdly, the study has advanced art therapy towards a more contemporary and critically informed discipline, one that can reflect on possible dilemmas encountered by lesbian clientele when verbally or visually self representing. The implications of the study have several intersections for the broader arts and health care sectors. (shrink)