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Begin New Search Topic Women Political Geography Global Focus Journal Contexto Internacional

1. Building Transnational Feminist Alliances: Reflections on the Post-2015 Development Agenda

Author:
Awino Okech and Dinah Musindarwezo
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
This article reflects on transnational feminist organising by drawing on the experiences of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) during the consultations leading up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. First, we re-examine some of the debates that have shaped the field of women’s rights, feminist activism and gender justice in Africa, and the enduring legacies of these discourses for policy advocacy. Second, we analyse the politics of movement-building and the influence of development funding, and how they shape policy discourses and praxis in respect of women’s rights and gender justice. Third, we problematise the nature of transnational feminist solidarity. Finally, drawing on scholarship about transnational feminist praxis as well as activism, we distil some lessons for feminist policy advocacy across geo-political divides.
Topic:
Globalization, International Cooperation, Regional Cooperation, Political Theory, Women, Sustainable Development Goals, International Relations Theory, and Alliance
Political Geography:
Africa and Global Focus

2. From Binary to Intersectional to Imbricated Approaches: Gender in a Decolonial and Diasporic Perspective

Author:
Andréa Gill and Thula Pires
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
This article proposes a re-reading of the problem of gender, or as it has been put, more often than not, ‘the woman problem,’ that resists the reproduction of modern/colonial systems of governance and their political norms, standards, ideals and pacts. In turn, it seeks to open pathways to dialogue with, rather than import, conceptions of gender that respond to the terms through which modern/colonial societies have been forged on the continent of Abya Yala, drawing inspiration from decolonial and diasporic perspectives. To this end, the article maps some of the available channels of the gender debate in what has come to be known as the global South from an array of perspectives that highlight the ways in which the relations between categories of oppression and privilege (such as race, class, sexuality and gender) are reflected and positioned so as to grapple with the coloniality of knowledge, power and being. More specifically, it focuses on three ways of dealing with power dynamics in the context of Abya Yala that have influenced how we conceive and respond to questions of gender. Its primary objective is to investigate the politico-epistemic conditions that structure gender thinking in binary and intersectional ways, and, in turn, open space for imbricated approaches forged from within (post-)colonial histories that do not take as their starting point the importation of theoretical references from places otherwise situated within a global political economy of knowledge/power/being. More than a critique of theoretical standpoints from the global North, in and of themselves, which regardless were not thought to respond to our realities, here we analyse the terms through which gender and feminisms have been put up for debate. Without effectively decentring the Eurocentred references that preoccupy gender thinking in our respective disputes, we risk continued distraction from what is at stake when gender is put on the table: the (im)possibilities of living one’s full humanity on one’s own terms.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Political Theory, Diaspora, Women, and International Relations Theory
Political Geography:
Europe, Latin America, and Global Focus

3. Women’s Struggles Against Extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author:
Enara Echart Muñoz and Maria del Carmen Villarreal
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Since Cynthia Enloe asked, ‘Where are the women?’ in 1989, studies about the place of women in International Relations have increased. However, most of the analyses since then have focused on the participation of women in international organisations, events and institutional spaces, making invisible other practices and places occupied by black or indigenous women from the South. This article aims to highlight the role of women at the international level, analysing their performance in disputes over the meanings of development in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on struggles against extractivism. In addition to denouncing the impacts of this development model, these struggles seek to construct alternatives that, although they could be essentially local, have been multiplied and articulated throughout the Latin American and the Caribbean territory, as part of a broader resistance to the dominant extractivism in the region. These struggles will be mapped using a database of 259 conflicts around mining activities, developed by the Research Group on International Relations and Global South (GRISUL).
Topic:
Gender Issues, Race, Natural Resources, Women, Global South, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Latin America, Caribbean, and Global Focus

4. Struggles Around the Empty Signifier of Freedom: An Interview with Leticia Sabsay

Author:
Thais de Bakker Castro
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
Leticia Sabsay is a prominent Argentinian academic, based at the London School of Economics, whose work has been exploring pressing issues and questions: how gender and sexuality relate to ideas of freedom, how to define human subjectivity, how to politically resist, among others. In Sabsay’s writing, ideas of gender and sexuality cannot be dissociated from our broader political formations and complex processes of becoming subjects in neoliberalism. And our aspirations to evoke political shifts and improvements cannot be separated from a notion of the human as a being with permeable borders, invariably interconnected to others and to a conjunction of experiences – as opposed to the liberal notion of autonomous individuality. I believe she joins theorists like Judith Butler in an attempt to resituate the ontological grounds of our notion of the individual and of our political formations, and she is thus an important reference for feminist and queer efforts to make sense of liberal cooptation, on the one hand, and conservative backlash, on the other. The following is an interview conducted in November of 2018, at the LSE, in which I asked her about her references, her more recent body of work, and her conceptualizations of current tendencies in politics. The interview was lightly edited for clarity.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Women, Freedom of Expression, and Feminism
Political Geography:
Global Focus