An International Feminist Challenge to Theory (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 5)

ADVANCES IN GENDER RESEARCH

VOLUME 5

AN INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO THEORY EDITED

BY

VASILIKIE DEMOS Division of the Social Sciences, University of Minnesota-Morris, USA

MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL Office of Academic Affairs, Indiana University Southeast, USA

2001

JAI An Imprint of Elsevier Science Amsterdam

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INTRODUCTION: AN INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO THEORY Vasilikie Demos and Marcia Texler Segal In 1.998 Research Committee 32, Women in Society, of the International Sociological Association (WISISA) and the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University invited a group of more than 30 scholars in sociology and closely aligned disciplines from 16 countries to spend the five days preceding the association's 14th congress at a pre-congress. The theme of the ISA congress was 'The Heritage of Sociology,' thus, the pre-congress was called 'Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology.' The participants examined and challenged sociological research and theory in the lights of recent advances in feminist theory, the varied perspectives of the economic north and south, and academic and action research agenda~. Rhoda Reddock, University of the West Indies, then WISISA chairperson, presided at the pre-congress, which was organized by Peta Tancred, McGill University and Gladys Symons, Simon Fraser University who were ably assisted by Blossom Shaffer, McGill University. Presentations at the pre-congress addressed five broad topics: Illuminating Theory, Defining Gender, Delineating the Natural/Social, Rethinking Development, and Strategizing for Feminist Living. In each session participants summarized their ideas briefly, discussion followed, and summaries were drawn up highlighting areas of consensus and controversy. The inadequacy of theoretical perspectives grounded primarily in the dualism and dichotomous thinking of the European Enlightenment emerged as one major theme. Another was how we conceptualize and label our central focus (sex?, gender?, women and men?)

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 1-10. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

VASILIKIE DEMOS AND MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL and how these labels relate to such diverse matters as biology, behavior, policy making, and social action. It quickly became apparent to the participants, as it will to readers of this volume, that the challenges feminist researchers and theorists pose to the status quo in communities and societies, and to the status quo in sociology and related disciplines, as well as to feminist theory and practice, are multiple. Our need is for grounded theory and concepts that inform and facilitate practice. The situations of women and men are too varied to be subsumed in a narrow and prematurely closed set of categories. Among the questions raised were: • are sex and/or gender meaningful categories or should we view individuals and society from a transgendered perspective? • particularly in research and planning related to economic and community development, should our focal point be women or gender? • should we view women and men as social classes or should we differentiate among women and men according to geography, economics or other attributes? • is it most productive to view biology as a given or as a social construct? • can there be a specifically feminist epistemology and, if so, can we develop one that is neither radically positivist nor radically relativist? As we reflected on our roles as feminists and scholars further questions surfaced: • are academic and action research compatible? • how can we resolve potential conflicts between political utility and intellectual integrity? • should our higher priority be effecting change or building theory? In the course of the pre-congress we learned to abandon ready generalizations about ourselves based on such attributes as seniority, nationality or prior friendship. We surmounted language barriers and culinary traditions and preferences. We learned about movements for social change and the state of feminist scholarship in each of our home and host countries. Ultimately, 29 of those to whom invitations were extended were able to share the immediate experience. Through this volume we now invite co-editor Vasilikie Demos and colleagues worldwide to enter into the discussion. The participants were invited to contribute papers based on their pre-congress presentations and the discussion that followed to this volume. Some were unable to do so owing to other commitments or because revisions of their presentations were already in press elsewhere. One paper we would have liked to include is 'Against epistemological chasms: The science question in feminism revisited' by Sylvia Walby (England). Walby's paper, however, had already been

Introduction

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accepted for publication in Signs by the time we contacted her. All the papers included here deal with the applicability of specific concepts or constructs to specific socio-cultural situations or criticize bodies of knowledge for not being inclusive. They offer a critique of Enlightenment/modernist theories and practice. In each instance, the writer assumes that empirical reality is broader than the theoretical frame within which it has been confined. The writers advocate dissolving physical and conceptual boundaries whether between the genders, the realms of biology and culture, the economic north and the economic south, the public and the private or the production and the application of knowledge. Still, some of the authors base their challenges to widely accepted constructs on culturally-specific data. Walby raises a more fundamental issue, that of the basis of knowledge. Her concern is that, in an attempt to reveal the inadequacy of prevailing theories for explaining the situations of women, feminist scholarship has become divided by epistemological chasms across which scholars argue for distinct partial knowledges and privilege the view of women based on their specificity rather than on 'rationality and systematic knowledge accumulation.' We would like to view the papers in this volume through Walby's epistemological lens asking whether the chasms here are more prominent than the efforts to cross them. Even without her paper, we can alert our contributors and our readers to the question. The European Enlightenment and the production of knowledge. In this volume feminist scholars from five different continents consider, critique and construct theories of society. Their papers reveal four interrelated themes. First, common to nearly all of the papers is an explicit or implicit acknowledgment of the European Enlightenment as a basis for the modern production of knowledge. In the introduction to her paper, 'Women redefining politics: between new challenges and old illusions,' Paola Melchiori (Italy) (p. 11) writes, •.. voices, coming from the margins of our world, remind us that the global Enlightenment message, linked to development, to the Western life style, just one among the others, has succeeded in asserting its distinctiveness in a timeless and spaceless Universalism that has proved to be a bad Universalism.

The contributors differ from one another in the extent to which they consider the European Enlightenment the all-powerful negative force Melchiori describes, but they are in relative agreement with the view that dichotomous or dualistic conceptions of reality are a critical consequence, particularly for women, of that social movement. In her paper, 'Theory incorporated,' Vicki Kirby (Australia) refers to such conceptualizations as 'binary' and maintains they represent 'insidious asymmetries.' Melchiori provides a partial list of these. She (p. 31) writes, " . . . the following list of binary configurations . . . are aligned through an organizing opposition of positive to negative, presence to lack;

VASILIKIE DEMOS AND MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL man/woman, culture/nature, one/other, mediate/immediate, reason/emotion, objective/subjective, white/black, enlightenment/ignorance, west/rest." Clearly the man/woman asymmetry is a critical one for feminist scholars. In this volume, the contributors explore this duality as it is embedded with other asymmetrical conceptualizations. The culture/nature dichotomy is of particular interest to Laura Corradi (Italy), Annemiek Richters (Netherlands), Abha Chauhan (India), and Gladys L. Symons (Canada). In, 'Feminism of color challenges white sociological theory and color-blind eco-feminism,' Corradi (p. 45) argues that the nature/culture dualism implicit in Western thought is unreflectively used by white eco-feminists in making unintended racist statements about social life. She says, "At times, what is 'natural' is not 'normal' from the point of view of white culture, social values and behaviors - and vice versa." Addressing the consequences of using white w o m e n ' s theory with its assumed nature/culture dichotomy for health care movements, Corradi (p. 45) maintains, At times, the word 'racist' has been used to define the agenda of (mostly white) breast cancer activists - not because of behaviors willinglymeant to exclude somebodya priori, but because of the systematic failure in addressing issues that are important among non-whites. In 'The biomedical digitalization of women's bodies and w o m e n ' s body politics in the context of globalization: challenges to women-and-health research,' Annemiek Richters, too, explores the nature/body dichotomy as it is connected to health. For Richters the nature/culture split is linked to the local/global dichotomy which, in turn, is linked to the analogue/digital split characteristic of the post modern world. As Richters surveys the literature she reads: woman is to nature as man is to culture; nature is to body as culture is to mind; body is to the local world as mind is to the global world; the local world is to the analogue world as the global world is to the digital world. Richters argues that the biomedical model of the body assumes all these critical splits and, thus, puts the body - particularly w o m a n ' s body - at risk. She (p. 67) writes, ... biomedicine as an integral part of our global digitalizing culture ... splinters bodily functioning into decontextualized, amoral signs and symptoms; into increasingly smaller measurable attributes, with the danger that we lose sight of the dynamic, multifarious and multiform relations which sustain life as well as jeopardize our humanity. In her paper, 'The nature/culture dualism in the Indian context,' Chauhan speaks of the insidious effect of this dualism as well as of others. She (p. 81) notes, 'Dualisms of all kinds have been opposed for their assumptions of unequal, colonial, patriarchal and hierarchichal relations.' Along with woman/man and nature/culture, Chauhan specifically considers the private/public dichotomy as it applies to the diversity of life in India.

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Chauhan (p. 81) argues that Western feminist scholars have used these dualities as 'oppositional' categories in their work and as a result overlook the complexity of social life. She does not recommend, however, that scholars refrain from using these dichotomies; rather, she (p. 81) argues that by focusing on the 'interrelatedness' of the categories, not their opposition, it is possible to grasp an understanding of all societies and to ' . . . fight the injustices and inequalities from within and outside the society from whatever boundary one may wish to define.' Melchiori takes up the private/public dichotomy and its consequence for w o m a n ' s body and citizenship. Using the examples of 'comfort women' in Japan during World War II and of Bosnian women during the 70s, 80s and 90s, she demonstrates how acts of violence against women previously seen as 'private' become 'public' and subject to court deliberations. Melchoiori shows the critical part the public link plays for women. In the context of the m o d e m nation-state, when an act is defined as 'public,' the assumption is that citizens' rights are involved and the state has the responsibility to protect those rights. In 'Postmodem feminism challenges organization theory,' Gladys L. Symons, focuses on three dichotomies. She considers the public/private dichotomy, and shows how this duality is related to the work/family, and more importantly, the rationality/emotionality dichotomy. Symons deconstructs organization theory and shows how the public/work/rationality nexus is embedded in such theory, thereby fostering in both theory and practice, masculine organizations. The utility of 'gender' as a concept. A second theme in this volume concerns the use of such basic terms as 'gender' and 'woman.' Barbara Marshall (Canada), Judith Lorber (United States) and I~da Chapoval (Brazil/Canada) explicitly address this concern. In 'Much ado about gender: a conceptual travelogue,' Marshall traces the history of the term, 'gender,' in academia and outside of it, and considers its usefulness in feminist analysis. Marshall reviews discussions pertaining to differences between the concepts, 'sex' and 'gender,' examines the shift from the use of the term, 'woman' and its variants to that of 'gender' in theories of development, discusses arguments about the term in feminism and considers its theoretical and practical utility. For Marshall, the term, 'gender' though problematic is useful. She (p. 111) states: If 'gender' is to have any theoretical or political purchase, then the tendency to conceptualize it categorically - as having some fixable referent - rather than as part of the process of constructing categories, must be resisted. The utility of any such concept is entirely pragmatic what does it allow us to do, or say, in terms of a given purpose, in a given time and place?

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A radical departure form Marshall's paper as well as those of others in the volume is Judith Lorber's, "It's the 21st century - do you know what gender you are?' Lorber argues that the concept 'gender' is outmoded. She provides

VASILIKIE DEMOS AND MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL a thorough discussion of the history of the term with particular emphasis on its instablity as well as the instability of related terms such as 'woman' and 'man.' Lorber maintains that feminists should engage in a movement to eliminate gender distinctions. At the same time, she adds a caveat. Noting that such a movement would not be universally appropriate, Lorber writes, 'A movement to eradicate gender divisions would not be a universally useful form of feminist politics. It would be most effective where women have achieved a high measure of equality.' Lorber's position, a privileged one, can be criticized not only for its focus on the western world, but for its overly idealistic and even premature conception of that world. At the same time, Lorber's paper challenges us to consider the extent to which gender is embedded in everyday life, to imagine a world where gender does not exist, and to ponder the possibility of constructing such a world. For Chapoval, too, the concept of 'gender' is problematic but for a very different reason from that articulated by Lorber. In her paper, "The devolution of 'women' as a category in development theorizing: is this an essential move?", Chapoval explains that the concept of 'women,' has been replaced by that of 'gender,' thus marginalizing third world women. She (p. 147) states, "By marginalizing or taking-for-granted the category of 'third world women', feminist theorists of development are directly or indirectly contributing to the reproduction of social practices negatively affecting the lives of third world women". Feminist theories of development. A third theme of this volume centers around problems and solutions in feminist theories of development. Explicitly with respect to this theme is an invidious split in feminism variously labelled the 'western/non-western' view or the 'North/South' view. As already noted, Chapoval maintains that a shift from the use of the term, 'women' to that of 'gender' results in erasing the visibility of women in the non-western world. While bringing these concepts back into theories of development may be irrelevant to Western feminism, Chapoval argues that "devolution" of the term 'women,' and in particular, 'third world women,' is "essential" to producing social change in many other parts of the world. For her these terms are critical in producing knowledge of women and development. In her paper, 'Rethinking development from a feminist perspective,' Ann Denis (Canada) (p. 151) takes her position as a 'Northern' scholar into account and asks two questions: " . . . (1) how does feminism question traditional approaches to development; (2) what would a feminist approach to development look like." Like Chapoval, Denis considers the problem of the invisibility of women in development, but in contrast to Chapoval, she expresses a pref-

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erence for the term 'gender' as opposed to the term, 'women.' For her the gender and development (GAD) model provides the most promising approach to the study of development. She (p. 154) writes, ... GAD shifts the focus of analysis from women to gender relations; in this holistic approach, since women do not exist in isolation, it is necessary to examine - and modify - the relations of oppression which they experience. In 'Sisters' keepers: economic organizing among informally employed women in Turkey,' Simel Esim (Turkey/United States) also addresses the concern about women's visibility as she considers the place of women's informal economic organizations in development. Esim observes that women throughout the world tend to be informally employed, and that such employment typically means their work is invisible, and consequently their needs and concerns are overlooked. She focuses on informal employment organizations in three urban settings, and argues that support of such organizations " . . . might prove to be valuable contributions to helping gain political and economic voice for urban women in the informal economy in Turkey." Janet Zollinger Giele's (United States) paper, 'In search of the good life: feminist correctives to modernization theory,' is a dramatic departure from those of Chapoval, Denis, Symons, and Esim. Like Denis, Giele takes into account her privileged position as a woman of the economic North, but rather than consider the development paradigms, that is, women and development theory or gender and development, she uses feminist insights she obtained from scholars of both the economic north and the economic south at the pre-congress in Montreal to critique and reconstruct modernization theory. Giele specifically considers issues of poverty, resources and environment. She concludes that "Once the limitations of modernity are recognized, the next steps are practical: fostering nurturant and integrative behavior, justice, and equality, especially in relation to minorities and outgroups - coming generations, people of different color, culture, and class, and the poor countries of the world." Feminism, Knowledge and Change. The fourth theme running through the papers concerns the place of feminism in producing knowledge and on-theground change. Each of the papers in the volume addresses this theme, but three, those of Lady Selma Ferreira Albernaz (Brazil), Helen Ralston (Australia/ Canada) and Deborah Harrison (Canada) are particularly relevant here. In her paper, 'Feminist nebulosa: theoretical approximations on the representations of feminism in Recife-Pe,' Lady Selma Ferreira Albernaz explores the popular as well as the educated conception of feminism in Brazil. She uses the term 'nebulosa' to characterize the vagueness with which feminism is defined. Albernaz notes, " . . . the acceptance of feminism translates a rereading

VASILIKIE DEMOS AND MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL of feminism that is confusing, making evident the opaqueness of the relations between feminism and society, exposed here through the notion of feminist nebulosa". Albernaz juxtaposes peoples' tendency to favor gender equality with their negative perception of feminism as a social movement - a not uncommon juxtaposition in other parts of the world including the United States. She observes that even among graduate students in the social sciences, there is a reluctance to identify oneself with feminism. She argues that this reluctance impedes actual changes towards gender equality, and that in order for fundamental changes to occur in society, it is necessary for people to identify themselves with and to participate in a feminist social movement. Individual belief in gender equality is not enough to bring about structural changes in society. In her paper, 'Being a White Australian-Canadian feminist doing research with South Asian women of color in the diaspora: crossing borders and boundaries, creating spaces, Helen Ralston begins by asking: What are the implications of feminist research and actions for a white Australian-Canadian doing research with South Asian 'women of color' in the diaspora? What does it mean for a researcher and for an immigrantwoman to cross borders and boundaries and create a new space for herself? Ralston, who has been researching women Of color in the diaspora for more than ten years, retraces her steps and provides an analysis of how her own background and experiences have intersected with her research. Using the insights of Dorothy Smith (1974, 1987, 1992), she explains that her research goal has been to take 'the standpoint of the immigrant woman'. Ralston recounts problems she faced and decisions she made in her attempt to cross boundaries of difference between the researched and herself, the researcher. Ralston does not provide objective conclusions drawn from her many research projects; rather, she ponders the subjective aspect of scientific research, and ends her paper as she begins it, by questioning the process of boundary crossing in the pursuit of feminist knowledge. In her paper, 'Can research, activism and feminism converge? Some notes on collaborative action-oriented inquiry,' Deborah Harrison, too, questions the process of obtaining knowledge in asking the question, 'does collaborative action-oriented research enable research and action to converge?' Harrison considers the divide between academics and community practitioners with respect to feminism, recounts the boundaries that must be crossed by the two groups in conducting collaborative action-oriented research, and affirms the place of process in crossing such boundaries. Harrison writes, 'The glue that is the byproduct of valuing process counteracts the inevitable tensions that arise during the time that academic and community members of the team

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spend learning to compromise with one another and to transcend their differences.' Like Albernaz, Harrison grapples with the idea of feminism as a movement to bring about change, and examines the question: 'is collaborative actionoriented research feminist?' In contrast to Albernaz who focuses on the importance of feminist self-identity in bringing about social change, Harrison argues that not all collaborative action-oriented researchers need be feminists in order to bring about feminist social change. She states, ' . . . the world we live in is not feminist, and the world is the context in which much of our research must make its way. Research centers need to negotiate with many aspects of this world if they wish to survive.' The following scholars participated in the 1998 Research Committee 32, Women in Society, of the International Sociological Association (WISISA)/ Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill University pre-congress. References to the work of any of the participants are indicated by asterisks (*) whenever they occur in the papers in this volume. Rahab Abdulhadi (Palestine/United States, currently Egypt) Lady Selma Ferreira Albernaz (Brazil) Catherine White Berheide (United States) IIda Chapoval (Brazil/Canada) Abha Chanhan (India) Linda Christiansen-Ruffman (Canada) Dilek Cindoglu (Turkey) Laura Corradi (Italy) Ann Denis (Canada) Dennis Erasga (Philippines) Simel Esim (Turkey/United States) Janet Zollinger Giele (United States) Deborah Ann Harrison (Canada) D. Jayalakshmi (India) Vicky Kirby (Australia) Judith Lorber (United States) Barbara Marshall (Canada) Paola Melchiori (Italy) Angela Miles (Canada) Helen Ralston (Australia/Canada) Rhoda Reddock (Trinidad and Tabago) Annemick Richters (Netherlands) Marcia Texler Segal (United States)

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VASILIKIE DEMOS AND MARCIA TEXLER SEGAL Patricia Simpson (Canada) Sinith Sitthiraksa (Thailand) Gopika Solanki (India) Gladys Symons (Canada) Peta Tancred (Canada) Sylvia W a l b y (England)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors wish to thank Teresa Andrews for handling all those crucial clerical matters without which this volume would never have been published and Martha Garcia for her usual meticulous and insightful assistance with the index.

REFERENCES Smith, D. E. (1974). Women's perspective as a radical critique of sociology. Sociological Inquby, 44, 7-13. Smith, D. E. (1983). The everyday worm as problematic: a feminist sociology. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (1992). Sociology from women's experience: a reaffirmation. Sociological Theory, 10(1), 88-98. Walby, S. (2001). Against epistemological chasms: The science question in feminism revisited. Signs, 26(2), 485-511.

WOMEN REDEFINING POLITICS" BETWEEN NEW CHALLENGES AND OLD ILLUSIONS Paola Melchiori

INTRODUCTION We have witnessed over the last two decades the emerging, among women, of what we can call "research for a full presence in the world." In recent years women have confronted their perspectives, their analytical frames, and their political tools, they tested their strengths and weaknesses in the private and public spaces that define the organisation of our material and conceptual world. The debate between Northern and Southern women gave further evidence to the fact that the main categories at the foundations of our political world and our possibilities of understanding the world are being dismantled. Different voices question the tenets of our conceptual world: nation]state; human/individual/collective rights; citizenship; democracy. These voices, coming from the margins of our world, remind us that the global Enlightenment message, linked to development, to the Western life style, just one among the others, has succeeded in asserting its distinctiveness in a timeless and spaceless Universalism that has proved to be a bad Universalism. "These voices tell us that the Enlightenment project, with all its good intentions and ideals of universal emancipation, has turned into a project of domination of the whole world" (Genovese, 1995: 34).

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 11-23. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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Women's specificity, known under many forms, with different degrees and at different times during the 1970s and '80s had to combine the conceptual challenges regarding women's issues with this emerging framework, which has imposed an accelerated assessment of consistency and autonomy. Women's political practice, researching 'full membership,' an extension of the borders of citizenship, led to reconception. Women asked, in the beginning, to be included in development and the 'universal rights project.' What happened is that, instead, analysing the reasons for the obstacles that opposed their inclusion, women shed light on some of the main aspects and contradictions of the notions that are the basis of the development and universal rights project. They had to question the fundamental 'critical silences' in its conceptual frame. They had to rethink the 'common-place' that delineates politics, and the 'plurality in common' based on conflictual differences, which is the dream of politics and democracy. It was a work that started to redesign the meaning, the spaces, of politics and the basic concepts that constitute the democratic conceptual frame. (Prezzo, 1996). Women's issues and women's presence have now achieved a visibility that enables comparisons and evaluations of the quality of this political presence. The question in this paper is: Is this work of discovery of new territories of knowledge and politics still going on or are we caught in the organisation of a presence in the world that is not able to change the rules of its functioning? Considering the quality of contemporary policy making which tends to even out all the needs for deep change by reducing them to the market rules, it is essential for us to trace back, maintain and explore the continuity of the key words which were at the core of our politics. This will allow us to point out consistency, implications and contradictions. It will allow us to identify what has been left, in women's public visibility, of the radical questions we were asking of civilisation, of the world, of men.

A STEP BACK IN THE SEVENTIES To fully understand what I mean for a radical critique of politics I need to go back to the early 1970s, when most of women's inventions took place. I have to recall here that what nurtured women's presence and thinking in many public spaces, even very official ones such as the United Nations Conferences, was the creative social practices of many small groups, born during the seventies, their particular form of knowledge production, the rules of their democratic game, continuities and ruptures they fostered in relation to political and women's tradition. I want to describe some examples of women's practices that are significant in this perspective of a redefinition of political spaces and of some of its basic concepts.

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IMPLICATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING FOR A REDEFINITION OF POLITICS In the 1970s women's practices of consciousness-raising spread around the world as a contagious disease. There were no militants, no distribution of leaflets, no parties, and no efforts to proselytise. Feminism 'caught on' through the reciprocal acknowledgement of the different experiences of individuals. Paradoxically, information spread out not on the basis of generalisations, which would have left out the peculiarity of each single experience. Its diffusion was almost spontaneous: it began in underground groups that were not visible in the social structure, and in absolutely anomalous forms. The perception of its strengths, inside and outside, reached its peak in this phase when women, exploring patriarchy, developed, at the same time, a critique of all forms of established power deriving from patriarchy, at all levels, in the social, political and intellectual scene and shed light on their own deep implication within that scene. In subsequent migrations, autochthonous and autonomous rebirths, 'feminism' developed and split up into many 'feminisms,' which then transformed and reinvented themselves as they interacted with their different contexts. Women's specificity became recognised in its many forms. As well, consciousness-raising had a kind of universality, albeit different from the one we know as the 'enlightenment project', now collapsing on itself in both its. liberal and Marxist versions. In the many regions of the world, women experienced an undeniable change when they addressed the 'female question', and reconceived themselves within it as women acting in the world: as autonomous subjects and not objects. Through local and global women's movements, women and women's issues gained political visibility. There is no place on earth that has not been infected by this force that allows women to take into consideration their lives and their place in history in a different way. The women's political practice that was behind that 'infection' was consciousness-raising. We should not forget the spaces that practice came from: it came from the bodies and the private rooms, the dreams and the hysterical 'words' that could not be pronounced in any language. It came from the spaces of physical and moral violence against women, families, spaces where it is difficult to separate love and care from violence, and spaces exiled from politics as well as essential to its existence. It was a practice whose truths and whose questions lay in that 'liminal' threshold where private and political is still obscurely confused: a different positioning of the public and the private. Its space can be called the space of biopolitics (Agamben, 1995). I am not sure we knew how deep the implications of that intellectual work of deconstruction were. It is at that level that our practices have been more

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significant, enlightening and questioning of the whole organisation of life, the threshold from natural life to social life. Paradoxically that practice was felt as frightening and powerful, but far from the ambiguities of the 'empowerment' definitions. This is perhaps the main reason for both the power and the 'relative failure' of these practices, for the strange contradiction between their effectiveness and their capacity to disappear in the shade. Today we are in a different stage. But before (or together with) climbing Parliaments and Ministries and quotas, and seeing that nothing changes, we should not forget our inventions and their spaces. These hidden places of history are as much imbedded in as excluded from the polis. They constitute the social fabric without being recognisable as such. We should not forget the core of that practice: it questioned the attribution of power, sovereignty, authority, the ways decisions are taken, priorities settled, and representation and delegation stated - that is, the whole set of democratic frame. FEMINIST

PRODUCTION

OF KNOWLEDGE

Another memory to focus on is the kind of production of knowledge that was at stake in those practices. The 1970s were a time of extraordinary cultural, social and political experimentation. One of the central traits of this time was the renewed tie formed among social processes, political action and different forms of cultural analysis and knowledge. The underlying hypothesis for experimentation was that political action was a way to understand reality. In this vision, learning and the theories explaining the formation of knowledge meant taking a political stand, and thus abandoning any attempt at neutrality. The most significant goal both for feminism and other social movements was to prevent a split between politics and intellect, academia and activism, praxis and theory. Several structures and forms of knowledge were experimented with in an attempt to reach this goal. Traditional divisions of labour into manual, intellectual, and sexual, and old dichotomies used to describe reality - such as nature-culture, body-mind, feminine-masculine, and biology-history - were questioned. The traditional language of politics was also put into question. Feminism in Italy played a central role in this questioning. Nonetheless, the struggle to overcome these divisions was - initially - not particular to feminism, but part of a social-political culture that was concerned with its own dissemination and the interplay between theory and practice. Political action always raised theoretical questions and speculation always led to social and political activism. Feminism grew in this fertile ground; it was both a product of the 1968 revolution and an attempt to go beyond it. Its primary concern was to spread its influence throughout the social fabric rather than accumulate knowledge.

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New forms of political analysis and action emerged. The analysis of the sexual identity and the analysis of the world were carried on together, with a focus on questioning identity, subjectivity, sexual differences, forms of female symbolization, and sublimation. In their analytical work, women collectively employed and reinterpreted culture and knowledge from a great range of perspectives, widely. Women's studies in Italy never developed in the same way as in North America. The concept of women's studies as an academic subject did not arise in those years and hence, the attempt to carve a niche for women studies in academia was never even discussed. It was taken for granted that really rigorous and creative knowledge was being produced elsewhere, using many interdisciplinary approaches to reflect the complexity of reality. Individual researchers attempted to bring the fruit of independent and alternative experiences into academia. Such contributions always sprang from small, autonomous groups, made of women from a variety of cultural, professional, and academic backgrounds. Even psychoanalysis (in its Freudian rather than Lacanian incarnation, with its focus on the pre-Oedipal phase) was approached with a political goal: that of analyzing both traditional and women's groups' power structures. The central point in women's quest was/is related to the purpose of cultural activity in the formation of female subjectivity. Women from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds joined forces to carry out this exploration. The challenge was to fuse the research on women's forms of knowledge with the political practice of bringing together women from a wide array of cultures and hierarchical positions. The comparison of their diversity was carried out both in terms of the variety of women's academic passions and in terms of where in a hierarchical scale such passions fit. Women questioned their own love for academic subjects, weary of the misogynist components of culture. Women asked themselves to what extent culture caused a departure from their own experiences. Culture was questioned from the point of view of people's real-life experiences, and from the point of view of 'lower cultures.' The relationship between life and opus, scientific or literary writing and private writing was also explored. Women speculated that the acts of teaching to and learning by women reawakened ancient mores that had been buried deep inside memory. In order to better explain what women wanted to articulate in the classes, I want to refer to Evelyn Fox Keller's (1985) work on the language of science. Fox Keller identified the basic metaphors with which science explains reality through examining the diaries and private images of scientists. Through her work, Fox Keller was also able to illuminate the core questions scientists were attempting to answer with their research. Emerging from her analysis are

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scientists' underlying motives. She discovered their drive for knowledge was tied to the drive for power over the female body. The female body was seen as something 'to be penetrated in order to reveal its innermost secrets,' something to 'comprehend and embrace,' something to be fully unveiled and investigated. She recounts the story of Barbara MacClintock, the eccentric biologist who first identified the DNA structure and whose discoveries were dismissed by the establishment due to her unusual visualization of scientific concepts. Fox Keller argues that women who are engaged in scientific thought walk along a fine line between self-recognition and alienation. In order to really accept and fully appropriate any language, 'one must share its fundamental metaphors.' If a woman's self is represented as 'inert matter,' 'blind and passive nature,' then as soon as she starts producing knowledge, she must accept an immediate and total devaluation of her gender identity. Women may try to live in a state of self-alienation, constantly deluding their own identity, but at what price? The alternative is to draw the line, somewhere . . . Our work with uneducated women basically confirmed Fox Keller's theories. It seemed to us that women instinctively reacted to the female images secretly carried inside any tradition. And that through the analysis of women's idiosyncrasies expressed toward academic subjects, it was possible to unearth cultural artifacts buried deep inside the history of knowledge. Participants were called in to be observers and to gather together all the discoveries being made about women's knowledge. The observers' task was to record and analyze all the 'symptoms' of uneasiness, restlessness, or excitement surfacing during class activities. This kind of observation amounted to the extension of self-consciousness to the realm of intellectual analysis. The reenactment of the mythical relation between man and woman leading to the foundation of everyday processes of knowledge were staged right in front of the observers' eyes. It also seemed that, just as in consciousness-raising groups, the absence of the male body allowed women to experience the lingering power of a 'ghostly' male presence, so that the knowledge 'filtered' through women did not eliminate the male imprint left on knowledge. Knowledge mediated by women actually made the male imprint even more evident. This awareness led to the study of the operative modes of knowledge, rather than 'women's studies.' Such modes were steeped in masculinity, female passivity, and misogyny. It was a misogyny that women sometimes could not even detect, perpetuating it in the very act of carrying out 'women's studies' about their own gender. We felt as if were watching women's history of knowledge unfold in slow motion in front of us: its blossoming, closures, initiations, the price of its success, and the reasons for its failures.

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We were looking for new criteria for redefinition of knowledge, in a manner more creative, in my opinion, than the subsequent flood of gender into every discipline. I am not going to develop here the reasons for this thinking. I just want to present an example of what I mean for creative and critical women's thinking: a critical thinking that cuts disciplines and the borders between academy and life, thoughts and perceived emotions, that redefines knowledge and its politics.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND PUBLIC HEARINGS: THE COURTS OF WOMEN But today, where are these challenging women's political and conceptual practices? In the collective book edited by Linda Christiansen-Ruffmann* (1998), The global Feminist Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge, I analyse The Asian Women Human Rights Council (AWHRC) initiatives as another one of these scattered practices, a radical women's practice that influenced Cairo and Vienna UN Conference on Human Rights. They contributed to change the official documents ('women rights are human rights'; 'women right to selfdetermination in relation to reproductive choices') but also the radical questioning of the Human Rights conceptual frame (Melchiori, 1998: 91-104). The AWHRC together with other locally based groups organised a series of public hearings on violence that are held before a 'Court of Women'. The phrase 'public heating' implies a space where voices traditionally hidden in the private sphere (in particular with respect to sexual crimes) can be listened to in public. The 'Court of Women' alludes to the fact that this public hearing on justice issues implies the need to revise its concept and the paradigms that form the basis of legal corpus. These public hearings are based on the evidence that violence nowadays strikes women particularly and on the idea that violence against women reveals the most obscure roots of any violence. The public hearings have taken into consideration different types of private violence in the North and in the South of the world. This analysis of violence tries to understand the reasons for the growing sexual abuse in the context of globalisation, of new economic policies and quick processes of modernisation. The forms of this violence can be different in the rich societies of the North and in the poor countries of the South: domestic violence, intimate homicide, sexual traffic in the North; infanticide of baby girls, death for dowry, sexual trade and genital mutilation in the South. But the increase and the meaning of this violence have the same intensity. Through the voices of victims, 'women of law', artists, inventors of ways of survival and resistance, both individual and collective, violence against women

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enters the public space. That violence has in every culture always been considered as part of the private world and, as such, outside law and even outside the possibility of being named. These voices, heard collectively in a public arena, cast a different light on civilisation and give women a new way of conceptualising what has happened to them. The first voice was that of the "comfort women" of the Japanese army (see, e.g. AWHRC, 1994; 1997) who, during the Second World War, used to kidnap young women in Asia to 'serve' the soldiers. After the war many of these women who "served" as prostitutes for the army were killed; others were sent back to their home countries. For reasons of the "honour" of their families, however, many of this former "comfort women" ended up hiding for the rest of their lives. Only one of them bore witness in the 'Court of women' on what had happened to her during the war. After this, other women decided to break silence, to give evidence about this side of war. The effect produced has been huge. Like a chain effect, it has allowed other women to talk; it has focused attention on similar atrocities at other sites, such as the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia war; it has reopened the search for the links between prostitution and war, between the structure of civil society and military institutions. These courts show also the contradiction within a notion of democracy and citizenship based on individual rights and on gender blindness. They question the relationship between individual and collective rights, between universal and women rights. The given links between land, nation-state, individual and collective rights are today broken. The neutral subject of Enlightenment who conceived the corpus of Human Rights doesn't exist anymore. It is significant that in emergency times the 'last call' is to basic 'humanitarian laws', as if these last ones could be separated by the rest of the conceptual frame that defines human rights. We are left with a whole body of concepts which have to do with a concept of 'human life' reduced to its minimal aspects, a 'naked life', an almost natural life, where women do not exist. These hearings, therefore, radically challenge the legal conceptual framework, in the same way, as did the idea that "women's rights are human rights", adopted in 1993 at the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. The 'Courts of women' deal mainly from those women's rights that are connected with sexuality. They start first of all to foster demands to revise legislation and international conventions. The international convention in Geneva, for example, still does not acknowledge the right to asylum for victims of sexual crimes, genital mutilations, slavery, ethnic or war rape and similar acts. Secondly, these hearings take advantage of the problems that this 'extension' creates from a legal point of view in order to question the conceptual presuppositions and the

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internal logic that exclude women. Women have never been either subjects or interlocutors in the 'original brotherly agreement' from which laws originates. Women remind us that the Aristotelian foundations of this 'corpus' are still the same: the distinction -- opposition between pure life - existence, pertaining to nature, of which women are the symbol, and the political life, reinvented by men in an act of self-recreation to 'jump out' from limitations that nature imposes: time, birth, death. It is a triple re-configuration among different kinds of knowledge, among voices that come from different social and cultural places: between the personal and the political spheres, between the public and the private spheres and between the history of single individuals and macro-history.

WOMEN ACROSS BORDERS Another 'living practice' of redefining politics was crossing the ethnic and political divide. Women in war, mostly Women in Black, made numerous attempts not to be swallowed by nationalism and loyalty to their land as a priority against loyalty to their gender. During wars in former Yugoslavia we witnessed the great endeavour of women who tried to work together although belonging to nations at war, trying to deal with their conflictual position. The fact that such different women could meet and tell their own stories, about their experience of conflict, about ways in which they saw themselves as members of a nation, of a land, allowed a redefinition of the very deep meaning of belonging to a nationality for an individual. We could call this practice a consciousness-raising on 'loyalties and belongings.' Every single woman, when re-defining the enemy/rival, had to take a stand with regard to her own society, often disclosing first of all the invisible violence that hides in a society and the ties that hold it up and hold her up. The understanding of those ties can explain to us why in war times women become so visible in the public arena and why they are swept away as soon as peace comes in. Or why the 'natural violence' of wartime has increased to a point to transform women into potential victims as symbols of a whole nation. From women who experienced the different wars in former Yugoslavia, new ways of reading, imagining and dealing with the ties with their 'motherland', with peace and war, have come out, beginning from their daily lives where peace and war start and end. A particular way of looking at the surrounding world allows us to focus differently on things; a particular way of reading oneself and reality can change the direction of interventions and can change the definition of "concrete" or practical priorities. The focus on dynamics of private violence in peace times changes, for example, the definitions of peace and war.

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A N D N O W .9 These years have not been easy. We have had to loose any illusion of possible collective identities, or global visions toward a common world for women. In our northern societies women's access to political society has not been able to produce really significant changes. It is not a problem of insufficient critical mass. On one-hand women who have gained 'citizenship' and representation in politics or in their job have experienced continuous attempts of marginalisation, or pure feminisation, or continuous distortions of their words or gestures as female support or care-giving actions to political parties or systems undergoing some difficulty. They have found a mixture of segregation and co-optation, the 'glass ceiling', and a strong contraposition between public achievements and intangible private patriarchal attitudes. The critical mass seems never to be sufficient. On the other hand they have not been able themselves to change 'the rules of the games,' in politics or in knowledge. The collective silence of women during the war in Kossovo was, in my opinion, a terrible indicator in this sense. Perhaps only in the private life have many 'rules of the games' substantially changed. But the situation is more complicated and somehow paradoxical. Women are today more aware of the cruciality of their position, of the importance of their contribution to economy, of their roles in society, of their work, both material and social. Unfortunately this awareness is not enough to change the structures of social imagination. Moreover this awareness occurs in the same time when women as a flexible variable in economy and society are most needed. A global restructuring in the organisation of patriarchy is going on based on the paradox which tries to include new awareness of women but not to touch old and ancestral balances in personal and public organisation of life and society. The global restructuring of capitalism calls for the need of a complete women's availability and flexibility. Male desperation in a universe without a future asks them for the same. Women are asked both by rulers of the economic world and by its victims, for quite opposite reasons, the same thing: to increase their availability, their material and mental work as well as their 'shock absorption' function at social and symbolic levels. In a world that is perceived as futureless they are asked to 'confirm' a staggering order: an ever more violent new order and an ever more threatened ancient order. Hence, their stepping out by their own autonomous initiative and because of their own personal reasons, from the role which has been apportioned to them is seen as an unacceptable attempt to shirk their duty, thus disrupting society's traditional shock-absorbing mechanisms.

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War is therefore waged against even those simple movements that advocate a change in position, which is likely, though, to disrupt the whole structure. It is a reaction against what women represent, even by their mere presence: namely, that their 'flexibility,' their social use value is not 'given by nature.' Everything seems to change but, as the last work of Pierre Bourdieu, 'La domination masculine,' (1999) has underlined, the fundamental importance of the submission of women continues to be a must and a need for male society, both in a 'primitive' society as the Berbers of the mountains of Morocco and in a post-moderu society like the United States. Levi Strauss told us, sometime ago, that women's bodies are tokens, carriers and not values in themselves This function of 'empty significant' reproduces women's original role: 'a general exchange coin,' the occult and concealed basis of the social bond (Levi Strauss, 1969). Women's bodies continue to be charged with imaginary meanings, rooted in a deep unconscious structure of people and society. This imagery works outside the control of intelligence, rationality and will. Women in an untouched patriarchy, are symbols of a deeper order, whose disorder threatens the basis of civilisation. We have so far underestimated the level of violence that the attempt to touch these balances can develop both in social and personal settings. The increase in violence towards or against women, both in the North and in the South of the world, shows its significance. Within different contexts, at different levels and under different forms, be it either the rules and regulations of procreation or sexuality in relation to reproductive technologies, or women's bodies during different wars, women's bodies continue to be used as tools for men's communication: carriers of messages among different ethnical groups, bodies to be controlled. There is a renewed attack conducted by all religions against women reproductive choices, the absolute need to control women's choices on their bodies, expressed not only by religious people but by themost laic scientists and politicians, in the name of civilisation and moral values. The need to exploit women as a last resource is added to the ancestral resistance against the recognition of women as equal partners. The present 'normal' degree of social violence is also nourished by this violence which further exacerbates the opposition against women's autonomy, whatever meaning is attached to this word. We should therefore ever more seriously tackle both the emergence of a new awareness and evidence 'of women' and 'on women' which seems to be 'progressive' for mankind as a whole and at the same time, the increase of an ancient violence that comes both from the world that has declared itself as bearer of civilisation and from its opponents.

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If on one hand extremely modern figures emerge, such as cyborgs, a step backward into prehistory is made in these aspects of social life. A hidden umbilical cord links the fragmented core of modernity to a new surge of 'barbarism.' Not enough has changed in this very material 'theatre of imagination.' We also have some responsibilities. It is also our weakness if the thorough analysis of the concealed structures of sexuality and of primeval relations, which lie at the junction of the private and public spheres, where 'barbarism' and 'civilisation' are still confused, was too quickly abandoned as a central issue in our work. As violence against women shows us, these issues are still the only ones able to cross extremely different cultural borders. Consciousnessraising practices, their particular form of knowledge and political approach were considered by men, as a creative social practice of small groups, a classic product of civil society; by women an early stage preluding to a true politicalpublic presence - entry into parliaments and public scenarios. We were not able to give to our own invented ways of doing politics, sufficient strength to impose them as forms of new politics, as the beginning of a different way of imagining-building the 'polis', the 'political society', with all its implication toward the fundamental paradigms of knowledge and politics. AS A CONCLUSION The present historical events push us to rethink globally the issue of political space in a perspective able to re-conceptualise the relationship between political space and the "natural existence" of human beings. It pushes us to show and question the hidden passages from nature to civilisation, from natural life to political existence and to re-focus the hidden aspects of the brothers pact that is at the foundations of our societies. We are now going through one of those times in history when the normal eourse of events discloses the hidden structures of society. This crisis is characterised by the collapse and by the reinforcement of patriarchy at the same time. The challenge of these times is to understand the deep mechanisms charactefising the global crisis and to collaborate in a civil solution without becoming trapped in the old roles of rescuing society within a very traditional imaginary of good mothers looking for peace and care only; and/or of true politicians able to deal with the rules of the public world. The creative women's practices described above disclose future directions and bases for women's knowledge and politics, opening a path to the redefinition of the political spaces of our times. They define a whole new set of questions, reminding us of the need for new conceptualisations. Despite all the difficult changes we have made in our lives and in the world, we have too often

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accepted rules, mediated desires, and accepted hierarchies of men in deciding what was important and what not. F r o m these uncertain borders, w o m e n ' s lives remind us of what the human species has not yet figured out in a civil way. In these new spaces we can think through the meanings of birth, procreation, sexuality, survival relationships, and the link of such experiences with the original structure taken by the 'polis'. Only from there can we imagine the future. Only from these personal, public, intellectual, common, bodily and embodied spaces, women from different cultures and situations may map their intertwining worlds and, in so doing, conceive of and create a new politics.

REFERENCES Agamben, G. (1995). Homo sacer. II potere e la nuda vim. Torino: Einaudi. Bourdieu, P. (1999). La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil. Christiansen-Ruffmann, L. (Ed.) (1998). The Global Feminst Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge. Madrid: The International Sociological Association. Fox Keller, E. (1985). Reflections on Gender and science. New Haven and London:Yale University Press. Genovese, R. (1995). La tribl) occidentale. Milano:Bollati Boringhieri. Levi-Strauss (1969). Le strutture elementari della parentela. Milano: Feltrinelli. Melchiori, P. (1994). CrinaIi. Le zone oscure delfemminismo. Milano: La Tartarnga. Prezzo, R. (1996). L'origine eterogenea. Lapis, 31, 3-6. Kumar, C. (1995). South Wind. On the Universality of Human Rights Discourse. In: C. Kumar (Ed.), Sacred Mountains Everywhere. Essays on the Violence of Universalisms (pp. 236-273). Bangalore: Streelekha. Asian Women's Rights Council and Vimochana (1995). In the Court of Women. The Public Hearings. India.

