The Feminist Review Collective - Debating Discourses, Practising Feminisms: Feminist Review, Issue 56

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

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Feminist Review is published three times a year. It is edited by a Collective which is supported by a group of Corresponding Editors.

The Collective: Avtar Brah, Ann Phoenix, Annie Whitehead, Catherine Hall, Dot Griffiths, Gail Lewis, Helen Crowley, Merl Storr.

Guest Editor this issue: Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe.

Corresponding Editors: Ailbhe Smyth, Ann Curthoys, Hala Shukrallah, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Jacqui Alexander, Lidia Curti, Meera Kosambi, Patricia Mohammed, Sue OSullivan, Zarina Maharaj.

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The essays in this issue demonstrate that any serious attempt to develop feminist practices is also an engagement with multiple discourses. By discourses in this context we mean not just linguistic or textual issues, but dynamics and dialogics of substantive political debates. Each contribution is situated within complex and multi-layered terrains. Thus Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz map discursive conflicts at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing; Purnima Mankekar locates one particular public debate in India as a site of political and cultural contestation; Laura Chernaik traces postmodern ethics in contemporary feminist science fiction; Sally R.Munt places the lesbian educator at the centre of debates around politics and pedagogy.

In pursuing each of these projects, the articles inevitably also interrogate myriad interrelated themes. Who needs (sex) when you can have (gender)? is not just a report on the proceedings of the Beijing conference but also discusses the re-emergence of gender and the subsequent de-centring of women in feminist theory in general and development policy in particular. It also reflects on tensions between activism and policy-making, and indeed on power relations between policy-makers in the north and activists in the south. In To whom does Ameena belong? narratives of identity, citizenship and belonging reveal the inextricable links between notions of public and private, state, law and family, and childhood as a barometer of gender, culture and political power. Pat Cadigans Synners examines a literary recasting of the relationship between nature, technology and what it means to be human in a postmodern moment, invoking problems of agency, difference and action. I teach therefore I am addresses the fraught politics of the academyboth its sexual politics and its professional politicsand in particular the ambivalent positions of lesbian teachers and lesbian students in institutions which both empower and disempower them.

Thus the essays presented here are wide-ranging in scope and very different in perspective and subject matter. However, their meeting points are at the borders delimiting the ethical, the political and the institutional. Borders between north and south, sex and gender, adulthood and childhood, lesbianism and heterosexuality, technology and natureand ultimately between debates and practices. But borders do not only demarcate separate territories: they also connect them.

Avtar Brah

Jayne O.Ifekwunigwe

Merl Storr

It has been brought to our attention that in the Summer 1995 issue of Feminist Review devoted to Ireland, one of the articles described Carol Coulter as a republican journalist.

Dr Coulter has been a staff journalist with The Irish Times for over ten years, working in Belfast and London as well as Dublin, and her professionalism and impartiality have never been questioned. She is also the author of a number of books and essays on questions relating to womens rights, feminism, nationalism and identity. She has never been associated in any way with any republican organization.

We apologize to Dr Coulter for any distress caused.

Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz

Gender, understood as the social construction of sex, is a key concept for feminists working at the interface of theory and policy. This article examines challenges to the concept which emerged from different groups at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 1995, an important arena for struggles over feminist public policies. The first half of the article explores contradictory uses of the concept in the field of gender and development. Viewpoints from some southern activist women at the NGO Forum of the Beijing Conference are presented. Some of them argued that the way gender has been deployed in development institutions has led to a depoliticization of the term, where feminist policy ambitions are sacrificed to the imperative of ease of institutionalization. Gender becomes a synonym for women, rather than a form of shorthand for gender difference and conflict and the project of transformation in gender relations. Gender sensitivity can be interpreted by nonfeminists as encouragement to use gender-disaggregated statistics for development planning, but without consideration of relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology, and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. A completely different attack on gender came from right-wing groups and was battled out over the text of the Platform for Action agreed at the official conference. Six months prior to the conference, conservative groups had tried to bracket for possible removal the term gender in this document, out of opposition to the notion of socially constructed, and hence mutable, gender identity. Conservative views on gender as the deconstruction of woman are discussed here. The article points out certain contradictions and inconsistencies in feminist thinking on gender which are raised by the conservative backlash attack on feminism and the term gender.