THEORY INCORPORATED Vicki Kirby

INTRODUCTION My original conference presentation addressed a particular subject that several of my seminar colleagues also circled around in either explicit or indirect terms, namely, how do we delineate Nature from the social. 1 An elaboration of this deceptively simple question must address the political implications of instantiating a division between an inherited substrate of forces whose determinations are regarded as natural or given (in other words, those forces that can't be changed by human agency), and a domain of qualitatively different energies whose plastic invention underscores their mutability. It is this latter space, a space where the effects of human ethical and political interaction and intervention are in evidence, that we regard as the social, or the domain of Culture. The itinerary of my intellectual curiosity over the years has fastened upon various manifestations of this division between Nature and Culture, and its challenge and complexity are arguably one of the most important and enduring within feminist analytical work. Indeed, one of feminism's defining motivations has been the sustained, interrogation of the division's gendered and engendering logic, with special attention falling upon the conflation of woman with 'the other,' 'Nature,' and 'the origin.' In this paper I want to briefly outline some of the reasons why the question of Nature has been of such importance and why current theorizations of the problematic, especially those configured around corporeal considerations, are routinely somatophobic. I will argue that the ramifications of this for the empirical sciences are considerable.

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 25-39. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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Perhaps I should say at the outset, however, that this is a difficult argument to mount. The problem, quite simply, is that I ' m trying to start a serious conversation between two modes of research that are currently disaffected. I'll be drawing on insights from deconstructive criticism and feminist poststructuralism while at the same time making positive acknowledgment of the fierce resistance to such theory in the empirical sciences. In the latter case, there is a tenacious insistence that data and evidence assume a different status to that of a generalized literature. And in the former, there is a tendency to dismiss the objections of empirical researchers because, in the main, they fall outside the accepted discursive and conceptual sophistications of such criticism. In the space allowed me here I will attempt to outline the shape of this dilemma and gesture towards possible areas of attention that might complicate and confuse its oppositional character.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS NATURE, OR WAS

IT CULTURE?

There has been cautionary, if not direct opposition to the explanatory and prescriptive power that is ceded to beginnings, especially to that origin of origins, Nature. This is clearly witnessed in Simone de Beanvoir's now infamous challenge to such forms of thinking - 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a w o m a n . . , this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch.' (1953: 273) Beauvoir's provocation came in the suggestion that if the supposed permanence of Nature can be shown to be a political and cultural determination with tractable parameters, then there is nothing very natural about the nature of woman. However, when Beauvoir unhinged woman's identity from the determining dictates of biological explanation, the extent of her intervention did more than simply problematize the automatic confiation of woman with Nature, the body, the sex, and so on. If woman's identity could not be essentialized, and if it was indeed open to vigorous interrogation and contest, then the identity of Nature itself was by implication also subject to violent redefinition. 2 It is worth reiterating why the question of Nature is a vexed one and why feminism's political raison d'etre remains tied to it in interesting ways. In sum, causal modes of reasoning that attribute explanatory force to an origin, in this case to the determining inheritance of Nature's biological lessons, inform that origin with a powerful prescriptive capacity. And it is in this tendency to explain injustice as the necessary, if unfortunate result of immutable and fundamental laws that exploitation is justified and political complacency institutionalized. Quite simply, if the scales are tipped against people by a set of variables that appear to be naturally ordained (a secular re-articulation of 'God's will be

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done'), then the reason why we might assume ethical and social responsibility for the less fortunate, although not entirely compromised, is significantly attenuated. As a consequence, whatever presents itself as an explanatory cause or foundational ground of inequality will remain an enduring and necessary site of political debate, and the myriad arguments that conflate biology with destiny will continue to attract concerted attention) Feminism has maintained focussed vigilance against biological essentialism, arguing that the identities of both men and women are inherently unstable because they are political assignments, historical and cultural valuations that can be questioned and thereby transformed. In the 1970s in particular, the two disciplines that provided the empirical evidence that things were significantly different in other times and in other places were anthropology and history. The sheer variety of gender roles and sexualities, the different divisions of labor, the many social arrangements that could reasonably be described as a family, the seemingly arbitrary determinations of race and ethnicity in different locations - such fluidity across space and time justified the conclusion that gender was mutable and could therefore be questioned and changed. Hence, when second wave feminism emerged as a significant political force its interventionary zeal relied upon empirical evidence to justify its interpretive assault upon patriarchal ideology. It was comparative evidence from the social sciences that was able to erode conservative posturings about the universality of social roles and behaviors, thus providing an important data base for the Women's Movement and for other struggles for equity. Importantly, the almost automatic rejection of any appeal to the category Nature, especially in the form of biology, was enabled by the insight that inasmuch as politics are reproduced within cultural regimes of signification, then political contestation is required at the level of representation itself. RETHINKING

REPRESENTATIONAL

POLITICS

This shift in perspective regarding the definition of 'the political,' especially after the failures of 1968 that saw a significant change in the evaluation of activist strategies, was encouraged by a growing appreciation that language and representation were more than transparent vehicles of meaning. 4 In other words, it was not just the content of an argument that mattered but also the form of its representation, or mediation. Indeed, the distinction between form and content became increasingly blurred as the complex process of mediation attracted critical interest. It seemed that within the very structuration or grain of representation a complicated political economy was at work, and one whose logic was inseparable from more conventional articulations of power. 5 Building

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on this insight, the poststructuralist/postmodern assault upon Althusserian Marxism and liberal frames of analysis alike, discovered an insidious masculinism and racism within an enlightenment politics of revelation and correction. Ironically, it appeared that the narrative form itself, with its sense of movement towards resolution, was driven by a notion of ofiginary deficiency (simplicity) that progress (complexity) both identified and remedied. For example, ignorance, darkness and simple-mindedness become synonyms in the white light of reason. The racism in this logic is especially apparent. However there is also an accompanying denigration of 'the feminine' (woman) that allows 'the man of reason' to identify himself as the knowing subject. 6 The genetic economy of these interrelated logics motor all emancipatory and progressivist narratives, even feminism, because reason dictates that an argument's rationality, its intelligibility or 'will to know' and make sense, will inevitably transcend or supercede an emasculated (and therefore feminized) 'othemess.' The difficulty however is that even poststructuralist and postmodern discourses fall prey to their own critique here, because an effective intervention against another argument will conventionally adopt an opposifional posture of correction. There is simply no escape from this, because the dream of escape, with its implied break from a negative situation that it presumes to resolve and surpass, simply repeats the Hegelian dialectic of sublimating difference. In a very early consideration of this bind, Jacques Derrida notes that even the most carefully rigorous thinkers 'are trapped in a kind of circle.': It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language - no syntax and no lexicon - which is foreign to this [phallocentric and logocentric] history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest (1978: 280). 7

However, this apparent recuperation of the problem need not signal resigned despair, for as I will try to explain in the following argument, it is only by thinking through the nature of this bind that the bind of Nature can be rearticulated. In other words, an inability to free ourselves does not have to mean that we are prisoners of the past and doomed to repeat its sins with unwitting zeal. Rather, the fact that things change and critique emerges from within what we might have thought were entirely repressive discourses and logics, suggests that the economy and architecture of their production are neither coherent nor predictable. In short, a constraint from one perspective is an enabling opportunity from another. It is important to note here that this uneasy insight into the complicitous nature of discursive economies and the disappointments of emancipatory

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rhetoric did not arise as a form of conservative opposition to feminist and other radical successes in activist struggles, as if to reify abstract and esoteric agendas over the pragmatic necessity for social change) On the contrary, it was colonial as well as women writers and activists who became disenchanted with promises of progress and equity. In a bid to explain the shortcomings of the enlightenment narrative in terms of the narrative itself rather than the personal failures of its victims, many commentators began to recognize that linguistic and discursive modes of production possessed a constitutive force in regard to life chances. It was increasingly clear that representation possessed an ontologizing efficacy, and the hurt and lived burden of its errors and iniquities were not necessarily defused by correction or ideology critique. 9

THE INCOHERENCE OF THE SUBJECT How did this hidden production of the self unfold? As mentioned above, subtle determinations within language systems conflated 'the feminine'/otherness/the origin, with the negative, that is, with lack, deficiency, and deviation from a norm of wholeness and health. But how was that norm determined in the first place, and why should it be taken as a valid reference point for equity struggles? The emerging evidence suggested that the apportioning of worth in these binarized judgments of positive to negative value rested on an explanatory tautology whose blind-spot was the logic of valuation itself. As we will see (and this harkens back to Marxist explanations of commodity value), price or worth attaches to a particular object by divorcing itself from the ongoing network of indebtedness that has produced it - its mode of production or history. Thus the value of a commodity appears to inhere in the fetishized object, as if worth is something intrinsic to it rather than to the process that enables it. Although Marxism certainly addressed what might now be called the 'subjectivizing' implications of the question of value, the elaboration of this economy did not extend into the significatory differential of the sign, nor to the microphysics of discursive formations, l° However, if representation and signification can be said to have ontological force, then the workings of these constitutive economies also deserve our close scutiny. The familiar tendency to identify meaning (value) as an intrinsic property of words and concepts rather than as a dynamic differencing has serious implications for how we perceive ourselves and others. By detouring through the following brief explanation of why representation matters (and I mean to evoke every sense of that word here), I will attempt to complicate what we conventionally mean by 'representation' and 'language' in order to explain why current understandings of the Nature/Culture

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problematic reiterate an undeclared fear of the body and its associations, as well as a very narrow definition of corporeality.

LIVING LANGUAGE A succinct illustration of the issues at stake here, especially as they relate to the strange attachments of language, behavior and sexual difference, was illustrated in a pathfinding study in its time, Gender at Work (1983). In this sociological investigation of how gender is engendered across different industries, Game and Pringle discovered that there was nothing inherent within the job itself that explained its comparative assessment as better or worse than another. For example, their research into the sexual division of labor took the whitegoods industry as a case study. Game and Pringle showed that on a particular factory floor where women were sitting at machines or locked into fixed positions on assembly lines, men were employed in tasks that demanded much more movement about the work space. Importantly, when employees were asked to account for the difference in pay scales between men and women the common explanation presumed it was the nature of the job that matched the wage reward. In the case described, the comparative assessment gave a positive evaluation to the bodily freedom and sense of independence that the men enjoyed, and a negative evaluation to the w o m e n ' s stationery and seated position. However, closer inspection of these reasons reveal their explanatory incoherence. For example, Game and Pringle noted: ... we were told that a vacuum cleaner assembly line was made up entirely of migrant women because it is 'too boring for men.' Yet in the same factory men worked on the washing machine line doing very similar work (1983: 31). Needless to say, the similar nature of these tasks was regarded quite differentlydepending on the gender of the person who undertookthem. In regard to the oppositiondangerous/less dangerous, dirty/clean, women are often prevented from earning higher male salaries from jobs deemed to be heavy and dirty because of their comparativefragility,as well as concerns for their future reproductive health. However: ... women in whitegoods factories are subjected to dangerous and unhealthy working conditions along with the other employees. And some of them do work in areas regarded as the most dirty and/or dangerous. Enamel shops, because of the heat and dust, are traditionallyseen as a male area but in one factory were operated entirely by migrants - women as well as men (1983: 30). Another glaring example of this shift in valuation is the case of female doctors in the Soviet Union. Given the enormous loss of life in the eastern block countries during WWII, a whole generation of young men who would otherwise have trained to be doctors had to be replaced by women. As a consequence, the status of medical doctors in the Soviet Union compared to their Western counterparts during this post-war period was reversed. This is not explained by

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the straightened circumstances of the Soviet economy, as engineers were paid comparatively high salaries at this time and, needless to say, the profession was a male domain. Game and Pringle's analysis of sexual difference in the health industry in Australia reveals a similar discriminatory logic. In sum then, Game and Pringle uncovered a semiotic valuation of positive to negative, value to lack, and this comparative reading of bodies, or 'corporeal transactions,' underpinned the monetary value that attached to certain tasks. This binary mode of production actually engendered gender, feminizing jobs performed by women and migrants as passive, menial and unskilled, and masculinizing jobs performed by white males or anglo-celts as more active, creative and competent. Given this, it was clear that arguments for equity had to acknowledge these logorithms where the very measurement of equality produced a masculinized norm as a shifting goal, thus making it an impossible achievement for disadvantaged groups. I want to linger here in order to extrapolate from this one example of semiosis at work to what is commonly regarded in poststructural analysis as its more general economy of expression. Let's begin with the following list of binary configurations which are aligned through an organizing opposition of positive to negative, presence to lack; man/woman, culture/nature, one/other, mediated/immediate, reason/emotion, objective/subjective, white/black, enlightenment/ignorance, West/rest. And we should also note the rather sticky attachments that obtain between these divisions that illustrate the kinship of their inter-dependence. It might help to understand how these differences are read if we compare them to the operation of a figure/ground. In the latter case, although we could say that both aspects of the image's totality are present and therefore 'at work,' only one can be identified and given value. The figure is regarded as selfdefined and present, whereas the ground's 'identity' is described in negative terms as the absence of the figure. Although in reality the ground actively produces the figure's legibility, and although the figure's apparent autonomy is therefore entirely compromised as a result of this debt, the actual mode of production of this valuation remains invisible. Of course, we could reverse the figure/ground in the hope of revealing the work of 'the other.' However the ground would simply shift in the process and again assume the shape of mere support, its own morphology enlisted into the production of figuring, or identifying, just one thing. Because these discursive effects are said to possess ontological significance, it follows that the mysteries of language and its operations have continued to attract analysis, especially over the past thirty years. Perhaps not surprisingly however, 'the linguistic turn' in political attentions has been coupled with a

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growing skepticism about the notion of evidence and the status of empirical data in general. As the grounds of science have been included in the problematic of interpretation, and as arguments against scientific rationalism have become increasingly attractive, the difficulty of anchoring an argument in any substantial way has emerged as something to be celebrated rather than lamented. The fixity and referential solidity of identity and power have been rendered problematic, and knowledge and truth are increasingly regarded as interested determinations rather than immutable reference points. As a direct result the horizon of lived possibilities, or how we realize life's chances, has become more expansive and less predictable. Importantly, it is because of these changes in how we think about power and identity that the identity of 'woman' has also been put under scrutiny, just as the identity of feminism itself has emerged as a site of vigorous contestation. But what has this to do with the Nature/Culture division, with feminism in the social sciences, and with my particular essay subject, a corporeal sociology? IS NATURE

SIMPLY

'NATURE,'

THAT

IS, CULTURE?

Although the above history is selective and generalized, it nevertheless gestures towards a possible explanation for the emergence of what I regard as two quite worrying tendencies within contemporary critical and feminist scholarship. As noted above, feminism's initial identity was greatly reliant upon empirical evidence, observation, and a healthy faith in the scientific method. And it was work that hailed from the social sciences in particular that provided the major impetus and justification for feminist demands. However, continental philosophy and the effects of related criticism have had the effect of fragmenting feminism's academic identity over the last thirty years. These divisions have manifested themselves in the form of different language communities, where the accepted vocabulary, analytical shape and textual parameters of investigation are discursively organized and difficult to translate from one approach to another. Although work within post-phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism and poststructural linguistics and discourse theory is heterogeneous in focus and intent, and although practitioners of these 'methods' may themselves be riven with disagreement, there is nevertheless a marked difference between the sort of feminism that draws on such interpretive criticism, and styles of feminist analysis that one might expect to find within the social sciences. There are certainly scholars whose interests complicate this division and whose knowledge-base is more eclectic. However, time constraints as well as the pedagogical divisions of university curricula tend to lock most of us into particular fields of analysis whose disciplinary protocols and familiar

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conventions define and affirm the sort of expertise that we can most readily recognize and engage. And it is precisely here that I want to locate my own interventionary observation, an observation that draws on an unorthodox intellectual history that crosses the social sciences with poststmcturalism and interdisciplinary studies. Firstly, I want to note the rather obvious point that in recent years the disciplinary divisions within the humanities have largely broken down. Subject areas have been divorced from the traditional histories of inquiry that once captured them, merging and morphing into the various forms of interdisciplinarity that have seen the rise of Cultural and Critical Studies, Performance Studies, Film Studies, Queer Theory and Gender Studies, Post-Colonial, Aboriginal and Ethnic Studies, and so on. This organizational rearticulation of knowledge marks what I described earlier as a more focussed attention to the politics of representation and interpretation, that is, to an analysis of mediation and the mode of production of the interpreting subject. And in regard to the argument I want to make here, it is interesting to note that much of this inter-disciplinary work, over the last fifteen years in particular, has given special attention to the materiality of the body as a special topic of inquiry. However, a certain contradiction has emerged in this work. Granted, the identity of the humanities, or at least its internal structure, has come unstuck in the general interrogation of identity and the shift towards interdisciplinarity. However, the privileged focus brought to discourse and representation in the humanities has meant that the status of empirical evidence and observation has been seriously depreciated, if not actively dismissed as a ground of analysis. If we take the body as a case in point and reiterate what has now become a mantra of interdisciplinarity, namely, that the body is a 'cultural construction' or 'language effect,' then the place of empirical research and the claims of observation are entirely unclear. Let us remember that the body's experience is the reflexive fulcrum of perception and interpretation, the site where the Nature/Culture question, and indeed, an enduring curiosity about our own ontology and species-being, are most poignantly staged. Given this, it seems reasonable to suggest that if we are persuaded that observation is a reading/interpretive practice among others, with no special claims to authoritative reference, then how are we to think the difference between the social sciences and the humanities that are in large part defined by this division? Do we really believe that the claims of empirical research can have no greater purchase than any other literary genre, inasmuch as observations are inevitably re-presented? In anticipation that the direction of my argument, or more accurately, the thesis that drives it should seem predictable at this point, an anti-theory argument that pits 'common sense' against more counter-intuitive approaches,

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I hasten to add that I regard experience as a textual operation; an interpretation of sorts that undermines the unmediated notion of a 'naked eye' or 'raw experience.' Nevertheless, I do not assume that this claim must run counter to biology. In other words, I don't regard the evidence of interpretive plasticity and complexity as the defining stuff of Culture, as if a biological bedrock of static and uncomplicated matter absents itself from these same reading practices; their mere support. Certainly, the dead weight of biological arguments can be a heavy burden if biology is equated with an archaeological blue-print. However, my point here is that it is not just sociobiologists who actively insist on such determinations. Cultural analysts, by dint of their refusal to interrogate the logic of life (bio-logy) as an expression of the life of logic, are unwittingly committed to the same conclusion. They each perceive Nature as a prescription whose elemental blue-print lacks the creative capacity to reinscribe and reinvent itself. The irony here is that both sides of this apparent debate are actually in agreement about the question of foundations, even if one side is unable to acknowledge the connection. The silliness of the situation (and it says a lot about the inability of specialist language communities to acknowledge and interrogate their most basic assumptions) is that vernacular versions of postmodern criticism that have fetishized Culture as the origin and end of all interpretation seem quite incapable of explaining the palpable weight and pragmatic efficacy of empirical research within the social sciences and the sciences. How do we account for science's achievements and status vis-g-vis other frames of knowledge, and the fact that most of us affirm our belief in the very real nature of this difference through our use and trust in these different technologies? In sum then, there is a quite familiar narrative logic in this history. The important role granted to empirical data in what, with hindsight, can be seen as the gradual production of these relatively new fields of interdisciplinary and feminist inquiry has been actively devalued. And an inevitable casualty of this suspicion and rejection of empiricism is that the division between the humanities and the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences has been further entrenched. There is a disturbing tendency in what, for convenience, I will gloss as the more digestible and simplified expressions of postmodern criticism. The debt to the empirical, to evidence gleaned through observation, corporeal curiosity and intuitive perception, and the difficulty that attaches to rethinking empiricism through these more recent analytical technologies, is ignored, and this complacency then celebrated. Instead of conceding that these questions must now assume a more complicated tenor, the dismissal of empirical work implies that questions about truth and evidence have actually been resolved. It's as if 'the linguistic turn' has a fixed location; as if the deconstruction of identity has been enlisted to more accurately identify what language is and where it is in play.

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CORPOREAL WRITINGS Unfortunately, the conflation of 'a general textuality' with linguisticism never considers that the 'play' of language is with/in the sciences, that is, within every sense of what we might understand as observation, reality, materiality, even truth. And here, I don't just mean to suggest that the sciences are also hermeneutic enterprises caught in the same language games as any other interpretive exercise. This assumption informs the domain of science studies, where scientific discourse is made an object for cultural analysts, but in a way that excludes the material nature of the object (the object of Nature no less), from consideration. The palpability of matter is conveniently placed on the other side of the ideational, thus reinscribing a Cartesian division between Culture and Nature, mind and body, interpretation and fact, that these same thinkers deplore. By restricting the domain of language to Culture, we assume we know the what and where of this strange organism we call 'language.' But what language does biology speak when it somatizes an hysterical symptom such as a glove paralysis; when it translates a viral code, when it reads and rewrites DNA, remembers a face, calculates and thinks? The deconstructive claim that 'there is no outside of text' acknowledges the systemic play of this comprehensive inclusion and the evolving process of its constant emergence. This more generous sense of implication concedes that identity is a dynamic effect that is never static, a figuring whose expression remains in constant productive debt to a context that is not simply outside itself. It is assumed that the implication of subject with/in object that is now familiar to feminist literary scholars and philosophers represents a major assault on more empirically based research. And contemporary forms of critical scholarship have entirely qualified the suggestion that perception is a 'given,' rather than a changing script. However, when we insist that perception is culturally informed there is a tendency to move too quickly over the most extraordinary and puzzling aspects of such a statement. For example, Oliver Sacks (1985), a well-known neurobiologist and writer, provides ample evidence that what we call biology is itself a changing script, a text whose lessons are interpreted, reinterpreted and transformed. Should we conclude that this invention is not biological, by dint of its coincidence with what we call Culture? Sacks explains, for example, how a man who has lost his olfactory capacities nevertheless remembers how to smell and taste and is subsequently able to enjoy his food again. He also recounts how a man who has been blind since birth, and who is without the grammar of seeing, without its interpretive dimension, remains effectively blind when his eyesight is given to him. Or again in the case of the 'man who mistook his wife for a hat,' as with other patients,

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Sacks describes a mode of being that is wrought from a corporeal alphabet of tics and movements, articulations whose spacing and timing Derrida describes as 'language.' Put simply, even if we were to grant that these complexities are Cultural in essence, we would still be left with a question about biology's ability to incorporate, that is, to read and respond to such complexity. It should now be clear that I see no special value in exchanging the explanatory term biology or Nature for Culture, for my purpose is to reinvigorate discussion about this most basic division and the political assumptions it instantiates. If we agree that there are political implications in how we make even these most fundamental discriminations (as the history of feminist and other political struggle attests), then the feminization of Nature as dumb meat takes on inaugural dimensions. The strategy within literary criticism and cultural analysis is to show that woman's identity is mutable, as if this proves that she is not biologically bound. Unfortunately however, this leaves the static and separate category of Nature/biology intact, as if the division discriminates a cultural actor with agency from a passive object with none. Rather than assume that we should oppose arguments about bio-determinations with cultural determinations, as if malleability defines Culture against an obdurate Nature, we could adopt a more comprehensive notion of movement and flexibility that by including Nature, redefines it. The result of trying to rethink 'carnal knowledge' would be that flesh would not be an abstracted and separable object, its substance observed and experienced by a disembodied subject. Carnal knowledge would be the body's consideration of itself, where perception and experience involve a corporeal intelligence that reflects upon and renegotiates its world. Thus, it might be claimed that the body is a site of interpretive complexity that exhibits what we might call literacy at the origin, and this claim might be made without splitting the domain of effect and affect from 'something' thought to be outside this textual play. This comprehensive dimension of 'making sense,' or 'making matter,' exceeds postmodern orthodoxies that equate sense with linguistic meaning. For there is an undeclared somatophobia in the latter's insistence that the body is a Cultural artefact. Ironically, the substance of flesh and bone is absent from these very arguments that warn against such exclusions. On the other hand, we find that the social sciences are very often driven by forms of positivism and empiricism whose knowledge base is presumed to be unmediated; a gathering of data pure and simple. Although I disagree with this postion I can also sympathize with the reasoning that promotes it. Researchers in the social sciences, inasmuch as their disciplines force them to hold fast to a more fixed notion of the referent, express a more pragmatic skepticism about

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the ubiquity of language games on the level of data. This is not to say that notions of cultural and social construction are the preserve of literary and cultural criticism, as the work of pioneers such as Berger and Luckman (1966) attest. Although they may not know it, when social scientists hold to a notion of construction, production and movement while at the same time insisting that a certain stability of the referent insists, they are close to the Derridean notion of 'play' that is so often misinterpreted as 'anything goes.' For Derrida, 'play' is not free and unrestricted movement. It is like the 'play' in a machine, where a relatively small amount of slippage is made possible by the actual workings of the machine itself. If it could be conceded that the comprehensive and perverse identity of 'language' includes the referent, perceptual and experiential considerations, the gravity and density of certain identities as well as the plasticity and ephemeral quality of others, then the dividing line between Nature and Culture could not be drawn so readily. This would allow us to ask if there is indeed an ontological priority, and therefore a clear cut separation between two distinct domains. As the notion 'language' is now over-determined as a synonym for Culture, and as cultural analysts in the main are not involved in field-work with the same respect for the object as social and disciplinary scientists, the need to rethink the substance of the referent simply doesn't present itself as an imperative. For this reason, it may well be via questions about Nature, reality, and the status of observation and empirical data, questions that remain foundational to the social sciences, that the insights of poststructural and postmodern discourse can be substantially embraced and reworked.

NOTES 1. Although papers that engaged this general problematic were by no means homogeneous, the Nature/Culture question was an insistent one nevertheless. See for example, Precongress WISISA - Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology, July 21-25, 1998 Montr6al, papers by Walby; Erasga; Richters; Chauhan; Corradi and Lorber. 2. For an excellent summation of several different forms of essentialist reasoning, see Grosz (1990). 3. An interesting twist on this style of argument can be seen in the response to Simon LeVay's work on the gay brain (1993), as well as in related suggestions that homosexuality is biologically determined through genetic predisposition. While many cultural analysts have rejected arguments that look to biology as a causal explanation of identity and behavior, many members of the gay and lesbian community have made positive reference to such evidence. In a society that practises homophobia and whose condemnation of gay identity presumes it is a moral choice, some activists have taken these biological arguments as contrary proof. In other words, if God's will has indeed been done and these behaviors are naturally determined, then recrimination and persecution

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are inappropriate. For an interesting discussion of LeVay's work which combines an attention and respect for the empirical evidence together with the sort of philosophical sophistication that can complicate it, see Wilson (2000). 4. For a helpful outline of the shifts in political and philosophical thinking in France, see Descombes (1982) and Dosse (1997). 5. Although many thinkers together make up this analytical shift in critical focus, four philosophers and cultural critics deserve special mention, namely Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. These writers have inspired an ongoing response to structuralism that includes feminist and post-colonial work. 6. See especially Moiler Okin (1979); Lloyd (1984); Cixous (1980) and Irigaray (1985). 7. I have chosen to quote from one of Derrida's earliest publications, a paper about interpretation and the social sciences. It continues to fascinate me why Derrida's contribution to the social sciences has largely been ignored. Its importance has yet to be determined. 8. There are of course some writers who are not persuaded by this assertion. See for example, Hartsock (1987). 9. See for example, the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 10. On the connection between Marx's commodity value and the Sanssurean notion of valeur, see for example, Spivak (1984; 1987); and Kirby (1997).

REFERENCES Beauvoir, S. de. (1953). The Second Sex. trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Berger, P., & Luckman, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Cixous, H. (1980). Sorties. trans. A. Liddle. In: E. Marks & I. de Courtivron (Eds), New French Feminisms. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Den'ida, J. (1978). Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. trans. A. Bass in Writing and Difference. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Descombes, V. (1982). Modern French Philosophy. trans. L. Scott-Fox & J. M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dosse, F. (1997). History of Structuralism: 2 Vols. trans. D. Glassman. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Game, A., 8,: Pringle, R. (1983). Gender at Work. Sydney, London, Boston: George Allen & Unwin. Grosz, E. (1990). Conclusion: A Note on Essentialism and Difference. In: S. Gunew (Ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. London: Roufledge. Hartsock, N. (1987). Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Minority Theories. Cultural Critique, Fall, 187-206. Irigaray, L. (1985). This Sex which is not One. trans. C. Porter with C. Burke. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Kirby, V. (1997). Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge. LeVay, S. (1993). The Sexual Brain. Cambridge Mass, MIT Press. Lloyd, G. (1984). The Man of Reason. London: Methuen. Moiler Okin, S. (1979). Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sacks, O. (1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador.

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Spivak, G. C. (1984). Marx After Den-ida. In: W. E. Cain (Ed.), Philosophical Approaches to Literature: New Essays on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Texts. Lewisburg, PA. Bucknell University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1.987). Some Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value. In: In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen. Wilson, E. A. (2000). Neurological Preference: LeVay's Study of Sexual Orientation. Substance, 91, 23-38.

FEMINISM OF COLOR CHALLENGES WHITE SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND COLOR-BLIND ECO-FEMINISM Laura Corradi

INTRODUCTION In this work I am offering a theoretical contribution meant to enhance our comprehension of the relationship between sociology and feminism - looking for some answers and proposing to add, in our discussion of the subject matter, an important viewpoint by using the race/ethnicity prism. In the first part, I am going to proceed from question to question - not necessarily trying to answer all of them - by looking to both sociological contemporary literature and the classics. In the second part, addressing questions four and five, I will look at the ecofeminist milieu, its dichotomies and contradictions. Engendered thinking, after decades of struggle is today a recognized - at times well established - type of located knowledge (Braidotti, 1996; Haraway, 1997). My contribution goes in the direction of highlighting the many different ways in which a similar struggle is still going on: for recognition and inclusions of women of color feminist theory - especially from the margins (hooks, 2000) - in the academic milieu. By margins I mean what is usually referred to as peripheral, both geographically and conceptually: so called Third World countries; former colonies; rural areas in industrialized countries; indigenous areas of resistance and permanence of domestic modes of production. We can find margins also far away

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 41-50.

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from the borders - numerous intersection points between race and gender with other categories (such as class and sexual preferences) within the 'center' itself of capitalistically advanced countries (Corradi, 1997, 1993). The first question I want to focus on is the following: when doesn't feminist theory look like feminist theory? I am puzzled by the subversive impact of feminist theory that does not wear those 'admission clothes' requested to be published or to be enabled of speaking in social sciences scholarly meetings. What does it happen when the elite jargon and its format are missing, or when the style is considered to be 'unacceptable' - among those who are charged with being abstract, and deciding who is going to be given the right of a word in the academic environment (Moraga & Anzaldua, 1984). Gatekeepers are legitimated not just by sincere white theory enthusiasts: many do not see other theory than the one they have always known - in so strengthening the whole Eurocentric (located) knowledge, and its criteria, as universal. Feminist theory is not exempt form such short-sightedness. Teresa de Lauretiis (1996) strongly criticizes what she defines as a redefinition of 'feminist theory' so expanded and flexible that it includes virtually any writing, visualization or performance that bears witness to women's oppression. While many feminist sociologists are aware of the trend toward authoritarian forms of globalization and the 'new world order' most of us didn't envision (yet) how such processes could impact the women's movement. In particular, we didn't take into consideration a possible tension in favor of what is called pensiero unico I (see Moraga & Anzaldua, 1984) even within the feminist area which has nothing to do with 'the dream of a common language' desired by Adrienne Rich (1996). If our common language is still dictated by dominant values and self-referential systems of legitimation, no theory will be produced about what Patricia Hill Collins (2000) called 'interlocking categories of oppression' referring to the many connections between class, race, gender and sexual preferences, and the unified experience within each individual. Given these premises, the second question I wish to address is the following: to what extent is white feminism challenging the heritage of sociology? Most of white feminism is not committed to challenging the logic and the language of white male theory in our discipline: white feminism's limits are marked by the attempt to negotiate space, visibility, and recognition with respect to some given rules - a highly defensive and unchallenging way of dealing with power - for a critical thinker! Concretely, white feminism did actually change - in the last decades - with respect to categories of analysis and directions of research. It changed the sociology of the family, sociology of work, and political sociology; and it affected most fields in social sciences, by impacting a discipline with new theory, methodology and empirical research. -

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What feminism still doesn't dare to challenge relates first to the foundations themselves of white sociology, i.e. classical theory; and, second, to the location of those who produce contemporary theory today. The latter poses new questions of democratization and inclusion from a class/race/gender and sexual preferences perspective-and raises the old sociological question: knowledge for whom, knowledge for what, as still worthy of reflection. The third question - which logically follows - is: how feminism of color

is challenging both the heritage of sociology and white feminist theory (not necessarily in this order). Far away from the academic environment, since the Combahee River Collective statement (1977) - a major document in the United States - black feminism taught a lesson on simultaneity of different forms of oppressions, and contributed to opening a discourse of embodied knowledge and the necessity of self-location in theory and in practice. This is skillfully recognized by white feminist and lesbian theoretician Adrienne Rich (1996) who points out that that while white women have been marginalized as women, their lived experience as white has led them to see feminist theory as something made only by white women and to marginalize others. Rich also questions the very foundations of white male theory in the United States. She ends by wondering about issues many of us ponder: why do we study Marx and Durkheim? I would add: why do most sociologists ignore W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, C. R. L. James? Why has whitecentered classical theory in the United States and in European countries not yet adequately engaged with these texts? The fourth question is an interlocutory one: where are we going to, in terms of both, feminist theory and sociological theory? I am especially interested in the appealing area of interface among the two, that is in the inbetweenness of a 'double belonging' that makes some of us define ourselves, subversively, as a 'feminist sociologist', instead of accepting the label of 'a feminist and a sociologist' - a quite comfortable separation, well established, almost a guarantee of business at usual. As in gendered language the use of male "neutrals" has rendered invisible women, in political and sociological theory "feminism" - without any race/ethnicity characterization - has rendered women of color invisible. For this reason, a distinction is necessary today: we refer to white feminist theory as the production of (mostly) white women versus women of color feminst theory produced by (mostly) non-white women. Let us examine, for instance, the relationships between nature and culture. Here, I wish to address the fourth question in the context of a specific branch

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of feminism: Western eco-feminism (Shiva, 1998). By saying that mainstream eco-feminism is part of white feminism, I do not ignore or dismiss the contribution of women of color in the eco-feminist debate, and the existence of a non-Western eco-feminist theory (Shiva, 1998). Rather, I wish to point out that most categories and concepts of eco-feminism come thoughtlessly from a Western perspective, even when these concepts are (more or less) successfully used or adapted to explain non-Western situations. The same process happened in science: white male science is still white and male (even when those who operate in this field may be female and/or nonwhite) precisely because science embodies the values of those who created it. As a social construct, it tends to reflect scientists' class, race and gender, their interests and priorities, their shared Weltanschaungen. Such a matter can be easily proven by considering (white) eco-feminism: While challenging patriarchal heritage, most eco-feminists still refer to dichotomous concepts - such as essentialism and constructionism - which are at the base of both feminist and sociological analysis and theory. Yet, some are trying to overcome what I believe are false boundaries between nature and culture. Among them, eco-marxist Nancy Hartsock (1987, p. 45) argues that "As embodied humans we are . . . inextricably both natural and social." Likewise, the socialist eco-feminist Mary Mellor (1997) engages in a brilliant polemic against both romantic essentialism and cultural-historical materialism, by posing a simple question: "Is it a relationship of affinity, of a unity of spirit/biology between women and nature, or the sharing of a socially constructed relationship of exploitation?" Her answer is radical: such a dichotomy should be considered a contradiction itself. It appears as a dichotomy if viewed through male defined reality; when viewed from the perspective of women's lives the dichotomycan clearly be seen as a contradiction. The male construction of a social world presupposes its material base in women's time and work. When women try to articulate a perspective that reflects their social condition, they are accused of essentialism, or at least detracting from the 'primary' economic struggle (p. 45). Such a dichotomous way of theorizing affects the social sciences in general, with many consequences and either/or dilemmas in research and analysis. These concepts are well developed by Native American feminist Lee Maracle (1996) in her critical work, I am woman. A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Maracle analyses the dualism between what is 'natural' and what is 'normal', i.e. what is socially constructed as acceptable behavior. At times, what is natural is not normal from the point of view of white culture, social values and behaviors - and vice versa. Maracle (1996, p. 136) also argues that " . . . what is abnormal is very often natural. Internalized racism (for example) is the natural response to the unnatural

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c o n d i t i o n o f r a c i s m . " H e r c o n c l u s i o n about the dualism b e t w e e n m a y sound as an accusation to intellectual whites: it is bread for our reflections. If you really want to know the difference between white male perception and everyone else's, it can best be summed up as the difference between normal and natural. One is based on a mathematical formula and is completely divorced from any sense of humanity. The other is born of the natural world and is dependent on humanity for its definition. Nothing more on white man need to be said (p. 136). M u c h more, I believe, needs to be said about white w o m e n , their relationships with the natural world~ with their o w n body, and with e n v i r o n m e n t a l changes increasingly leading to illness. T h e fifth question I want to posit is the following: what is white women's theory about the body and health, identity politics and social movements? Since divisions within feminist theory are v e r y often reflections o f existing social division, l o o k i n g at the; e m p i r i c a l w o r l d is a must. In the f o l l o w i n g paragraphs I will highlight a specific c o n t e n d e d arena - w h e r e issues related to body, health, ethnic and sexual identity are w e l l c o n n e c t e d in a social m o v e m e n t : breast c a n c e r activism. Breast cancer activism, b e c a u s e o f its roots in the w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t , seems to h a v e inherited these features o f insensitivity toward u n e d u c a t e d w o m e n w o m e n w h o ask for m a m m o g r a p h y instead o f being critical of intrusive m e a n s o f detection; p o o r w o m e n w h o h a v e ' b a c k w a r d attitudes' about safe sex; m i n o r i t y w o m e n w h o h a v e less time for m e e t i n g s and too m a n y children to take care of. A t times, the w o r d 'racist' has b e e n used to define the agenda o f (mostly white) breast cancer activists - not because o f behaviours w i l l i n g l y m e a n t to exclude s o m e b o d y a priori, but because o f the systematic failure in addressing issues that are important a m o n g non-whites (Corradi, 1995). T h e s a m e issue is w e l l reflected in the e n v i r o n m e n t a l m o v e m e n t . A s breast c a n c e r activist and writer Judy B r a d y (1994, p. 189) explains, The environmental movement at this point is in two camps: first there is the white movement which hugs trees and worries about dolphins. They are not wrong but in a sense they stay at the periphery of other issues. And then there is a movement that is still 'underground' in the sense that it doesn't get coverage in any of the press: the environ-mental justice movement that is fighting against lead poisoning in their kids and toxic waste dumps, and against Chevron ... Most of these groups are mad up of people of color because in this country those people are usually poor - and we are a racist culture - and I don't see these white women making any kind of alliances with those people of color. They may have representatives of people of color in their movement, but when it comes to the political agenda, a real alliance is not going to happen in any near future for sure. Starting with the a x i o m that the b o d y is a place o f resistance (Corradi, 1995), one of the issues I considered during the nineties is c o n c e r n e d with h o w w o m e n

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perceive the illness and its causes - after a cancer diagnosis. Why each woman activist interviewed decided to personally join the cancer movement? Even though my research on the subject is qualitative and cannot be in any way generalized, white activists seem to feel dispossessed as individuals, after a cancer diagnosis: something has been taken away from them - the individual right to be healthy. Women of color tend to feel the problem in terms of a collective threat: if women get cancer, the whole community is under attack. There are probably many different reasons to explain this. Some may be found in women of color feminist discourse, whereas body is conceptualized as "what we are", instead of something we own. Another relies upon the centrality of body as interface between nature and culture, in a dialectical unity without promoting separations between body, mind and soul. As Italian sociologist Renato Stella (1996, p. 48) argues,

-

"the principle that distinguish Nature and Culture is the same principle that separates the Individual from Society and Body from Soul." In Marx, Durkheim and Weber, body is absent or implicit mainly because of the dichotomy body/mind - or body/soul. Body "does not produce meaning" nor social action in Weber. It is mostly 'labor force' in Marx; and it is considered to be 'organically irrelevant' in Durkheim - who believes Body and Soul are both to be submitted to the Reason, since Body is trivial and Soul is superstition i.e. absence of knowledge. In fact, he observes, animals do not commit suicide because they are made just of body. And women commit less suicide since they are given less intellect. In Weber body is the conjunction of Nature and Culture, yet sociologically is analyzed only as object/subject of power and strength - from which descend the physical and mental inferiority of women. The risk of naturalizing women, pregnancy, mothering is obviously present in most of (unchallenged) classical sociological theory. Consequently, such a risk is not absent in feminist writings. On reproduction and child-rearing, I agree with Mary Mellor (1997), who observes that not all woman are or wish to be mothers and that the tasks associated with mothering are not related to biology and can be performed by either men or women. 2 Surprisingly enough, indigenous theory - especially that in which subversive subjects are engaged in resistance to annihilation - from the very beginning has included women's visions of a different society, starting from roles and power relationship between genders - instead of procrastinating the solution of 'women's issues' to some later "post-revolutionary" phase. This is the case of Mayan women in the Mexican southeast tribal area of Chiapas - at the border with Guatemala. Many indigenous communities - about three million persons, -

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belonging to seven different ethnic M a y a n groups - have decided to resist land expropriation. This has created low-intensity war zone. 3 Given the gravity of the situation for the rebellious Zapatista communities and their most vulnerable members, it is noteworthy that the mistake of considering w o m e n ' s claims as a secondary issue was avoided. This contrasts sharply with typical revolutions in which gender problems have been seen as "something we can deal with later on" - a not so urgent issue (Corradi, 1997). F r o m the margins, indigenous women have been able to negotiate veto power as well as the strategy and the political direction of rapidly changing processes. For Mexicans, who were accustomed to associating politics strictly with men, the appearance? of the Zapatista women on television, in newspapers and in their own towns was a shocking and inspirational departure from political tradition (Davis and Capozza, 1999, p. 2). In a 'globalized' Mexico, whose ruling class signed N A F T A agreements, winds of gender struggle rose from its margins: more precisely, from 'the other half of the jungle.' The Zapatista rebels had to approve - upon the organized female pressure - a Revolutionary W o m e n ' s Law. 4 This was the first coded law the uprising indigenous community processed and applauded. Indigenous women are those who face the risk of extinction to a greater extent. W h e n their ecosystem is under attack, their health and their survival itself is threatened. This un-deniable fact may contain some explanation of why illiterate women are able to negotiate a gendered political space, without going through processes of masculinization of their identities and needs.

CONCLUSION Body presents a physical limit to capitalism also and in subjective terms: the awareness of untimely and avoidable deaths does stimulate political growth among those who are hit - or at risk - of life-threatening illness. Body should be central in any theory of social action. This is true, as we have seen in cancer activism and indigenous movements - both characteristics of strong w o m e n ' s leadership. The body is an environment (Corradi, in press). As Vandana Shiva (1998) pointed out, ecology which we commonly refer to nature comes from the Greek world oikos (household). The home as cultural matter - the home as natural matter. Just westerners can do distinctions . . . Nira Yuval-Davis (1998), goes further in the analysis: For western feminists, as members of a hegemonic collectivity, their membership in the collectivity and its implications for their positioning was often rendered invisible, while Third World Women acutely experience their being part of a subjugated collectivity and

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L A U R A CORRADI often did not see autonomous space for themselves to organize as feminists... In this nondialogue, Third World women would feel that Western women were constructing them solely in terms of what seemed to them to be barbaric customs and subjugation, without taking into account the social and economic context in which they existed. Third World women would thus be defined in terms of their 'problems' or their 'achievements' in relation to an imagined free white liberal democracy. This had the effect of removing them (and the 'liberal' democracy) from history, freezing them in time and space, and eternally constructing them as politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of western feminism.., differences, rather than being acknowledged, have been interpreted by those holding the hegemonic power within the movement as mainly reflections of different stages of consciousness.

I w o u l d like to put f o r w a r d N a t i v e A m e r i c a n f e m i n i s t s o c i o l o g i s t L e e M a r a c l e ' s p r o v o k i n g q u e s t i o n , w i t h w h i c h she g i v e s c l o s u r e to h e r d i s c u s s i o n . A n d I w o u l d also like to turn s u c h a q u e s t i o n to all o f us f e m i n i s t s o c i o l o g i s t s , since w e are p a r t - as c o m m i t t e d intellectuals - o f the m o r e g e n e r a l w o m e n ' s social movement. A good number of non-white women have addressed the women's movement and decried the fact that we are outside the women's movement (...). That white women of North America are racist and that they define the movement in accordance with their own narrow perspective should not surprise us. White people define everything in terms of their own people, and then very magnanimously open the door as we prove ourselves to be civilized. Such is the nature of racism. If we don't escape learning it, can we expect that they should? We are part of a global movement in the world, struggling for emancipation. Women worldwide will define the movement and we are among them. Until white women can come to us on our own terms, we ought to leave the door closed. Do we really want to be part o f a movement that sees the majority as the periphery and the minority as the center?

NOTES 1. One market - one thought. P e n s i e r o u n i c o - in a globalized neo-liberal market economy refers to something more than a dominant (or hegemonic) way of thinking. As in mathematics, the 'one and only one solution' may shape the logics - the 'one and only one' theoretical code may shape the consciousness of the theoretician. P e n s i e r o u n i c o is difficult to translate: it became a common expression in the Italian debate around the New W o r d Order in the last few years. It is a totalitarian way of thinking, which tends to obliterate all different forms of thinking. 2. As I would like to add, mothering has not the same social meaning everywhere and in different cultures it tends to include different tasks. A comparison I made in Tamil between a matriarchal and a patriarchal societies, located few miles away from each other, shows how childrearing may vary considerably, according to the place women occupy and their status. 3. Since 1994, more than 70,000 troops (roughly one-third of the Mexican Army) have been stationed in Chiapas. 'Women fear they will be raped or accosted by the soldiers if they leave their homes to do their laundry or work in the fields. In some

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cases, the soldiers have introduced prostitution and drug use in villages, according to indigenous organizations'(Capozza, November 1999, p. 4). 4. What follows is my working translation of the Women's Revolutionary Law: 1. Women - with no exception due to race, beliefs, color, political ideas - have the same rights in participating to the revolutionary struggle with the role and degree their own will and capacities determine. 2. Women have the right to work and receive fair compensation. 3. Women have the right to decide the number of children they can give birth to and take care of. 4. Women have the right to participate to community issues and be in charge, if elected in a free and democratic way. 5. Women and their children have the right to a primary attention when it comes to health and nutrition. 6. Women have the right to education. 7. Women have the right to choose their companion and should not be forced to agree to a marriage. 8. No woman will be hit or physically mistreated neither by family memeber nor by others. The crimes of attempted rape or rape will be punished severely. 9. Women will be in charge of leading the organization and the revolutionary armed forces. 10. Women will have all rights and dues included in revolutionary laws and regulations.'

REFERENCES Brady, L (1994). One in three: Women with cancer confront the epidemic. CIeis. Braidotti, R. (1996). Cyberfeminism with a difference. Utrecht: The Netherlands Universiteit Utrecht. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. New York: Roufledge. Corradi, L. (1995). Malignant Profits: The debate on genetics and the environment causes of cancer among scientists, women survivors and people of color. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Crnz. Corradi, L. (1993). African-Italian Labour Force. Sociological Abstracts. Corradi, L. (1995). Capitalism as production of death and the body as a place of resistance: Three postulates. Malignant Profit, Umi. Corradi L. (1997). Italian women of color. Mediterranean Review, 4. Corradi, L. (1997). L'Intemazionale della speranza. Taccuino dal Chiapas. In: Altre Ragioni. Corradi, L. (In Press). When Body Is Environment. In: When Body Is Environment. Environmental Causes of Cancer and Primary Prevention. Corradi, L. (Forthcoming).The Movement for Environmental Health in the United States. In: I. Spano (a cura di). Systemic Complexity and Eco-SustainableDevelopment. Quaderni della Comunit~ Europea. Davis, A., & Capozza, K. L. (1999, November). The masked women of Mexico. On-Line Journal of in Win (Women In Network). Mexico. De Lauretiis, T. (1996). Feminism and its differences. Mediterranean Review, 2. Hartsock, N. (1987). The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. In: S. Harding (Ed.), Feminism and Methodology. Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

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hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Cambridge,/VIA: South End Press. Maracle, L. (1996). I am woman: a native perspective on sociology and feminism. Vancouver, BC.: Press Gang Publishers. Mellor, M. (1997). Feminism and ecology. Washington Square, N.Y.: New Uork University Press. Moraga, C., & Anzaldua, G. (1984). The bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Rich, A. (1996). A politics of locations. Mediterranean Review, 2. Shiva, V. (1998). Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. Boston: South End Press. Stella, R. (1996). Prendere corpo: l'evoluzione del paradigma corporeo in sociologia. Milano, Italy: FancoAngeli. Yuval-Davis, N. (1998). Mediterranean Review.

THE BIOMEDICAL DIGITALIZATION OF WOMEN'S BODIES A N D WOMEN'S BODY POLITICS IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION: CHALLENGES TO W O M E N - A N D HEALTH RESEARCH 1 Annemiek Richters

INTRODUCTION For too long, bodies in biomedicine have been mainly perceived, studied, represented and treated as assemblages of invariant natural facts, as objects separated from the self and bounded from others by skin. The globalization of biomedical representations of the body and their applications in health promotion and health care involves the expanding dominance of biomedicine's objectifying view of bodies. New developments in biomedical technology have created tools to enhance this objectifying approach while simultaneously undermining the formerly presumed invariance and stableness of bodies, thus generating liminal medicalized bodies whose status challenges traditional concepts of personhood in which the sense of self ends at the boundaries of the skin. The new technologies are also exported worldwide with consequences which cannot be foreseen yet.

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 51-70. 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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In this paper social-science perspectives on the body will be used to explore the consequences for women of the globalization of various forms of biomedicine and their particular views of women's bodies. In the social sciences, the body as a specific focus for study has long been neglected. Particularly under the influence of Foucault (e.g. 1979, 1980) bodies have come to be studied as sociopolitically and culturally 'inscribed bodies' and the site of some of the most fundamental forms of social inequality, control and violence. Biomedicine came to be seen as one of those forms which had to be contested. A problem with analyses based on this perspective is that they omit the degree to which women accept, invoke, and adapt to medicalization of their lives and bodies. Thinking of the body as a lived and living entity, as something that asserts or presents itself and actively relates to self and society, opens the way to understand women's relation to medicalization, not only in terms of colonization by medicine and society but in terms of active bodily engagement with the world as well. Seen from the latter perspective, the body is not only potential ground for control but also for personal and collective empowerment. Studying the gendered impact globalization, and biomedicine riding piggy back on globalization, can have on bodies should therefore include the various ways women actively respond to globalization and its accompanying medicalization of their bodies. The reader should know that for me science should not be defined by its subject-matter or methods, but its purpose. The purpose of this contribution is to defend the position that any socio-cultural or technological development affecting human bodies should be based on a critical dialogue of various perceptions of those bodies and the world they are part of. The paper does not, and cannot, follow a single logical development from first page to last, but rather is meant to be a sample of a mode of thinking. It first describes globalization and the related increasing digitalization of the world. Subsequently, it outlines how biomedicine takes part in this process and as such affects women's bodies and women's bodily engagement with the world by presenting some anthropological case-studies from around the globe. This is followed by a discussion of women's body politics in a power-centered and multi-fractttred world. In conclusion, the importance of the strengthening of 'the analogue' through research is stressed.

G L O B A L I Z A T I O N AND THE DISRUPTION OF AN ANALOGUE WORLD Globalization is the most fundamental set of structural transformations going on in the world today. It stands for monopolistic, homogenizing capitalism, for

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modem technologies, for worldwide knowledge and information flows. It should not be understood, however, as wholly an economic concept, as simply an ongoing development of the world system, or as purely a development of largescale global institutions. What it also refers to is the increasing impact that ideology and action from a distance has on our lives. In this sense, globalization is as much an 'in here' (the West from where this paper is written) as an 'out there' phenomenon. It is as much about the self and the body - changes in our personal lives and bodies, and certainly changes in local arenas - as it is about global structures and systems. It is a shake-up of institutions in which new forms of unity go along with new forms of fragmentation and new as well as old forms of inequality (Giddens, 1996/97). All the processes involved in globalization need the use of thought-system integrating languages. The digitalizing languages as we have known them in Western societies for some time - figure-fact language being just one of them are well suited to this integration. Digitalizing languages prevent us from properly expressing the interrelatedness of the various worlds in which we live, such as the relations between the supernatural, natural, personal, societal and cultural worlds; between past, present and future; between local life-worlds and the world at large; between the inner world of our bodily experiences and the modem and post-modern outer world. The predominant digitalizing language divides the world into a collection of numbers and figures; neutral tools used to localize, find, count, know, manage and manipulate. In that world we are a fiscal number; a bank-account number; a house, telephone, and E-mail number; a national passport and driver's license number; a diagnostic category, a patientfile and a DNA-passport number. We all end up as a death certificate number. The digitalizing languages that reign over us in Western societies are rapidly taking control of the whole world. They are the languages of business and technology. They increasingly determine how people and their bodies are perceived, conceptualized, experienced, talked about and acted upon; in society at large, in personal experience, in clinical practice, and in health research. They are languages of affirmations and denials, of words and silencing; languages which dissolve, for example, all sorts of narratives (that is, analogue communications) about the body and its signs, symptoms and symbols. Narratives in which, for example, references are made to supposedly healthy, failing or disordered relations within the body, and between body, self, the supernatural, nature, society, culture and political-economic structure. Though globalization tends to infringe on locally diverse conceptualizations of self and society as well as locally diverse embodiments of self and society and homogenize them, variation in these conceptualizations and embodiments still exists, as do some remaining parts of the rain forests. We are, however, -

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only at the beginning of the process of cultural synchronization. As yet, in many places, it is still mediated by local counter-forces. An increasing number of anthropological studies of the ongoing encounters and exchanges between local and global knowledge about the body, have contributed to the deconstruction of a biomedically defined body, a body as a digitalized object stable in time and space. But for how long and in what ways will this mediation continue? There is no guarantee that bodies worldwide will not all become reified and commoditized, turned into disembodied entities, equalized under the increasing impact of the dictates of a centralized political-economic world order; dictates which impede the lasting existence and development of diverse counterhegemonies that are necessary for querying the rationality of a monocultural, monolingual cosmology based on power, profit and efficiency. Is this too pessimistic? During her George Marshall commencement speech in 1997 at Harvard University, Madeleine Albright said: "We, too, must heed the lessons of the past, accept responsibility and l e a d . . . No nation in the world need be left out of the global system we are constructing." A reader of the International Herald Tribune wrote as a reaction: "How pompous, patronizing, indeed, how fatuous! Marshall must have been turning over in his grave" (International Herald Tribune, June 25, 1997). I second that reaction. The 'new world order' needs far more imagination and mutual acknowledgment, tolerance, respect, openness and critical exchange on the construction of economies and political cultures than has been evident to date. The same holds for the construction of ethics, bodies and selves. The march of biomedicine with its ever more sophisticated technologies in the world today, however, threatens to narrow the space for these different constructions, as the following case-studies demonstrate.

THE MEDICALIZATION OF WOMEN'S LIVES AND BODIES: SOME EXAMPLES FROM THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL RECORD Life's Lesions and Bodily Distress: The Holism of Experience and its Dissection by Biomedicine The contemporary global economy has increased the harshness of living conditions for the majority of people in many countries in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly for women (Doyal, 1995; Farmer et al., 1996). These conditions often result in subacute non-life threatening symptomatologies. Finkler (1994, 1997) found in her study of gender and sickness in Mexico that the frequency of these symptomatologies is higher among women than among men. The

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discourse of the women persuaded her that what she identified as 'life's lesions' are as virulent as any pathogen found in nature. By 'life's lesions' she means perceived adverse existence, including inimical social relationships and unresolved contradictions in which a person is entrenched that gnaw at the person's being, and fester through time. Such lesions become inscribed on the body and manifest in anguish, in generalized pain experienced in the entire body, and in myriad non-life threatening symptomatologies. There are numerous species of life's lesions that prevail in Mexico among the poor. Domestic violence is one of them. It is not a recent phenomenon. However, as in many other developing countries, it has taken on a contemporary cast in the isolation of the nuclear family and the lack of community sanctions. Frequently experienced by women, domestic violence becomes inscribed on the body through a woman's comprehension of its meaning, which produces anger and moral indignation. The resulting symptomatologies are often untranslatable into the signs on which medical diagnoses are based, and they often go undetected by traditional biomedical technologies. An example of a non-life threatening condition due to life's lesions is m o v e s a n as it is experienced in Haiti (Farmer, 1988). M o v e s a n (bad blood) is a sickness, which is widespread among rural Haitian women. In much of Haiti, disvalued experiences - shocks, disappointments, anger, fright - may be embodied as disorders of the blood. M o v e s a n is such a disorder. It is caused by malignant emotions. The women who spoke to Farmer about this disorder almost always designated interpersonal strife and its psychological effects as the cause of their problems. However, later they invariably focused on their abundant somatic symptoms. Those most vulnerable to m o v e s a n are pregnant women or nursing mothers. M o v e s a n is the chief cause of the let g a t e (spoiled milk) syndrome. Bad blood is thought to make it impossible for a lactating mother to afford her infant 'good milk'. The stories told by sufferers of m o v e s a n and their associates play a key role in the shaping of the m o v e s a n experience. M o v e s a n becomes an idiom in which many forms of misfortune are obliquely presented. The opposition of vital and lethal body fluids (bad blood and spoiled milk) serves as a moral barometer. As somatic indices, bad blood and spoiled milk submit ,private problems to public scrutiny. The powerful metaphors of blood and milk as the body's most vital constituents turned to poisons, serve, Farmer infers, as a warning against the abuse of women, especially pregnant or nursing ones. Transgressions are discouraged by their publicly visible, and potentially disastrous, results. The syndrome of m o v e s a n should not only be looked at as a moral barometer of interpersonal strife and other forms of misfortune on a village level.

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It is also related to global, macro-economic changes leading to poverty and subsequently to fear, pain, hunger and brutality, as well as to women's increasingly difficult struggle for survival in these circumstances. These social dynamics of distress, however, are often treated as taboo subjects, and women's protest is mainly expressed somatically. Pointed questions by Farmer about specific episodes, however, elicited long and nonspecific narratives addressing the more existential questions of suffering placed in the larger context of physical and social afflictions. In a number of cultures across the world, women communicate their embodied distress in terms of blood and/or nerves. Metaphors like move san and its equivalents that retain the holism of experience easily lose their communicative force, however, with the breaking up of close-knit communities resulting from processes of modernization. The potential responses and behaviors elicited by these metaphors also become limited when they become part of the domain of biomedicine. The blood and nerves idioms, as they are known worldwide, are trivialized by biomedicine or dissected by internationalized biomedical and psychiatric language into a somatic or psychiatric syndrome. Even psychiatry reduces complex distress idioms more and more to essentially biologized entities within individuals. The redefinition of women's distress and its treatment with enormous quantities of psychotropics leads to the interiorization of women's emotions. Consequently, women's repertoire of value judgements, critique and protest gradually erodes in the process (Richters, 1996). The Awakening of a Silent Physiological Event: The Menopause as Pathology

Bodily distress that means something important for women is often dismissed as unimportant by biomedicine. At the same time biomedicine picks up bodily events or processes that go unnoticed by women themselves, as signs of pathology. The end of menstruation - a happening in all women of a certain age - is a case in point. A study by D. L. Davis (1997) of aging women in a Newfoundland fishing village shows that medicalization of the menopausal transition in places where aging bodies were beyond the control of biomedical ideas and practices can happen at an amazing speed. Davis set out to research the experience of menopause in Newfoundland in the 1970s. She found that menopause was not a salient life-event for the women she interviewed. It was considered a normal process, and its major symptoms were not found to be unique to mid-life or to the cessation of menses. Processes associated with mid-life health and well-being were referred to by the concepts of nerves and blood; concepts, which described female health and character

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throughout the whole life cycle and were intrinsically related to women's individual and collective status, and to the moral order of the local community. The significance of nerves is derived from the belief that nerves can both affect and respond to psychological and social phenomena. Nerves were idiosyncratic and collective, dramatic and mundane, physical and mental. To portray nerves as illness or sickness misrepresented the nature of the concept. Yet women did have license to complain, be sick, or impose themselves on others for support. Silent suffering brought little social reward. Suffering had to be communicated. The major focus of women's communication and support networks, however, was not the symptoms, or how to cope with the symptoms, but the legitimacy of the complaints. The local women's community of judgement was so strong that it had deterred the incursion of medicalized views of menopause. When Davis returned to 'her' village fourteen years later, the situation was entirely different. In the past talk about nerves, blood and the body by middleaged women was about everything but the body. Little more than a decade later, talk about the body had become speaking about the body. 'Med-speak' had replaced 'nerves-speak'. The once collective, public body with its permeable and multiple boundaries as part of an analogue worldview had been digitalized. Complaints of nerves were no longer taken seriously, but were trivialized and ridiculed instead. Like the houses that now have locks on their doors, the bodies of the women have become bounded and privatized. That is at least what the Newfoundland women think, or are supposed to think. Robbed of the exPressive, supportive, and esteem-enhancing functions of traditional talk about nerves and blood, the women now seek help and advice from medical practitioners, submitting their reproductively-worn wombs and ovaries for removal, and agreeing to life-long medical 'replacement' of their lost hormones. They have successfully internalized the biomedical model and psychologize symptoms and syndromes as personal failures or bad life-choices. Unlike the analogue language of blood and nerves, which encoded social power and action, the digitalizing and privatizing bio-medical language of menopause is neither empowering nor conducive to social action. It is, as its function prescribes, a silencing language. In the case of the Newfoundland community, it is important to realize, however, that any explanation of the medicalization of menopause and the assault on women's physical integrity should go beyond standard medicinebashing and examine the much larger political-ecological conditions affecting the community and its way of life. What happened in Newfoundland both to the local fisheries and women's bodies can be seen as an effect of globalization on local level. While in many other parts of the world globalization still meets counterforces, in Newfoundland globalization appears to have become

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all-pervasive. The older women lost their former social identities. Their selves have become frozen in biomedical language. How exactly this could happen, and whether the women of the community resisted the medicalization of the body until the collapse of the fisheries put all local knowledge in question, remains to be answered by further study and feminist analysis.

The Appearance of the Body: The Sharpening of Body Boundaries and the Normalization of the Female Body The rise to prominence of digitalized commodity culture in Western societies has resulted in bodily maintenance as its central tenet (Lupton, 1994: 36-40). Bodily maintenance in the interest of good health merges with the desire to appear sexually attractive and to be able to market one's body, especially for women. Numerous technologies aimed at a purely physical transformation are available. In our time the female body has to be slender, but also firm and flexible (Bordo, 1990). The firm, developed body means that one cares about one's self and how one appears to others, suggesting will-power, sexual potential, energy, control over infantile impulse, the ability to make something of oneself and to reproduce successfully. More socio-centric notions of self and body present in many parts of the world challenge the Western ideal of cultivating an autonomous self and body. In these notions the self is not so much conceived of as a body, but as a locus of shared social and natural relationships, of shared biographies. Becket (1995) observed that notions of selfhood in the Pacific islands are interpersonal and sustained by the assumption that sociability and relatedness underlie personal existence. Bodies do not circumscribe individual experience. Bodily boundaries are fluid. Self, identity, and body are embedded in the socio-cosmic matrix. The body is transparent and permeable, permitting the essence of the self, the yalo, to spill out into the community. The fluidity of bodily boundaries, on the other hand, also allows spirits and spiritual manifestations to enter and occupy the body. Among the Fiji, personal experience must be contextualized as a continuous exercise in actualizing, cultivating, and maintaining the individual's connections to the social world. This means that the Western preoccupation with the cultivation of one's own body-shape and a disease like anorexia is inconceivable among the Pacific islanders. Personal achievements are indexed not by bodily shape or by the disciplining of the body, but by one's connectedness with and performance of care in the social matrix of the family and the village. It is the ability to be generous with food rather than to possess it that confers

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prestige in Fiji. Food is used to potentiate social relations. Women invest in cultivating not their own bodies, but those of others which fortifies their embeddedness in a plexus of social relations. 2 The splitting of the self into body and mind and its isolation from the social, however, is no longer the exclusive property of Western societies. Likewise, anorexia is not still a disease which occurs exclusively among Western white middle-class women. It has crossed the lines dividing gender, ethnicity, class and race. It seems that this crossing is just the beginning of a globalization process geared toward the worldwide transformation of women's bodies, according to Western standards for the ideal female bodily appearance. Modern communication technologies and medical technologies are more than ready to be instrumental in the globalization of this normalization process. Kaw (1993) finds in her ethnographic research in the San Francisco Bay Area that Asian-American women submit to cosmetic surgery in order to have their eyelids restructured, their nose bridges heightened, and the tips of their noses altered. They have internalized the view that their own genetic physical-features eyelids without a crease and a nose that does not project - indicate a certain 'sleepiness', 'dullness' and 'passivity' in a person's character. Kaw argues that through the subtle and often unconscious manipulation of racial and gender ideologies, medicine, as a producer of norms, and the larger consumer society of which it is a part, encourage Asian-American women to mutilate their bodies to conform to an ethnocentric norm. Cosmetic surgely is a means by which these women hope to acquire symbolic capital in the form of a look that holds more prestige and augments the chance of social and economic success. It is racial stereotypes that influence Asian-American women to seek cosmetic surgery. Yet, Kaw concludes, medicine, along with a culture based on endless self-fashioning, is able to motivate women to view their feelings of inadequacy as individually motivated, as opposed to socially induced phenomena, thereby effectively convincing them to participate in the production and reproduction of the larger structural inequalities that continue to oppress them. It might be possible, however, that the women themselves feel like the Dutch women who had undergone cosmetic surgery in K. Davis' study (1994). Davis argues that while cosmetic surgery throws into critical relief the commodified nature of the body in consumer culture - women actually purchase a new body - it paradoxically enables them to feel 'embodied subjects' rather than 'objectified bodies'. What is at issue here is what 'being subject' means for them. Cosmetic surgery for the Dutch women was not about beauty, but about wanting to become ordinary, normal, or just like everyone else. In narratives, the surgery was presented as part of a woman's struggle to feel at home in her body; to feel a subject with a body rather than just a body. -

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The Leaky and Fragmented Body: Manipulation, Exchange and Marketing of Body Parts An array of recently developed high-tech medical interventions has broadened the purpose of health care and challenged the Western notions about bodily boundaries that are taken for granted. While the challenge to these notions in the former section came from non-Western analogue perspectives on the body, in this section it comes from increasingly sophisticated digital perspectives. The possibilities medicine now offers are no longer just those of corporeal normalization, including the fashioning, upgrading, styling and accommodation of outward bodily appearance, but also those of the transgressive interchangeability of body parts. Transplantation medicine, biotechnology and genetics have created new ontological entities: organs, eggs, the pre-implantation embryo and genes. The creation of these entities, their manipulation and their transfer - whether as gifts or as commodities - to third parties forces us to engage the ontological question of what it means to be human; how we should understand ourselves, our nature and significance, and our connections with our contemporaries, our ancestors, our descendants, our past and our future. Transplantation technology has led to a blurring of distinctions between life and death (i.e. dead people with living organs, living people with organs of the dead) and enables a blurring between humans and animals (i.e. xenotransplantation). As a subset of genetics and biotechnology, artificial reproductive technologies inherit from technoscience the will to fragment and divide processes, events, and sequences that have been traditionally perceived as undistributable and unified (Farquhar, 1996). These technologies potentiate, for example, the divisibility of maternity into three components: genetic-chromosomal, uterine-gestational, and socio-legal maternity, including, in the case of surrogacy, the transfer of newborns from one 'mother' to another (in some cases, to a third). The technology of transgenetics already creates the possibility of design babies, merging portions of genes from different persons or different species. With this technology, children literally have more than two immediate parents - immediate sources of genetic material - and one or more of these extra parents might not even be human. The children of the future will have a production line as their origin. With the rise of all these technologies, images of the coherent body and coherent self have both been fragmented. Such challenges to assumptions about self/body integrity, however, have already given rise to new forms of social relationships and in the course of time they will most certainly lead to a new kind of society. We are just beginning to learn what all these developments

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mean for men as compared to women in various socio-cultural contexts in terms of embodiment and disembodiment, freedom and control, equality and inequality (Shildrick, 1997; Tong, 1997; Rothblatt, 1997). What the gendered impacts of the globalization of the new technologies are and will be is a subject that has hardly been studied yet. With her study of reproductive technologies, genetic testing and the planned family in Japan, Lock (1998a) gives us an example of how a particular culture receives and applies the new technologies at a particular point in time. In Japan, intrusive technologies are believed to be unnatural, contrary to Japanese custom, and dangerous to both individuals and society. Nevertheless, the new technologies may be used for the production of the 'correct' family, should married couples need assistance with having children. However, they should not be used simply to fulfill individual desires. Insemination by donated sperm as well as contract surrogacy with a stranger raise moral concerns and anxieties in contemporary Japan, and are strongly opposed. Blood ties are seen as important and going outside the family as risky, biologically speaking. The rigorous normalization of the planned family means that those women and children who are socially marginalized pay a heavy price for whatever reasons. Lock postulates that, given the shortage of social support for physically disadvantaged children, and the persistent stigma they experience, together with the ready availability of abortion, women's pragmatic cooperation with the use of biomedical technologies may well be the driving force in the rapid proliferation of genetic testing and screening as this technology develops. If this is so, why shouldn't then, for the sake of an even more perfect society, the acceptance of other, more bodily intrusive technologies follow? The Embodiment of Hyper-reality and Risks At the turn of the century bodies were increasingly understood as forms of digital archives (Waldby, 1997; Williams, 1997). The new technological imaging capabilities offer medicine additional grounds for technological calculation. In computerized forms of vision the body is pictured as digital data, that is as an image produced as a mathematical structure of data. The possibility to enframe the body within the logic of the computer means, for example, that in anatomy the time of the corpse is up. The medical student can learn to cut the body in an odorless, affect-neutral and virtual way. The upshot of this and similar developments is that bodies become ever more elusive: instead of the patient's body or body parts being at the center of contemporm2¢ medical practice and discourse, we find virtual bodies represented by multiple images and

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codings. We now have three-dimensional screens that exteriorize direct images of the body's interior, screens that display online digital images, coded into graphs and pictorial display, of bodily processes and functioning, and screens which visualize invisible risk factors. When invisible signs of the body are made visible to the client through a biomedical screening technique, things happen to the lived body that can only recently be explored. The historian Duden (1993) observes that today a sonogram can tell a woman whether she is pregnant or not, whereas in the past quickening, a woman's experience of feeling a movement in the belly, revealed that she was pregnant and made her pregnancy a social fact. In modern prenatal-care programs, Duden writes, women's bodies are transformed into a field of operations for technological interventions, an ecosystem for a fetus. Farquhar (1996) argues for the United States, and Georges (1996) confirms in her study of fetal ultrasound imaging in Greece, that the users of the new visualizing medical technologies, however, may already be forging complex and rich worlds of meaning out of these new visualizing medical technologies. Sonogram technology may indeed make maternal connection easier to imagine for some women, while for others, especially when the technology reveals that the fetus may be at risk, maternal bonding may be discouraged. An unintentional consequence of the nature of the technology is that the natural, evolutionary, ontological relations women have with their fetuses are shifting from a matter-of-fact entity to an abstract virtual reality in progress. Little is known of the culturally inflected experiences of women and obstetricians as they interact with fetal ultrasonography in various contexts outside North America and Western Europe. We also know little or nothing about nonWestern women's experiences of risk as signs of possible current or future disease in themselves or their offspring. When Duden (1993: 26-27) describes the process of abstraction that goes on when, in a prenatal center in Harlem, New York, Maria Sanchez, a recent immigrant from Puerto Rico, is presented with graphs showing the risk factors of her having a fetus with problems, she comments that the counselor's insistence on risk made little sense to Maria. "Maria must stretch her imagination to grasp these abstractions. The experience of her mother was more sensual, warm, touchable, familiar." Martin (1996) prefers to take this as a hypothesis in need of ethnographic exploration. She states that we cannot know where meaning is impoverished and abstract and where it is rich and multilayered unless we have deeper knowledge of the contexts in which Maria makes sense of the graphs or her mother having made another kind of sense of different knowledge. Developments in epidemiology, biochemistry and genetics make it possible to calculate risk factors of more and more diseases. The assumption in the

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Western public health discourse on risk is that all bodies, male and female, are actually or potentially diseased. Because of women's specific reproductive bodily functions, women's bodies, however, seem to be more at risk than those of men are. Women live, as was illustrated above, with the risk of abnormalities of their fetuses. And even before they reach menopause they are confronted with the risk of osteoporosis. In North America, for instance, the language of risk has come to dominate the vocabulary of popular, medical, and policy making to such an extent that life-long drug therapy is recommended for virtually all middle-age women (Lock, 1998b). Another example is women's high risk of breast cancer in the Western world. Gifford (1986) presents in her study of the meaning of risk factors for breast cancer a model in which risk takes on two distinct dimensions: a technical, objective or scientific dimension and a socially experienced or lived dimension. Clinical medicine bridges the two dimensions. Gifford interviewed medical practioners and patients in the United States. The first deal with risk by transforming it into a clinical entity that resides in a particular part of the body, a sign of a present or future disease. Risk for the patients is rarely an objective concept. Rather, it is internalized and experienced as a state of being; a state that is somewhere between health and disease and that results in the medicalization of a woman's life. Being diagnosed 'at risk' is itself a risk factor. It represents the risk of medicalization and the risk of losing control over the definition of one's own health, according to Gifford. How women in various socio-cultural contexts are exposed to the new predictive, risk-technology differently and respond differently to the resulting medicalization of their lives in terms of gains and losses remains to be studied. Another issue for study is differences in women's bodily experiences of risk.

WOMEN'S BODY POLITICS IN A MULTI-FRACTURED AND POWER-CENTERED WORLD The case-studies presented above demonstrate that the fields and concerns of biomedicine are diverse and heterogeneous and that the globalization of biomedicine in its different forms leads to the medically reimaging, culturally reconstructing and morally reconceiving of bodies and persons. The majority of women today are not simply responding, whether intentionally or not, in their body-politics only to tradition and local hegemonies, but also to globalization and its resulting complexities. It was highlighted in particular how biomedicine, itself increasingly dominated by digi-languages, contributes to the digitalization of women' s life-worlds and bodies and thereby tends to dissolve all sorts of traditional narrative,

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analogue communications. Women's bodies, however, are in most cases not only affected by hegemonic biomedical discourses and practices as docile or passive. As lived bodies, they also resist docility as part of self-formation (Lupton, 1997). Case-studies from around the world collected by Lock and Kaufert (1998) illustrate the complexity of women's responses to the process of medicalization, responses, which may range from selective resistance to selective compliance. However, women may also be indifferent, depending on whether medicalization fits in with their own priorities and values. According to Lock and Kaufert, the studies suggest that ambivalence coupled with pragmatism may be women's dominant mode of response to medicalization. Women, perhaps more than men, are ontologically relational beings. By giving birth women relate past, present and future of the human species in general, and family life in particular. For these reasons, women perhaps more than men suffer from the violations of their physical and social integrity caused by digitalization processes. It is therefore perhaps more in the female than in the male bodily context of experiences, that we can identify resistances to the digitalization of human beings who are by nature all part of a relational, analogue world. To date, the field studies have only been able to give us a glimpse of women' s embodied experiences in the context of hegemonic digitalizing forces. More in depth studies are needed to reveal similarities and differences in women's bodily-engagements in socially and culturally transformative processes within the space they still have available for these engagements. Performances and results can vary widely as the following elaboration of themes brought forward by the case-studies show. These studies raise individual, social and ethical issues that need to be further explored if we want to gain more insight into women's bodily engagements and body politics. Just suppose that women's bodily distress due to life's lesions is indeed reduced to lesions inherent in the individual and treated with psychotropics. Then it remains to be seen whether women retain old repertoires of value judgments, critique and protest, transform them, develop new ones which are directed at social problems, or accept the medicalization of their problems as the best option they have, considering the circumstances. In a study of Greek immigrant women in Montrtal, Lock (1990) describes the medicalization of a distress condition called n e v r a (nerves) by the women that provides them with legitimacy for their suffering and offers some comfort, even though they are aware of the social and political sources of their n e v r a . As one woman says: 'Yes, I take Valium right now, but it doesn't do any good, except it helps to impress my husband a bit' (quoted by Lock, 1990: 242). This is an example of how biopower can be used as a defense against other forms of power.

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D. L. Davis (1997) presents the medicalization of menopause in Newfoundland mainly in terms of losses for women, but we may also wonder if and what women gain by medical interventions. Chirawatkul and Manderson (1994) describe how village women in northeastern Thailand have always regarded menopause as a natural, and, positively viewed, sign of aging. Increased monetarization of the economy, the migration of men and younger women in search of wage labor, and increases in the number of female-headed households have made it imperative, however, for middle-aged and older women to remain economically active. The result is that there is a growing interest in prolonging menstruation, and in controlling the process of aging, the loss of vitality and energy, and health. To deal with this situation, Thai women show considerably more confidence in the power of biomedicine than in traditional knowledge and healing methods. Like many anthropologists, Becker (1995) employs a reductive binary approach in her study of body image in Fiji. She uses knowledge from afar to critically reflect on the condition of the so-called advanced societies. Her study is full of nostalgia for a way of life that has vanished in her own society, the United States. The exploration of the Fijian self engaged in collective social-life leads Becker to examine the relationship between the body, the self, and society in Western culture. The splitting of the Western-self into body and mind, its specific, individualistic relation to the social, and the way the self is subjugated through media, markets, and biomedicine, emphasize, according to Becker, the pathological nature of modern American society. The pathological in Fijian society remains, however, underexposed in her study. From other sources we know that, for example, the incidence of sexual abuse of children and women is high in Fiji, but is an issue that has long been silenced (Davies, 1994). As a consequence, we still know nothing about the effects of rape in the Fijian culture that perceives bodily boundaries differently from the digitalizing West. Nor do we know from her study anything about possible changes in male and female selfhood in Fiji under the influence of globalization. In order to come to grips with the processes of medicalization and globalization and their impacts on local life-worlds we need more diachronic studies tracing changes through time, such as the study by D. L. Davis (1997). We may then discover, for example, that Western body images are only invoked temporarily. Lock (1998a) observes that after the Second World War in Japan industrial developments enabled the female body to become westernized - the eyes were 'rounded,' the breasts made larger, the hair curled. The last decennia show, however, a reverse of the development. An influential movement in the world of fashion cultivates the classic, 'true' Japanese female appearance again.

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It seems beyond women's power, even in Japan, to stop the manipulation of the female body by technology and its 'enterprising up' as part of globalization. However, we can at least wonder if it is morally and socio-culturally right to accept this process being called 'consumer choice' if we know that this expression really stands for servitude and coercion or even for brute force for many women in the world. Reproductive technologies, for example, surely do away with ontological 'natural determination', and allow open-ended malleability and the transcendence of traditional limits. But does this mean progress for everybody (Gupta, 2000)? Or is it progress for some and embodied violence for other women? One speaks today of postmodernism as 'modernism without illusions'; that is to say, without the illusions about man and society the Western world has debated and fought about since the Enlightenment. The Western world now seems tired of those illusions. Should we wonder whether today's progress is progress at all? It would be wrong to conclude that I am against flexibility, malleability and the transcendence of limits. The possible outcomes of present regimes of fragmentation are not restricted to decline or a nostalgic return to the original unity. New reproductive technologies may indeed be able to produce different and other kinds of subjects and subjectivities and might have promising implications for new kinds of relationships, politics, and communities, as Farquhar (1996) argues. But we have to be vigilant since no transcultural ethical-governor controls the 'fruits of progress'. At first sight the new reproductive technologies might appear beneficial to human freedom and happiness, but are they really? And are they beneficial for all women in all socio-cultural contexts? Women's bodies have always been battlegrounds on which contests other than women's own have been waged. Indigenous cultural traditions, rules and values have often violated these bodies. Today's global enterprise culture and rapidly modernizing technologies have added new means to throw into the battle. It is not just trafficking in women's whole bodies for sex anymore, but dealing in ever-smaller parts of those bodies, ranging from organs to cells and genes. Recently developed high-tech medicine is still only available for a minority of women, but, as stated before, we are only at the beginning of the digitalization of the body and socio-cultural globalization processes. This may, in due course, lead to the geneticization of the world. This means that more and more phenomena in human existence will be brought under the influence of genetics and economy. In worst case scenarios, the crafting of genetic technology onto racist and classist social structures will only reinforce already existing oppression (Rothblat, 1997: xix). Unlikely? From the history of technology in general, and of biomedical technology in particular, we know that what is science-fiction one day, can be reality the next.

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Since the process of geneticization and its globalization has just started, it is hard to predict how women will respond to this new process. Only time will tell. As is often the case, one has to live it before writing about it. How much freedom will women have to choose the type of children they want; and how much control will governments and communities have over eugenic choices? Will genetic technology indeed reinforce racist, classist and gender oppression, as some people fear? Concerning all the new high-tech interventions we need to ask what they mean in terms of liberation and oppression, opportunity and control, new connections and disconnections, old and new identities, etc. While searching for answers to the many questions and problems raised, we need to acknowledge the lived experience of the body and take into account what lay-people as embodied beings-in-the-world can tell us about these issues. We also need to study how their responses to new knowledge, images and technology are mediated through such factors as gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, class, race, religion, sexual identity and age. CONCLUSION

The Strengthening of the Analogue through Research Some of the implications of the global-local exchange of digital and analogue approaches towards bodies for the way women's bodies are conceptualized, perceived, experienced, talked about and acted upon; in clinical practices as well in people's life-world, and in society at large, have been outlined in this paper. It was emphasized that we need to know more about the degree to which women intentionally or unintentionally accept, invoke, and adapt to new biomedical technologies. A main characteristic of biomedicine as an integral part of our global digitalizing culture is that it splinters people's bodily functioning into decontexmalized, amoral signs and symptoms; into increasingly smaller measurable attributes, with the danger that we loose sight of the dynamic, multifarious and multiform relations which sustain life as well as jeopardize our humanity. While reifying the digitalization, biomedicine casts a veil over analogue bodily experiences. In the women's narratives of these experiences, we find references to aspects of this totality of analogue relations, which are important for them and for us. Because society holds the individual responsible for the maintenance of his or her health, biomedicine tends to construe socio-cultural causes as bodily, that is to say natural, imperfections. Illness narratives, on the other hand, often relate individual suffering to the social and political order on both micro- and macro-level. One may wonder whether globalization and

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digitalization will succeed in totally eradicating vocabularies in which the analogue approach to the life world plays a prominent role. Biodiversity and linguistic diversity are linked. The ongoing dwindling of diversity can be seen as an indicator of the extent to which the world has become controlled by globalization and digitalization. Medicalization is just one exponent of this process. Biomedicine has the potential to relieve people from a lot of pain and suffering, but the flip side is that by its digitalization, it also denies and confutes an enormous amount of pain and suffering societies create. Therefore, in women-and-health research one should be vigilant that the analogue is not silenced by 'the digital'. Deconstruction of women's narratives still reveals needs and desires that cannot be expressed in digitalized language. We often also find in them an incipient critique of the society in which women live. Social structures and cultural traditions are very tenacious and unconsciously influence people's behavior and perceptions. As researchers we should therefore not let the changing reality of women avert our attention from the often very constant hidden determinants of women's perceptions, behavior and socio-cultural and bodily conditions, Where necessary we should aim at developing knowledge, which is better than women's lay knowledge. At the site of the individual body, biopower may, for example, be experienced as enabling, but women may be unable to foresee what the negative consequences of biomedicine are for themselves, as well as for humankind. Despite the current tides to the contrary, researchers should still see it as their task to occupy themselves with theory-building which provides tools to analyze and explain all sorts of relationalities; relations between what is inside and what is outside our bodies, as well as relations between ideas and action 'in here' and 'out there'. Anthropologists have used 'others' and 'otherness' in far-away cultures - and increasingly also subjugated knowledges in here - to deconstruct the familiar, ready-made concepts we Westerners use in our research and clinical practices. But what if globalization and 'others' wholly eradicate the cultural and biological diversity of the world and 'others' and 'otherness' can no longer assist us with that deconstruction. What if the concepts and methods of the hard sciences eradicate the kinds and forms of objectivity that the social sciences have generated? I cannot look into the future, but am sure that, as is always the case, women, the weak and the poor will suffer most from this development. Therefore researchers should guard the dialectic between the digital and the analogue, and strengthen the analogue where necessary. This should occur whether it is the analogue in women's narratives about their bodies or the analogue in our analyses of these narratives and analyses of the various aspects of the self/body/ culture/power/politics nexus which are overlooked in these narratives. Research from an analogue and cultural comparative perspective of women's bodily

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functioning can, as I have tried to convey in this paper, not only contribute to the deconstruction of familiar, ready-made concepts about women's bodies and further critical theorizing about those bodies as objects and subjects, but also to the development of health care that is sensitive to gender in all its possible diversity and contributes to women's emancipation. If present trends in globalization persist, in the next millennium women might feel that they want something they could or should have had, or sense that they have lost something, but can not remember what. Then, at least our research will be there to remind them.

NOTES 1. An earlier version of this paper was published in A. Kolk, M. Bekker & K. van Vliet (Eds), (1999) Advances in Women and Health Research: Toward Gender-Sensitive Strategies (pp. 27-47). Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. 2. The comments here are about the anthropological present. The New York Times (Goode, 1999) reports that Dr. Anne E. Becker, director of research at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center found that since the introduction of television in the last few years, there has been an increase in eating disorders among high school girls on Fiji island.

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Farquhar, D. (1996). The other machine: Discourse and reproductive technologies. New York: Routledge. Finkler, K. (1994). Women in pain: Gender and morbidity in Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Finkler, K. (1997). Gender, domestic violence and sickness in Mexico. Social Science & Medicine, 45, 1147-1160. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980). Power~Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon. Georges, E. (1996). Fetal ultrasound imaging and the production of authoritative knowledge in Greece. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 10, 141-157. Giddens, A. (1996/1997). Excerpts from a keynote address at the UNRISD conference on globalization and citizenship. UNRISD News, 15, 4-6. Gifford, S. M. (1986). The meaning of lumps: A case study of the ambiguities of risk. In: C. G. Janes, R. Stall & S. M. Gifford (Eds), Anthropology and Epidemiology: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Health and Disease (pp. 213-249). Dordrecht: Reidel. Goode, E. (1999, May 20). Study finds TV trims Fiji girls' body image and eating habits. New York Times, p. A17. Gupta, J. A. (2000). New reproductive technologies, women's health and autonomy: Freedom or dependency? New Delhi: Sage. Kaw, E. (1993). Medicalization of racial features: Asian American women and cosmetic surgery. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 7, 74-90. Lock, M. (1990). On being ethnic: The politics of identity breaking and making in Canada, or Nevra on Sunday. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 14, 237-255. Lock, M. (1988a). Perfecting society: Reproductive technologies, genetic testing, and the planned family in Japan. In: M. Lock & P. A. Kaufert (Eds), Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (pp. 206-240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lock, M. (1998b). Anomalous ageing: Managing the postmenopansal body. Body & Society, 4, 35-63. Lock, M., & Kaufert, P. A. (Eds). (1998). Pragmatic Women and Body Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lupton, D. (1994). Medicine as culture: Illness, disease and the body in western societies. London: Sage. Lupton, D. (1997). Foucault and the medicalisation critique. In: A. Petersen & R. Bunton (Eds), Foucault, Health and Medicine (pp. 94-113). London: Routledge. Martin, E. (1996). Book review of B. Duden, Disembodying women. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 19, 307-309. Richters, A. (1996). Women, emotions and depressive disorders: Between adjustment and protest. Curare: Zeitschrift fr Ethnomedizin, 19, 233-243. Rothblatt, M. (1997). Unzipped genes: Taking charge of baby-making in the new millennium. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge. Tong, R. (1997). Feminist approaches to bioethics: Theoretical reflections and practical applications. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Waldby, C. (1997). The body and the digital archive: The Visible Human Project and the computerization of medicine. Health, 1, 227-243. Williams, S. J. (1997). Modern medicine and the tmcertaln body': From corporeality to hyperreality. Social Science & Medicine, 45, 1041-1049.

THE NATURE/CULTURE DUALISM IN THE INDIAN CONTEXT Abha Chauhan

INTRODUCTION The dichotomy between nature and culture in the feminist discourse stemmed in large measure from western historical theorizing (Ortner, 1974; Rosaldo, 1974). The earliest feminist scholarship accepted the universal subordination of women and associated nature with women and culture with men. The series of ethnographic studies that followed challenged the universal validity of these dichotomies by focusing on the differences in women's lives and perceptions. The contemporary postmodernist and deconstructionist feminist critique has further provided an impetus to this understanding by highlighting the multicentered and multi-faceted areas and experiences of women. The non-western world, and India specifically, challenge theoretical dichotomies, though it must be emphasized that since India is a pluralistic and culturally diverse society, "multiple sites of power and knowledge" (Foucault, 1973, p. 31) exist within it . . . At the risk of generalization and hence of tautological interpretation, an exploration of the relevance of the dichotomous framework in understanding women's situation in India is attempted in the present work. It is argued that the dichotomy - woman is to man as nature is to culture or private is to public, does not provide a sufficient conceptual frame-work for understanding either the subordination of women of the nature of gender relations in India. The reasons for this stem from the distinct historical trajectory and cultural moorings of the Indian society. 'Nature' and 'culture,'

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like 'woman' and 'man,' are not value free concepts open to objective and universal analysis. In the Indian context, the concepts have different meanings and they often intersect in various forms having different implications across caste, community and regional lines. Correspondingly, the dichotomous relationship is perceived differently and carries varied connotations. Arguments focusing on the nature/culture dichotomy fall under two categories of anthropological and radical feminist writings. The formulation 'female is to male as nature is to culture' was regarded as a powerful framework in the social anthropological writings in the late 1970s and early 1980's. This was so because in the social anthropological writings "it offered a way of linking sexual ideologies and stereotypes both to the wider system of cultural symbols and to social roles and experience" (Moore, 1994, p. 16). The essay by Sherry Ortuer Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture ? was regarded as the most influential one. Ortner argues that female subordination is universal and since its explanation is not inherent in biological differences between sexes, it must be located within the cultural system - in cultural ideologies and symbols. To the question what could be common to all cultures that place a lower value on women, Ortner's answer is that women must be associated with something which every culture devalues. This, according to her, is 'nature' (p. 72). Culture is superior to nature as it controls and transcends it, and since women because of their involvement in reproduction and related functions are seen as closer to nature, they are to be controlled and contained as well. Women are confined to the domestic chores of the house, their sphere of activities concentrated in and around the family while those of men are situated in the political and public arena. Ortner however, clarifies her aim, which is to identify and locate the cultural valuations which make women appear close to nature; 'in reality' they are not any closer to, or further from, nature than men. In the 1970s, the writings of the radical feminists such as Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Kate Millet (1977) attributed the subordination of women to the natural biological and reproductive functions of women. They emphasized the need to make the areas of life described as personal into those of political struggle and theoretical analysis. Nature was seen as the single most important cause of men's domination and the relation between nature and culture as one between women and men. Since the origin was sought in biology, the emancipation was seen in the elimination of natural differences between the sexes and in the private sphere of family. It was thought that this would enable individuals of all ages to live and interact in an undifferentiated culture or public order (Jackson & Jones, 1998, pp. 3 4 ) . The two slogans, 'the personal is the political,' and 'sisterhood is powerful', which gained significance in this period endorsed the idea that women's

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subordination, decided by nature is universal and rejected the liberal idea of the private/public dichotomy. All the ills of the west were grouped under the concept of 'patriarchy' and it was believed that only the eradication of its structurally unequal patterns could remove the existing inequalities. Though there was a lot of debate centered around it, there was a general acceptance of the idea that in cultures men dominated the public world and through this domination controlled and defined women's behavior. (Evans, 1997, pp. 42-43). The limitations, in the Indian context, of the radical feminist approach, which centered around the concepts of 'private' and 'public,' is taken up later. The significance of Ortner's analysis lies in viewing women's subordination not as inherent in biological differences between the sexes, but as cultural constructions reinforced by the existing social institutions and activities, or what came to be described as gender differences. 'Gender' as an analytical concept challenged the essentialist and universalistic dictum that biology is destiny, even though some of the later studies challenged the persistent tendency in comparative studies to attribute the cultural organization of gender to the biological differences in the roles of women and men (Stolche, 1993). The analytical dichotomies are attacked for assuming that gender difference is everywhere rooted in the same difference and hence "take for granted what it should explain" (Collier & Yanagisako, 1987). These critiques are, however, not able to free themselves form a similar trap. More challenging perhaps, as will be shown subsequently in the context of India, is to question the claim that the separation of the private and public is based on, and necessarily draws from, the natural differences of the sexes. Another aspect of dichotomous dualism that needs to be questioned is the assumption of the universal subordination of 'women' and 'nature' and their relationship with 'men' and 'culture.' In fact, one of the current challenges of sociology is to move beyond such dualisms and claims of universality. (Miles, 1998). The dichotomy that associates women with nature and reproductive and domestic activities in India is not exclusively private and personal for women alone, nor what are described as the public spheres for men alone. On various occasions and in different situations, men are as much a part of natural world as women are of culture. Among the Toda people of Nilgiri Hills of South India, all the operations of the dairy which are regarded as sacred are performed by men alone. (Walker, 1986). Culture in most of the communities in India is not viewed as distinct form nature, in fact culture evolves from people's relationship with nature. For Ortner, culture is superior to nature for the control it exercises, but for many people in this part of the world- both women and men, nature is superior because it is created by the supernatural being who is all powerful and therefore to be worshipped and propitiated. The folk and tribal

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cultures in India are full of examples of the use of rituals and religious beliefs for maintaining ecological balance and preserving natural resources. Therefore, not only does the relationship between nature and culture differ, but so does that between culture and humanity. The assumption that every culture devalues women also needs questioning as the valuation varies across time, place and situations. The procreation and birth of a child is highly valued and increases woman's status but the state of bareness or widowhood mainly among higher castes, is regarded as inauspicious and women in such states are treated adversely. Women's sexuality is controlled and carefully guarded for various reasons from the desire for progeny to the fear of women's sexual power, and not necessarily because women's reproductive functions are seen as closer to nature. It is not clear in Ortner's analysis whether "women's domestic activities symbolize nature, are part of nature, or rather, place women in a mediating position between nature and culture" (Pateman, 1983, p. 288). In India it is mainly women belonging to upper class and caste who are confined to 'private' activities within the domestic sphere, while a large number of women belonging to the poorer section of the society, those of lower caste, and members of peasant and tribal communities work outside the house participating extensively in agricultural, animal husbandry and allied activities. Their work is often seen as the extension of their household activities and no clear demarcation occurs between the private and public realms in such situations. Moreover, the modern census occupational classification counts only paid workers. Thus, women's work participation rate is recorded as lower than that of men, and much of women's work is rendered invisible, marginal and of lower value. 1 Leela Dube (1997) has shown how differences in kinship systems and family structures account for some critical differences among societies in the ways in which gender operates, especially with regard to resources. It is common knowledge, for example, that women in rural India harvest crops, but they are sold in the market by men who then have access and control over resources. The communities being mainly patrilineal, the property is passed on to the men with women having very little right of ownership. Even with the passage of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 granting property rights to women, many of them are either not allowed to lay claims on the property or are given some amount in the form of dowry at marriage. The poorer communities either do not have enough property or women's claims are subverted under the guise of customary laws. The history of the several regions of Africa and Asia suggests the ways in which colonialism and capitalism created public and private spheres by taking

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the production from home to factories. (Ollenburger & Moore, 1992). In much of rural India (which has 70% of the country's population), women still grow food, plant trees, milk cows and grind flour. Besides this, much domestic work, particularly cooking and looking after the children, is shared by other people of the extended kinship, in particular older ones, including men. This does not mean that women are not loaded with work. In fact they have little time for leisure and their primary concerns center around the requirements of their families. In cases where men either drink and do not care for their families or migrate for work, women have to lead a hard and difficult life, particularly where they are the heads of the households (Schenk-Sandbergen, 1995). In such situations the border between the private and the public gets fuzzy where both women and men strive hard to earn their livelihoods, even though women's problems are greater because of their reproductive role and the patriarchal culture of the society. In the poorer and disadvantageous households, even when men have to adopt and use survival strategies, the access to land, property and power remain vested in the hands of richer and high caste males. The development process initiated so far since independence has not only assumed that all men had an equal access to public power but also pushed women to the realm of 'private' and the cash economy and paid jobs as the 'public' realm. Questions such as how and why gender, class and caste intersect in the existing society as they do or how the gender relations of power between women and men from the exploited sections are to be perceived, are pertinent. (John, 1996). The relevance of such questions can be gauged from the recent development in western feminist discourse where the need to provide space not only to articulate differences in gender and sexual identity but also to various other differences, is realized. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, non-white and non-western women started developing their own critique of patriarchal knowledge on the basis of the differences derived, for example from racism and colonialism. Post modernists that offered criticism of the existing theories endorsed such claims emphasizing the differences of experience, of culture and of identities. For many feminists the post-modernist perspective sounded useful as it allowed sex- and gender- based differences as well as the space for their experiences and lives. This challenged the universal methods in sociological analysis that emphasized on the concepts of objectivity and rationality. (Christiansen-Ruffman, 1998, Introduction). With it disappeared the monolithic notion of universal domination and subordination of women and of patriarchy. Women were no longer viewed only as victims but also as agents who could articulate their distinct perceptions. (Evans, 1997). In India in the late 1980s, concepts such as 'hierarchy' - so often used as the principal underlying feature of inequality in Indian caste society began to

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be explored by unearthing historical forms of women's resistance . If some feminists emphasized the traditional sources of women's strength, others showed interest "in defining the ways in which ordinary women used the spaces traditionally accorded to them to negotiate with their husbands, families and communities" (Knmar, 1995, p. 73-74). In recent years, the women's movement in India has spread horizontally, shedding its elite image to encompass the concerns of the dalits, the tribals , the minorities and other weaker sections of the society. 2 Women's struggles, problems and representation in various institutions are becoming visible. In a recently concluded conference of the Indian Association of Women's Studies (lAWS), special plenary sessions were organized on 'Tribal Issues' and 'Reservation Policy,' focusing on the issues of the women from the disadvantaged sections of the society (Plenary Abstracts, 2000). The women's movement in India has a plus point in this sense, but it has also seen the diluting of some of the specific issues of women, not only of sexual violence against women, but also personal and private issues of various communities that are discriminatory toward women. For instance the goal of Uniform Civil Code, one of the Directive Principles enshrined in the Constitution toward which all must work, got bogged down due to the fundamental approach of various communities to the great disadvantage of women. Indian society possesses contradictions of its own kind, some of which are difficult to comprehend and tackle. On the one hand, there is one Constitution and one law which grants fundamental rights, equality and justice to all (with special provisions for the weaker sections), but the government policies are usually neither gender-sensitive nor implemented properly. 3 On the other hand, there are legally recognized personal and customary laws, but their interpretation, which is often done by men, situate women in vulnerable and disadvantageous positions. Women belonging to such communities often face paradoxical situations when they suffer both as women and as members of a minority group. The women's movement then weakens and the specific issues of women are side tracked, not only because of the patriarchal feature of the community from within but also because of the attack on their community by the outside forces. The use of Hindu cultural symbols, mainly to establish 'Indianness' of the women's movement against the allegation that it was 'Western,' led to the alienation of some members of the minority communities. (Agnes, 1994). How does one understand the articulation of women from various sections of society and their unity on women's specific issues is indeed challenging theoretically and even more difficult practically. In many ways the 1970's and the 1980's in the west saw the emergence of an extensive feminist critique of the public world and the acceptance of the assumption that the two

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worlds are not separate but interlinked. It was consistently argued that as women need public spaces from which they have been deprived for so long, men too have to be judged in the private sphere along with the public. The genderstereotyped constructions of women, especially by the state and the double standard of morality were questioned. (Evans, 1997). The feminists are now trying to develop a theory of social practice "grounded in the interrelationships of the individual to collective life, or personal to political life, instead of their separation and opposition" (Pateman, 1983, p. 299). The feminist critique is that if women are to participate fully in social life, then men must share the child rearing and domestic tasks so that women's identification is not restricted to the 'private' world marking their subordination. The Western feminist critique of the opposition between the 'private' and the 'public' and their efforts towards bringing about true equality between women and men by doing away with these sexual differences is based on the assumption that everywhere the dichotomous relationship is hierarchical and one category is always of lower value than the other. In the Indian situation these concepts often overlap and change with the context. Though the dichotomous relationship is usually unequal, it is defined quite differently. Family nuclear, joint or extended, is regarded as an important institution of private and personal domain for both men and women in India despite the feminist challenge to this separation, seeing personal as political. In patriarchal societies such as India, with religion, caste and class along with the state playing predominant roles, various formal and informal methods are employed by men to control women. Apart from female foeticide, infanticide, rape, dowry deaths and sexual harassment including cases of child rape within the family and of marital rape that are coming into light. 4 (Karlekar, 1998). Women's organizations used various legal and social measures to eradicate these situations. Difficulties are posed as many young women, socialized in middle class norms, hesitate to make the 'personal' 'public.' The perception that the private realm of the household with centuries-old specifically defined rules and functions should be seen as 'political' and opened up to public scrutiny, is complex and problematic. The gender roles and relationships within the family are of diverse nature and manifested in different ways on various occasions. Here it must be emphasized that besides gender, age plays an important role, and elderly women are given more respect and importance by the younger men and women. During marriage in the family for instance, women have different roles to play depending on their seniority and relationship with the bride or groom. These roles are different from those of men. Women generally see to the overall maintenance of the house, ceremony, food accommodation, gifts, etc., while men deal more with outside activities and arrangements. Here, even though

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the activities of women and men are those of inside and outside, both are indispensable to each other. If women do not do men's jobs, men cannot do women's work. If women are restricted from going out, men are prohibited from entering the separate interior location in the house. Such exclusivity of work and the related knowledge provide women with power which is derived from their strength in the family and community. Talking about the position of women among Hindus, M. N. Srinivas (1977) notes that their preoccupation with ritual provides women with power over men, and he adds further that this increases with advancing age. Women in rural areas of India of all castes and communities share with each other their work through various informal networks which strengthens their social and emotional ties besides providing economic assistance. During marriages and festivals, they visit each other's houses on a rotation basis for cooking delicacies. Among the Saharia tribe of Central India, women of the clan form small circles and prepare chapatis for the meal during marriage, while men prepare curry or other vegetables (Chauhan, 1999a). Thus, though the hierarchical relations based on gender and age do exist within households, the dependence and co-operation is mutual and selfsustaining. The liberal western assumption of the individual is one constructed through difference and separation from others as a free and equal being, perhaps to be emancipated from the hierarchical and the primordial bonds. In countries like India, individualism or autonomy in the sense of taking initiative and independent decisions, is drawn from the collectivism of the family and society. In a study of the Nagarattar, a mercantile community of South India, Nishimura has shown the way in which the aacchis (married women) derive economic and political assistance and acquire social identity and prestige in the community. This is done through the use of kinship networks and the combination of the economic autonomy of the nuclear household and the power of joint house-hold which provide strength to the Nagarattar entrepreneurship (Nishimura, 1998). It is this power and strength and mutual sharing derived from family and community or society and its values that prevent women from taking decisions against the collective interest, even if they go against their own interests, especially in the changing times. Therefore, what looks hierarchical and unequal through a Western lens may not be so in the Indian context. Familial affairs are private and personal for both women and men and even if men are engaged more in the outside work, the tasks done by women are not necessarily considered demeaning and exploitative by women themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that even in the 1990s, the women's movement in India could not attain the radicalism of the Western feminism of the 1970s.

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Women resorted mainly to the methods of accommodation and adaptation, rather than take some of the patriarchal structural inequalities head on. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw women across the country united on the two vital issues of dowry deaths and rape. The period saw a large number of cases of dowry deaths and rapes of women in custody. Though dowry was given since time immemorial as stridhana or 'women's wealth' (Tambiah, 1973, p. 64) as part of women's pre-mortem inheritance, it was reported to have acquired a menacing form, especially in the cases of dowry deaths which were not heard of before. Although dowry-related crime is more common among urban, educated families, many case studies 5 report that its tentacles have spread to areas and communities that did not practice dowry in the past (Chauhan, 1999b, pp. 126-127). These concerns led to amendments in the Criminal law (Agnihotri & Mazumdar, 1995, pp. 870-871). At this stage, the movement had considerable public support from both women and men, which led to effective policy changes. The reasons for the support can be seen in the ideological norm of respect for women in Indian culture, as well as in the reaction against the impact of rising consumerism and the new material culture that was facilitated by the opening up of the economy. A significant factor in major changes in these and other laws governing women's rights was the response to Towards Equality, the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in Indiana (Government of India, 1974). 6 Even these efforts, however, could not affect change significantly. This was so because the problem was defined either as one of law and order or of the declining moral and cultural values of particular families. There was general acceptance on major issues, from granting equality and fundamental rights to all in the Constitution to making special provisions for women in the form of reserving seats for them in the political institutions at the grass-roots levels. This is quite unlike the west where women had to fight continuously and consistently for political rights and representation. It is however true, that women's representation in the decision-making bodies has always been limited in the traditional village councils as well as in statutory bodies in India. The Amendments in 1992 made possible the entry of one million women at various levels of urban and rural local bodies. 7 Today, a bill for granting reservation to women in the Parliament and state assemblies is awaiting approval as some members have concerns about the sharing of quotas by classes and communities regarded as backward, s The willingness of men, even if grudgingly, to give political space to women not only by not openly opposing their voting and election rights, but also by agreeing to affirmative action, indicates that politics, though public, is not

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forbidden for women who are generally understood to be relegated to the private realm. Neither is the economy forbidden, as can be seen by the number of development initiatives that women leaders take at the grass-roots level and by their increasing numbers in various fields of employment. 9 It is a different, though pertinent, matter that their numbers are still modest and that they have to face numerous barriers and backlash in the process. The change is that it is accepted, where it was not 20 years ago, that women can and should take part in the educational, economic and political fields and must acquire related education and qualifications. The change is accepted, however, within the patriarchal structure of the society. A well-qualified woman has better marriage prospects, but this does little to lighten her workload or that of her parents since these are circumscribed by the traditional pattern of the society. It is not uncommon in north India for an employed women to make contribution towards her own dowry. What constitutes 'personal' and 'private' are the issues of family, marriage, divorce or even property. A great deal of emphasis is therefore, still placed on marriage in the arranged form, female sexuality is tightly controlled, divorce is discouraged and women are expected to look after and even sacrifice for their families. There was opposition to the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 as it dealt with the issues regarded as personal. 1° Similarly in 1985, an opposition to the judgment by the Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case led to the passage of the Muslim Women (Protection of Divorce) Act of 1986 which took the issue of maintenance for Muslim women in the case of divorce out of the general purview of Criminal Procedure law. H In rural and tribal areas where people by and large do not object to women's participation in political bodies and development initiatives, they have strict reservations about women's roles in what are regarded as personal matters, for example those dealing with divorce and remarriage. Therefore, for most of the communities in India, political, economic and development issues become 'public' and social issues like marriage and divorce become 'private' or 'personal' for all women and men. In this context, women's participation in what is regarded as the public/political is not opposed but what is regarded as private/personal is. This shows that not only do the dichotomies have different meanings, but that the meanings change over time. However, this conceptualization and dichotomization is the reflection of patriarchal nature of society which still wants to maintain control over women's bodies and sexuality and their choice in the selection of mate. A large number of women, particularly in rural areas also subscribe to this view. But this does not necessarily mean that they view themselves as being deprived of their

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individual rights, it could be simply because they do not wish to discuss such matters 'in public' with those men from whom they have maintained distance and avoidance in various ways and forms all along. It could also be because, women express and share their knowledge and emotions through various traditional mechanisms and networks, and even in abusive songs. Raheja and Gold in their work on north Indian kinship have shown the ways in which women express their subordinate position and their experiences through songs of birth, marriage, festivity, rituals and informal personal narratives. (Raheja & Gold, 1996). These arguments show that the meanings and perceptions of nature/culture, private/public and indeed women/men, differ historically and contextually; as does the relationship between each of these since they are intersected by the notions of caste, class, race, color and religion. In establishing this, feminist scholarship presents some of the challenges to the discipline of sociology in which the concepts of universality, objectivity and rationality are contested. Dualisms of all kinds have been opposed for their assumptions of unequal, colonial, patriarchal and hierarchical relations. What then, is the usefulness of such dichotomies that are critiqued by feminists who emphasize their interrelatedness rather than their oppositions? Some of these have been noted by Moore (1994, pp. 16-17). First, "it provides a useful starting point for discussing the cultural construction of gender," and then for "examining how the symbolic associations given to the categories 'man' and 'woman' can be understood as the result of cultural ideologies rather than inherent qualities or physiology." Hence, the dichotomies neither assume universal subordination of women nor do they base the power relations in society on the differences between women and men. In this sense, it gives scope for alternate ways of looking at the meanings which different people give to the concepts and the relationship between them. Here it must be added that the relationships between these dichotomies need not be unequal in all situations in a similar manner and order. Despite providing a critique to the separation between two opposites, western feminism does not free itself from these assumptions. My critique to the western feminist critique of the opposition between nature/culture, private/public and women/men is, not to assume but question and probe the inequality inherent in these dichotomies. From my own perspective as an Indian woman, I see my society as rich in culture, human and natural resources and wealth as much as I derive my strength as a woman from these. With this perception perhaps, 'we' can fight the injustices and inequalities from within and outside the society or from whatever boundary one may wish to define.

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NOTES 1. For instance, in the 1991 Population Census, the Work Participation Rate (the proportion of workers in the population) of men in India is shown as 51.6, while of women as only 22.3. 2. The dalits constitute the lowest section in the traditional Hindu caste hierarchy. The 'tribals' are regarded as the adivasis or the indigenous people. Both these categories, often considered as the most deprived of all groups are referred by the terms 'Scheduled Castes' and 'Scheduled Tribes' respectively in the Constitution of India which provides special rights for their protection and development. The term 'minority' generally refers to the small religious communities like the Muslims, Christians, Parsis, and Jews. The Constitution of India grants freedom of religion to all of them and the State cannot discriminate against anyone on ground of religion. 3. India gained independence on 15 August 1947 and the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950. India is the Sovereign Socialist Democratic Republic and the State grants equality before the law to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. 4. The latest official data (National Crime Records Bureau, Government of India, New Delhi, 1999) show that crimes against women have increased by 4.8% in 1997 over 1996. The increase has been 3.3 and 8.9% in the cases of Rape and Dowry death respectively for the same period. The alarming rise in dowry deaths occurred despite the act being made illegal through the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 and more stringent through later amendments in 1984 and 1986. 5. Dowry customarily refers to those gifts that are voluntarily given with the bride to be taken to her conjugal household at marriage. This was regarded as a meritorious act symbolizing love and affection and well-being of one's daughter. The elements of coercion, demand, harassment or death of a bride have been recent additions. Increasing class, wealth and educational differences which are more in urban areas are considered to be some of the important reasons for the escalation of dowry problems to various communities. For instance L. Caplan in his study on Dowry among Christians in Madras city (Man, 19, 2, 216, 1984) maintains that in south India, the practice of making cash offering to the bridegroom's family is a comparatively new phenomenon. 6. The Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) constituted by the Government in 1971 to examine the status of women in the changing society and to suggest recommendations to enable women to play a meaningful role in nation building, submitted its report 'Towards Equality' in December 1974. The CSWI Report is regarded as a pioneer in the history of women's studies and women's movement in independent India. 7. Two amendments were made in the Constitution of India in 1992 for making rural and urban local bodies more functional and effective. These are popularly known as the 73rd and the 74th Amendments respectively and provide for the reservation of one-third seats for women at all local levels of governance. These amendments are regarded as landmark achievements in India as more than one million women occupy seats in the grass-roots democratic institutions in India today. 8. A Bill was introduced in the last session of Parliament (1999-2000) to grant reservation of one-third seats for women in Parliament and State assemblies. The Bill could not be passed as some political parties opposed it on the ground that the Bill has

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no provision for women belonging to the weaker sections of the society. Women's groups, including women across communities and castes have consistently fought for the issue for some years now. The reasons for opposing the Bill in the Parliament are baseless as men from these sections of society are present in adequate numbers and there is nothing to stop their women from contesting elections. In fact it could be easier for these women to win ,awing to the numerical strength of their communities. 9. For instance, the percentage of women Central Government employees was 3.9 in 1983, 6.60 in 1989 and 7.58 in 1991 (Directorate General of Employment and Training Ministry of Labor, Government of India, New Delhi) 10. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 amended and codified the Hindu law relating to marriage. This law made changes in the pre-1955 Hindu Sastric laws. The most important of these are the prohibition of bigamy and the provision of divorce. 11. In India there is a common Criminal Code for all communities, but since the decision dealt with the case of divorce, it had a bearing on the Muslim Personal law. Shah Bano the wife of Mohammad Ahmed Khan was granted maintenance on divorce by the Supreme Court of India as per the Indian Criminal Procedure (as different from the Muslim Personal Law). This decision created a stir throughout India as many Muslims regarded this as the interference in their personal law. The Government succumbed under the pressure and repealed the judgment through Parliament which led to the formulation of separate law for the Muslim women. This Act of the Government was also widely criticized.

REFERENCES Flavia, A. (1994). Women's movement within a secular framework. Economic and Political Weekly, May 7, 1123-1128. Agnihotri, I., & Mazumdar, V. (1995). Changing terms of political discourse: Women's movement in India, 1970s-1990s. Economic and Political Weekly, July 22, 1869-1879. Chauhan A. (1999a). Tribai women: Continuity and change. Udaipur: A.C. Brothers. Chauhan A. (1999b). Dowry-related crimes :Violation of human rights. In: A. P. Vijapur & K. Suresh (Eds), Perspectives on Human Rights. New Delhi: Manak Publications Private Limited. Christiansen-Ruffman, L. (1998). Introduction. In: L. Christiansen-Ruffman (Ed.), The Global Feminist Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge. Madrid: International Sociological Association. Collier, J. F., & Yanagisako, S. J. (Eds) (1987). Gender and kinship: Essays toward a unified analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dube, L. (1997). Women and kinship. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Evans, M. (1997). Introducing contemporary feminist thought. United Kingdom: Polity Press. Firestone, S. (1970). The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. New York: Morrow. Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. London: Tavistock. Government of India (1974). Towards Equality. New Delhi: Committee on the Status of Women in India. Jackson, S., & Jones, J. (1998). Thinking for ourselves: An introduction to feminist theorizing. In: S. Jackson & J. Jones (Eds), Contemporary Feminist Theories (pp. 1-11). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

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John, M. E. (1996). Gender and development in India, 1970s-1990s: Some reflections on the constitutive role of contexts. Economic and Political Weekly, November 23, 3071-3077. Karlekar, M. (1998). Domestic Violence. Economic and Political Weekly, July 4, 1741-1751. Kumar, R. (1995). From Chipko to Sati: The contemporary Indian Women's movement. In: A. Basu (Ed.), Women's Movements in Global Perspective (pp. 58-86). Oxford: Westview Press. Miles, A. (1998). Feminist sociology and social movement: New possibilities, new paradigms for sociology and the world. In: L. Chfistiansen-Ruffman (Ed.), The Global Feminist Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge. Madrid: International Sociological Association. Millett, K. (1970). Sexual Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Moore, H. L. (1993). The differences within and the difference between. In: T. del Valle (Ed.), Gendered Anthropology. London: Routledge. Moore, H. L. (1994). The cultural construction of gender. In: The Polity Reader in Gender Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nishimura, Y. (1998). Gender, kinship and property rights: Nagarattar womanhood in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ollenburger, J. C., & Moore, H. A. (1992). A sociology of women: The intersection of patriarchy, capitalism and colonization. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ortner S. (1974). Is female to male as nature is to culture? In: M. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (Eds), Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pateman, C. (1983). Feminist critiques of the public/private dichotomy. In: S. I. Benn and G. F. Gans (Eds), Public and Private in Social Life. New York: St. Martin's Press Plenary Abstracts (2000). Women's perspectives on public policy. IX Indian Association of Women's Studies Conference, 8-11 January, Hyderabad, India. Raheja, G. G., & Gold, A. G. (1996). Listen to the heron's words: Reimagining gender and kinship in North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rosaldo, M. (1974). Woman, culture and society: A theoretical overview. In: M. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (Eds), Women, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schenk-Sandbergen, L. (Ed.) (1995). Women and Seasonal Labor Migration. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Srinivas, M. N. (1977). The changing position of Indian women. Man, 12, 2. Stolcke, V. (1993). Is sex to gender as race is to ethnicity? In: T. del Valle (Ed.), Gendered Anthropology (pp. 17-37). London: Ronttedge. Tambian, S. J. (1973). Dowry and bride wealth and the property rights of women in South Asia. In: J. Goody & S. J. Tambiah (Eds), Bride Wealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yanagisako, S. J., & Collier, J. F. (1987). Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship. In: J. F. Collier & S. J. Yanagisako (Eds), Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (pp. 14-50). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Walker, A. R. (1986). The Toda of South India: A new look. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation.

POSTMODERN FEMINISM CHALLENGES ORGANIZATION THEORY Gladys L. Symons

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to read organization theory critically, from a postmodern feminist perspective. Both feminism and postmodernism are troublemakers, since they raise thorny epistemological questions about knowledge claims. For this and other reasons, they provide us with some useful tools for rethinking disciplinary practices. In this analysis, organization theory is approached as text, and three binary oppositions embedded in the discourse are examined. The paper begins with a brief discussion of organization theory, postmodern feminism, binarism and deconstruction. The treatment of these themes is not intended to be exhaustive: Rather, I offer a concise introduction for readers not familiar with one or another of the topics. The next step is to deconstruct three binary oppositions, namely: rationality/emotionality; public/private; work/ family. I have chosen these particular binarisms because they have an obvious and immediate impact on women's lives in organizations. Finally, I discuss the ideological assumptions rooted in this organizational discourse, showing how the gendered nature of bureaucratic organizations is both constructed and maintained.

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 85-96. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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ORGANIZATION THEORY One of organization theory's basic tenets states that we live in a society of organizations, where organizational forms play an important role constructing social life. Analyzing organization, therefore, is essential for understanding society in general. Organization theory has undergone some dramatic changes in the past 30 years, evolving from an essentially functionalist systems approach aimed mainly at managers, to a multi-theory, multi-methods sub-field providing important critiques of the canon. (See Bnrrell and Morgan (1979) for an interesting analysis of the epistemologieal underpinnings of the field). Traditional organization theory focuses on topics such as typologies of organizations, organizational goals, structure, strategy, boundaries, environments, organizational ecology and the like. Scott's (1981) work provides a good example of this corpus. Much of organizational theory was, and still is, aimed at management and often contains prescriptions, whether explicit or implicit, to assist managers in their job of organizational leadership (or organizational control, depending upon one's perspective). Mercifully, this canon has come under criticism from a number of schools, such as Marxism, critical theory, postmodernism, and different types of feminism. One can read Clegg, Hardy and Nord (1996) and Reed and Hughes (1992) for examples of organizational theory written in these different genres. One can now read debates in organization theory concerning issues such as worker control, technocratic consciousness, criticism and deconstruction of the canon as grand narrative, as well as conversations about diversity, equity, sexuality and emotions in organizations, gendering of organizations and the like. Nevertheless, these perspectives remain marginal, and perhaps none more so than postmodern feminism. Indeed, a focus on women and gender in organization studies in general continues to be segregated, even in "relatively progressive volumes" (Martin, 2000, p. 209) analyzing organizational life.

POSTMODERN FEMINISM At first glance, feminism and postmodernism seem to be strange bedfellows, yet they share a critique of modern society which extends to a number of fronts (Calas & Smircich, 1992a; Owens, 1983). Feminism has long been weary of the grand narrative of the Enlightenment, universal 'Man', the story of scientific progress, emancipation and freedom. Finding women's place in history is no easy task! In its turn, postmodernism has declared itself the critic of positivism, scientism, reason, progress, unity, consensus and 'Truth'. Says Power (1990, p. 110):

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In its most stark and general sense, postmodernism stands for the 'death of Reason'. More accurately (and less melodramatically) it is the rejection of a particular model of reason and the various ontological commitments perceived to lie at the heart of it. Such a rejection or 'deconstruction' extends to a number of philosophical sacred cows - the 'unities' of representation, of meaning, of theory and ultimately of the self. Postmodernism is an assault on unity. Or, as Hutcheon (1993, p. 247) rather unceremoniously declares, "It is no longer big news that the master narratives of bourgeois liberalism are under attack". Both feminism and postmodernism eschew universalism, consensus and unity, while celebrating diversity, difference, marginality and local narratives. In spite of these similarities, an important question remains (Fraser & Nicolson, 1993; Knight, 2000). How can a postmodern feminism combine the postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives with the social criticism of feminism? One answer to this question would reject Lyotard's (1979) wholesale renunciation of metanarratives, asserting that there can be a p o s t m o d e m feminist theory. It must, however, be "explicitly historical, attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods and to that of different groups within societies and periods" (Fraser & Nicolson, 1993, pp. 428-429). Locating explanation in social space/time and attending to the articulation of race, sex, class (Stasiulus, 1990), age and sexual orientation become the challenges of a postmodern feminist analysis. Applying a postmodern feminist perspective to organization theory means being aware of the impact of theorizing on organizational practice. I fully concur with Calas and Smircich's (1992b, p. 234) position on this matter, when they state: Our advocacy of feminist perspectives does not stem from pure scholarly reasons - that is, that "more knowledge is good". It is a strategy for making a difference by doing differently. Our rationale [is sustained by].., recognizing that the way scholars do 'organizational science' often defines the way society does 'organizational practice'. Thus having a socially conscious organizational practice may depend first on having a more socially conscious organizational scholarship.

DECONSTRUCTING BINARY OPPOSITIONS Feminists have long been engaged in the process of deconstruction, a favorite pastime of the postmodernists. Deconstruction is a way of decoding, of taking apart the meaning of a text, in order to bring to light other meanings that are hidden in the discourse. The deconstruction of texts shows how traditional readings suppress alternative interpretations of them (Tong, 1989, pp. 222-223), and how the dominant discourse drowns out other voices to become the way of structuring social reality. "The deconstruction of discourse in any context

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must be concerned with undermining the imposition of a veneer of reality on texts, in whatever form" (Mumby, 1988, p. 161). In the case of organization theory, deconstruction provides a tool to see beneath the facade of reality constructed by the dominant organizational discourse. Feminists have applied the technique to organization studies texts (Bradshaw, 1996; Calas & Smircich, 1992a, b; Martin, 1990) and I personally have had some fun with public administration texts (Symons, 1992a). A favorite target for deconstrnction is the binarism, that is, thinking by means of opposition. Binary oppositions, with their concomitant implicit hierarchical ordering (e.g. high/low, white/black, man/woman, masculine/feminine, visible /invisible, culture/nature, co-optation/critique) underlie the logic of the metanarrative. Hence, deconstructing such dichotomies constitutes a fine postmodern activity. Both feminism and postmodemism offer a critique of binarisms (Owens, 1983), uncovering the hierarchies embedded in this dichotomous thinking. I would like to challenge three binary oppositions embedded in the traditional organization theory and open a discussion on their impact on gender relations and women's lives.

Rationality/Emotionality The exaltation of the rational is, of course, a distinctive mark of modernity, and a cardinal feature of both the bureaucracy and traditional organization theory. Weber (1947) makes an important distinction between Zweckrationalitiit, that is formal and instrumental rationality determined by expectation of results or 'calculated ends', and Wertrationalitiit, substantive or value-rationality, which is determined apart from its chances of success. It is instrumental rationality that Weber identifies as a fundamental characteristic of the bureaucracy. Moreover, when 'rationality' is invoked in organization theory, or even in everyday speech, it is taken for granted that one is making reference to functional, 'means-ends', or instrumental rationality. Indeed, this type of rationality, in appropriating the name, ignores and dismisses other forms, such as value rationality. Rationality/emotionality is a stable binarism of modernity, and bureaucratic organizations are a major site for juxtaposing the rational and the emotional. The hierarchical relation of the rational as superior to the emotional is implicit in this dichotomy - "reason over passion". It is also taken for granted in organizational discourse, where rational decision-making is exalted as the prominent task of the manager. And it is no small coincidence that rationality is identified with the masculine and emotionality with the feminine in modern Western culture.

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In traditional organization theory, emotions are considered taboo, for they signal a weakness on the part of the worker, someone who may be "unable to control her emotions". More specifically, emotions and emotional displays associated with the feminine, such as grief and tears, are taboo. Anger and rage, on the other hand, considered to be more masculine emotions, are permitted, at least for high-status employees such as bosses. Such emotions may even be seen as 'necessary' at times, in order to control recalcitrant workers. Indeed, in my study of emotional space in organizations (Symons, 2000), both male and female managers describe situations where it was necessary to display anger (whether or not sincere) in order to "get things done". Emotions are 'personal', and thus it is considered appropriate that they should remain in the private sphere. Following this logic, emotions have no place in the bureaucracy (Putnam & Mumby, 1996; Symons, 2000). One supervisor interviewed described the unwritten rule in her office, "[In this place], You don't love, you don't hate. You produce." Of course, emotions do make their way into the workplace, as important studies such as Hochschild's (1979, 1983) on emotion work and emotional labor have shown. Moreover, from a postmodernist feminist perspective the rationality/emotionality dichotomy is false (Martin, 1994, 2000; Putnam & Mumby, 1993). As Ferguson (1984, p. 199) notes: A feminist perspective on rationality explicitly connects reason to emotion ... The ways in which we attend to sensations and define situations are not external to feelings but are constitutive of them... Our emotions are one of the ways in which we know the world, and are thus not the opposite of reason. We need the connection to the world that emotion allows in order to reflect on and evaluate that world. The long-standing association of feeling with irrationality reflects masculine illusions of separateness and masculine fears of loss of control more than any universal traits of human reason. While vast nnmediated feeling may distort perception and hinder the capacity for reflection, the suppression and denial of emotion does the same. A new and very exciting area of organization studies is emerging questioning the rationality/emotionality dichotomy from a feminist perspective (Fineman, 1993; James & Gabe, 1996; Meyerson, 1998; Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Putnam & Mumby, 1993). Whether this new research is incorporated into the canon remains to be seen. Public~Private The division of the public and private spheres of activity represents an important taken-for-granted binarism in organizational texts, 1 so taken-for-granted that it need not be named. (Indeed, in organization theory, the terms 'public' and 'private' have a completely different meaning, referring to sectors of activity,

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i.e. private enterprise and the public service.) Berger, Berger and Kellner (1973) outline an important argument concerning the division of the life-world2 into public and private spheres. Modernization has transformed society, and one of the many significant changes brought about by this process is the segmentation of modern life. The fundamental dichotomy is the division of the life-world into the public and private spheres. These two 'worlds' are conceived as separate and often conflicting realities, with different structures and different outlooks or worldviews. As the individual moves through daily life, s/he experiences these different and frequently inconsistent worlds of meaning and experience. The public sphere is dominated by large formal organizations of the bureaucratic type, with a concomitant perspective based on functional, instrumental rationality. It is in this sphere that 'work' is done. In the private sphere we find the organizational form known as the family, that unit considered to be the locus of affect and emotions, the center of love and caring, nurturing and empathy, the haven away from the aggravations of the outside world. In the private sphere, people and relationships are valued in and of themselves, and decisions are made on the basis of the value of individuals and their emotional attachments to others. The experiential reality of ordinary people in their dally lives, however, is quite different from the theory elaborated above. In fact, the public/private split is another false dichotomy, for these 'two spheres' are in fact fusioned into one contradictory and overlapping set of experiences which constitute the lifeworld in modern late capitalist societies. People do not simply 'migrate' between these two worlds, as Berger, Berger and Kellner (1973) suggest. Women in particular have difficulty realizing the public/private dichotomy (Acker, 1992; Parkin, 1993; Symons, 1986). We elaborate below.

Work/Family Part and parcel of the public/private split is the work/family dichotomy. The life-worlds of the public and private spheres, while appearing different and separate, are in fact tightly interwoven. The concept of the work-family system (Lupri & Symons, 1982) depicts this interdependence. Moreover, the transformarion brought about by changing family forms means that now, in contrast to the past, both men and women are spending a good part of their adult lives in both the so-called private and public spheres. Deconstructing the work/family dichotomy invites at least two interpretations. First of all, ordering work over family accounts for the precedence given the former over the latter: The family must bend to organizational demands placed

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on the wage-earner(s). Organizations and occupations are greedy, and they exact what they can in terms of time, as well as physical, emotional and mental energy. Secondly, and no less importantly, naming a work/family split suggests that work is not done in the family. Let us take a closer look. The family is sustained by at least six types of labor, namely: (1) economic support; (2) domestic labor; (3) emotion work; (4) reproduction; (5) dependent care; (6) personal service. Economic support for the family is usually provided through participation of one or more family members in the paid labor force.3 Domestic labor involves maintaining the physical household. Emotion work (Hochschild, 1979, 1983) includes generating, demonstrating, and maintaining affect in the home, keeping the peace, upholding family ties, etc. Reproduction involves not only bearing children, but also revitalizing workers to prepare them for labor in organizations, once again, the following day. Dependent care is work done for children, the elderly and/or handicapped family members who are dependent on others for their sustenance. Finally, personal service is work such as cooking or washing clothes, that is done for adults in the household who are capable of doing it themselves. In the prototypical patriarchal family,4 the 'breadwinner family' (Eichler, 1988), the husband is the economic wage earner and the wife is responsible for the care of the home and children, that is, the domestic labor, the emotional labor, reproduction, dependent care and personal service. Work is certainly done in this private sphere, and women do it, full-time, without pay. In the dual-earner family (which, incidentally has taken over from the breadwinner family as the numerically 'typical' North American family), both husband and wife participate in the labor market and work for a wage. Here, women do the domestic labor, the emotional labor, reproduction, dependent care and personal service, as well as contribute to the economic support of the family. Men's participation in work in the home is limited at best. The work/family binary opposition masks the contradictions and the conflicts involved in most women's and some men's lives. Such conflicts are not new, however, for they existed, and still do, in breadwinner families, just as they are present in dual-earner families. The point is that in the past, these conflicts were never questioned! The fact that a family was uprooted and moved 3,000 miles away from kin and neighborhood, or that the father regularly left home before the children were out of bed, and arrived back in the evening after they were bathed, fed and back in bed was rarely seen as a conflict between family and work. These were experienced as individual, private problems to be adapted to as well as possible - not as public issues involving the organization of work, the sexual division of labor, the gendered bureaucracy, and the dependency of the family on the organization.

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Contemporary work/family conflicts are accentuated in the dual-earner family since the couple now juggles the demands of two jobs in the paid labor market.

GENDERED ORGANIZATION THEORY What can a feminist deconstruction of binary oppositions such as rationality/ emotionality, public/private and work/family teach us about organization theory? From a feminist perspective of social criticism, deconstruction of organization theory has two intentions. First, the exercise uncovers the ideological assumptions about the masculine and the feminine embedded in the discourse, and secondly, the analysis demonstrates how these assumptions construct and maintain gendered bureaucratic organizations as both theory and practice. The gendered processes within organizations (Acker, 1992; Grant & Tancred, 1992; Mills & Tancred, 1992) are brought to light, processes that are masked by traditional organization theory. In fact, traditional organization theory purports to be 'non-gendered' (Hearn & Parkin, 1993, p. 149; Martin, 1994, 2000). The notion of gender is used here in the sense of an organizing principle (Ferree & Hess, 1987). Gender is "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes . . . [and] a primary way of signifying relationships of power" (Scott, 1986, p. 1067). Gender defines social relations between the sexes, where relationships of power and dependency are interwoven in a complex tapestry throughout the social structure. We see a hierarchy of male dominance and female subordination replicated in institutions, organizations, language and practice (Symons, 1992b). In the gender process, the abstract category of gender is translated into, and embodied in experiences of everyday organizational life. Gender as an organizing principle brings to light the gendered processes played out in the organization. Indeed, "advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine" (Acker, 1992, p. 251). Gendering also involves the creation of symbols and images, as well as forms of consciousness (p. 253). There are, not surprisingly, important implications for both men and women, as Kaschak (1992, p. 5) points out: The most notable aspect of current genderarrangementsis that the masculinealways defines the feminineby naming, containing,engulfing,invading, and evaluatingit. The feminineis never permitted to stand alone or to subsume the masculine. ( ... ) Masculine meanings organize social and personalexperience,so that women are consistentlyimbued with meanings not of their own making. This statement has particular meaning for life in bureaucratic organizations where the glass ceiling continues to be constructed over the gendered office

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(Symons, 1992b). In the organizational setting, gendered social relations are masked under the guise of a gender-neutral organizational logic and language. The deconstruction of binary oppositions allows us to see the fundamental contradiction between the working of the gender process in organizations and a supposedly gender-neutral administrative logic. Consider the rationality/emotionality dichotomy. Sustaining this binarism calls into question women's skills and capacities for decision-making positions in the bureaucratic organization, since women are believed to be more 'emotional' than men. It is feared that women might let their feelings affect their view of the world, including their capability to make 'rational' decisions. Indeed, senior female managers counsel women to control their emotions and suppress emotional displays, for fear that men would consider them 'weak' or 'out of control,' hence unfit for leadership positions (Symons, 2000). The contradictory nature of the rationality/emotionality binarism is highlighted in a recent development in organization theory and practice, a change that Fondas (1997) calls the 'feminization' of the managerial role. The classic description of management tasks as "planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling" has given way to the '90s discourse on "motivating, coaching, mentoring and empowering." Now managers must learn to surrender control and share responsibility, help and develop others and show concern for subordinates' feelings. They are advised to exhibit interpersonal sensitivity and focus on the needs of others, as well as build a connected network of relationships. Fondas (1997, p. 268) concludes that there is a move away from a "male culture of competition and hierarchy" to a "female culture of affiliations and collaborations". The irony of this situation is found in the fact that these traditionally feminine qualities and skills are no longer labeled or named as such. Could it be that when traditional feminine skills and qualities become valued in the organization, they lose their feminine affiliation? I have heard male managers explain this paradox by asserting that in any event, attributing such abilities to women constitutes stereotyping, and better we dispose with stereotypes in this day and age. Maintaining binarisms such as the ones discussed in this paper reinforce the gendered nature of organizations. Indeed, the public/private binarism supports the gender process in organizational life by reinforcing the sex-segregation of the labor market, and by calling into question women's very place in work organizations. The work/family dichotomy operates in a similar manner by supporting a sexual division of labor, assuring women's double shift (Hochschild, 1989) and rendering problematic her career chances in the bureaucracy.

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CONCLUSION Studying organization theory is a intriguing enterprise, and a postmodern feminist perspective and method shed new light upon a multidimensional, complex subject. The exercise I have undertaken in this paper reminds us that the dominant position need not be the only definition of reality, that power can be resisted (Foucault, 1970; Ferguson, 1984, 1994) and that minority voices can be heard. Postmodern feminist analysis of organization theory opens up new and exciting vistas for both theory and practice. In a postmodern world where power/knowledge constructs social reality, organizational sociologists, as well as organizational members, would do well to hear some feminist voices. The dominant circle of social reality (Sumner, 1979) has been broken and the gendered nature of organization theory is exposed. Gendered organizations must be accounted for and, from a feminist point of view, countered. A postmodem feminist perspective on organizational reality can enrich all our lives, both inside and outside bureaucratic organizations. Presenting such possibilities is, I believe, the role of feminist critique. I hope this paper contributes to this end.

NOTES 1. For an interesting deconstruction of the public/private dichotomy in a story told by a company president, see Martin (1990). 2. The life-world is a meaningful order that gives sense to the business of living (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973, p. 63). It is socially constructed and socially maintained. 3. Where this paid labor is done (i.e. outside or inside the home) raises new issues for the public/private binarism (Mirchandani, 1999). 4. The 'family' needs to be qualified, for rapid and complex changes have produced many different forms, including reconstituted families, solo-parent families as well as same-gendered-parent families.

REFERENCES Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies,jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender and Society, 4(2), 139-158. Acker, J. (1992). Gendering organizational theory. In: A. J. Mills & P. Tancred (Eds), Gendering Organizational Analysis (pp. 248-260). Newbury Park: Sage. Berger, P., Berger, B., & Kellner, H. (1973). The homeless mind: Modernization and consciousness. New York: Random House. Bradshaw, P. (1996). Women as constituent directors: Re-reading current texts using a feministpostmodernist approach. In: D. M. Doje, R. P. Gephart Jr., & T. J. Thatchenkery (Eds), Postmodern Management and Organization Theory (pp. 95-124). Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage.

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Burrell, G., & Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis. London: Heinemann. Calas, M., & Smircich, L. (1992a). Re-writing gender into organizational theorizing: Directions from feminist theorizing. In: M. Reed & M. Hughes (Eds), Rethinking Organization: New Directions in Organizational Research and Analysis (pp. 227-253), London: Sage. Calas, M., & Smircich, L. (1992b). Using the F word: Feminist theories and the social consequences of organizational research. In: A. J. Mills & P. Tancred (Eds), Gendering Organizational Analysis (pp. 222-234). Newbury Park: Sage. Clegg, S. R., Hardy, C., & Nord, W. R. (Eds) (1996). Handbook of Organization Studies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage. Eichler, M. (1988). Families in Canada today. (2nd ed.). Toronto: Gage. Ferguson, K. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ferguson, K. (1994). On bringing more theory, more voices, and more politics to the study of organization. Organization, 1(1), 81-99. Ferree, M. M., & Hess, B. B. (1987). Introduction: In: M. M. Ferree & B. B. Hess (Eds), Revisioning Gender (pp. 9-30). Newbury Park, London & New Delhi: Sage. Fineman, S. (Ed.) (1993). Emotion in Organizations. London: Sage. Fondas, N. (1997). Feminization unveiled: Management qualities in contemporary writings. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 257-282. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of discourse. In: R. Young (Ed.), Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader (pp. 48-78). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fraser, N., & Nicholson, L. (1993). Social criticism without philosophy: An encounter between feminism and postmodemism. In: T. Docherty (Ed.), Postmodernism. A Reader (pp. 415-432). New York: Columbia University Press. Grant, J., & Tancred, P. (1992). A feminist perspective on state bureaucracy. In: A. J. Mills & P. Tancred (Eds), Gendering Organizational Analysis (pp. 112-128). Newbury Park: Sage. Heam, J., & Parkin, W. (1993). Organizations, multiple oppressions and postmodernism. In: J. Hassard & M. Parker (Eds), Postmodernism and Organizations. London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage. Hochschild, A. R. (t979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85, 551-575. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hochschild, A. R. (1989). The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at home. New York: Viking. Hutcheon, L. (1993). Beginning to theorize postmoderuism. In: J. Natoli & L. Hutcheon (Eds), A Postmodern Reader (pp. 243-272). Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. James, V., & Gabe, J. (1996). Health and the sociology of emotions. Oxford, U.K: Blackwell. Kaschak, E. (1992). Engendered lives. A new psychology of women's experience. New York: Basic Books. Knights, D. (2000). Autonomy retentiveness! Problems and prospects for a post-humanist feminism. Journal of Management Inquiry, 9(2), t73-185. Lupri, E., & Symons, G. L. (1982). The emerging symmetrical family: fact or fiction? A crossnational analysis. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 23(34), 166-189. Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. Martin, J. (1990). Deconstructing organizational taboos: The suppression of gender conflict in organizations. Organization Science, 1(4), 339-359.

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Martin, J. (1994). The organization of exclusion: Institutionalization of sex inequality, gendered faculty jobs and gendered knowledge in organizational theory and research. Organization, 1(2), 401-431. Martin, J. (2000). Hidden gendered assumptions in mainstream organizational theory and research, Journal of Management Inquiry, 9(2), 207-216. Meyerson, D. (1998). Feeling stressed and burned out: A feminist reading and re-visioning of stressed-based emotions within medicine and organization science. Organization Science, 9, 103-118, Mills, A. J., & Tancred, P. (Eds) (1992). Gendering organizational analysis. Newbury Park: Sage. Mirchandani, K. (1999). Legitimizing work: Telework and the gendered reification of the worknonwork dichotomy. The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 36(1), 87-107. Mumby, D. K. (1988). Communication and power in organizations: Discourse, ideology and domination. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. Mumby, D. K., &. Putnam, L. L. (1992). The politics of emotion: A feminist reading of bounded rationality. Academy of Management Review, 17(3), 465-486. Owens, C. (1983). The discourse of others: Feminists and postmodernism. In: H. Foster (Ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. Parkin, W. (1993). The public and the private: Gender, sexuality and emotion. In: S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in Organizations (pp. 167-189). London: Sage Publications. Power, M. (1990). Modernism, postmodernism and organization. In: J. Hassard & D. Pym (Eds), The Theory and Philosophy of Organizations (pp. 109-124). London: Routledge. Putnam, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (1993). Organizations, emotion and the myth of rationality. In: S. Fineman (Ed.), Emotion in Organizations (pp. 36-57). London: Sage Publications. Reed, M., & Hughes, M. (Eds) (1992), Rethinking organization. London: Sage. Scott, W. R. (1981). Organizations. Rational, natural, and open systems. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Scott, J. W. (1986). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. American Historical Review, 91, 1053-1075. Stasiulus, D. (1990). Theorizing connections: Gender, race, ethnicity, and class. In: P. S. Li (Ed.), Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies. London: Academic Press. Symons, G. L. (1986). Coping with the corporate tribe: How women in different cultures experience the managerial role. Journal of Management, 12(3), 69-79. Symons, G. L. (1992a). Drconstruction de la culture organisationnelle: Symbolisme et pouvoir an sein de la fonction publique. In: R. Parenteau (Ed.), Management Public (pp. 97-11). Sillery, Qurbec: Presses de l'Universit6 du Qurbec. Symons, G. L. (1992b). The glass ceiling is constructed over the gendered office. Women in Management Review, 7(1), 18-22. Symons, G. L. (2000). The rationality/emotionality dichotomy in organizational theory and practice. Paper presented at the ASAC-IFSAM 2000 Conference, Universit6 du Qurbec Montrral, Canada, July 8-11. Tong, R. (1989). Feminist thought. Boulder: Westview Press. Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization. New York: The Free Press.

MUCH ADO ABOUT GENDER: A CONCEPTUAL TRAVELOGUE Barbara L. Marshall

INTRODUCTION 'Gender', as a marker of the social and cultural elaboration of sexual difference, has not only been established as a central analytic concept in contemporary social analysis, but has become part of our everyday vocabulary. As such, it has become one of the lenses through which we seek to understand ourselves, others, and the public issues of the day. What is meant by gender, however, has considerable variability and can only be grasped in the context of the substantive social issues to which it is applied, and the normative assumptions that we bring to our understandings of those issues. In this paper, I attempt to illustrate this by reflecting on the manner in which the concept of gender has travelled through academic, political and popular discourses over the last few decades. These reflections emerge from a larger project 1 that was motivated, in large part, by my own biography. My academic career coincides neatly with that of the career of gender as a concept in sociology (we both entered the discipline in the mid-1970s), and gender has been the central focus of my work as a feminist sociologist. A few years ago, I became intrigued by the ways in which the very term 'gender' started to function as a lighting rod for a whole series of debates - both theoretical and political, both feminist mad anti-feminist. Much ado about gender, indeed. I wish, here, to trace some of the travels of gender as a concept as a means to understand the ensuing debates about its

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theoretical and political efficacy, particularly as these relate to the 'mainstreaming' of gender, and both the feminist and anti-feminist critiques of that mainstreaming. In doing so, I hope to contribute to the project of rehabilitating gender as an integral concept for sociology, and for feminism.

CLASSICAL CONSTRUCTIONS: GENDER AND MODERNITY The story of sociology as a 'modern' discipline that I learned as a student was a typical one, and, when it comes down to it, a very short story: out of the social and political ferment of the 19th century, Marx, Durkheim and Weber came riding on their post-Enlightenment horses to bring us their respective visions of a common humanity on the cusp of a brave new world. Rarely acknowledged in the disciplinary history is the existence of vigorous women's movements that predate sociology and were also concerned with fundamental issues of social change and social order. Women occupied a contradictory and ambivalent position in relation to the 'modern' as it has been sociologically interpreted, particularly in the sense of modemity representing a gradual liberation of the individual from the bonds of tradition. 2 Women were cast as unable to fully transcend these bonds, and thus figured most frequently as a 'strategic absence '3 in classical sociology. This has had profound consequences for how sociology developed its understandings of itself, and of the modern world and these two understandings are intricately interrelated. As a discipline whose roots can be placed firmly in the Enlightenment privileging of mind over body, reason over superstition, and 'progress' over tradition, early sociology was remarkably resistant to a fully sociological understanding of women - and by extension, of men. The late 18th mad early 19th centuries saw a radical change in our understanding of the male/female distinction. As Thomas Laqueur argues in his historical investigations into the 'making of sex' (1990), the entrenchment of sexual dimorphism - the articulation of radical physiological differences between the sexes - had more to do with social and political currents of the time than any new scientific discoveries. Sex, it seems, occupied a problematic position at the boundary of the natural and the social. As taken up by classical sociology, " . . . the mind/body split rather than neutralizing sex difference had the opposite effect. There was a tendency to focus on the female, reproductive body in contrast to the masculine, rational m i n d . . . " (Sydie, 1994:118). Thus, 'manliness' could be understood as a bourgeois virtue to be achieved through active mastery over the natural - through the triumph of reason over passion, the hallmark of modernity (Jackson & Scott, 1997: 555). Women, on the other

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hand, were irretrievably embodied. They lay outside of the modern, connected to it through their relation to men. Modernity was not just a metaphysical attitude, but was represented by a series of institutional reconfigurations. Most significant here were increasingly distinct boundaries between the public and private realms, with most sociological interest directed towards the latter. This is well-illustrated by the overwhelming emphasis on capitalism, industrialization, secularization and urbanization as the hallmarks of modernity. But the public/private distinction was (and continues to be) conflated with a masculine/feminine distinction, so that women were not seen to participate in, or even experience the effects of the institutional dimensions of modernity that were of such interest to sociology. Nor was it recognized that these institutional transformations were profoundly gendered, creating newly gendered characters (such as workers, citizens, and consumers). Sexual difference was absolute, located in the domestic/private, and hence located in women. Given that the starting point for classical sociology was to theorize the individual as social - that is as constituted only within society and social relations - it should have been able to embrace both public and private spheres as wholly social in their constitution, but it did not. The public/private dualism, instead, becomes expressed as a whole set of familiar dualisms - universal/particular, rationality/emotion, instrumental/expressive, economic/familiar. This set of dualisms was encapsulated through the distinct difference, understood as a dichotomy, between 'masculine' and 'feminine,' and was embodied by the sexual division of labor. Women's very subjectivity was construed as being of a fundamentally different order than men' s and it certainly was not that of the 'modern' subject. As Denise Riley (1988: 8) suggests, the "differing temporalities" of the category of 'women' in relation to the emerging categories of 'body,' 'soul,' 'society' and 'the social' in post-Enlightenment may be read as a "history of an increasing sexualization, in which female persons become held to be virtually saturated with their sex".

THE 'MAINSTREAMING' OF GENDER Academic mainstreaming The introduction of 'gender' as a key concept in sociology, and the subsequent growth of feminist scholarship that has taken up gender as its 'problem horizon' has gone a long way to revise the story told by earlier sociologists. If you look up gender in almost any contemporary guide to sociology, you will find some reference to its distinction from 'sex'. As Ann Oakley put it in the text that was to enshrine the distinction in sociology: 'Sex' is a biological term: 'gender'

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a psychological and cultural one" (1972: 158). 4 Feminist uses of the concept of gender, while diverse, take their cue from Simone de Beauvoir's assertion that "one is not born but becomes a woman" (1949: 249). Gender, as differentiated from biological sex, has been understood by feminists as socially constructed, historically and culturally variable, and subject to re-construction through conscious social and political action. That gender differences - understood as the differences between men and women - were so clearly manifested as gender inequalities gave an urgency to the project of their documentation as social constructions, not biological inevitabilities. Feminist sociology insisted on gender as a fundamental dimension of social life, and as a central analytic category within the discipline, without which the key interests of the discipline (such as work, politics, family, education, religion, culture) could not be adequately understood. Gender was everywhere in differentiated subjects and unequal allocations of social and economic resources. An important task in feminist sociology's insistence on the gendered dimensions of social life was to draw attention to aspects of the social that had been overlooked by mainstream sociology. The manner in which gender has travelled into mainstream sociology appears to be characterized by the two dominant modes of theorizing gender that Connell identified as faulty more than a decade ago (1985, 1987): role theory and categorical theory. In general, the substitution of 'gender' for 'sex' in role theory (i.e. from 'sex role' to 'gender role') does little to address its fundamental weaknesses: its underlying functionalism, its inability to grasp the dynamics of change, 5 its underemphasis on power, its tendency to reify 'roles,' and its focus on individual behaviors rather than social institutions. However, if " . . . role theory tends to dissolve into individualism, categoricalism resolutely stays with the big picture and paints it with a broad brush" (Connell, 1987: 54). Categorical theories are characterized by: (a) the association of interests with specific categories (e.g. 'men' and 'women'), (b) a primary analytic focus on the " . . . category as a unit, rather than on the processes by which the category is constituted, or on its elements or constituents" and (c) a conception of the social order as comprised of " . . . a few major categories - usually two - related to each other by power and conflict of interest" (Ibid.). Neither sort of theory is adequate to an analysis that goes much beyond treating 'gender' as a variable. Despite the introduction of gender as a means to get at the social construction of difference and power in a way that the elision of sex and gender did not permit, some legacies of earlier approaches persist. For one thing, the introduction of gender into the sociological vocabulary seems to have done little to loosen its containment by the feminine. 6 Perhaps more importantly, the ubiquitous usage of gender in a categorical sense has the effect of rendering it static

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and unproblematically linked to biological referents, which are precisely the problems that feminists identified in early sociology. As Carver (1998: 18) summarizes a similar review of political theory, 'gender' tends to be " . . . loosely synonymous with 'sex' and lazily synonymous with 'women'." This is not just a problem of academic terminology, but is replicated in the manner in which the turn to gender has been taken up by policy makers and popular social commentary.

Mainstreaming outside the academy The United Nations, in the adoption of the Forward-Looking Strategies document, that emerged from the Nairobi conference in 1985, also shifted its focus from 'women' to 'gender' (Stienstra, 1996: 15). In 1995, the production of the Platform for Action of the UN Fourth World Conference on W o m e n in Beijing represented a comprehensive adoption of the "language of gender, and, specifically, ,of gender mainstreaming" (Baden & Goetz, 1997: 5). Paragraph 38 of the Beijing Declaration unequivocally asserts " . . . that a gender perspective is reflected in all our policies and programmes" (United Nations, 1995c). The concept of 'gender mainstreaming' in the UN has its roots in development work over the last few decades, and particularly in the shift from W o m e n in Development (WID) to Gender and Development (GAD) as a paradigm for integrating research and practice (Rathberger, 1990; Young, 1997). 7 The shift from 'women' to 'gender relations' as the central analytic category in feminist development work resonated with the shift in feminist social science more generally, but as Rathberger (1990: 495) suggests, it is a shift whose radical impulse is less easily translated into practice. The shift to gender has also been charged with diffusing the radical impulse of earlier approaches, particularly in relation to the 'mainstreaming' of gender: As gender has become a more mainstream and therefore more respectable and fundable field of research, new players are entering the field, who bear no allegiance to feminist research and may not even be familiar with its basic texts, concepts and methodoIogies. Economists, statisticians and econometricians...responding to the growth in demand from major development bureaucracies for research and analysis to inform their new 'genderaware' policy directions, have taken up research into gender issues. This recent body of research has tended to look at gender as an interesting statistical variable ... While such research may be of great interest and can provide invaluable insights and empirical evidence, it can under-specifythe power relations maintaining gender inequalities, and in the process de-links the investigation of gender issues from a feminist transformatoryproject (Baden & Goetz, 1997: 7). Thus, in examining both the academic and policy contexts, feminists have seen gender-consciousness reconstituted in not-necessarily-feminist ways. This

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reconstitution can be seen most clearly, though, in popular tracts on gender. Those that appear to have captured the popular imagination are those that see gender differences as being rather static and immutable - whether 'socially constructed' or not. Such explanations do not need to reassert biological explanations that explicitly attempt to collapse gender back into sex. Explanations relying on cultural or social sources of difference can become just as rigid and essentialized as those that point to 'nature.' Media darling Camille Paglia goes so far as to suggest that those of us teaching about gender should "break out of the ghetto of academic publishing" and "consider assigning the kind of general-release books whose sales in the many millions indicate that they have struck a chord with the mass audience". To this end, she suggests that books like Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand, John Gray's Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, and comedian Tim Allen's Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man " . . . draw upon the wisdom of actual experience to present a picture of sexual relations far more persuasive than anything current academic theorists have produced" (Paglia, 1997). What all of these books share is a conviction that gender signifies a cultural difference in the extreme - not just a gendered culture that differentiates between males and females, but two distinct cultures of masculinity and femininity. In a sense, Paglia is correct to suggest that these sorts of popular tracts present a 'persuasive' account, which resonates with many peoples' experience (as do jokes about women's obsession with shoe sales or the invisible umbilical cord attaching men to TV remote controls). That these sorts of accounts over-generalize and reify differences is not the only problem - more vexing is that positing gender as fixed and absolute binary difference, and according it explanatory power as such, hardly constitutes analysis. Even if those differences are recognized to be socially or culturally derived, such a strategy serves only to re-naturalize that binary. In such accounts, 'gender' becomes a simple replacement for 'sex' as the descriptor of pre-constituted categories. "Only human beings", says the unabashedly conservative Barbara Amiel, "would be so potty as to try to deny gender-specific behavior" (1995: 13). Only human beings? I'll leave it to the reader to ponder the implications of that statement. Despite the initial emancipatory impulse in distinguishing gender from sex in a move to de-essentialize the former - to see it as variable, malleable, and relational - gender itself has become essentialized in its usage in various contexts. In some contexts, it merely identifies the point at which 'women' become relevant to the analysis, leaving the rest untouched. In others, it becomes just another word for 'sex.' As Terrence Carver (1998: 22) summarizes it, such usage "...constantly reinscribes the supposedly obvious and supposedly wellunderstood categories male and female, men and women, back into political

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ideas, just when these ideas are starting to be really problematic, politically interesting and interestingly complex". Or, as Paola Melchiori* suggests, "Even 'gender,' that was meant to escape nature traps, is . . . becoming as rigid as nature in its exploratory, capacity" (1998: 97). Gender, in its mainstream usage, has become a portmanteau that contains/constrains a whole series of ontological, epistemological and political questions.

GENDER TROUBLE: DEBATES WITHIN FEMINISM Debates about gender within feminism have raised questions about both the ways in which gender is used, and the very distinction between sex and gender upon which the concept is based. Four key lines of critique have emerged: (1) that the basic distinction between sex and gender reinforces a nature/culture dualism and reifies sexual dimorphism. (2) that the concept of 'gender' is too universalizing and too overdetermining, implicating it as shot through with racism, classism and heterosexism. (3) that the turn to gender has meant a depoliticizing turn away from women. (4) that the emphasis on gender as socially constructed has signalled a shift from the material to the discursive: one that cedes too much to discourse and culture at the expense of a more materially grounded analysis. Two recurring and related themes underlie these feminist debates about gender - the inscription of 'difference' and 'diversity' as the leit motif of both feminist politics and feminist theory, and the increased influence of postmodern and poststructuralism 8 in the academy. Unlike some accounts that locate both of these developments in the same grand sweep of intellectual fashion, I want to begin by arguing that the former is more directly related to shifts in the political constituency of feminism, as previously marginalized women have carved out spaces from which to speak, and the latter is related to a more generalized 'crisis of knowledge,' that has relentlessly scrutinized all the 'grand narratives' that have (mis)informed Western intellectual systems. Thus, 'difference' and 'diversity' are not questions that postmodern theory put on the agenda, but questions that have led to a wide-spread questioning of the 'categorical hegemony' of existing theoretical accounts of gender. 9 Nonetheless, those sympathetic to the postmodern turn are more likely to criticize gender as based on a faulty distinction between nature and culture, and as an overdetermining narrative in i t s e l f - one that flattens out important differences. Those more critical of the postmodern turn fear that the way that 'gender' has been taken up depoliticizes and/or erases the material bases of women's oppression.

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Feminist responses to postmodernism and poststructuralism have often been hostile. Some of the strongest critiques of the postmodem turn in feminist theory have linked it directly to the emergence of 'gender' (as opposed to 'women') as the preferred category of analysis (Hoff, 1994; Modleski, 1991; Sangster, 1995). Writing in Socialist Review, Barbara Epstein (1995) identifies academic feminism as primarily responsible for the theoretical hegemony of poststructuralism, and what she sees as an attendant depoliticization of theory. But there has been another sort of response to the poststructuralist/feminist alliance - one more closely connected to cultural conservative projects. On this account, poststructuralism (again, generally conflated with postmodemism) is seen as part and parcel of an intellectual takeover of 'special interests' in the academy, that has replaced systematic and cumulative knowledge acquisition with the 'mantra' of 'race, gender and ethnicity' (Emberley, 1996; Fekete, 1994; Horowitz, 1993). Thus, Gross and Levitt (1994: 3) can group together feminism, anti-colonialism, environmentalism, queer theory, postmodernism and other forms of 'cultural constructivism' in their scathing critique of 'the academic left', a potent force that has undermined the legitimation of natural science as the most privileged form of knowledge. Feminism is charged with wanting, not just "full judicial equality for women", but "a complete overthrow of traditional gender categories, with all their conscious and unconscious postulates". This phantasmic creation of 'gender' as an authoritarian category has been taken up as a political resource in a variety of anti-feminist projects.

MORE GENDER TROUBLE: THE ANTI-FEMINIST CRITIQUES The term 'gender feminist' originated in American philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers' book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), and has since gained fairly wide circulation as a descriptor of what is supposedly wrong with contemporary feminism. As one of the critics puts it, there is " . . . one word which expresses in a nutshell the idea of these feminists. That word is gender" (de Casco, 1995: 15). Oakley (1997: 41) suggests: "Because gender as a concept was a basic building block of second-wave feminism, there is probably no better way to undermine feminism than by discrediting the very idea of gender". Recalling that the original political impetus for the feminist adoption of 'gender'was in its distinction from 'sex,' and its rejection of biological determination, it is not surprising to find the anti-feminist critiques premised on a " . . . returning gender to sex: making social inequalities disappear inside the body" (Oaldey, 1997: 34). l° There are two distinct ways, that I will outline in turn, that the critique of the concept of gender has functioned in recent critiques of feminism.

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One line of criticism is that of the explicitly conservative, anti-feminist forces, particularly those associated with fundamentalist 'pro-family,' 'pro-life' moral projects. The conservative attack on 'gender' and 'gender feminists' gained a good deal of steam in the preparations leading up to, and the activities at, the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in the fall of 1995. The conservative critique of gender mainstreaming developed through a series of debates in the preparatory committee meetings, culminating in the attempt by several conservative delegations to have the word 'gender' bracketed throughout the draft platform for action. 11 Their failure to achieve this did not prevent 'gender' from remaining an issue at the conference itself. The most detailed critique here comes from Dale O'Leary, an American Catholic Conservative, whose paper, "Gender: The Deconstruction of Women" was widely circulated at the NGO forum. O'Leary energetically attacks the social constructionism that underlies the concept of gender, suggesting that it does not advance the 'real' interests of women, as it denies them their 'nature'. As she summariazes it, the "Gender Feminists' . . . war against 'socially constructed roles' is a war against the natural relationships between women and their children, between women and men, and between women and their own feminine nature". (1995: 28). While O'Leary makes specific reference to 'gender feminists,' her conservative critique of gender differs quite substantially from the libertarian version in which the term originates. Christina Hoff Sommers coined the term 'gender feminism,' in opposition to 'equity feminism,' to describe what she saw as 'bad' and 'good' feminism. Gender feminists " . . . believe that our society is best described as a patriarchy, a 'male hegemony,' a 'sex-gender system' in which ~he dominant gender works to keep women cowering and submissive" (1994: 16). Equity feminism, on the other hand, asks for nothing more than formal legal equality of individuals before the law - something we already have, so presumably it is obsolete. The charges laid at the feet of 'gender feminism' include an inordinate focus on women-as-a-group, male-bashing, misrepresenting the extent to which the 'balance' has swung in favor of women, and the promotion of victimology, just to name a few. 'Gender feminism' has, on this account, taken over (in Sommers' words, 'stolen') la mainstream feminism, severing it from its (proper) liberal roots, and rejecting the "enlightenment principles of individual justice" (Sommers, 1994: 22). 'Gender-feminism' becomes, in the hands of Canadian cultural theorist John Fekete, 'No-feminism'. Fekete, citing Sommers approvingly, notes that her alternative, 'equity feminism,' does not work in Canada, because " . . . equity is one of the code words around which gender-obsessed biofeminists organize" (1994: 351). Biofeminism, and its offspring, biopolitics,

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is charged with regressing into "dark mythologies of race and gender" (p. 12) and "fixated in gender thinking" (p. 22). While, for the conservatives, 'gender' has under-emphasized, through its insistence on social construction, the 'natural' differences between men and women, the libertarian critique charges 'gender' with privileging group membership over the individual, and as promoting a biologically-linked essentialism that over-emphasizes the differences between men and women. Yet as different as these accounts are, they share some fundamental sintitarities. Both perceive a gender-feminist conspiracy and target 'gender analysis' as an authoritarian program, and both frame their rejection of 'gender,' 'gender equity,' 'gender perspective' or 'gender analysis' in terms of a defense of individualism. The conservative critique is premised on a defense of natural individual difference based on biological sex. The concept of gender as socially constructed poses a threat to individualism because it challenges this conception of natural difference. This conception of individualism in implicit in the continual conflation of 'gender' and 'the family' in the conservative analysis. De-constructing gender is equivalent to destroying the family - the latter defined as the nuclear, hetero-patriarchal family. 'Gender feminists', on this account, want men and women "to be the same" (O'Leary, 1995: 9), seek to "turn women into little men by day and sexual service stations by night" (Dalzell, 1995: 47), it is a futile attempt to "redefine human nature" (Joseph, 1995: 94). The defense of individuality here is the defense of the masculine individual - produced through a rigid separation of public and private, the latter constructed around the patriarchal family. On O'Leary's account, it is only the patriarchal family that can civilize men, tie them to the future, and convince them to "take up the hard work of building society" (1995: 22). If women abdicate their natural role as defined by the patriarchal family, "society wilt deteriorate into anarchy" (Ibid.). The libertarian critique, on the other hand, explicitly wants to defend an abstract individual who is, on first reading, ontologically ungendered. Repeatedly, the politicization of gender (and sexuality) is criticized, generally via the assertion that gender-feminism has polarized men and women in an overly antagonistic fashion, creating difference through the insistence on social construction. Consider here Fekete's charge that feminism has created a "panic culture of group antagonisms", and his closing plea that "individuals have to be able to escape from groups" (1994: 336). Daphne Patai (1996: 583) even invents a new word to describe this supposed overpoliticization - 'heterophobia': "a real, visceral and frightening antagonism toward men and a consequent intolerance toward women who insist on associating with them". Similarly Fekete characterizes 'biofeminism' as a "backlash against heterosexual pleasure". (1994: 56) That the critique of gender hierarchies is confused with

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an attack on men and heterosexuality is not coincidental. As Oakley has noted: "Antifeminist attacks on gender continually conflate sex and gender, particularly in their critiques of male-bashing: critiques of masculinity on the level of gender are presumed to be an attack on sex itself' (1997: 37). It is precisely on this antagonism towards heterosexual men that gender-feminism has supposedly created, that the libertarian and conservative critiques find their common ground. The conservatives, as we've seen, are explicit about this, confidently citing the naturalness of heterosexuality and the neat lining-up of sex differences to support it. While the libertarians are careful to avoid the assertions of 'natural' or 'authentic' sex that pepper the conservative critiques, many make a curious attempt to depoliticize gender as an identity while attempting to simultaneously reassert the legitimacy of certain types of gendered identities - particularly in the masculine. This is evident from a number of themes that recur in the literature: anxiety over lack of attention to men qua men, pique at the inattention to the special trials of masculinity, and the supposed emasculation of men by feminism - both voluntary, in the case of those men who support feminism, and involuntary for others. These arguments all rely on a (sometimes explicit, but often implicit) heterosexual framing of feminine/masculine opposition and complementarity.

RETHINKING GENDER? Can the manner in which 'gender' has become a lightning rod for anti-feminist critiques be taken, alongside the reservations about the term expressed within feminism, as a signal that it has outlived its usefulness? On the contrary, I think that these critiques of 'gender' crystallize a number of important issues for feminists. First, the extraordinary focus of both the conservative and libertarian critiques on sexuality bring into sharp relief the heterosexual matrix of gender, and hence the threat to normalized heterosexuality that a thorough deconstruction of gender poses. This is particularly evident in the conservative anxiety over 'gender' in the UN programme as opening the door to a proliferation of sexual identities and 'lifestyles,' and the libertarian panic over 'heterophobia.' Heterosexuality becomes, for the libertarians, a stand-in for 'family' as it appears in the conservative critique: that which is natural, desirable, and defensible as an ideal, and the ultimate location of immutable gender differences. 13 Secondly, the extent to which the centring of 'gender' in feminist analyses has problematized men, and has disrupted the notion of some stable, essential masculinity that has been unjustly diluted or deformed by feminism, reinforces the importance of insisting on 'gender' as a relational concept. Both the

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conservatives and the libertarians would rather that feminists talked about 'women' than 'gender,' because such a framing makes it easier to see women as the authors of their own oppression. Thirdly, the manner in which 'gender' and 'race' and/or 'ethnicity' are linked together, especially in the libertarian critiques, is instructive. Framed as a 'mantra,' standing in for all differences that threaten universality, this should act as a clear signal of the importance of linking the analysis and politicization of gender with those other axes of difference. Finally, the critiques of 'gender' underscore the ambiguous relationship of feminism to debates about modernity/postmodernity, hinted at in my review of critiques of gender within feminism. The trumpeting of one form of 'reason' and 'rationality' as the standard against which a focus on gender is measured and found lacking, is a signal characteristic of the Enlightenment heritage. So too, is the conflation of feminism and poststructuralism in the academy, with the intent of condemning both as anti-modern. TM More crucially for political projects, these debates about 'gender' position feminism as central to debates about democracy, liberal individualism, and the presumed world-historical triumph of a particular form of liberal-democratic capitalism. 'Gender' 15 refuses to disappear into bland proclamations of universal values and disembodied 'persons.' To locate feminism's ultimate truth in its classical liberal moment, asking only for a "fair field and no favors" (Sommers, 1994: 51), allows the framing of gender only in individual terms. Given a "fair playing field," presumably achieved through the removal of formal legal barriers to equality, differences in outcome - the empirically observable difference in statuses of men and women - must then be attributed to primarily individual factors. The latter may be conceived of as failure (inability to assert one's individualism over stereotypical socialization, lack of motivation, personality defects), choice (rationally weighing the options, and 'choosing' motherhood, dependency, typically feminine roles, and so on) or as the result of natural difference (biological predispositions). Each of these conceptions hypostatizes gender as pre-modern and as difference that has, at least socially, been overcome through the formal inclusion of women as individuals in the liberal polity. Those differences that remain are not constituted as socio-political, but as particularities that have no substantive significance within the discourse of liberal modernity, the latter based on a progressive eclipsing of partieularism by universalism. This is nothing but an updated rendering of the metaphysical exile of women from modernity. Such an understanding of gender is faulty on a number of counts, but none more so than in its failure to grasp the manner in which gender is continually produced in different ways and in different contexts. Far from being a relic of less-enlightened times, gender difference (and inequality) is constantly

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constructed, reconstructed and given varying degrees of political significance, and not always in predictable ways. As Sylvia Walby asserts, patterns of inequality between men and women have changed, "but in complex ways, not simply for better or worse" (1997: 1). That complexity appears, on the surface, paradoxical, in that there seem to be patterns indicating a simultaneous convergence and polarization, or as Donna Haraway (1991) has termed it, a simultaneous erosion and intensification of gender. It appears paradoxical though, only to the extent that we hold gender to be a relatively static and homogenous categorization. For example, the increase in opportunities for women-as-a-group in most industrialized nations, as measured by such standard indicators as their educational opportunities and labor market success, needs to be read alongside increased disparity between women (for example, of different classes, ages, ethnicities, sexualities) in their access to the resources that would allow them to take advantage of a changing opportunity structure, if such measures were agreed upon as defining 'success.' The simultaneous erosion and intensification of gender becomes even more pronounced when we try to understand shifts in patterns of gender inequality in a global context. Maxine Molyneux has argued that, internationally, gender politics have been affected by three major trends over the last decade: the growing hegemony of neo-liberal models of economic management, the collapse of communism, and the resurgence of nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms. As she suggests: While each took different and specific forms in particular regions and countries, all could be found to greater or lesser degrees in the various regions of the world. These phenomena are international in character, they affect a considerable range of countries, and they involve cross-national linkages (1994: 289).

They are also phenomena that are inextricably bound up with organizing gender, and shape in important ways the ways in which gender can be taken up as a political point of departure. A range of recent work on globalization, restructuring, and shifts in citizenship regimes demonstrates how gender does not just signify ready-made difference, but is in fact productive of difference - difference that is mobilized through nationality, ethnicity, race and class. Processes of 'restructuring' and 'democratization' are not just mapped onto ready-made gender identities, but gender is actively constructed and invoked in the translation of abstract political and economic principles into the concrete experiences of embodied persons. As feminism itself becomes more internationalized, the charge that Western feminists have overprioritized gender has become more common, and is one that needs to be taken seriously. Alexander and Mohanty, for example, suggest a " . . . convergence between the way gender emerged as a primary category of

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analysis and the social, demographic and class composition of those who actually theorize gender in the U.S. academy" (1995: xvii). There is now a rich and varied literature of feminist work written from standpoints other than that of the 'originary' conception of gender. 16 In particular, writings by 'Third World q7 feminists have been notable in their success at 'disaggregating' (Afshar, 1996) gender, demonstrating its constitution through race, ethnicity and class, and drawing out how diverse political contexts - and the ways in which women have been constituted as political actors - actively shape and reshape gender relations. The import of this work goes far beyond its 'filling in the gaps,' or "summoning Third-World feminism in the service of (white) Western feminism's intellectual and political projects" (Alexander & Mohanty, 1995: xx). It has, I think, important implications for rethinking gender as an analytic category, that goes beyond seeing 'difference' as either anomalous or as providing colorful examples of some general principle. To see only 'other' feminisms as constructed in and through national and ethnic struggles, is to see Western feminisms, and their centering of gender, as somehow innocent of these messy and complicating factors. The interrelationships of gender with national and ethnic projects is complex, involving bodily and reproductive practices, cultural reproduction, labor and political struggle. Through all of these processes, nationalisms and nation-building are bound up with racialized conceptions of 'manhood' and 'womanhood.' Read against the sharpness with which a diversity of feminisms have drawn out the contexts in which gender is produced and regulated, the remaking of gender in the shifting economic and political context of late twentieth century industrialized nations can also be seen as illustrative of gender's historicity. We need to be able to put gender in its place, the latter understood not only as presence, but also as location. The mainstreaming of gender in sociology, and its privileging as a concept in feminism have accorded it presence, but its location requires far more substance, and far less fixity. CONCLUSIONS:

PUTTING

GENDER

IN ITS PLACE

The emergence of gender as a central category of social analysis is in no small part the result of feminist politics, whose development was/is closely related to broader patterns of social and economic change. Similarly, the fracturing of gender as a unified category is largely the result of other sorts of political movements, that have also emerged in relation to social and economic change. Once we try to analyze gender as a social category it is already bound up with a whole range of social relations that will shape its experience, representation, effects and the ways in which it is politicized. This is the essence of its historicity.

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There is certainly the possibility that a focus on gender will dilute the feminist intent that it originally signalled. As is far too often the case in mainstream scholarship, research that invokes gender does not necessarily concern itself with the fundamental asymmetries and inequalities that feminist analyses of gender have taken to be central. This, though, is not a problem organically linked to 'gender' as a concept. Nor are the other problems with 'gender' that have been raised by the feminist critiques - they are problems that are concerned with what 'gender' has been used to say in different contexts. On this, perhaps it is the moral conservatives who have best grasped gender's radical impulse its denaturalizing of sex as well. There are problems, too, in the way in which gender has developed, particularly in its relationship to that thing called 'sex,' that has led it to be understood as having cultural dimensions (identity, status, inequality) that can be 'discovered.' Once discovered, 'gender' can then be taken either as patently explanatory, or targeted for change through conscious action. Both of these interpretations tend to miss the point about both gender and sex as "created and re-created when practised and discussed" (Yuval-Davis, 1997:119). If 'gender' is to have any theoretical or political purchase, then the tendency to conceptualize it categorically - as having some fixable referent - rather than as part of the process of constructing categories, must be resisted. The utility of any such concept is entirely pragmatic - what does it allow us to do, or say, in terms of a given purpose, in a given time and place? In the case of gender, there is nothing useful to be said about it, outside of the concrete specificity of particular social relations, for it is this ensemble of historically located social relations that constitutes any identity. The continual remaking of gender in always shifting circumstances illustrates the need to be more careful in our deployment of abstract concepts. Both the abstract concepts that feminists have shown to be gendered in their assumptions and effects, and the abstract concept of 'gender' itself, can only be apprehended adequately through their concrete embodiments. Here, I am thinking of work like that of Zillah Eisenstein (1994), who has interrogated American democracy from the standpoint of the pregnant woman of color, Cynthia Enloe (1993), who asks what the militarism of the Gulf War means to a Filipina domestic working in Kuwait, and Sinith Sittirak (1998), who critically analyzes development models by asking what 'development' means to her mother, a Thai woman with a particular biography. Relevant, too, is R. W. Connell's (1995) exploration of 'masculinity' via ethnographic inquiry with differently situated men. I highlight these not to argue for any privileged epistemic standpoint from which 'reality' may be more fully apprehended, but simply to suggest that gender is taken up very differently once we move from -

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the abstract to the concrete. 18 Like the turn of a kaleidoscope, as different pieces reconfigure, the picture changes. But neither do I wish to suggest that gender, conceptualized at a higher level of abstraction, can serve no useful analytic or strategic purpose. Here, I think Sylvia Walby is correct to argue that "we need to have concepts at different levels of abstraction" (1997: 5), and that to foreswear macro-level and comparative analysis of larger patterns of gender inequality, in the name of recognizing the importance of local contexts, would be a mistake. That the patterns and issues are so recognizable - poverty, violence, sexual autonomy, reproductive choice - is not insignificant. The question remains, however, as to whether or not 'gender,' as a concept, is up to the task. Gender continues to have merit both as an analytic concept and as a political resource, but it requires some rethinking that attends to its logic-in-use. We need to constantly ask what it is saying (or not saying). The manner in which the political assault on gender has been coded, in both its conservative and libertarian versions, and the erosion of political legitimacy attached to gender when it applies to women should stand as clear warnings of the dangers should feminists fail to take up some of the difficult questions involved. So too, should the inadequacies of any originary sense of gender, that places it unproblematically in the Enlightenment discourse of rights, and for which the complaints about it from 'others' are treated as merely supplementary. In this form, 'gender' has not travelled very well. As Raymond Williams has noted in Keywords, problems of a term's meanings can only be explored through an analysis of the problems it is used to discuss (1983: 17). Gender mainstreaming and its critiques demonstrate this point clearly - that how we talk about gender and what we take it to mean continue to be bound up with the substantive social issues with which we are engaging, and with the normative frameworks we bring to bear on those issues. It is precisely these normative frameworks, that often remain unexamined, that are critical in distinguishing between feminist and non-feminist uses of, and critiques of, gender. Our normative orientation as feminists requires that we will refuse some gendered logics and their construction of 'women,' while strategically accepting others. To avoid freezing 'women' and 'men' as discrete categories, however, requires continual reference to the historicity of gender as a social relation and a social practice.

NOTES 1. See Marshall (2000) for elaboration. 2. For a more detailed account of classical sociology's treatment of women, and the implications of this for the manner in which the discipline has developed, see Marshall (1994).

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3. By 'strategic absence,' I mean that what is often important in what a theory is saying can be found in what it is not saying. With respect to women, this means that we can glean much about a theory's conception of them by examining their dislocations or absences from important contexts. 4. The sex/gender distinction was first introduced in the medical and psychoanalytic literature of the mid-1950's, in the context of the treatment of individual pathologies intersexuality and transsexualism. In this context, gender was conceptualized as 'identity' - one's 'gender identity' was one's self-understanding, in a socio-psychological sense, as male or female. The medical/psychiatric problem of individuals for whom there was a lack of congruency between 'sex' and 'gender' (as identity) necessitated the distinguishing terms. As Bernice Hausman has argued convincingly: " . . . prior to the introduction of 'gender' into twentieth-century discourse as a signifier of 'social sex', 'sex' was a signifier encoding both biological and social categories. 'Gender' was no less operative in social relations, but it went unmarked as a separate aspect of being a sex. 'Sex' came to refer solely to the biological realm when technology developed to the point that clinicians could routinely intervene at the level of (and therefore change) physical signifiers of sex" (1995: 75). 5. As Connell notes, the problem is not that role theory does not recognize change, but the manner in which change is understood, hnplicit is an understanding of change as something that 'happens' to roles from outside, or results from the 'real self' that resists the constraint of some role. "The problem is rather that role theory cannot grasp social change as history, that is, as transformation generated in the interplay of social practice and social structure" (1985: 263). 6. In a recent review that I conducted of a number of current introductory sociology textbooks, this was very evident. 'Gender' pointed primarily to places where women were present in the text. That is, when sociologists talk about gender, they are, for the most part, talking about women. Thus, with few exceptions, social phenomena as diverse as bureaucracies, motorcycle gangs and language can be discussed without reference to gender, unless women are anchoring the reference. In its sharpest form, this is represented by the index of one text (Schaefer et al., 1996), which at the end of the entry on 'gender' instructs us to 'see also, women.' There is no entry for men in the text's index. Now, the fact that sociologists are including women in discussions of a wide range of issues is a good thing, and one that no feminist would argue against, but it does not quite fulfill the potential of gender as an analytic, as opposed to a descriptive concept. 7. See the contributions from Chopoval and Denis to this volume. 8. Because my concern here is to focus on the ways that postmodern and poststructuralist themes have been taken up and/or rejected, I will use the terms used by the authors that I am discussing. While I believe that postmodernism and poststructuralism should be distinguished (as outlined above) this task is made difficult by their frequent conflation in the literature (often via the hybridized term 'postmodernism/poststructuralism'). Agger (1991) and Huyssen (1990) provide some helpful distinctions. 9. If I seem critical here of some postmodernists/poststructuralists taking credit for forcing feminists to think more carefully about how they invoke 'gender,' I am. However, I am equally critical of feminists who see the whole concept of 'gender' as a clever poststructuralist way of ignoring women. 10. Anti-feminism, of course, has a history that long predates the debates of the last few years that I am concerned with here. Walby (1997) provides some comparison of

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earlier and later forms of anti-feminism, as does Steuter (1992). Garland Publishing has recently compiled a 3-volume set of readings from oppositional literature in the U.S., covering the years 1848-1994 (Howard & Tarrant, 1998). 11. While they were not successful, an "informal contact group on gender" was struck at this final meeting of the preparatory committee, which was mandated to "seek agreement on the commonly understood meaning of 'gender' in the context of the Platform for Action and to report directly to the conference in Beijing" (United Nations, 1995a: 1). 12. Her terminology here is extremely problematic, implying that there was some rightful 'ownership' of feminism (by whom is unclear) that could be violated, and casting 'gender feminists' as outlaws. 13. This is not to equate the move to recentre heterosexuality as simply overt homophobia. Paglia, for example, has made her own sexual preferences well known. Even homoerotic desire, though, is read through a rigidly hetero-gendered frame, that allows her to, for example, see gay men as "guardians of the masculine impulse" (1992: 24), having most cleanly severed their 'humiliating' dependence on women (as mothers, wives). 14. The charge of anti-modernism is particularly underscored by Fekete's blanket term 'bio-politics' to encompass the politics of race, gender and ethnicity, and the related assertion that this is a 'new primitivism.' 15. Along with it's companion terms in the 'mantra'. 16. See, for example, Afshar (1996), Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989), Alexander and Mohanty (1995), Jayawardena (1986), Moghadam (1994), Mohanty et al. (1991), Weylan (1996), Yuval-Davis (1997). 17. I use the term 'Third World' here only because it is still common currency in the literature to which I am referring, even though that literature goes a long way towards problematizing it. Mohanty (1991) presents a comprehensive review in this respect. Angela Miles (1997: 159) has used the term 'Two-Thirds World' to remind us of "the South's predominance in both population and land mass". In general, 'Third World' signifies Africa, Asia and Latin America, while 'First World' or 'Western' signifies Europe and North America. Increasingly 'North' and 'South' are used to signify the difference between economically unequal parts of the world. All of these terms, of course, overly homogenize whatever population they refer to, obscuring internal diversities and inequalities. 18. I am indebted to Derek Sayer's (1987, 1988) elaboration of Marx's method in taking this up as an integral characteristic of adequate analysis. Moving from the concrete (the world as experienced) to the abstract (the concepts that allow description) yields 'simple abstractions.' A complete analysis also requires going from the abstract to the concrete, in that " . . . it is only through the particular and the concrete that the general and abstract has any real existence" (1988: 5).

REFERENCES Agger, B. (1991). Critical Theory, Poststructuralism,Postmodernism.Annual Review of Sociology, 17, 105-131. Afshar, H. (1996). Introduction. In: H. Afshar (Ed.), Women and Politics in the Third World (pp: 1~5). Routledge. Alexander, M. J., & Mohanty, C. T. (1995). Introduction:Genealogies,Legacies, Movements. In: M. J. Alexander & C. T. Mohanty (Eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (pp. xiii-xliii). Routledge.

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Allen, T. (1994). Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man. New York: Hyperion. Amiel, B. (1995). The Madness of the Unisex Experiment. Maeleans, August 28, 13. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (Eds) (1989). Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (in association with H. Cain) (1992). Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Color and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. Routledge. Baden, S., & Goetz, A. M. (1997). Who Needs [Sex] When You Can Have [Gender]? Conflicting Discourses on Gender at Beijing. Feminist Review, 56, 3-25. Carver, T. (1996). Gender is Not a Synonym for Women. Lynne Rienner. Carver, T. (1998). A Political Theory of Gender. In: V. Randall & G. Waylen (Eds), Gender, Politics and the State. (pp. 18-28). Routledge. Connell, R. W. (1985). Theorizing Gender. Sociology, 19 (May), 260-272. Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. University of California Press. Connell, R. W. (1996). New Directions in Gender Theory, Masculinity Research and Gender Pelitics. Ethnos, 61(3/4); 157-176. Dalzell, C. (1995). The Bracket Brigade at Work: the UN's Vision of Utopia. In: M. Cook (Ed.), Empowering Women: Critical Views on the Beijing Conference. Little Hills Press, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia. de Beauvoir, S. (1961). The Second Sex (1949). Bantam Books. de Casco, M. L. (1995). The Battle at Beijing. Empowering Women: Critical Views on the Beijing Conference. Little Hills Press, Crows Nest, NSW, Australia. Eisenstein, Z. R. (1994). The Color of Gender. University of California Press. Enloe, C. (1993). The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Emberley, P. C. (1996). Zero Tolerance: Hot Button Politics in Canada's Universities. Penguin. Epstein, B. (1995). Why Post-strncuralism Is a Dead End for Progressive Thought. Socialist Review, 25(2), 83-119. Fekete, J. (1994). Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising. Robert Davies Publishing. Gray, J. (1992). Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. Harper Collins. Gross, P., & Levitt, N. (1994). Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Johns Hopkins University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. Routledge. Hausman, B. L. (1995). Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology and the Idea of Gender. Duke University Press. Hoff, J. (1994). Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis. Women's Studies International Forum, 17(4), 443--447. Horowitz, I. (1993). The Decomposition of Sociology. Oxford University Press. Howard, A., & Tarrant, S. R. A. (1998). Antifeminism in America (3 volumes), Hamden, CT: Garland Publishing. Huyssen, A. (1990). Mapping the Postmodem. In Linda Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (pp. 234-277). Routledge. Jackson, S., & Scott, S. (1997). Gut Reactions to Matters of the Heart: Reflections on Rationality, Irrationality and Sexuality. Sociological Review, 45(4), 551-575. Jayawardena, K. (1986). Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Joseph, R. (1995). Beijing's Blueprint for Revolution: an Experiment in Social Engineering. Empowering Women: Critical Views on the Beijing Conference. Little Hills Press, Australia. Laqueur, T. (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard University Press.

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Marshall, B. (1991). Reproducing the Gendered Subject. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 11, 169-196. Marshall, B. (1994). Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change. Polity Press and Northeastern University Press. Marshall, B. (1995). Communication as Politics: Feminist Print Media in English Canada. Women's Studies International Forum, 18(4), 463--474. Marshall, B. (2000). Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Melchiori, P. (1998). Redefining Political Spaces and the Concept of Politics: Migrating Practices of Consciousness-raising. In: L. Christiensen-Ruffman (Ed.), The Global Feminist Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge (pp. 91-104). International Sociological Association. Miles, A. (1996). Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions 1960s-1990s. Routledge. Modleski, T. (1991). Feminism Without Women. Routledge. Moghadam, V. M. (1994). Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. Mohanty, C. T. (1991). Cartographies of Struggle: Third-world Women and the Politics of Feminism. In: C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo & L. Torres (Eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indiana University Press. Molyneux, M. (1994). Women's Rights and the International Context: Some Reflections on the Post-communist States. Millenium, 23(2), 287-313. Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Harper and Row. Oakley, A. (1997). A Brief History of Gender. In: A. Oakley & J. Mitchell (Eds), Who's Afraid of Feminism? Seeing Through the Backlash (pp. 29-55). London: Hamish Hamilton. O'Leary, D. (1995). Gender: the Deconstruction of Women. Unpublished Paper, Circulated at the NGO Forum at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing. Paglia, C. (1992). Sex, Art and American Culture. Vintage Books. Paglia, C. (1997). Feminists must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal. Chronicle of Higher Education, Reprinted in the Newsgroup Paglia-1, July 1997. Patai, D. (1996). Heterophobia: the Feminist Turn Against Men. Partisan Review, Fall: 580-594. Rathberger, E. M. (1990). WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice. Journal of Developing Areas, 24(4), 489-502. Riley, D. (1988). Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of 'Woman' in History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sangster, J. (1995). Beyond Dichotomies: Re-assessing Gender History and Women's History in Canada. Left History, 3(1), 109-121. Sayer, D. (1987). The Violence of Abstraction. Basil Blackwell. Sayer, D. (1988). Karl Marx and the 'Real World'. Paper Presented at the Political Economy of the Margins Conference, Toronto, May, 1988. Schaefer, R. T., Lamm, R. P., Biles, P., & Wilson, S. J. (1996). Sociology: An Introduction. First Canadian edition. McGraw-Hill. Sittirak, S. (1998). The Daughters of Development: Women in a Changing Environment. ZED Books. Sommers, C. H. (1994). Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. New York: Simon and Schuster. Steuter, E. (1992). Women Against Feminism: an Examination of Feminst Social Movements and Anti-feminist Counter-movements. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 29(3), 288-306.

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Stienstra, D. (1996). from Mexico to Beijing: International Commitments on Women. Canadian Woman Studies, 16(3), 14-17. Sydie, R. A. (1987). Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological Theory. Toronto: Methuen. Sydie, R. A. (1994). Sex and the Sociological Fathers. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 31(2), 117-138. Tannen, D. (1990). You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow and Company. United Nations (1995a). Report of the Informal Contact Group on Gender, 7 July, 1995. United Nations (1995b). Platform for Action. Adopted at the World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, September 1995. United Nations (1995c). Beijing Declaration. Adopted at the World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, September 1995. Walby, S. (1997). Gender Transformations. Routledge. Waylen, G. (1996). Analysing Women in the Politics of the Third World. In: H. Afshar (Ed.),Women and Politics in the Third World (pp. 7-24). Routledge. Williams, R. (1983). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Fontana Press. Young, K. (1997). Gender and Development. In: N. Visvanathan, L. Duggan, L. Nisonoff & N. Wiegersma (Eds), The Women, Gender and Development Reader (pp. 51-54). Fernwood. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. Sage.

IT'S T H E 2 1 S T C E N T U R Y - D O Y O U KNOW WHAT GENDER YOU ARE? Judith Lorber

Gender systems change. As they transform, they produce different accounts of nature. Now, at the dawn of a new century, it is possible to witness such change in the making. We are moving from an era of sexual dimorphism to one of variety beyond the number two. We inhabit a moment in history when we have the theoretical understanding and practical power to ask a question unheard of before in our culture: "Should there be only two sexes?" (Fausto-Sterling 2000, 77).

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the challenges to a feminism based on a stable category of 'woman' that are presented by the social construction and postmodern views of genders as fluid and multiple, and by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender theory and research on sex and sexuality. It lays out their potential positive and negative impact on feminist theory and praxis. The paper will discuss ways of doing multidimensional research, and the implications of such research for feminist theory and politics.

INTRODUCTION F e m i n i s m h a s b e e n a m o v e m e n t t h a t is by, for, a n d a b o u t w o m e n . R e c e n t theory, r e s e a r c h , a n d politics, s o m e u n d e r the r u b r i c o f f e m i n i s m , s o m e not, h a v e c h a l l e n g e d the stability a n d clarity o f the c a t e g o r y ' w o m a n . ' T h e social An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 119-137. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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constructionist perspective on gender in the social sciences sees multiple sexes, sexualities, and genders produced in everyday interaction. Similarly, postmodern feminists in the humanities have shown how variations of sex, sexuality, and gender are generated by individual performativity and by cultural representations. A large body of theory and research from transgender studies has shown the fluidity of sexual desire, sexual identity, gender identity, and gender display in bisexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals. These multiplicities and complexities of sex, sexuality, and gender present a challenge to feminist theories, research, and politics that are based on a stable category of 'woman'. This paper will describe these challenges and their potential positive and negative impact on feminist theory and politics. It will discuss some problems in multidimensional research, and end with suggestions for a feminist degendering movement. Because so many of the new theories and studies about gender are based on a social constructionist perspective, I will start with a brief overview of the evolution of the concept of gender in feminist theory.

THE EVOLUTION OF GENDER At the beginning of the second wave of feminism, the use of gender in place of sex by English speakers was a deliberate strategy to counter prevailing ideas about the universality and immutability of sex differences. 1 What we now call gender was originally conceptualized as 'sex roles' - the social and cultural overlay that exaggerates and builds on the biological differences between males and females, with procreative functions the most obvious and universal. 'Sex roles' encompassed behavior and attitudes learned in growing up and applied to adult work and family situations. As the concept of gender has developed in the social sciences, it has moved from an attribute of individuals that produces effects in the phenomenon under study (e.g. crime rates, voting patterns, labor force participation) to a major building block in the social order and an integral element in every aspect of social life (e.g. how crime is conceptualized and categorized is gendered, political processes are gendered, the economy and the labor force are gender-segregated and gender-stratified). In the social construction perspective, gender is a major social status that is crosscut by other major social statuses, such as race, ethnicity, social class, religion, and sexual orientation. As a research variable, gender is not necessarily a binary, nor are gender categories constant. The social construction perspective sees gendering as an on-going process (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Through interaction with caretakers, socialization in childhood, peer pressure in adolescence, and gendered work and family roles, people are divided into two groups and made to be different in behavior,

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attitudes, and emotions. The content of the differences depends on the society's culture, values, economic and family structure, and past history. The resultant gendered social order is based on and maintains these differences. Thus, there is a continuous loop-back effect between gendered social institutions and the social construction of gender in individuals. In societies with other major social divisions, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and social class, gender is intricately intertwined with these other statuses (Acker, 1999; Nakano Glenn, 1999; West & Fenstermaker, 1995). These stratifying statuses form what Hill Collins (1990) calls a 'matrix of domination.' In addition to gender, bodies and biological differences have also been researched from a social construction perspective. This research shows that gender is not an overlay on biology; rather, biology itself is socially constructed as gendered (Lorber, 1993). Bodies do matter, but the way they matter is a social phenomenon (Butler, 1993). Menstruation, menopause, pregnancy and childbirth, eating disorders, illnesses, and disabilities are biological phenomena that are mediated and experienced socially (Bordo, 1993; Lorber, 1997; Martin, 1992; Parlee, 1994; Wendell, 1996). Female and male bodies are gendered for femininity and masculinity, for instance, through sports (Hargreaves, 1986; Messner, 1992). Rich (1977) and Katz Rothman (1989) describe the ways that childbirth and motherhood are experienced as socially institutionalized. As Fausto-Sterling says, "Reading nature is a sociocultural act" (2000, 75). Other research has shown that emotions, including sexual violence, are socially constructed as well, since they are molded by norms of situational appropriateness and permissiveness (Hochschild, 1983; Sanday, 1990; Scheff, 1990). Rubin (1984) laid out the politics of the social formation and control of sexual behavior, and Laqueur (1990) traced the history of ideas about the body and sexuality in Western culture. Homosexuality and heterosexuality have both been analyzed from a social construction perspective (Greenberg, 1988; Kitzinger, 1987; Richardson, t996). In the social construction of bodily phenomena, sexualities and emotions, the norms and expectations of gender play a significant part. This should not be surprising, since gender is a major building block in all the social institutions of modern life. Gender is deeply rooted in every aspect of social life and social organization in Western-influenced societies. The Western world is a very gendered world, consisting of only two legal categories - 'men' and 'women.' Despite the variety of playful and serious attempts at blurring gender boundaries with androgynous dress and desegregating gender-typed jobs, third genders and gender-neutrality are rare in Western societies. Most of those who cross gender boundaries by passing as a member of the other gender, or by sex-change surgery, want to be taken as 'normal' men or women (Gagn6 & Tewksbury, 1998a).

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The social constructionist perspective contends that all aspects of gender can be resisted, reformed, and reshaped through individual agency, group pressure, and social movements, and so it is a key perspective for feminist politics. However, this perspective, especially in its postmodern and queer theory extensions, has created contentions within feminism.

GENDER VS. WOMAN Recent debates over gender have split feminists between 'gender feminists' and 'difference feminists' (Foster, 1999). 'Gender feminists' contend that sex, sexuality, and gender are constructed in everyday interaction within the constraints of social norms (Bem, 1993; Connell, 1987; Lorber, 1994). The intertwining of sex, sexuality, and gender with each other and with other socially produced categories, such as social class, race, and ethnicity, results in multiple and fluid social identities. Postmodern feminists in the humanities have similarly contended that varieties of bodies, sexual desires, and genders are presented by individuals and represented in cultural depictions (Butler, 1990; De Lanretis, 1984; Garber, 1992, 1995; hooks, 1990). 'Difference feminists' argue that the experience of female bodies and sexuality produces a common and stable identity - woman (MacKinnon, 1989; Rhode, 1990). In this perspective, women's procreative potential enhances their nurturing capacities; their emotional openness makes them good mothers and bonds them to other women (Chodorow, 1978). Conversely, the social encouragement of male aggression and their patriarchal entitlement encourages the violent potentialities of men's control of women's bodies, sexuality, and emotions (Dworkin, 1987). These two perspectives in feminism have polarized because difference feminists have contended that the social construction and postmodern perspectives erase the category 'woman' on which so much of feminist theory, research, and politics is based. However, non-white, non-European feminists have already critiqued the falsity of a global conceptualization of 'woman' and insisted on racial ethnic and cultural multiplicities (Hill Collins, 1990; Melhuus & Stolen, 1997; Trinh 1989). Feminists writing about men have described the differences among them - bodily, sexual, racial, ethnic, and social class (Brod & Kaufman, 1994; Connell, 1995; Hearn & Morgan, 1990; Staples, 1982). In addition, a large body of theory and research from gay, lesbian, and transgender studies has provided extensive data on the variety in sexualities, including heterosexuality (Abelove, Barale & Halperin, 1993; Beemyn & Eliason, 1996; Devor, 1997; Herdt, 1994; Jacobs, Thomas & Lang, 1997; Katz, 1995; Leong, 1996; Ratti, 1993; Thomas, 2000; Tucker, 1995; Warner, 1993).

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The complex experiences described by social construction and postmoderu feminists, multicultural and men's feminism, and queer theory enriches our knowledge of people's lives, which cannot help but expand feminist theory. Feminist research needs to be multidimensional, with multiple levels of analysis that include the heterogeneity of identifies, the varied dimensions of status, and the power relations congealed in gendered social institutions (Lorber, 1996). What are some strategies for doing multidimensional research, and how will the data they produce influence feminist theory?

DOING MULTIDIMENSIONAL RESEARCH How can we do research that reflects the ways that gender intersects with other statuses; the interplay of sex, sexuality, and gender; and the revolutionary possibilities of transgressive behavior? We can take a critical stance towards the conventional gender categories without abandoning them entirely, examining the ways that other social statuses change their effects. Or, we can do research that examines what people do to and with whom and how these processes construct, maintain or subvert statuses, identities, and institutional rules and social structures. Both of these approaches demand thoughtful examination of the familiar binaries. As Frye notes, "Pattern discovery and invention requires encounters with difference, with v a r i e t y . . . Discovering patterns requires novel acts of attention" (1990, 180). Let me discuss in turn contextual effects on gender; the interplay of sex, sexuality, and gender; and radical behavior that forces us to go beyond the binaries. For each, I will describe some research that has already been done and suggest what needs to be filled in by new research. Contextual Effects on Gender

In common parlance and in much feminist research as well, there are only four major gender statuses - heterosexual men and women, gays and lesbians - and even sexual orientation may be dropped when it does not seem germane to the research topic. These elisions and large-scale groupings are based on assumptions about people that do not hold up in actual life, and so the data based on them is as flawed as was the data based just on men subjects was in the past. The intertwining of other dimensions with gender shows that we cannot design research just in terms of comparing women and men. A review of research on gender effects in people with disabilities found that women and men with similar levels of physical functioning and sexual

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orientations had very different life chances (Lorber, 2000a). Women are less likely to find jobs that allow them to be economically independent. They are also less likely to have a lifetime partner, because they need the care and attention that women are expected to give to others. They may be better able to find a life partner or a circle of women caregivers if they are lesbian. Heterosexual women with disabilities, however, may find the fulfillment of traditional wife-mother gender roles beyond reach. The opposite situation occurs for men with disabilities. They are more likely to find a life partner, a woman if they are heterosexual, a man if they are gay. In the traditional husband role, care received is recompensed with economic support, so as long as a man with disabilities can earn an income, he can fulfill his family role obligations. In short, if you add the dimension of 'bodiedness' to gender and sexuality, you get very different data than if you look only at able-bodied women and men. Gender alone cannot be the basis of comparison in analyzing work situations, nor can place in the workplace hierarchy. In workplaces employing both women and men, position in the hierarchy sometimes does and sometimes does not override a worker's gender. The behavior of men and women doctors, for example, sometimes reflects their professional status and sometimes their gender, and it is important to look at both aspects to understand their relationships with patients (Pringle, 1998). The men workers in women's occupations and the women workers in men's occupations cannot be lumped in a minority category. The women come up against the glass ceiling that blocks their upward mobility, whereas the men are on what Williams has called a "glass escalator" - they are encouraged to compete for managerial and administrative positions (1992). We must also consider within-gender differences, the most obvious being the cross-cutting by race, ethnicity, social class, and geographical location. Sprague (1991) found that because material interests reflect positions in the social relations of production and reproduction, as well as more immediate community contexts, political attitudes hew more closely to class, gender role, and affiliation with social movements than to a simple division of men versus women. Even if yon control all other social statuses, there are within-group differences. Collinson and Hearn (1994) found that men in management exhibit multiple masculinities - aggressive authoritarianism, benevolent paternalism, competitive entrepreneurialism, buddy-buddy informalism, and individualistic careerism. These multiple masculinities among men managers have different effects on relationships with men and women colleagues, as well as on sponsorprot6g6 interactions. Collinson and Hearn call for a simultaneous examination of unities and differences among men. Cockburn similarly says about women in comparison with men, "We can be both the same as you and different from you, at various times and in various ways" (1991, 10).

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In sum, the components of the conventional gender categories need to be teased apart in order to distinguish gender effects from the effects of other statuses. Sometimes the effects combine, as in the multiple advantages of educated and prosperous heterosexual white men, and sometimes they counteract each other, as in men with disabilities and women physicians, a phenomenon sociologists call status dilemmas (Hughes, 1971). Status dilemmas are the fault lines in the gendered social order, so they are a particularly important subject for feminist research. The more data we have about people whose statuses crosscut gender divisions, the more we can find ways to undermine the social order based on those divisions.

Interplay of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals are often grouped as 'transgenders.' However, they are quite different, and these differences have to be reflected in any research design that has 'transgenders' as its focus. Careful research has already produced data that negates early assumptions. For example, it was thought that cross-dressing was a necessary phase in the transition to permanent sex change, but the two phenomenon are not inevitably linked. Ekins (1997) distinguished three patterns among men cross-dressers - those related to sex ('body femaling'), sexuality ('erotic femaling'), and role behavior ('gender femaling'). Transsexuals were thought to be heterosexual in sexual orientation, but it turns out that there are transsexuals who are homosexual in desire and behavior, both before and after surgery (Bolin, 1988; Devor, 1997, 496-512; Feinbloom et al., 1976). Studies of sexuality among transsexuals have shown that homosexuality, heterosexuality, and even bisexuality are too narrow to encompass what they do and how they feel. The 65 male-to-female transsexuals Gagn6 and Tewksbury (1998b) interviewed were sexually attracted to women, but hated performing sexually as men. When they tried sexual relations with men, they hated thinking they were gay. Sexual relations for them was a gender performance - they wanted most of all to be treated by their partners as women. They thought of themselves as 'women with penises.' Their relations with men were considered heterosexual and relations with women were considered lesbian, considerably blurring sex, sexual, and gender categories. Similarly, Devor's in-depth study of 45 female-to-male transsexuals found they considered themselves 'penisless men,' but often used dildoes. In transition and after phalloplasty, they had sex with transsexual and heterosexual women. Some had sexual relations with gay men to learn how men with penises use them; others considered themselves gay (1997, 475-512).

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Bisexuals are usually grouped with lesbians and gays, but because they are neither heterosexual nor homosexual, creating a single category obscures important data. Among bisexuals, women and men exhibit different sexual and emotional behavior. Women and men bisexuals prefer women partners for emotional intimacy and men partners for physical assertiveness (Weinberg, Williams & Pryor, 1994, 49-58). To date, most research on bisexuals has concentrated on their sexuality and identity (Garber, 1995; Rust, 1995; Tucker, 1995). But bisexuals could tell us much about the social practices of liminality, dual identities, and non-conventional emotional relationships and households. Other members of the transgender community - transvestites (or crossdressers) and transsexuals (who have surgery to change their genitalia to match their new gender status) also need multiple categories. Cross-dressing is a familiar phenomenon in many societies throughout history, with many combinations and permutations of gender and sexual display, identity, and permanence (Ekins, 1997; Garber, 1992). In Western societies, women have dressed as men to work in non-traditional jobs, join the military, or enter other places where women are not allowed. Some heterosexual men cross-dress for sexual pleasure. Other men and women cross-dress for performances, parties, and parades. Their cross-dressing is deliberately transgressive. The two types of cross-dressing - passing and transgressive - have totally different implications for gender identity and gender politics. If they successfully pass as women or as men, especially if they have transsexual surgery, transgenders change their legal status and all their identity papers to their new gender, burying their former status and taking on new names. One such was Billy Tipton, named Dorothy Lucille at birth, a jazz musician who passed for most of his life as a man in order to work in that gender-segregated world (Middlebrook, 1998). Treating passing transgenders as unproblematic members in their new status masks their past history and on-going strategies of careful gender construction, data that is rich in the practices of how we all do gender (Devor, 1997; Rogers, 1992). Researchers working on issues of sexuality and transgendering have recognized the need to clarify categories and not to take sex, sexuality, or gender for. granted, but more general feminist research has for the most part ignored the interplay among them. Bracketing off the body, most researchers assume a conventional biological substrata and would be totally taken aback if respondents insisted they were neither male nor female, neither women nor men, neither 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual' but 'both' - or 'all of the above.' The lives of transgenders can be examined from the standpoint of transgendered people and communities, but they also provide grist for a critique of the gendered social order. Those who successfully construct their gender against

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their sex assignment, whether through cross-dressing or surgical alteration of genitalia, may reaffirm the conventional categories of man and woman, but their own behavior has sabotaged the solidity of the categories. In Garber's words, anyone who passes successfully (by crossing any boundaries) possesses "extraordinary power . . . to disrupt, expose, and challenge, putting in question the very notion of the 'original' and of stable identity" (1992, 16). Like those with one major dominant and one major subordinate status, successful passers subtly undermine the gendered social order.

Radical Acts, Radical Effects Even more challenging for feminist research, theory, and politics are people who openly expand the number of sexes and genders beyond two. Radical gender-benders, who sometimes call themselves 'queers,' do not claim identity with men or women, heterosexuals or homosexuals (Seidman, 1997). Queers openly subvert binary gender and sexual categories through their deliberate mixtures of clothing, makeup, jewelry, hair styles, behavior, names, and use of language. Transgression - queering - is their goal. By not constructing gender and sexuality in expected ways, they make visible, in Butler's term, the performativity on which the whole gender order depends (1990). In their self-presentation, mixtures of partners in relationships, non-conventional combinations of housemates, and in-your-face political acts and cultural perfonmances, they are saying to heterosexuals and homosexuals 'get over it' and 'get used to it' (Warner, 1993). The phenomenon of queerness has generated an extensive literature, but it is split off from much of feminist discourse. Outside the queer community, gender-benders' androgynous self-presentations can lead to questions about the validity of their legal documents. In Turkey, the battle over identity cards was particularly bitter because they are color-coded pink for women and blue for men, leading researchers to call the conflict 'pink card blues' (Kandiyoti, forthcoming). 'Queers' provide a fascinating source of data on status transgression in action, but these histories have not been utilized by feminists other than those working on transgendering. Women and men whose physical appearance goes against the conventions of femininity and masculinity (e.g. tall, muscular women and short, slightly built men) and who dress in a gender-neutral fashion are transgressive despite leading conventional lives (Devor, 1989; Lucal, 1999). If they don't deliberately feminize or masculinize through dress, hair style, and adornment, they are often taken for members of the gender they do not identify as, and they meet constant challenges of their otherwise congruent biological and social identities. To

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the extent that they maintain their right to be in their legitimate social space (especially gender-identified bathrooms), they paradoxically challenge the status quo (Halberstam, 1998). As research subjects, they can tell us how hard it is to 'undo' gendering. Intersexuals are born with ambiguous genitalia, looking neither completely male nor completely female. They also frequently have divergent combinations of chromosomes, hormones, and physiology, which may not show up until puberty. In Western societies, intersexual infants are assigned a sex and usually undergo 'clarifying' surgery; they are then brought up as either boys or girls. Current research has shown that for intersexuals, not only is gender socially constructed, but sex is as well. Kessler (1998) has found that what sex the child with ambiguous genitalia will be assigned depends on the size of the penis/ clitoris. According to her research on pediatric plastic surgeons in this field, only if the surgeon feels that he (and it is usually a he) can make an adequate-sized penis, will the child be m a d e into a boy. Kessler points out that this social determination of the sex of the child and its construction through surgery is masked by medical rhetoric. The doctors' message to the parents is that the child has a true sex that is female or male, and that the surgery is needed to make the anomalous genitals match the true sex. In actuality, the sex as well as the gender are socially constructed, because the child usually ends up with a combination of male and female biology but is designated male or female. Examining the data on the biological sexing of the body, Fausto-Sterling (2000) convincingly argues that sex is a continuum rather than clearly binary. She says that the neural pathways in the brain are not completed prenatally; the data on the interplay between the body and the brain and the physical and social environment suggest a loop-back effect; and the outcome is much more of a physiological mixture than our culture and sciences can accept. In the last few years, there has been an intersex movement that protests against 'clarifying' surgery on infants (Nussbanm, 1999; Turner, 1999). This movement argues that such surgery is genital mutilation that ruins future sexual pleasure. The current controversy over the treatment of intersexual infants may discourage arbitrary sex assignment and surgery to make the external genitals match it. That would mean a growing group of intersexuals, whose visibility could, Fansto-Sterling says, change the whole gender system. Where is the feminist research on the teenagers and adults born with ambiguous genitalia who have had this surgery? Do they live as women or as men? How do they identify themselves sexually? Such research is needed to counteract claims for the ultimate biological basis of gender. The case of the male child who was reassigned and raised as a girl after a botched circumcision destroyed his penis, who then chose to become a boy,

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seems to clinch the argument that biology trumps socialization (Colapinto, 2000). Money and Ehrhardt (1972) claimed that this case was a natural experiment in whether you could raise a male as a girl because the child in question had an identical twin, who was being raised as a boy. But this case can be read as the rejection of a devalued gender status as much as it can the inevitable emergence of bodily and psychological hard-wiring. The child chose to reject the reassigned sex status on reaching puberty, when hormones and further genital surgery were prescribed by the adolescent's medical doctors and psychiatrists to create additional feminization. According to the original account of the case, the mother said early on that her sex-reassigned daughter was a tomboy (Money & Ehrhardt, 1972: 118-123). But the mother had also been a tomboy, and recognized that the behavior she was imposing on the daughter was more restrictive than that demanded of the son. Femininity never had any appeal for 'Joan'. Colapinto (1997) quotes Joan's identical twin brother as saying, "When I say there was nothing feminine about Joan," Kevin laughs, "I mean there was nothing feminine. She walked like a guy. She talked about guy things, didn't give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup . . . . We both wanted to play with guys, build forts and have snowball fights and play army." Enrolled in Girl Scouts, Joan was miserable. "I remember making daisy chains and thinking, 'If this is the most exciting thing in Girl Scouts, forget it,' " John says. "I kept thinking of the fun stuff my brother was doing in Cubs. ''2 Is this rejection of conventional 'girl things' the result of internal masculinization or the gender resistance of a rebellious child? Being a man is a preferred status in many societies, so it is not surprising for those with ambiguous genitalia to prefer that gender identity (Herdt & Davidson, 1988). More research needs to be done on the life histories of intersexed adolescents and adults in today's less gender-fixed climate to see to what extent they have chosen to go against their original sex assignment and how their lives compare to permanent transvestites and body-changed transsexuals. A neglected area of research is the question of how the lovers of bisexuals, transsexuals, and transvestites construe their own gender identity once they know the complexities of their lovers' genders, bodies, and sexualities. The persistence of the conviction that the lover be taken at 'face value' - what they said they were before the unmasking - may be an attempt to salvage their own 'straight' gender and sexual identities. But from the point of view of a transgender, that may not wash. Writing in STP (Swing the Pussy), a newspaper published by and for New York City lesbians, Widom says to a 'cross-confessor' who wondered in an earlier issue if she was attracted to butch gals, female-tomale transsexuals, or even to biological men,

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To answer some of your questions, butches and FrMs are not men in the same way that people identified as male at birth are• Maybe you want to be with people who were identified as male at birth or maybe not.., but being attracted to butches and/or FTMs is not exactly the same as being attracted to bio-boys (1999: 2). • . .

But she does not say why. I would say that a femme lesbian might want a butch dyke, but might not want a female-to-male transsexual or a 'bio-boy' because the butch dyke's gender is woman, the F T M ' s and biological male's gender presumably is m a n ) But would a lesbian want a male-to-female transsexual? Lesbian separatists have questioned the genuineness of their womanhood (Gamson, 1997). Indeed, Rust says that because lesbian feminism is based on emotional and sexual bonding among w o m e n , bisexuality and gender queering, "by challenging both dichotomous gender and dichotomous sexuality, challenge the very existence of lesbianism" (1995, 59). They certainly present a rich lode of data for new feminist perspectives on sexuality. In sum, the content of the transgressions (gender status, sexual behavior, sexual identity, appearance, genitalia) and the divisions between those who want to pass as normal women and men and those who are open gender rebels make 'transgenders' a conceptually rich area for research. Those working in this area have recognized the need to clarify categories and not to take sex, sexuality, or gender for granted, but feminist research in general has ignored categorical multiplicities and interplays and opted for global categories of 'women' and 'men' or 'heterosexuals' and 'homosexuals.' Even feminists who attend to the body assume a conventional biological substrata and would be hardpressed to categorize respondents who insisted they were neither male nor female, neither women nor men, neither 'homosexual' or 'heterosexual' but 'other' - or 'both.' The use of undefined categories of sex, sexuality, and gender misses complex combinations of status and identity, as well as differently gendered sexual continuities and discontinuities that have the potentiality to challenge the social order.

FEMINIST POLITICS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Careful attention to the nuances of sex, sexuality, and gender has turned up data that undermines the assumptions that bodies, desires, and behaviors come in two clear and contrasting categories. But how do we translate this data into political action? Should we continue to rally around the flag of womanhood? Butler says, "Surely, it must be possible both to use the term, to use it tactically and also to subject the term to a critique which interrogates the exclusionary operations and differential power-relations that construct and delimit feminist •

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invocations of 'women' " (t993: 29). I do not think it is possible to conceptualize Woman as a stable category and to use the experiences of women with varying bodily, sexual, and gender histories and practices at the same time. I think that it is time for feminists to take a leap past the conventional categories not only in research and in theory, but also in politics. The multiplicity of sexes, sexualities, and genders forces us to go beyond the binaries. Given that pressure, I urge feminists to think about undoing gender (Lorber, 2000b). By undoing gender, or degendering, I mean not thinking in terms of °men' and 'women' in feminist praxis and politics. Degendefing politics does not center on individual feminization or masculinization. It is concerned with the institutionalization of gender divisions in work organizations, family structures, education systems, and other areas of society that comprise the gendered social order. Since this social order is constructed and maintained in dyadic and group interaction, degendering needs to take place at those levels as well. These are some degendering tactics: When faced with a political solution to a social problem, we can ask if conventional gender categorization and separation is necessary and what the latent consequences are likely to be (Bacchi, 1999). To this end, we must dissect the layers of power embedded in the gendered 'relations of ruling' (Smith, 1990). We can try to blur gender boundaries in our everyday lives and undermine the built-in gender divisions in our work worlds (Delphy, 1993). Whenever we can, we should encourage the degendering of instrumental tasks, physical labor, athletic prowess, emotional sustenance, and physical spaces, especially bathrooms. Efforts have already been made to undermine one aspect of the gendered social order, child care, through subsidized parental leave for either parent (Swedin, 1995). Some heterosexual couples have structured their families to be gender-equal on every level - domestic work, child care, and financial contribution to the household (Bem, 1998; Deutsch, 1999; Risman, 1998; Schwartz, 1994). Lesbian and gay couples have reared children in a variety of family arrangements (Weston, 1991). Allocating health insurance and other benefits to individuals rather than to couples through the 'head of household' would further undermine the idea of gendered families (Robson, 1994). A movement to eradicate gender divisions would not be a universally useful form of feminist politics. It would be most effective where women have achieved a high measure of equality. Tracing the rise in women's status in the United States in the last 150 years, Jackson (1998) argues that thanks to increasing bureaucratization and rationalization of many areas of modern life, women have substantial equality with men in jobs, legal fights, education, and voting power. However, despite these marks of formal equality, sexual harassment, rape, and physical violence against women are still prevalent. A

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feminist degendering movement that pushed for gender neutrality at the informal levels of interaction in the work world and in the family would enhance the social forces of rationality and objectivity that have given women in the Western world their formal equality with men in laws, jobs, and voting power. It would not do much good in directly combating sexual harassment, rape, and physical violence, but it might undercut the legitimation of these harmful manifestations of masculinity. A degendering movement whose goal is greater equality would also have to include pressure for erasure of other invidious divisions, especially race and ethnicity, and for open access to economic resources, educational opportunities, and political power. In many countries, violence and sexual exploitation, as well as the spread of AIDS heterosexually, seriously undermine efforts to upgrade the lives of women and girls (World Health Organization, 1995). Feminist work here has all it can do to prevent women's lives from worsening. A gender perspective is needed to influence the programs of development agencies to be attentive to possible deleterious effects on women and girls of seemingly gender-neutral policies. Degendering would be counter-productive. A feminist degendering movement could undercut the valued qualities of women's lives that difference feminists have valorized - nurturance, relationality, emotionality - if the outcome of degendering is what we have come to see as a masculine world - objective, instrumental, and bureaucratic. But in actuality, the modern world is rule-based and relational, rational and emotional at one and the same time, and so are the people in it - whatever their sex, sexuality, or gender. Good and bad qualities are scattered across the spectrum and encouraged by nurturing and hurtful experiences. Degendering might encourage everyone to nurture and, I would hope, discourage violence towards others in thought and in actions. In my mind, a non-gendered social order would offer many more possibilities for creative and caring behavior than our current gender pigeonholes for identity, attitudes, emotions, work, and relationships. In short, because it includes men, attends as well to other subordinating social statuses that also have to be undermined, but most of all, because it directly challenges the structure and framework of women's oppression and inequality, a degendering movement is what I would like to see as the feminist politics of the new century. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This paper is based on a presentation at RC 32 ISA Pre-congress on 'Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology,' St. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, July

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2 1 - 2 5 , 1998. A v e r s i o n was presented at a plenary session, ' S o c i o l o g y in the 21st C e n t u r y , ' Eastern S o c i o l o g i c a l Society A n n u a l Meetings, Baltimore, M D , M a r c h 5, 2000

NOTES 1. Since gender does not have the meaning in other languages that it does in English, a circumlocution such as 'social sex' is often used, or the English usage and word are imposed in a way that may blur deep cultural differences of meaning (Widerberg, 1998). For critical discussions of the sex/gender distinction, see Gatens (1996) Hood-Williams (1996) and Wallach Scott (1999). 2. Quote is at p. 12, electronic version. 3. In Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg's autobiographical novel, the femme lover of a butch lesbian breaks up the relationship when the butch decides to take testosterone and have breast reduction surgery in order to pass as a man. The femme says, "If I'm not with a butch everyone just assumes I ' m straight. It's like I ' m passing too, against my will" (1993, p. 151).

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THE DEVOLUTION OF WOMEN AS A CATEGORY IN DEVELOPMENT THEORIZING: IS THIS AN ESSENTIAL MOVE? I~da Chapoval

INTRODUCTION The unfolding of feminist theory of development is profoundly influenced by trends in Western feminist theorizing. The various models of feminist development theory, i.e. Women in Development (WID), Women and Development (WAD), Gender and Development (GAD), among others, are adaptations of, or modeled upon Western feminist theory frameworks such as liberal feminism, radical feminism and others. Without implying any inherent evolutionary model, we can easily identify parallels between the major phases of feminist theories of development and the unfolding of Western feminist theorizing. For instance, when examining the initial feminist model of development, the WID, corresponding elements to the early liberal feminist framework are found. Like liberal feminism, the WID model views the role of the state as an essential vehicle for the eradication of women's oppression. In terms of their conceptual frameworks, feminist development theories share various similarities with Western feminist theorizing. For example, when examining the concept of 'women', we clearly notice that initial models of

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 139-150. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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development as well as early feminist theories upheld the concept as a basic, fundamental category or unit of analysis. With the rise of the concept of 'gender,' the concept of 'women' became marginal within feminist theory's conceptual framework. Correspondingly, the category 'Third World women' became also secondary within the vocabulary of later feminist development theorizing, e.g. the GAD model. The many parallels shared by Western feminist theorizing and feminist theories of development are not accidental. Feminist theories of development like feminist theorizing are products of the West. Theorists working within both frameworks are usually educated in the West, their models are, to a large extent, originated in academic circles in the West, and their academic work is overwhelmingly published, at least in their initial stages, in the West. The influence of feminist theorizing on theories of development is not necessarily problematic. However, it might be claimed that because of its Western influence and origin, feminist theories of development may be either inadequate or inapplicable as models for development. A comprehensive examination of such claims is far from the scope of analysis of this paper. One issue to be addressed here, however, is related to the unquestionable acceptance of Western feminist conceptual frameworks as blueprints for feminist development theory and research. In this article, I will examine and criticize this unquestionable adoption of Western feminist conceptual schemes for feminist development theorizing. My critique focuses mainly on the marginalizing of the category of 'Third World women' within the vocabulary of development theories. I would claim that the abandonment of such category, largely influenced by Western feminist theorizing, is a mistaken move which should be theoretically reconsidered within feminist development theory and research. Finally, I would argue for the devolution of Third World women as a category of analysis in development theorizing and claim that this devolution constitutes an essential move towards a more comprehensive feminist model of development.

C O N C E P T S OF ' W O M E N ' AND 'THIRD W O R L D W O M E N ' WITHIN E A R L Y FEMINIST T H E O R Y AND DEVELOPMENT MODELS Not unlike early Western feminist theory, early feminist theories of development upheld 'women' as a uniform or homogeneous conceptual category sharing universal characteristics and having identical needs and interests. The concept of 'women' within early feminist theory was central because it implied an

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essential characteristic shared by all women, i.e. oppression. The oppression experienced by women was said to be generated by sexism, a system of domination affecting women as an uniform category. Similarly, within early feminist theories of development, the implicit uniformity of the concept of 'Third World women' was attributed to the essential characteristic of oppression, however in this case the oppression experienced by Third World women was grounded on both sexism and poverty. 1 How could women be liberated from such oppression? In answering this question, the WID theoretical framework shares some basic assumptions with the early model of liberal feminism. Both frameworks view the state as an essential vehicle for the eradication of women's oppression. States can exert fundamental changes for the betterment of women' s position in society, through the provision of educational opportunities, political participation, employment opportunities and legal rights (Boyd, 1994). Liberal feminism and the WID model advocate the use of pressure on the state to obtain more social welfare, or by demanding equal opportunity in the labor market, particularly in the higher ranks of this market, and especially by increasing women's participation in political and other decision-making bodies. In answering the question of how women can be liberated from oppression, the next feminist model of development, the WAD, shares many of its assumptions with radical feminism. Like radical feminism, the WAD model claims that women's development could not occur through reform from within established power structures. Both theoretical models claim that in patriarchal societies, women confront oppression in the workplace, in the family and in most spheres of society at large. While there are specific cultural differences in women's experiences, traditional gender-based attitudes which are deeply ingrained in the consciousness of both men and women, have limited women's access to and control over all spheres of life. The basic assertion shared by both radical feminism and the WAD development model is that women could only improve their position in society outside patriarchal power structures. Both frameworks were built on and acclaimed women's culture, emphasized women-only projects, and warned against close cooperation with male-dominated institutions, including the state. At a practical level, both models were influential in the policy and creation of many feminist organizations in the West and in the developing countries, non-government organizations with a feminist orientation (Parpart, 1989; Rathgeber, 1990). What is important to recognize about these early development theoretical models, the WID and WAD, and their corresponding theoretical frameworks within Western feminism, i.e. liberal and radical feminism, is that, despite the fact that these are completely distinct theoretical frameworks, they maintain

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the categories of 'Third World women' and 'women' respectiVely as basic categories of analysis. When the concept of 'women' suffered severe criticism within later Western feminist theory, for its essentialism or biological reductionism, the category of 'Third World women' as a homogeneous group was concurrently criticized as a myth within feminist theories of development (Chowdhry, 1995). The categories of 'women' and 'Third World women' became marginalized categories of analysis and were shunned from feminist conceptual frameworks for their implicit universalism and essentialism.

CONCEPTS OF 'WOMEN' AND 'THIRD WORLD WOMEN' WITHIN LATER FEMINIST THEORY AND D E V E L O P M E N T MODELS Within current Western feminist conceptual frameworks, it is claimed that 'an inclusive, monolithic concept of 'woman' denies multiplicity, complexity, and historical and geographical location of genders'(Lorber, 1994). Feminist theorists came to criticize the concept of 'women' by explaining that the category is nothing more than a metaphysical attempt to bring multiplicity into unity, and as such, it does not exist since 'collective identities are nothing else than dangerous fictions' (Kristeva in Meyers, 1990). These theorists are problematizing the notion of 'women' and 'Third World women' as identities (implicit in most early feminist theorizing, including development theories), since the notion of identity itself is multiple and heterogeneous. In terms of feminist development theorizing, it became widely accepted that 'Third World women' is not and cannot be defined as a homogeneous category. Third world women, it is argued, are differentiated by divisions of generation, personal interests, class, color, culture, rural versus urban residency, and so forth. Consequently, to be effective, feminist development models must take into account the divisions and the wide Variation in these women's experiences. In the face of these critiques, a discourse emphasizing difference and particularity emerged, and with it, the category of 'Third World women' became irrelevant and even marginalized within feminist development theorizing. As the idea of gender relations emerged in Western feminist theory, so did a new feminist development model, the GAD, or the gender and development model. Its conceptual framework and discourse excluded the category of 'Third World women' and centered on the idea of gender relations. GAD's main objective is to investigate the specific ways gender ideology and relations contribute to women's subordination and the sexual division of labor and power (Marchand & Parpart, 1995).

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The (GAD) perspective calls for both short-term and long-term approaches to women's development, and to a gender-sensitive rather than a 'woman-only' approach, as was the case with the predominant proposals of the WlD and WAD models. The GAD approach holds that in order to improve the status of women, it is necessary, to integrate women in large development projects that include men and women equally with respect to access to profitable skills training, credit and other services. The approach is said to challenge the naive perspective of both WID and WAD frameworks. For instance, theorists and researchers working within the WID approach argue that women's participation in the sphere of paid production in developing countries constitutes a necessary condition for the improvement of their social and economic positions (Moghadam, 1990; Anker et al., 1982; Anker, 1985; Bodrova & Anker, 1985; Sathar et al., 1988). These theorists claim that if Third World women are helped to earn a relatively substantial income on a steady basis, they will be able to gain a higher status in the family in terms of greater decision-making power and control over their lives. Researchers working within the GAD approach, however, challenge such and other related claims and argue that in most developing countries, women's income does not necessarily become a valuable and powerful resource that wins them decision-making power and equality in the division of labor. In Kenya, for example, where a powerful sex stratification system predominates, husbands who had poorly-paid, marginal occupations saw their wives' earning capacity as questioning their breadwinning ability, and, therefore, their superiority and authority over them (Safilios-Rothschild, 1990). As a consequence, husbands could not afford to let women' s income-generating activities out of their control, and women were not able to acquire prestige or decision-making power as a function of the income they earned. It was only when husbands felt quite secure in their superior male position, because they had successfully fulfilled their breadwinning role, that they were willing to allow women who work and earn a substantial income, more power and equality within the family. Within a GAD framework, Safilios-Rothschild (1990) argues that since powerful sex stratification systems predominate in most developing countries, only development interventions that help increase both men's and women's incomes can be successful in alleviating poverty, improving the status of women, and increasing productivity as well as family welfare. Although the GAD approach represents a breakthrough in the feminist development theory and practices in many ways, it could not escape the WID and WAD idea of Third World women as the impoverished, vulnerable 'other.' For example, Sen and Grown (1987), both GAD theorists, portray Third World women as victims of poverty and backwardness. According to these theorists:

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For womenthis vulnerability [i.e. being poor in the South] is further reinforced by systems of male dominationthat, on the one hand, deny or limit their access to economicresources and political participation, and on the other hand, impose sexual divisions of labor that allocate to them the most onerous, labor-intensive, poorly rewarded tasks inside and outside the home, as well as the longest hours of work (Sen & Grown, 1987: 26). Why is this the case? Why can't feminist theorists of development escape the universal idea of Third World women as victims of oppression? A possible explanation for the question of why feminist development theorist have difficulties in escaping the WID and WAD idea of Third World women as victims is quite simple and it can be summarized in the following form: Third World women are still subjected to poverty and oppression. Consequently, conceptual frameworks or schemes that emphasize gender relations and marginalize the concept of 'Third World women' might not be sufficient in addressing the problems of oppression and poverty faced by these women. To address the oppressive reality of these women, we need an adequate conceptual framework and this, I would argue, involves bringing the concept of 'Third World women' back into the discourse of feminist development. Once the category of 'Third World women' is reestablished within feminist development theorizing, we will be better equipped, as sociologists and feminist theorists, to discuss the problems affecting these women. It is far from my objective here to undermine the concept of 'gender relations' as a valid category of analysis. As a feminist theorist, I fully recognize the importance of the concept. In the following section of this paper, I advocate for a devolution of the concept of 'Third World women' in feminist development frameworks. This, however, should not be interpreted as an attack on the concept of 'gender relations.' Mine is not to be understood as an either-or argument, i.e., either the concept of 'Third World women' or that of 'gender relations,' but merely as an attempt to reestablish the importance of the concept of 'Third World women' within feminist theories of development.

AN A R G U M E N T F O R THE D E V O L U T I O N OF THE C O N C E P T OF 'THIRD W O R L D W O M E N ' WITHIN FEMINIST THEORIES OF D E V E L O P M E N T As was stated earlier, the current feminist theory of development holds that the universalistic categorization of Third World women negates the variation in these women's experiences (Sen & Grown, 1987). Theorists working within a GAD framework claim that by assuming an universal category of 'Third World women,' divisions and the wide variation in these women's experience are disregarded, inevitably leading to ineffective development models.

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Here I would argue against that claim and state that the category of 'Third World women' is still a necessary and fundamental concept for feminist theories of development. My argument is grounded on the following claims: I.

'Third World women' is not a category as multiple and varied as it is claimed in recent feminist development theory. These women share some specific characteristics, which undeniably connect them together as a valid category (unit) of analysis. II. Even though 'gender relations' is a necessary concept within feminist development theory, 'Third World women' is also necessary and needs to be reestablished within feminist development theorizing. As sociologists, working with feminist theorizing, it is important to deal with social relations and structures, however, it is also fundamental to return and examine the source(s) of these relations, i.e. it is essential to go back and recognize agency (inherent in the structure of such gender relations). L Is 'Third World Women' a Valid Sociological Category or Unit of Analysis?

To answer this question appropriately, a definition of the concept is necessary. The concept of 'Third World women' has been widely used within feminist theory of development as an implicit or explicit geographic category. 2 Some of the widespread applications of the concept as a geographic category includes a distinction between Western and non-Western, South versus North, and Economic South versus Economic North. The use of the concept as a geographic category necessarily leads to a multiplicity of characteristics for Third World women. Residence in the (economic) South or non-Western societies does not necessarily imply shared commonalties among women. As it is already acknowledged, women residing in these locations are as varied and multiple as women living in the (economic) North or Western societies. These women are differentiated by class, ethnicity, personal and political interests, age, color, and other characteristics. Thus, using the concept of 'Third World women' as a geographic category 'dissolves almost immediately upon construction when confronted with the world, which inevitably contains, not only a myriad of women's experiences, but experiences that are internally multiple and shifting' (Grant, 1988). The category of 'Third World women' proposed here, however, includes not only a number of women living in developing countries, but also numerous living at the margins of developed, industrialized societies. The definition adopted for my argument goes beyond the issue of geographical location. Here, I use

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Mohanty's (1991) definition of the concept of 'Third World women' as constituting a political category which potentially transcends geographic borders. According to Mohanty (1991), even though "these [are] women with divergent histories and social locations, [they are] woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systemic." The use of Mohanty's definition sets the grounds for my argument that 'Third World women' can and should be (re)considered as a valid unit or category of analysis, since they can be defined as a homogeneous group, with a multiplicity of common interests and concerns, despite such divisions of personal interests, of class, color and culture. Some of the similarities shared by 'Third World women' as a political category include the fact that Third World women still constitute the majority of the poor, accounting for more than 70% of the world's 1.3 billion people living in poverty (Neft & Levine, 1997). These women also constitute the bulk of the 'new poor' due to the current combined strategy of cuts in social welfare and the rationalization and flexibilization of labor. Another similarity is the fact that Third World women still find their access to education, employment and political influence limited solely because of their gender? In country after country, 'Third World women' are still the majority of victims of domestic violence and sexual exploitation. I could proceed here by citing an endless list of characteristics shared by Third World women which entitle them to the status of a valid unit or category of analysis; I could write about their commonalties in terms of restricted access to health care services (and the health problems generated by this) to their common exploitation within flexible markets of the new globalizing economy. However, I would like to suspend my own suggestions here and propose that further elaboration be reserved as future project involving other feminist theorists of development. The list on the common elements and shared characteristic of Third World women might need constant revision and updating, since these might continuously change. A shared effort in this direction seems fundamental, however, for the future of feminist development theorizing. II. 'Gender Relations' Versus 'Third World Women ?' The Problem of Non-Recognition

As previously discussed, the shift to the concept of 'gender relations' within feminist theorizing led to the marginalizing of the concept of 'women' and correspondingly of 'Third World women' within feminist development theory. In this last section, I would argue that the concept of 'gender relations' should be used in conjunction with the concept of 'Third World women'- within feminist theories of development. The

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recognition of Third World women as agents, acting within such gender relations is crucial for the unfolding of a more exhaustive feminist model of development. Marx proposed that human actors rather than overarching social forces make history and thereby constitute society (Holton, 1996). Gender relations, like any type of social relations, exist only insofar as there are human actors. Whatever the nature of the social relation, it always involves human actors or agents, that is, social relations are progressively created and recreated through human action or agency. When examining gender relations, it is then crucial to include agency, if we want to avoid the problem of reification. A basic definition of reification is the treatment of any human phenomena as if it were a real or concrete thing, that is, something other than a human product. When the concept of gender relations is used apart from its components, i.e., social groups forming such relations, it can easily become a form of reification. If we want to avoid the problem of reifying gender relations within feminist development theorizing and research, the concept (of gender relations) must be examined in terms of agency, i.e. it must refer to and include the concept of 'Third World women.' The examination of agency is fundamental for the future feminist development theory and research because acknowledging agency in gender relations seems to be the only manner to address the problems affecting Third World women. The recognition of 'Third World women' as agents in gender relations constitutes only a partial recognition of agency, in that Third World women (agents) exist only in gender relations with other agents. However, despite the fact that the recognition is merely partial, it is fundamentally important because it would set the grounds for a more comprehensive examination of the other agents involved in such gender relations. Only when Third World women are fully recognized, conceptually and practically, as agents or actors within feminist development theory and research, the examination of the complete set of gender relations could be properly undertaken. Why is the recognition of Third World women as agents in gender relations so important? Giddens (in Cohen, 1996) argues that enduring practices are reproduced only if actors take their behavior for granted. By marginalizing or taking for granted the category of 'Third World women,' feminist theorists of development are directly or indirectly contributing to the reproduction of social practices negatively affecting the lives of Third World women. The non-recognition of Third World women as a valid category of analysis might be an important contributing factor to a lack of awareness for Third World women and consequently the reproduction of enduring actions, behaviors and problems affecting them. If we look back in history, we see countless examples of such forms of nonrecognition and accompanied lack of awareness among women. For instance,

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not long ago, women were not recognized as citizens, and as such they were denied fundamental political and civic rights, such as the right to vote or the right to own property. Many women believed then that they were not capable of becoming citizens themselves. Early feminist theorists and activists worked both at a theoretical and at a practical level to reverse this non-recognition and to make women aware that they themselves could be citizens. Today, the majority of women worldwide have no doubt about their capacity as citizens. A problem arises, however, when women are not recognized as women (or Third World women are not recognized as Third World women). This current form of non-recognition creates enormous problems. Gordon (1991) argues that the uncritical valorization of differences inherent in recent feminist theories (and consequently recent feminist theories of development) "threatens to forestall efforts to theorize those pernicious social processes that differentiate women." The stress on differences posited in recent feminist theories, Fraser (1990: 6) argues, "is provoking worries about whether women share any common conditions or common interests at all and, if not, about whether common action is possible." On this, Fraser (1990: 6) writes: "the deepest fear [about the recent feminist discourse] is that we are backing ourselves so far into an anti-essentialist corner that feminism itself will become impossible." Feminist theorists of development must work together to find meaning in the category of 'Third World women.' As feminists, we cannot do without such a category. We need to go back to agency, we need to return to and fully recognize a basic category of analysis so that we may address the basic problems of development affecting (Third World) women worldwide.

CONCLUSION The unquestionable adoption of Western feminist conceptual frameworks for feminist development theorizing seems unwise, especially in regard to the marginalizing of the category of 'Third World women' from the vocabulary of development theories. The abandonment of the category of 'Third World women' from the vocabulary of feminist development theories, largely influenced by Western feminist theorizing, is a mistaken move which should be theoretically reconsidered. The concept of 'Third World women' should be incorporated back into the discourse of feminist development theory. As seen in the discussion above, a number of feminist theorists are currently claiming that feminism itself could not be sustained or substantiated if the concept of 'women' is relinquished from its own discourse. A similar rationale applies to the concept of 'Third World women' within feminist development theorizing.

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I hope m y argument was sufficiently convincing in suggesting that the devolution of 'Third W o r l d women' as a sociological category in development theorizing constitutes an essential move towards a more comprehensive feminist model of development. As discussed above, the category can be grounded on a continuous list of similarities. Further discussion of these similarities, however, should be reserved for a joint effort among those theorists working with feminist development theorizing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their insightful comments and helpful suggestions, I thank the editors of this volume, Vasilikie P. Demos and Marcia Texler Segal. I gratefully acknowledge the support received from Professor Peta Tancred, McGill University, to participate in the 1998 W I S I S A conference in which this article was originated.

NOTES 1. The idea here is that both grounds for oppression, i.e. sexism and poverty, are intertwined and influencing one another. Third World women's oppression is said to be grounded on either or both grounds. 2. The concept of 'Third World' referred to the non-aligned nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These nations constituted a 'third' group of nations since they were neither allied with the U.S. nor with the former Soviet Union, the first and second world. The category might be seen as obsolete, since first and second world are no longer existing categories, especially after the adoption of a free market economy by the second world. However, the concept of 'Third World women' used in this article refers to a purely political category with no reference to nation-states. 3. My intention here is not to reduce 'Third World women' to a passive category of 'potential beneficiaries' of development. This is an outdated approach based primarily on Western stereotypes which represent Third World women mainly as mothers and wives and consequently focusing on issues such as population control, child health, nutrition, and other family related aspects. My aim is to acknowledge Third World women as active contributors in the developmental process. However, to do so, one has to recognize the oppressive forces acting against their full development as social, economic and political actors.

REFERENCES Anker, R. (1985). Comparative Survey. In: V. Bodrova & R. Anker (Eds), Working Women in Socialist Countries: The Fertility Connection. Geneva: ILO. Anker, R., Buvinic, M., & Youssef, N. (1982). Women's Roles and Population Trends in the Third World. Geneva: ILO. Bodrova, V., & Anker, R. (1985). Working Women in Socialist Countries: The Fertility Connection. Geneva: ILO.

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Boyd, R. E. (1994). Empowerment of Women in Contemporary Uganda: Real or Symbolic? In: H. Dagenais & D. Pich6 (Eds), Women, Feminism and Development. Montrral: The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and McGill-Qneen's University Press. Chowdhry, G. (1995). Engendering Development? Women in Development (W1D) in International Development Regimes. In: M. H. Marchand & J. L. Parpart (Eds), Feminism, Postmodernism, Development. New York: Routledge. Cohen, I. J. (1986). Theories of Action and Praxis. In: B. S. Turner (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dagenais, H., & Pichr, D. (1994). Concept and Practices of Development: Feminist Contributions and Future Perspectives. In: H. Dagenais & D. Pich6 (Eds), Women, Feminism and Development. Montreal: The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women and McGill-Queen's University Press. Fraser, N., & Bartky, S. (1990). Revaluing French Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Press. Grant, L. (1988). The Gender Climate in Medical School: Perspectives of Women and Men Students. Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, 43, 109-110. Gordon, L. (1991). On Difference. Genders, Autumn. Holton, R. J. (1986). Classical Social Theory. In: B. S. Turner (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lorber, J. (1994). Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press. Marchand, M., & Parpart, J. L. (1995). Feminism/Postmodernism/Developmenr New York: Routledge. Meyers, D. T. (1990). The Subversion of Women's Agency in Psychoanalytic Feminism: Chodorow, Flax, Kristeva. In: N. Fraser & S. Bartky (Eds), Revaluing French Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Press. Moghadam, V. M. (1990). Gender, Development, and Policy: Toward Equity and Empowerment. Helsinki: World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (WIDER). Mohanty, C. et al. (1991). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Neft, N., & Levine, A. D. (1997). Where Women Stand: An International Report on the Status of Women in 140 Countries 1997-1998. New York: Random House. Parpart, J. L. (1989). Women and Development in Africa. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Rathgeber, E. M. (1990). WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice~ Journal of Developing Areas, 24(4), 489-502. Safilios-Rothschild, C. (1990). Socioeconomic Determinants of the Outcomes of Women's IncomeGeneration in Developing Countries. In: S. Stichter & J. L. Parpart (Eds), Women, Employment and the Family in the International Division of Labour. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sathar, Z. et al. (1988). Women's Status and Fertility Changes in Pakistan. Population and Development Review, 14, 3 September. Sen, G., & Grown, C. (1987). Development Crisis and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press.

RETHINKING D E V E L O P M E N T FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE 1 Ann Denis

INTRODUCTION Within the theme of ' F e m i n i s m Challenges the Heritage of Sociology', two broad questions inform this paper on 'rethinking development': (1) how does feminism question traditional approaches to development; (2) what would a feminist approach to development look like. It was with some trepidation that I, as a 'Northern' scholar, chose to reflect on questions of development: can I, as an outsider to the process, legitimately do so? Reflecting on the question of epistemic privilege, I have come to subscribe to Bat-Ami Bar O n ' s conclusions that the problems of grounding epistemic privilege in the practices of socially marginalized subjects suggest to me that even if it were possible to identify one socially marginalized group as special, it would be hard tomake an attribution of epistemic privilege to this group that does not idealize its practices (1988: 94). I also find Margaret A n d e r s e n ' s insights pertinent. In discussing her own research as a white scholar studying an Afro-American community, she extends Patricia Hill Collins' (1990) discussion o f Black feminist scholars as 'outsiders within' to argue that majority group scholars can develop and utilize tensions in their own cultural identities to enable them to see different aspects of minority group experiences and to examine critically majority experiences and beliefs (1993: 42).

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Let me begin by situating myself socially and intellectually. In terms of my gender, ethnicity, language or religion, and, less frequently, in terms of race or social class, I have, throughout my life, been concurrently (and often because of the same aspect of my identity) part of both privileged/dominant and marginalized groups. Some of my experiences of marginality and difference resulted from circumstance (growing up in a single parent family in the 1950s and 1960s; being a Protestant anglophone in predominantly Catholic francophone Qutbec during the same period), some from choice (studying and taking sabbaticals abroad; as a woman in the late 1960s, completing doctoral studies and becoming a university professor; working as a sociologist in a university department in which the predominant language and culture - French - is not my own, and arguing strongly for the legitimate place of academic programs in this language within what is becoming an increasingly anglophone university). My socialization in a feminist and sociologically conscious family contributed to my awareness of these ambiguities, not to say contradictions, within my personal life. In addition, as a Canadian sociologist, I have been conscious of (and resisted) the intellectual colonialism we have experienced, and continue to experience relative to the 'mother countries' of Britain and France, and the intellectual imperialism of the United States. Both are particularly evident and inappropriate in one of my areas of specialization, ethnic relations. My areas of specialization and preferred analytic frameworks have also inclined me towards sensitivity about marginality and subordination. My thinking on the subject of development from a feminist perspective has been influenced both by written material, much of which is referenced in this text, and by exchanges over the years, most notably with fellow members of the Women in Society Research Group of the International Sociological Association (WISISA), at meetings of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), with colleagues at the University of Ottawa and at the three campuses of the University of the West Indies, and with students in the courses I have given on gender and comparative social structures, on gender and development, and on gender and ethnicity, as well as exchanges with students working on theses related to women/gender and development.

1. QUESTIONING TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO DEVELOPMENT BY FEMINISM A. The Consequences of the Invisibility of Women Ester Bosernp's ground-breaking study, Women's Role in Economic Development (1970), is widely recognized as the first major contribution of

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feminism to rethinking development. Boserup demonstrated three things: the economic contributions that women made, particularly in horticultural societies; that development planning did not consider including women among the target populations for training for 'modern' initiatives; that one consequence of some of these initiatives was to eliminate economic contributions which women had previously made, with development practices therefore often leading to an overall deterioration in women's access to resources. Despite criticisms of Bosemp's work as atheoretical and overly simplistic (Beneria & Sen, 1981), her work, combined with the predominant current of feminism of the period, liberal feminism, and with the dominant approach in development, modernization theory, contributed to the introduction of the Women in Development (WID) approach (Rathgeber, 1990) in development. The objective of liberal feminism vis ~ vis development was to ensure that women as well as men would participate in and benefit from investment in education, technology and industrialization in developing societies. These goals paralleled those of liberal feminists in North America, increasing women's access to (post-secondary) education and their opportunities for participation in paid employment, goals that reflected the preoccupations of the predominantly 'white' middle class women's movement of the period. In order to ascertain the relative benefits to women and men of development policies, data disaggregated on the basis of gender was essential, but had rarely been collected. Underlining its importance and, to the extent possible, carrying out gender-specific analyses, was another contribution of feminism to the study (and practice) of development, illustrated, for example, in the work of Tinker and Bramsen (1972), Barbara Rogers (1980) and others. This work confirmed Boserup's thesis that women did not benefit as much as men did from development initiatives, and that, in some cases their situation actually worsened. It also underlined the gaps in gender specific data and the importance of collecting it. Within development, WID analysis and development planning that incorporated a 'women's' component became formally de rigueur for many Northern funders of development. Documentation of what tasks were done by women, by men and by children (of each gender) was a major feature of WID analyses. Projects were often required to have a dimension which specifically addressed women's economic participation, frequently by handicraft production using their traditional skills or by technological innovations giving them easier access to fuel and water. The other main thrust of 'women's' components of development projects was greater access to resources related to their reproductive responsibilities, such as information about nutrition and health practices. Such analysis and planning initiatives, however, in no way questioned the existing social structure, including the gendered division of labor. Like modernization

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theory, which itself was by then subject to a more general critique, WID was a rather conservative approach. B. Recognizing Women's Existing Economic Contribution Although WID initiatives were intended to incorporate women into the development process, they ignored the fact that women were often already economically active as well as being responsible for most of the reproductive work within their societies. Existing time budget studies (for example, MignotLefebvre, 1978), not to mention the new WID documentation of women's work should have made this obvious, along with the corollary that without fundamental changes in the gendered division of labor, women often lacked the time and energy needed to engage in the (additional) income generating activities which were 'de rigueur' in WID approaches? C. GAD - The Revolutionary Potential of this Holistic Approach Gender and Development (GAD), which developed during the 1980s (Rathgeber, 1990) draws its intellectual roots from socialist feminism. Drawing their inspiration from a combination of radical feminism and marxist feminism, the various currents within socialist feminism (Juteau & Laurin, 1988) all incorporate the principle of two more or less autonomous sources of oppression for women, patriarchy and social class. While all agree that the nature of women's oppression varies by social class, some theorists within this tradition (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983; Stasiulis, 1999) adopt an intersectional approach in which the social reality of women and men, and the dynamics of their social, cultural, economic, and political contexts [are] multiply, simultaneously, and interaetively determined by various significant axes of social organization (Stasiulis, 1999:347 - emphasis in original).

Socialist feminists agree that both production and reproduction must be analyzed, underlining the inter-relations between the two, and they reject the private-public dichotomy, arguing that fundamental changes in both social class relations and gender relations are essential for the elimination of women's oppression. Thus, this approach, which raises fundamental questions about the existing power relations within (and between) societies (Mies, 1986, for example) is, potentially, a revolutionary one. Building on this approach, GAD shifts the focus of analysis from women to gender relations: in this holistic approach, since women do not exist in isolation, it is necessary to examine - and modify - the relations of oppression which they experience. Rather than concentrating on the meeting of women's

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basic needs, the emphasis is on the women identifying and strategizing about their strategic interests (Moffat et al., 1991; Moser, 1989). The agenda of change is one stressing empowerment of the oppressed, notably women. Thus women are conceptualized as being agents of change, not merely objects or recipients of change. Consistent with these orientations, 'development' is not limited to the economic: political organization, social justice and equity are also key concerns (Sen & Grown, 1987, Antrobus, 1988). Although these principles now underlie the gender analysis which is supposed to be an integral part of development projects financed by CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) (1995, 1997) and by some of the other national donor agencies, the extent to which this is implemented and that the results of this analysis inform the projects remains a topic for empirical investigation. To date the realization of the revolutionary potential of the approach, either within societies or in the development of more equitable relations between donor and recipient societies - or more generally between those of the economic North and South - does not seem to have been strikingly evident (Rathgeber, 1995). As Connelly et al. (2000) note, a variety of meanings are in fact associated with GAD, depending on the user and the political agenda.

D. Challenges to 'Imperial Feminism,' Post-Colonial Critiques Since the 1980s there have been critiques by Black feminists and feminists of color of the ethnocentrism of 'white' feminism, often combined with critiques of its predominantly middle class orientation. Much of the criticism centers on the assumption of the homogeneity of women's interests and experience, which are equated with those of white North American and European middle class women (Amos & Parmar, 1984; hooks, 1982; Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983). Where 'third world women' are distinguished as a separate category~ typically they are homogenized in it, rather than their diversity being acknowledged (Mohanty, 1988). A second crucial element is the uncritical use of Eurocentric models and definitions, combined with ignorance about the analytic tools found in other (non-European) traditions. This results, among other things, in the universalizing of a particular explanatory paradigm for an understanding of the 'Other', in contrast to the recognition, when Western societies are examined, that a variety of explanatory paradigms may provide useful insights (Lazreg, 1988; Amos & Parmar, 1984; Mohanty, 1988). The uncritical use of external frames of reference, particularly when their appropriateness is questionable, hardly leads to a liberating analysis (Lazreg, 1988). Connected with these points is the criticism of the priority accorded to the writings of 'Westerners' (including those trained in Western traditions). Furthermore, Westerner scholars (including

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some feminists) have been criticized for their appropriation of knowledge about non-Western societies for their own professional advancement, with little regard for either sharing the fruits of their research with the non-Western community studied or for acknowledging insights and guidance they have received from members of these communities. These critiques should resonate for Western feminists: we have, over the years, made parallel ones of the work of male Western scholars in relation to women.

2. TOWARDS A FEMINIST APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT A. What is 'Development'? A feminist conceptualization of 'development' is not based exclusively on economic growth. Certainly it is important for the members of all societies to be able to meet, and to some extent exceed the meeting of, their basic needs. Equally, however, a feminist conceptualization of development argues that this be done in a manner that is sustainable nationally and internationally and which gives priority to gender equity. DAWN 3 defined development as "socially responsible management and use of resources, the elimination of gender subordination and social inequality and the organizational restructuring that can bring these about" (Sen & Grown, 1987, p. 2). The indigenous-feminist theorizing informing this definition stresses the need for economic and social change, empowerment of women, and progressive changes in public-private relations to benefit women (Barriteau; 2000:167 - emphasis in the original).

Feminists have criticized policies emphasizing production for export at the expense of production for domestic consumption. Agricultural production which is primarily for export has typically resulted in improvements in technology and financial returns in the sectors of agriculture in which men predominate either as owners or workers, while in those in which women predominate, conditions have often deteriorated. Furthermore financing the resulting increase in dependence on imported food falls particularly heavily on women: typically they are responsible for feeding the family. In the case of manufacturing for export, especially in export processing zones, it is often women who are hired to work in unhealthy and unsafe conditions for very low wages. True this provides cash, but at what human cost. A feminist concept of development would factor in such costs in evaluating the costs and benefits of particular development strategies. In fact approaches to development which exclusively stress the economic, often through emphasis on the production of goods for export, have frequently resulted in less adequate meeting of the population's basic needs.

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Unbridled consumerism, the overconsumption "which underpins the lifestyles of the North and the elite of the South [and] is a central element of the Western development model" (Miles, 1996: 143, quoting World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet, 1992: 34) is condemned by feminist activists from the South, as a r e poverty, unequal trade relations, structural adjustment programs, coercive population-control strategies, militarism and nuclear testing, and the dumping of hazardous wastes (Miles, 1996: 143).

Responding to the strategic interests of women and men of all ages is also an integral part of a feminist conception of development. Thus development from a feminist perspective involves empowerment, not merely donations of (often externally defined) needed goods and services. The process of empowerment should, ideally, begin at the stage of identifying the needs and considering various ways of dealing with them. Development, then, involves the economic, political, social and environmental. Its goal is an equitable and sustainable allocation of resources in order to meet the basic needs and strategic interests of all, rather than economic growth primarily for the sake of individual profit. B. Directed by Whom? Respect for Voices From the South and From the North A legitimate criticism of many development policies has been that priorities and acceptable means of implementation are determined by the donors. Furthermore, industry in the donor country has often reaped substantial economic benefits from these interventions. Feminists, in particular those from the economic South, have been among the critics of these externally driven processes. On the one hand is the question of identifying and acknowledging who the beneficiaries of the interventions actually are - those from the North (development consultants and companies manufacturing the products integral to the implementation of the development project) as well as those from the South. On the other hand are questions which have been considered by some to be related to epistemic privilege, but which I will qualify rather as respect for voices from the South and from the North. Specifically this relates to the societal analysis on which interventions are based. Until the 1980s most analyses of the economic South, feminist or not, were the work of those from the economic North, or those whose training had led them to internalize its canon. Such analyses often continue to be considered more credible than ones carried out by those whose training and/or experience in the South have led them to question this canon. As we have already noted, Northern/Western feminism has

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been criticized for imposing on the South assumptions based on analyses of their own societies. Articulated more proactively, some from the South have argued in favor of developing their own 'indigenous' societal analyses (Barriteau, 1995; Wiltshire, 1994; Miles, 1996, Chapter 6). Consideration of the continuing effects of colonialism and/or of contemporary economic imperialism often figures in such analyses. Particularly during struggles for national independence or for less authoritarian forms of governance, other sites of oppression may be at least as crucial as oppression based on gender. Such preoccupations have been criticized by some feminists of the North as inappropriate, diverting energy from the 'true' feminist struggles. Rather they should serve as a reminder that the debates within Northern feminism about the salience of different sites of women's oppression should necessarily include consideration of such macro variables as colonial and post-colonial oppression, institutionalized racism and the sociopolitical context. The fact that internal ethnic/race relations differ from those experienced by compatriots (or those with common ancestry) whose families have settled in the predominantly 'white' North is another significant difference that needs to be born in mind by feminists, whatever their race. In the Caribbean, for instance, Blacks predominate in politics, in contrast with the United States or Great Britain. The perception that Northern feminism necessarily implies that relations between women and men are oppositional and that the family is a major site of women's oppression has been challenged both by Black feminists in the North (Collins, 1990) and by feminists from the South (Barriteau, 1995; Wiltshire, 1994). The meaning associated with particular practices or concepts may be different from that attributed to them by feminists from the North, and may vary across societies and time: the Islamic veil is a case in point (Lazreg, 1988; Hoodfar, 1997). Articles in the special issue of Feminist Review on 'Rethinking Caribbean Difference' (1998) elaborate on a number of concepts, including class and race, whose connotations are not adequately captured in concepts based on the experiences of the North. Elsewhere Rhoda Reddock has argued that feminist conceputalisations of [ethnic] difference, especially those coming from the Anglophone Caribbean, need to be quite different from masculine ones. They need to highlight the interconnectedness among women as well as the separateness and so provide a basis for collective social action (1998: 53)

an insight, as she notes, of relevance to the North as well as to elsewhere in the South. In summary, and returning to Andersen's thesis (1993), which was discussed at the beginning of this text, the argument proposed is that, within a climate

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of respectful listening and exchange those from the North can usefully collaborate with those from the South in developing and implementing development activities and strategies which are informed by feminism. C. How to Achieve a Feminist Approach to Development?

Achieving a feminist approach to development requires a multi-pronged approach, and a great deal of patience and mutual respect. Participatory strategies which can promote empowerment - a key element of a feminist approach entail labor intensive discussion and exchange of information at the grassroots level in order to establish, at this level, priorities and means of implementation, a bottom-up approach in contrast with the more usual welfare based top-down one. -

In the end the aim should be to set in motion a process which is doubly transformatory: women being transformed into conscious social agents, and practical needs into strategic interests (Young, 1997: 371). Providing information about how others live has often "sparked off discussions of alternatives which are feasible and culturally appropriate" (Young, 1997: 371). Feminist scholars and NGOs can produce and help disseminate such information. For grass-roots, transformative strategies to be funded, changes are needed in what constitute 'reasonable' time-lines and the evaluation criteria of funders. This in turn requires not only that the underlying alternative visions of development be articulated, but also that they become accepted as part of the canon of development policy. This work is being undertaken by women's NGOs, by feminist scholars and research institutes, and by feminist policy makers, in all cases with important leadership by Southern feminists (Parpart et al., 2000). Some mainstreaming, despite the attendant dangers of cooptation (Baden & Goetz, 1998), is probably a necessary component of this process. Adopting a concept of development which has been broadened from 'economic' to 'human' is a crucial conceptual shift from the dominant neoliberal model, as are the necessary engendering of development and the rejection of a private-public dichotomy. The acknowledged need for economic and social change must underlie development activities, and include changes in privatepublic relations to the benefit of women. Feminists participating in this project must avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and the homogenization of women. At the same time, no doubt in part thanks to the strength of dichotomies in Eurocentric epistemology, Goetz's observation (1991) that incorporating the genuine inclusion of diversity among women,

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rather than a weak fragmentation, continues to resonate as a further challenge that we as feminists face.

3. CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE CHALLENGE FOR D E V E L O P M E N T - EQUITY COMBINED WITH E M P O W E R M E N T AND RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY Our feminist project will not be easy, since it involves fundamental changes in power relations within and among societies. Emancipatory development will only occur when development theorists and practitioners adopt a more inclusive approach to knowledge/expertise, a readiness and ability to 'hear' different voices/experiences and the humility to recognize that established discourses and practices of development have often done more harm than good (Parpart, 1995: 240).

Conceptualizing equity in combination with respect for diversity both within and between societies is one of the challenges of this project, as is developing mechanisms to implement this revolutionary concept. As feminists we have articulated significant critiques of development, some of them derived from our need to strive for the ideal of collaboration among equals, equity, respect for diversity. At the same time we continue to grapple with contradictions within our own practices. Feminism is not, after all, a unitary approach, and this is one of its strengths.

NOTES 1. I would like to acknowledge with thanks the financial support of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ottawa, and the research assistance of Fida Abou-Nassif. I am also particularly grateful for the opportunities for exchanges that the Women in Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association (WISISA) and contacts with colleagues at the University of the West Indies have offered. 2. This is a point that Peggy Antrobus made forcefully to me in conversations during the early 1990s. It is also implicitly, if not explicitly, evident in many empirical analyses of women's work (paid and unpaid) in the development literature since the late 1970s. 3. ' D A W N ' stands for 'Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era' a collective of activists and researchers from the economic South.

REFERENCES Andersen, M. L. (1993). Studying Across Difference. Race, Class, and Gender in Qualitative Research. In: J. H. Stanfield II & R. M. Dennis (Eds), Race and Ethnicity in Research Methods (pp. 39-52). Newbury Park: Sage. Antrobus, P. (1988). Women in development programmes: the Caribbean experience (1975-1985). In: P. Mohammed & C. Shepherd (Eds), Gender in Caribbean Development (pp. 32-52). University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica: Women and Development Studies Project.

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Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (1983). Contextualising Feminism - Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions. Feminist Review, 15, 62-75. Amos, V., & Parmar, P. (1984). Challenging Imperial Feminism. Feminist Review, 17, 3-19. Baden, S., & Goetz, A. M. (1998). Who needs [sex] when you can have [gender]? In: C. Jackson & R. Pearson (Eds), Feminist Visions of Development (pp. 19-38). London & New York: Routledge. Barriteau, V. E. (1995). Postmodernist Feminist Theorizing and Development Policy and Practice in the Anglophone Caribbean: the Barbados Case. In: M. Marchand & J. Parpart (Eds), Feminism/Postmodernism/Development (pp. 142-158). London & New York: Routledge. Barriteau, V. E. (2000). Feminist Theory and Development: Implications. In: J. L. Parpart, M. P. Connelly & V. E. Barritean (Eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development (pp. 161-177). Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Beneria, L., & Sen, G. (]981). Accumulation, Reproduction and Women's Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited. Signs, 7(2), 279-298. Boserup, E. (1970). Women's Role in Economic Development. New York: St. Martin's Press. Canadian International Development Agency (1995). CIDA's Policy on Women in Development and Gender Equi~. Hull, Qutbec: CIDA. Canadian International Development Agency (1997)~ The Why and How of Gender Sensitive Indicators. A Project Level Handbook. Hull, Qutbec: CIDA. Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought. New York: Harper Collins Academic. Connelly, M. P., Li, T. M., MacDonald, M., & Parpart, J. L. (2000). Feminism and Development: ~t~eoretical Perspectives. In: J. L. Parpart, M. P. Connelly & V. E. Barriteau (Eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development (pp. 51-159). Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Feminist Review (1998). Special issue on 'Rethinking Caribbean Difference', 59. Goetz, A. M. (1991). Feminism and the claim to know: contradictions in feminist approaches to women in development. In: R. Grant & K. Newland (Eds), Gender and International Relations (pp. 133-157). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hoodfar, H. (1997). Return to the Veil: Personal Strategy and Public Participation. In: N. Visvanathan, L. Duggan, L. Nisonoff & N. Wiegersma (Eds), The Women, Gender & Development Reader (pp. 320-325). London: Zed Books. hooks, b. (t982). Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto. Jutean, D., & Laurin, N. (1988). L'tvolution des formes de l'appropriation des femmes: des religieuses anx 'mOres porteuses'. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 25(2), 183-207. Lazreg, M. (1988). Feminism and Difference: the Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria. Feminist Studies, 1, 8t-107. Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Press. Mignot-Lef~bvre, Y. (1978). Les enjeux de la production domestique non marchande en Afrique. Tiers Monde, XIX(76), 819-830. Miles, A. (1996). Integrative Feminisms. London & New York: Routledge. Moffat, L., Geadah, Y., Smart, R. (1991). Two Halves Make a Whole: Balancing Gender Relations in Development. Ottawa: Canadian Council for International Cooperation, MATCH International Centre, Association qu6b6coise des organismes de coop6ration internationale. Mohanty, C. (1988). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. Feminist Review, 30, 61-88.

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Moser, C. (1989). Gender Planning in the Third World: Meeting Practical and Strategic Needs. World Development, 17(11), 799-825. On, B.-A. B. (1993). Marginality and Epistemic Privilege. In: L. Alcoff & E. Potter (Eds), Feminist Epistemologies (pp. 83-100). New York: Routledge. Parpart, J. (1995). Deconstructing the Development 'Expert': Gender, Development and 'Vulnerable Groups'. In: M. Marchand & J. Parpart (Eds), Feminism/Postmodernism/Development (pp. 221-243). London & New York: Routledge. Parpart, J. L., Connelly, M. P., & Barriteau, V. E. (Eds) (2000). Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Rathgeber, E. (1990). WID, WAD, GAD: Trends in Research and Practice. Journal of Developing Areas, 24(4), 489-502. Rathgeber, E. (1995). Gender and Development in Action. In: M. Marchand & J. Parpart (Eds), Feminism/Postmodernism/Development (pp. 204-220). London & New York: Routledge. Reddock, R. (1998). Challenging Sociology: Feminist Critical Reconceptualisations and Caribbean Contributions. In: L. Christiansen-Ruffman (Ed.), The Global Feminist Enlightenment: Women and Social Knowledge (pp. 45-58). Madrid: International Sociological Association. Rogers, B. (1980). The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies. London: Tavistock. Sen, G., & Grown, C. (1987). Development, Crisis and Alternative Visions: Third World Women's Perspectives. New York: Monthly Review Press. Stasiulis, D. (1999). Feminist Intersectional Theorizing. In: P. Li (Ed.), Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada (2rid ed.). (pp. 347-397). Toronto: Oxford University Press. Tinker, I., & Bramsen, M. B. (Eds) (1972). Women and World Development. Washington D.C.: Overseas Development Council. Wiltshire, R. (1994). Indigenization Issues in Women and Development Studies in the Caribbean: Towards a Holistic Approach. In: H. Dagenais & D. Pich6 (Eds), Women, Feminism and Development/Femmes, Fdminisme et Ddveloppement (pp. 98-110). Montrtal & Kingston: McGill Queens University Press for CRIAW. Young, K. (1997). Planning from a Gender Perspective: Making a World of Difference. In: N. Visvanathan, L. Duggan, L. Nisonoff & N. Wiegersma (Eds), The Women, Gender and Development Reader (pp. 366-374). London: Zed.

SISTERS' KEEPERS" ECONOMIC ORGANIZING AMONG INFORMALLY EMPLOYED WOMEN IN TURKEY Simel Esim

INTRODUCTION This paper focuses on economic organizations of informally employed women in urban Turkey. It is an analysis of the nature of organizations established by urban women micro and small entrepreneurs, with respect to differences in terms of organizing strategies as well as class background, education level, nature of business and approaches to marketing the services and products. The next section of the paper gives a brief background on women's economic organizations in developing countries. The following section is a brief review of the literature on organizing informal economy women around the world, definition of terms such as informal economy, economic organizing around non-financial issues and micro and small entrepreneurs. There is also a discussion of the research methods used during the fieldwork to collect data for this paper, elaborating on the identities of the women whose productive and organizing activities are reviewed. In the third section, the nature of urban informally employed women's non-financial economic associations in Turkey are discussed.

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 163-178. 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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BACKGROUND The women's economic organizations discussed in this paper are non-financial in nature. The financial nature of informally employed women's economic organizations has been extensively explored in the development literature. The informal financial solidarity groups exist under different names around the world, such as roscas (Latin America), tontines (West Africa), oususus (West Africa) and gamayes (Middle East). Microfinance programs initiated by donor agencies or international NGOs tap into the existing mechanisms of these informal financial groups to provide links to formal loan opportunities for those who do not have access to such formal financial services. Women' s involvement in these informal financial schemes is well documented. For instance, in Egypt, gamayes are a traditional group savings arrangement popular among urban poor women and men. In these collective savings schemes each member of the group hands in a specified sum of money at the beginning of every month. In turn, each has the right to collect the aggregate sum of money paid for by all the other members. They are popular among the poor households in urban areas for those times when larger amounts of money than is typically available are needed. Women are known to be the organizers of most gamayes. The microfinance movement has recognized the need for extending their services to women micro and small entrepreneurs early on in the process. A number of programs around the world have either exclusively targeted women or have developed mechanisms to reach women clientele. Over the past decade, significant progress has been achieved in making microfinance services available to the poor and especially women in developing countries. Intermediary financial institutions of various types have found it economically viable to deliver microcredit to the poor and to women by tapping into some of the existing informal financial networks and mechanisms. They have been willing to accept character guarantees in lieu of asset-based collateral and have devised mechanisms such as group guarantees and solidarity groups to ensure loan repayment. The most successful microfinance programs in developing countries such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and BancoSol in Bolivia reach millions of poor women and thus, a significant share of the poor. They have found women to be good credit risks and have been able to expand and develop their institutions while they continue to provide more and better microfinance services to poor women. In fact, recognizing their success, donor agencies like the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank have started to invest in microfinance.

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A number of programs have been implemented to deliver business development services to women microentrepreneurs (i.e. training, marketing, sourcing of raw materials). The delivery mechanisms for these services varied by such providers as the private sector, community-based organizations, marketing companies set up by NGOs, associations, and networks. The discussion about which of these delivery mechanisms is most appropriate for delivering which type of service has been an ongoing debate. However, women micro and small entrepreneurs' organizing around non-financial activities and for accessing some of these business development efforts has received little attention.

LITERATURE REVIEW More women and men around the world are in informal employment arrangements than are those in formal labor market jobs. Formal labor organizing is weak or non-existent in those jobs that absorb the majority of women workers. Jobs in the informal economy, export processing zones, and agriculture are unorganized by their nature. Women generally find jobs not in organized workplaces, but in small factories, sweatshops or home-based units which are the kinds of work-places exempt or hidden from national employment and labor legislations. Women in search of a livelihood become self-employed selling fruits, vegetables, other food products, and crafts. Finally, women in agriculture are employed in the most vulnerable forms of employment and/or contribute as unpaid family labor. Organizing women who are informally employed for collective action poses a challenge for labor organizers due to the scattered nature of their workplaces and subsectors. Mos~ of the world's women who are economically active are in the informal economy, frequently as microentrepreneurs. More than half the economically active women in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are self-employed in the informal economy, as are about a third in northern Africa and Asia. In Latin American countries, 30-70% of women workers are employed in the informal economy and are likely to be microentrepreneurs. Women in the informal economy face such constraints as invisibility, restricted access to factor and product markets, and lack of social security. Since, women's employment in the informal economy provides more employment than the formal sector for them, there is a need to identify and develop interventions that can address these constraints on a large-scale by policy makers, labor activists and development specialists.

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BOX 1. TWO EXAMPLES: SEWA AND PATAMABA The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) was founded in 1972 in Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat in India as a trade union of women employed in low-paying production, commerce and as laborers. Inspired by Ghandian teachings, SEWA drew upon strategies of three different movements: the labor movement, cooperatives, and the women's movement. Its mission is to organize its members so that they may advocate on their own behalf and improve their economic situation. Part of the problem facing low-paid self-employed women workers in the "informal" sector is their lack of recognition from "authorities" who often view them as a nuisance. For instance, due to a colonial British law still in existence, women vendors sitting in public areas to sell their goods were committing an offense. They were frequently harassed by authorities, who confiscated their goods, subjected them to physical violence, and evicted them from the premises. SEWA organized the vendors in advocacy efforts, and in a landmark ruling the Indian Supreme Court declared that it was the city's duty to provide a space for informal economy vendors to sell their goods and services. SEWA also began its own bank in order to give women access to small loans, and its clients are primarily hawkers, vendors, and women working in tobacco production and dairy-farming. The Bank's success, largely due to borrowers' high repayment records, has been held up as a model for women and microenterprise development efforts around the world. The National Network of Homeworkers (Patamaba) was established in 1989 by 29 women homeworkers from eleven provinces in the Philippines. It was founded by the initiative of the women homeworker members of a mass-based activist nongovernmental organization. At that time home based workers were invisible to public policy makers and were not counted in the national census and income accounts. Neither the government nor nongovernmental organizations paid attention to their conditions of work. They had no institutional means to voice their common concerns, influence national policy and programs, press for their rights and redress their grievances. (Lazo, 1996) The organization now has 5,000 members across the country. Patamaba works on creating public awareness on the concerns of homeworkers through workshops, meetings, and dialogues. It works with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and other agencies of the Government of the Philippines (GOP) on enforcing laws regarding homework and welfare benefits of homeworkers such as social security insurance. Improving the material welfare of homeworkers is a major goal of Patamaba. Therefore Patamaba helps organize women home-based workers into cooperatives. It also realizes the importance of product design and standardization, training, and credit. It works at the enterprise development, institutional capacity building and policy advocacy levels.

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Two examples of successful organizing women in the informal are the Informally Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India and the National Network of Homeworkers (Patamaba) in the Philippines as seen in Box 1 above. Both organizations are involved in direct organizing, provision of social protection, awareness raising campaigns and institution building among informally employed women. They have expanded their membership and reach among street vendors and home-based workers across the years using extension services on a geographical basis (neighborhoods, markets, cities), building alliances and social networks, and making use of existing social and economic structures. The experiences of these organizations are being replicated at the national, regional, and international levels. International networks such as Women Informal Economy Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and International Network of Homeworkers (HomeNet) also work on organizing, research and advocacy for women working in the informal economy. WIEGO is an international group organized by United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), SEWA, and Harvard University to promote more accurate and comprehensive statistical measures of women's work in the informal economy. HomeNet helped organize a number of regional and national initiatives for women-home based workers in South-East Asia, South Asia and Europe. It also played a pivotal role in drafting the Home "Work Convention. On June 20, 1996, the ILO adapted the Home Work Convention, which was supplemented with a list of recommendations which establish guidelines for good practice (see Box 2). The Convention, which is intended to set an international standard, has not

BOX 2. ILO CONVENTION HOMEWORK DEFINITION the term "home work" means work carried out by a person, to be referred to as a homeworker, (i) in his or her home or in other premises of his or her own choice, other than the workplace of the employer; (ii) for remuneration; (iii) which results in a product or service as specified by the employer, irrespective of who provides the equipment, materials or other inputs used, unless this person has degree of autonomy and of economic independence necessary to be considered an independent worker under national laws, regulations or court decisions. Source: http://www.gn.apc.org/homenet/conv.html

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been ratified by any govemments so far. However, a number of governments, such as South Africa and England, agreed to work on national laws, policies and practices to conform to the Convention. 1 These and other organizing efforts among women in the informal economy have been documented in recent works such as Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organizing Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First (Rowbotham & Mitter, 1994), Women in Trade Unions: Organizing the Unorganized (1994), and Homeworkers in Global Perspective: Invisible No More (Boris & Prugl, 1996). Regionally speaking, women's organizing efforts in the informal economy have been documented for South Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America more so than other regions of the world. For instance, Elsa Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (1989) compile a number of organizing experiences among household workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Marilyn Carr, Martha Chen and Renana Jhabvala (1996) bring examples of informal economy organizing from a number of South Asian countries in Speaking Out: Women's Economic Empowerment in South Asia (1997). A subregional ILO project initiated in 1988 on Women Workers in the New Putting Out System in Southeast Asia documented the data on employment patterns, conditions of work and organizing efforts among home-based workers in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

DEFINITIONS The subjects of this paper are mainly informally employed men and women who are working from their homes, stalls or small shops. While they exercise some degree ofindependent decision-making over choice of products, markets, pricing, working hours, work intensity and disposal of income from business, they also operate at the margins of the formal labor market and service and product markets characterized by limited access to resources, capital, information and markets. Many in numbers, these women and men have not been able to find employment in the formal labor market because of high unemployment rates, or their limited skills and education. Most of the economic entities are very small (micro) often employing just the owner and a few additional workers - typically family members. These microenterprises, as they are called in the economic development literature, are characterized by ease of entry, low skill and educational requirements, low capitalization and high labor intensity. Since these enterprises are self-regulated, they offer flexible hours, the are the very characteristics that make informal employment in microenterprises attractive for poor, low skilled women.

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Women microentrepreneurs in this research are mostly home-based workers who produce food, crafts or carpets and use exhibitions/fairs or door to door sale techniques to market their products. Others are in subcontracting arrangements receiving work on a piece-by-piece basis from middlemen including garments, toys, oil filters, electronics and engines. There are also observations and interviews with women and men small entrepreneurs, with workshops or continuous/permanent places to sell their services or products. These are economic entities (5-10 employees) with slightly more resources than microentrepreneurs (Magill, Esim et al., 1995; Esim, 1996).The informally employed women's economic organizations discussed in this paper are based in three urban areas. They are informal and non-financial in nature. They are informal because they are not registered with authorities and are loosely structured without written rules or regulations. Only one of the women's economic groups in this study was officially registered as a cooperative. Further, the solidarity among the members of the group and the support mechanisms are mainly non-financial in nature. Non-financial cooperation is concentrated around providing child care and other forms of labor relief among the women, advising on product design, markets and cost-saving resources, and pooling resources by organizing around a cooperative arrangement. There is little exchange of money among the members of the group. They do not implement, for instance, rotating saving funds.

RESEARCH

METHODS z

Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used to collect data. Fieldwork for the study was conducted in Turkey between January and August of 1995. The three qualitative research methods I used were in-depth interviews, institutional interviews (Esim & Cindoglu, 1999) and focus group interviews (Esim, 1997). For the quantitative analysis, I used a structured survey questionnaire of 168 questions with questions on demography, employment, sales, financial and non-financial issues. Survey interviews were conducted with 470 women and 235 men in seven out of a possible seventy-two Turkish provinces. The eight focus group interviews were semi-structured interviews conducted in three provinces with urban micro and small entrepreneurial women selected from the survey sample. Almost half (47.8%) of the women interviewed for this research were microentrepreneurs while less than one-third (31.1%) of the men in the same subsectors and neighborhoods were microentrepreneurs. Women micro and small entrepreneurs were more likely to sell their products and services to women clientele. They were also more likely to employ women workers when compared to men.

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Of the micro and small entrepreneurs 79.1% of the women and 82.5% of the men were married. While only 2.5% of the men were divorced, separated or widowed, the rate for women was 10.8%. Almost all of these women were the sole or main providers of the households they lived in, a finding consistent with other studies of households maintained by women around the world. Such households have a high representation in the informal economy. Overall, men entrepreneurs were likely to have better access to the formal financial system than women entrepreneurs, Only one-third of women micro entrepreneurs and one-half of women small entrepreneurs had checking or savings accounts in the banks. Over half of micro and small entrepreneur men had checking or savings accounts in banks. Only one-third (31%) of women entrepreneurs belonged to formal economic organizations, such as cooperatives for individual trades, while the rate for men was 53%. Other than the Hairdressers Federation, the leadership of all the federations and the membership of most of the federations for individual crafts and trades are heavily populated by men. Women form their own informal economic groups in subsectors where formal representation channels are limited. For both women and men, respondents with no formal education or only with some primary level education were less likely to belong to business related organizations than those with higher levels of education. Both women and men small entrepreneurs were more likely to belong to formal economic organizations than their microentrepreneur counterparts. As Table 1 shows, micro and small enterprise categories clearly overlapped with class lines. Microentrepreneurs came from urban working class and squatter areas with more limited access to markets, capital and formal education compared with small entrepreneurs who lived and conducted their businesses in middle class neighborhoods, obtained better access to capital and attained higher education on the average. More women microentrepreneurs went to public or private training programs for their skills training and had on-the-job training than women small entrepreneurs. However, the training they received was mainly in sewing, machine embroidery and hairdressing thereby reinforcing traditional skills and gender expectations. Also women small entrepreneurs had more formal education than their microentrepreneur counterparts and therefore they also needed less non-formal training. The Majority of women microentrepreneurs started their businesses on their won savings with no outside financing. Only one-third borrowed from family or friends. More than half of the women small entrepreneurs used personal savings to start their businesses. Forty percent borrowed from friends or relatives. Women microentrepreneurs also had less access to mainstream markets than their small entrepreneur counterparts. Therefore they utilized

Economic Organizing Among Informally Employed Women in Turkey Table 1.

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Women Micro and Small Entrepreneurs in Turkey.

Women Microentrepreneurs

Women Small Entrepreneurs

Business Location

urban squatter, working class neighborhoods

urban lower-middle class, middle class neighborhoods

Clientele (Marketing)

immediate neighborhoods and open air markets, exhibitions, fairs or door to door marketing in middle class neighborhoods

own shops/ateliers/stalls or other people's shops in central markets in middle class neighborhoods

Education

2 with elementary school or less schooling, most others with some level of high school

32.8% went to senior high, 18.4% went to university

Training

20.6% went to public/private training programs, 26.0% learned their skills with on the job training

28.6% acquired their skills with on the job training, 13.9% had public/private training

Prior work

60% did not work or were housewives, 26.5% worked in publicor private sector

42% did not work/were housewives, 40% worked in private/public offices

Capital Requirements

9.0% started without capital, 43.5% started with personal savings, 33.6% borrowed from family or friends, 9.0% took bank loans

52.7% used personal savings, 1.6% retirement funds, 2.0% borrowed from banks, 40.8% fiom friends/relatives

creative m a r k e t i n g m e c h a n i s m s such as selling in w o m e n ' s h o m e gatherings, in bank or g o v e r n m e n t offices during lunch breaks and renting tables at exhibitions and fairs. E v e n w h e n they did not h a v e their o w n w o r k s h o p s or shops, w o m e n small entrepreneurs offered their products and services to m i d d l e class or upper m i d d l e class clientele in their o w n p e r m a n e n t stalls, or the shops o f other p e o p l e through n e t w o r k s and connections.

ECONOMIC ORGANIZING AMONG INFORMALLY E M P L O Y E D W O M E N IN U R B A N T U R K E Y This section o f the paper r e v i e w s the i n f o r m a l e c o n o m i c associations f o r m e d by w o m e n m i c r o and small entrepreneurs in three urban areas, Istanbul, A n k a r a and C o r u m , in Turkey. T h e y h a v e b e e n f o r m e d in the absence o f formal organizations, such as training and m a r k e t i n g outlets, and to address legal and

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political impediments. They represent structures and modes of interrelationship that are more flexible and adaptable than formal ones. While women micro and small entrepreneurs' economic groups may not be addressing gender inequalities directly, they deal with immediate economic, political and legal constraints to women's income generating activities. Such environments might serve as consciousness raising and empowering experiences for women in the long-run and provide platforms for such experiences to be discussed. Results of focus group interviews confirmed that these groups provide a solidarity among those struggling with similar problems, juggling work, child care and facing market discrimination. Members of the groups show cooperative rather than competitive market behavior by giving each other new product and marketing ideas. On a final point, the working conditions of women micro and small entrepreneurs can be improved by a range of economic and social benefits negotiated through organizations that give women voice and bargaining power as a group. The two economic groups of women microentrepreneurs to be discussed in this section are: The 3B group in Ankara and the Corum Women's Cooperative. The three women small entrepreneurs' groups are from Kadikoy, Ortakoy and Beyoglu districts of Istanbul. 3B (Information Application Bank) is a marketing cooperation among women micro entrepreneurs in greater Ankara, which was initiated by the Directorate General for the Status and Problems of Women (DGSPW) of the Women's Ministry. Most of the 200 women who are members of this marketing cooperation were initially women who applied to the Directorate in despair saying that they had skills and products, yet limited or no marketing outlets to generate needed income for their families. One bureaucrat in the directorate provides the contacts and makes the connections regularly for the women microentrepreneurs to attend fairs and exhibits and sell their products. An agreement was made by the Directorate for the 3B women with the local Municipality, to provide them with permanent stalls one day a week in the local municipal market. The members of 3B have formed work relations and helped each other with product design ideas. Those in a similar line of work such as food preparation, clothing or handicrafts were talking about forming separate ateliers where they could share the costs thus enabling them to move their operations out of houses. Members continued to come to the Directorate to get advice on business and legal problems. The 3B women microentrepreneurs had quite egalitarian and horizontal communications among members, but their ties with the founding agency and their officers were relatively deferential and hierarchical. They lived in different

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squatter areas around the city and their everyday chores and responsibilities necessary for subsistence took precedence over networking and organizing. Therefore the institutional support of the Directorate was crucial to the existence of their businesses and economic groups. In time the group could split into subsectors and exist separately from the Directorate. Another women microentrepreneurs' economic group was the Corum Women's Cooperative. It was founded by a group of committed activists and community leaders. The founders applied for an official cooperative status and arranged the municipal market space for the cooperative members' to sell their products. The relation between the members of the cooperative and the founders has been respectful and thus, hierarchical. After the victory of the religious Refah Party during the local municipal elections of March 1994, the new municipality asked them to leave the permanent shop space that was allocated to them free of charge by the previous municipality. Deprived of this marketing outlet, the Cooperative has declared bankruptcy. The founders have estabvlished a temporary shop space in a side street that is quite secluded and the members were struggling to find other channels through which to continue the group and sell their products together. Kadikoy, Ortakoy and Beyoglu Market Women formed marketing groups and open market units in Istanbul. They formed horizontal ties among members because they were mostly women who had some experience and familiarity in organizing and came from similar class and educational backgrounds. The 10 to 15 women small entrepreneurs in each of the three Istanbul open markets started off as separate individuals selling their arts and crafts. During the course of working in the same market space, they developed friendships and discussed their common problems such as municipality regulations and having to pay bribes to the municipal inspectors. They also provided support for each other through keeping an eye on each others stalls when one had to step away, or advising one another on product design issues. This kind of cooperative behavior was typical of the women small entrepreneurs in the Ortakoy, Kadikoy and Beyoglu markets even though they were all producing and selling very similar products and could be expected to be competitive. The women market sellers realize that their chances of obtaining permanent stalls in open markets was dependent on having a group voice rather than applying and negotiating as individual sellers. With the victory of the religious Refah Party in municipalities in Ortakoy and Beyoglu in 1994, the municipal authorities unofficially declared women selling in the streets as 'improper and unbecoming,' on the record they commented on the stalls 'cluttering the market space and being not pleasing to the eye.' Two women market sellers' groups had to organize, write petitions

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and struggle against the decision of the municipalities to close their operations. This united effort among the women small entrepreneurs was the first step to giving a name to their cooperative efforts. The Ortakoy group members continued to fight against the municipality decisions in united terms and called themselves the Ortakoy Market Women. The Beyoglu group gave up on fighting the municipality and decided to rent interior spaces together to set up their stalls and sell their products. They paid less table rent by pooling than they would have by renting individual tables. The Kadikoy open market women sellers were more fortunate since the Social Democrat municipality of the time was not antagonistic to their existence. They initiated negotiations with the municipality of Kadikoy to establish a permanent closed market space for the sale of their products. More recent initiatives in Turkey include a gathering of nearly 40 individuals in the city of Istanbul in October 1999 to discuss the nature and status of home-based work in Turkey. The workshop participants included international and national researchers, Turkish government officials, women home-based workers, NGOs, representatives from United Nations agencies regional offices, and ILO representatives. Organized by a coordinating committee of researchers and activist women based in Turkey, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), HomeNet, and the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), the three main objectives of the workshop were to (ICRW, 2000a): • Increase visibility for women home-based workers in Turkey among government agencies, the general public, and research institutions and to initiate a discussion for the creation of a national policy around home-based work; • Introduce the rationale and the terms of the 1996 ILO Convention on Homework to the conference participants and the general public; and discuss strategies to implement the ILO Convention on Homework in Turkey. • Initiate a discussion around how to best provide support for women homebased workers' organizing efforts. One important result of the workshop was the initiation of a Working Group on Women Home-based Workers (WG-WHW), an informal network of interested individuals, who are professionals, researchers and activists. Following the workshop, the working group emerged with the main objective being to increas visibility of women home-based workers in Turkey among public, keys stakeholders including trade unions, related state organizations and ministries, and researchers. The strategies of the working group in achieving these objectives include (http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerST/homebasedworkers):

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• Launching research in areas where there are gaps in knowledge • Identifying and developing relevant statistics ° Engaging with interested members of the media to write or broadcast news on home-based work • Undertake policy advocacy activities around home-based work • Establish dialogue with key stakeholders such as trade unions, local governments, and women's organizations to integrate home-based work in their research, and organizing work • Develop common international strategies with solidarity networks such as HomeNet, WIEGO, etc. The WG-WHW is currently designing a proposal for coordination of organizing activities with women home-based workers who participated in the workshop. Also a series of meetings have taken place with women home-based workers in a few areas of Istanbul (Avcilar, Umraniye, Kaynarca). Neighborhood surveys are being designed to review the extent and nature of home-based work in these areas. The working group members have also initiated contacts with a women's group in Van (in eastern Anatolia) that is planning to conduct a neighborhood survey on home-based work in this city. The WG-WHW will provide technical assistance in the design of the survey. All the survey results will be discussed with the women home-based workers in subsequent neighborhood meetings. Discussions are also under way with representatives of textile and chemicals unions and the newly established Women's Rights Center of the Istanbul Lawyers Guild to incorporate women home-based workers in their work. Following the workshop, preliminary discussions have taken place among the members of the working group on developing a research proposal. It was agreed that the vertical and horizontal shifts that occur in subcontracting chains in a volatile global economy are worth exploring from the perspective of women home-based workers. Recent research conducted in Portugal and Greece provide good examples of research design. The WG-WHW members were also able to influence important macroeconomic decisions by undertaking a series of activities on home-based work around the 8th five-year economic plan (2001-2005) in Turkey. Through their initiatives language on women home-based workers has been incorporated into the documents of the labor, gender and poverty subcommittees. The working life subcommittee (of the labor market committee) report includes home-based work as an area where there is need for legal arrangements. The working group also provided an attachment to the main document on the principles for a regulation on home-based work in Turkey.

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The gender and working life subcommittee report includes language on new approaches to women's work, unpaid work, economic organizing as well as home-based work. Among the proposals developed were those on non-standard work and economic organizing. As a result of the exchanges with the members of the WG-WHW during the gender subcommittee meetings, representatives of State Institute of Statistics are considering presenting home-based work as a separate section in their statistical report on the last decade. The members of the WG-WHW also contributed to the report of the poverty subcommittee (of the committee on the improvement of income distribution and poverty) on home-based work and forced migration as a cause for poverty.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS In summary, the organizing efforts by urban women in the informal economy come about mainly as a result of the lack of legal support and marketing services. Women home based workers and street vendors are quite invisible in the eyes of public policy makers. Any support women micro and small entrepreneurs receive from local governments and nongovernmental organizations is haphazard and unlikely to be continuous. The only example of cooperation between women's economic organizations and national government has been through the Directorate General for the Problems and Status of Women, although cooperation is limited. Limitations include the funding allocations and administrative status of the Directorate, its limited reach to Ankara (as it only has one office in the capital city) and allocation of time and resources to thinking about strengthening economic organizing efforts of informally employed women in Turkey. These efforts in solidarity among urban women micro and small entrepreneurs are still in their initial stages of formation. Their memberships are small and their efforts exist in isolation from other women's organizations and labor organizations. However, they should not be dismissed as marginal. Groups such as these exist around the world and when developed fully, they can be instrumental in winning rights to minimum wage, and social security schemes for informal workers as in the case of SEWA in India and Patamaba in the Philippines. On the policy side is the kind of support or lack there of that these groups face in dealing with local and national governments. Specifically, the shifts in the political climate from predominantly secular to religious have posed a challenge and has forced them to negotiate terms with religious authorities who discourage women's work outside the home. In the case of Turkey, the shifts

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in the political climate from secular to religious have also brought about a change in the perception of gender roles and a challenge to such activities as NGO-sponsored child care centers and training for women to engage in economic activities. Thus, strategies developed by among urban women micro and small entrepreneurs in these informal economic organizations deserves some attention. In conclusion, women microentrepreneurs' organizations in Turkey face serious constraints in developing and maintaining their organizations. The support they receive from local and national governments and institutions is crucial for their existence. Without such support, they may not be viable in the long run. Social security, unemployment insurance, minimum piece rates or wage arrangements need to be openly discussed. Public education on the issue of women home-based workers is a must. It is important for international donors and international and national women's groups and labor organizations to follow the developments of urban informal economy women's non-financial economic groups in Turkey. Building alliances with them and supporting their institutional capacities might prove to be valuable contributions to helping gain political and economic voice for urban women in the informal economy in Turkey. The efforts following the workshop on women home based workers in Turkey in October 1999 and the follow up work accomplished by the Working Group on Women Home-based Workers can help provide the much needed institutional capacity building support for the economic organizing efforts of women in the informal economy, especially home-based workers. The multi-prong strategy of the WG-WHW around organizing, action-research, public education and outreach, national and regional policy advocacy and international networking is proving to be a promising model in this regard. Yet such efforts are also still at their early stages and need to be supported by international donor agencies, women's organizations and networks.

NOTES 1. Further information on HomeNet and the ILO Convention on Homeworkers can be accessed from the website of the International Network of Homebased Workers at:http://www.gn.apc.org/homenet/. 2. Two related publications documenting fieldwork for this research and a discussion of the different methodologies are: Esim (1997). Can feminist methodology reduce power hierarchies in research settings? Feminist Economics, 3(2), 389-391, and Esim and CindogIu (forthcoming). Women's organizations in 1990s Turkey: Predicaments and prospects. Middle Eastern Studies.

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REFERENCES Boris, E., & Prugl, E. (1996). Homeworkers in global perspective. New York: Routledge. Can', M., Chen, M., & Jhabvala, R. (1997). Speaking out: Women's economic empowerment in South Asia. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications. Chaney, E., & Castro, M. C. (1988). Muchachas no more: Household workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Esim, S. (1997). Can feminist methodology reduce power hierarchies in research settings? Feminist Economics, 3(2), 389-391. Esim, S., & Cindoglu, D. (forthcoming). Women's organizations in 1990s Turkey: Predicaments and prospects. Middle Eastern Studies. International Center for Research on Women (2000a). Home-based work in Turkey: Issues and strategies for organizing.. Washington, DC.: ICRW, January. International Center for Research on Women (2000b). Follow up to the workshop on women homebased workers in Turkey. Washington, DC.: ICRW. February. Hosmer M., Mitter, M, & Mitter, S. (1994). Women in trade unions: Organ&ing the unorganized. Geneva: ILO. International Labour Organization (1992). Homeworkers of Southeast Asia: The struggle for social protection in Thailand. Bangkok: ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. International Labour Organization (1992). Homeworkers of Southeast Asia: The struggle for social protection in Indonesia. Bangkok: ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. International Labour Organization (1992). Homeworkers of Southeast Asia: The struggle for social protection in the Philippines. Bangkok: ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. Jhabvala, R. (1992). Women's struggles in the informal sector: Two case studies from SEWA. In: S. Gothoskar (Ed.), Struggles of women at work. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. Lazo, L. (1996). Women's empowerment in the making: The Philippine bid for social protection. In: E. Boris & E. Prugl (Eds), Homeworkers in global perspective. New York: Routledge. Magill, J., Esim, S., Capoglu, G., Sariaslan, H., & Cindoglu, D. (1996). Supporting women-owned businesses in Turkey: A discussion of needs, problems, opportunities, and strategies. Bethesda: DAI. Mayonx, L. (1995). Alternative vision or utopian fantasy?: Cooperation, empowerment and women's cooperative development in India. Journal of International Development, 7, March-April, 211-228. Rowbotham, S., & Mitter, S. (1994). Dignity and daily bread: New forms of economic organizing among poor women in the third world and the first. New York: Routledge. WG-WHW website. 2000. http://h°mepages'msn'c°m/v°lunteerst/h°mebasedw°rkers

IN SEARCH OF THE GOOD LIFE: FEMINIST CORRECTIVES TO MODERNIZATION THEORY Janet Zollinger Giele

INTRODUCTION Contrary to the optimistic and expectant mood that has dominated American public debate since the end of World War II, there is now a fleeting but recurring sense of unease about the future. Public intellectuals like Robert Reich (2000, May 8) and William Julius Wilson (2000, April 12) point to the immense and growing inequality between rich and poor in the United States and other advanced industrial nations. Martha Chen (1999), in a review of the changing economies of developing countries points out that, contrary to mainstream economic theories, the informal sector or underground economy has grown out of all proportion to what had been predicted. Because women are disproportionately employed in the informal sector as street vendors or as seamstresses working out of their homes, and are paid such low wages that they find it difficult to subsist, a greater percentage of women and children are poorer than in the past. Such accounts are unsettling because they begin to suggest that widely accepted economic and sociological theories of modernization are flawed. Rather than clear and sustained progress for all nations and all people, there is a divide between the fortunes of modern and developing nations. Those who provide capital and a consumer market are rolling in wealth. Those who provide labor and natural resources are seeing large segments of their populations fall into unremitting poverty.

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The ultimate question behind this paper is how current economic and social dynamics of the globalized economy might be changed to produce the improved standard of living and increased opportunity for all that were originally expected. To answer that question one must examine the prevailing assumptions and attitudes underlying current theories of modernization and highlight both strengths and blind spots. Such a critique could be based on a variety of sources, ranging from social commentators and religious thinkers to feminists and other reformers. For example, social commentators like Reich, Wilson or Chen suggest that there should be some way that the modern economy could make a more equitable distribution of its fruits to disadvantaged laborers along with the investors and managers of capital. Religious commentators look to deeper ideas in modem culture as the source of the current crisis. Robert Bellah (et al., 1996), a sociologist of religion, points to an overemphasis in America on the rights of the individual, to the detriment of social obligations embedded in the social covenant of the Founders. Theologian Rita Brock (2000, April 17) implicates western religion because of its tendency to split the world between a secular "this world" and a sacred "other world", which results in a lack of recognition of interdependence among individuals as well as between the constructed world and the natural world. This essay, however, uses a third source of insight: namely, feminist commentary on globalization of the economy and its impact on families, communities, and children. Building on a week-long seminar in Montreal at the International Sociological meetings in 1998, that brought together feminists from both advanced and developing countries, this paper sketches a distinction between the insights of women from the "economic North" and the "economic South". Women from Europe and North America tended to focus on the unjust arbitrariness of traditional gender roles and to elaborate various ways to overcome discrimination. Women from the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, however, sidestepped the neutral term 'gender' to discuss how women are being adversely affected by the development schemes of the International Monetary Fund working in concert with advanced industrial nations. Their main worries centered on huge national problems of poverty, management of resources, and threats to the environment. These two feminist perspectives reveal both the advantages and perils of the modernization process. The northern or western feminists concern themselves with the equality made possible by a modem society, as well as with the progress still to be made. The women from developing countries are not sure they are "feminists" in the western sense of that term, but they do present what they consider to be a woman's perspective on the urgency of helping the oppressed people of their countries to have a good life and be able to pass it on to coming

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generations. These two perspectives constitute a template for revising the reigning paradigm of economic development and modernization. On the one hand, it is worth preserving the potential for equality and democracy that modern economies make possible. On the other hand, unbridled economic change can destroy the very quality of life and promise of the future that it is meant to enhance. The challenge is to combine the positive and forward-looking aspects of modern society with those traditional values that have reinforced mutual obligation, family ties, and respect for the natural world. A close examination of the various themes of feminist thought provides clues on how this can be done.

FEMINIST SENSIBILITIES IN THE ECONOMIC NORTH The leading feminist sociologists of the economic North articulate a belief that all of us in modern societies tend to share: that women's equality is closely linked to the modernization process and perhaps even dependent on it. they associate modernity with liberation from oppressive patriarchal control of reproduction, free access to education, and new rights to political freedom and economic independence that come from labor-saving advances in technology and increased opportunities for women to have paid work in the formal economy. Their hope for the future is that further modernization will extend such emancipation downward through all levels of western society and out to the developing world. Their vision is universalistic and unitary in assuming that more freedom for women is a good thing, that it will come with a modern developed economy, and open to women the kinds of activity and political expression previously reserved for men. The focus in the economic North is on rights, progress, and the openness of civil society. The intellectual agenda that goes with this world view is one of breaking down "essentialist" distinctions between men and women, between heterosexual and homosexual persons, and between formal and informal institutional structure. Any claim that there are biological differences between women and men tends to be minimized and treated as regressive because such ideas are thought to be culturally and socially constructed rather than the result of innate differences (Lorber,* 1997). 1 The power of social construction is in fact so great Kirby,* (1997) contends that the nature and distribution of even such concrete physical experience as illness is shaped or "enfleshed" by cultural beliefs. Yet these highly abstract discussions of concepts such as essentialism, the mind/body distinction, or the term gender rather than sex ("men", "women") sound quite removed from the concrete daily problems of women in either developed or developing world. Diversity of actual experience is subsumed

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under the analytic rubric of socially constructed mental categories, with the result that critiques of this approach or assertions that women do have a different perspective tend to be labeled as essentialist or romantic about the past and about traditional society. Two types of commentary, however, do emerge from the Northern feminists, both having to do with the question of standpoint: one from the feminist sociologists, the other from feminist economists. The sociologists reflect on their own class position, wealth, or privilege of nationality vis-a-vis other less fortunate women. Dilek Cindoglu* (1998), for example, describes her experience in conducting focus groups with all kinds of women in Turkey. One of the strong feelings that I confront in the field is resentment; when I go to the field as a Turkish, upper middle class woman academician particularly I confront the resentment of people who have lesser life c h a n c e s . . . As a relatively more powerful woman - mostly stemming from my social class background - I get easily designated as their s a v i o r . . . This load of responsibilities brings a heavy emotional burden to me and sometimes blocks my writing as well . . .

Another sociologist, Helen Ralston* (1996), describes doing research with minority women in Canada. As a "white hyphenated Australian-Canadian feminist researcher and outsider" she sees her role as one of consciousnessraising concerning feminist ethnocentrism, which she suggests is a subspecies of western and northern ethnocentrism and racism. Rather than appropriating the voices of minority women, she defines her goal as one of joining with them to articulate a vision of social justice and positive social change. For the feminist economists, the issue of standpoint focuses on being women who counter the men in the profession2 They attribute many of the problems of economic development to widespread subordination of women and to male bias in economic thought. In their book Beyond Economic Man, Ferber and Nelson (1993) assemble a number of essays by economists who summarize major shortcomings in the neoclassical model that pictures the individual as a utility maximizer with sufficient autonomy and information to make the most rational choice. A number of distortions result. The consumer and worker are not always well informed. People never freely choose in terms of their own best interests but are always influenced by custom, culture, and their relative power position. Because the model makes no place for altruism, much of women's work in caring for children and workers is rendered invisible and left unexplained except by stretching the individualist model. The feminist economists' explanation for these distortions is that men dominate in the economics profession, men make up the models, and in so doing, they draw on their own experience, in which they (men) have always been better able to choose on the basis of their own best interests without taking

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into account the wishes or interests of others. England (1993) summarizes two different feminist strategies: the first is to get women into those male spheres from which they have been excluded; the second is to valorize the kinds of relational and caregiving work that women do and in the process create an incentive for men to do more of that work. The work of the feminist economists is certainly related to the inadequacies of the neoclassical model for dealing with sustainable development, but Blank (1993) is correct in saying that their critique offers no better alternative to the current model with its focus on the importance of incentives and choice. In fact, the standard model is very useful for explaining much of economic behavior in western industrial societies. Moreover, it is very useful for thinking about how to use incentives in public policy where, in a democratic society, you want people to choose the desired pattern of behavior, not have to be coerced into it.

WOMEN'S THEMES FROM THE ECONOMIC SOUTH In striking contrast to the benign view of modernity held by many western and northern feminists, the women from the economic South believe that economic development is by and large destructive. Rather than focus on political and civil rights, they measure the benefits of modernity in economic effects on diverse class and ethnic groups in their countries. For them, the goal of development should be health, subsistence, and participation of all, not just the profit makers, in an improved standard of living. This view is succinctly stated by Vandana Shiva (1989: 10) in an excerpt introduced at the Montreal seminar by Angela Miles* (1996). Culturally perceived poverty need not be real material poverty: subsistence economies which satisfy basic needs through self-provisioning are not poor in the sense of being deprived. Yet the ideology of development declares them so because they do not participate overwhelmingly in the market economy ... even though they might be satisfying those needs through self-provisioning mechanisms . . . . This cultural perception of prudent subsistence living as poverty has provided the legitimisation for the development process as a poverty removal project. As a culturally biased project it destroys wholesome and sustainable lifestyles and creates reai material poverty, or misery, by the denial of survival needs themselves, through the diversion of resources to resource intensive commodity production. In contrast with the northern feminists, who assume a common path to modernity and women's equality, the southern feminists call for active participation by diverse groups: women along with men, and lower classes along with middle classes. They say it is important to listen to women to discover what stakes they hold in the everyday economic and local community decisions. Gopika Solanki* (1998), for example, described a large state-run project for

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dam-building in India that was being promoted in the "best interests of people" even though it would displace several million tribal peoples from their land in three adjoining states. She also told of provider-controlled hormonal contraceptives being forced on women under state sponsorship with all opposition being labeled as "retrograde, pre-modern, anti-technology and anti-people". Also from India, D. Jayalakshmi* (1998) showed how women in her community, who had been ignored by state dam-building projects, were actually the main stakeholders in irrigation (the men having migrated out). Use of these women's knowledge and interests was absolutely vital if state policies for land and water control were to be effective. Sinith Sittarak* (1998) of Thailand, in her critique of development schemes, documented Thai women's leadership in bringing traditional indigenous knowledge to bear on choosing appropriate paths to development. She gave two examples, the first when women enforced the fishing limit near the shore so that wild fish stocks were soon restored. The second example of women' s leadership was in changing Practices in the forest industry. To assure sustainability of production in a natural way they planted and dedicated native trees in the forest as well as traveled to Finland to lobby the international timber industry against huge plantations of foreign species such as eucalyptus. These women build their critiques on direct experiences of change within the traditional "woman's sphere", and even at times seem to disdain western style feminism as being too narrowly self-interested and insensitive to the problems of the whole society. They don't hesitate to assume differences between men and women and focus instead on discovering the power women already have and then using it to good advantage on behalf of the caregiving, food production, and community maintenance tasks that women have always done. These examples convey several distinctive features in the outlook of feminists from the economic South. They appear less concerned with gender equality than with what is happening to the "life-worlds" and living conditions of women, such as the aggressive exploitation of natural resources by multinational corporations and loss of control by small landowners, families, and communities. These concerns are consistent with a long line of feminist economic and social analysis of women and development. As the development process unfolded during the United Nations Decade for Women (1976-1985), it became apparent that development posed many obstacles to women's equality. Mechanization of agriculture and the export of cash crops such as flowers or luxury foods drew women out of subsistence production and resulted in rising food imports and a food crisis in a number of African and Latin American countries. Nor did women's status improve as they entered the informal sector or marginal jobs in the cities where their pay and security were very low (Nash, 1983a, b; Deere & Leon, 1987).

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As scholars and feminists began to rethink the impact of development on women, they recognized the great importance of race and ethnicity, class, and rural or urban location as factors in how women fared. Although a society as a whole might be considered developed, women within that society who were employed as migratory field workers, domestics, or street vendors did not enjoy the same life chances as middle class women employed as clerical workers or professionals (Tiano, 1987). The restricted opportunities of the less favored groups to enter the more "modern" occupations were heavily influenced by their race, ethnicity, and class background. What most disturbs the women-in-development scholars is the worsening condition of Third World women who have been forced off the land by the need to earn wages. These women join the migratory or urban labor force. Not only has aggregate food production suffered but also the individual woman's ability to assure enough food for herself and her family (Nash, 1983a, b; Deere & Leon, 1987). Thus, contemporary development, rather than fostering equality, appears to exploit the most vulnerable women at the economic periphery while it serves the interest of those with wealth or education who inhabit the modern core (Nash, 1983a: xv).

AN UNFOLDING CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY What has become evident in the last few years is that disenchantment with globalization and modern economic development is no longer confined to the Third World. The disruption of the World Trade talks in Seattle in 2000 were a signal that workers and environmentalists in the advanced economies were also aroused. The key criticism of modern development is that profit and economic success of multinational corporations has taken precedence over the general well-being of humanity. Moreover, all people living in the contemporary world have learned to some extent to think in terms of comparative advantage and profit maximizing. Thus there is a growing sense of unease that the advancement of individual rights may come at the cost of the general welfare. My own awareness of this dilemma has come only very recently. Like many others born in the 1930s, I grew up in a semi-rural area, without a telephone and running water, but using a cistern to catch rainwater off the roof and a wood stove for cooking. Thus, I appreciate the modern wonders of having a bath every day, doing laundry with an automatic washer and dryer, and keeping warm in the winter by an oil-burning furnace with a thermostat. Just as wonderful is the privilege of having a car and being able to drive rather than wait for a bus or ask for a ride. Unlike my mother whose days were taken up

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with mundane household chores, I have time for paid work, special interests, and leisure. But several experiences over the last year have made me attuned to a new overriding question: How, if everyone in the world used as much water and energy or drove a car, could we ensure a livable future to coming generations? A number of thoughtful people see an impending crisis from pollution, scarcity of renewable fuels, and the difficulty of supporting a population of six billion that has tripled in only fifty years. The self-regulating social mechanisms of the modem world seem inadequate to meet the age-old human obligation, as Robert Solow (quoted in Anand & Sen, 1996: 14) puts it, to pass on at least as good a world as we received to the yet unborn. During a visit to Taiwan in October of 1999, I saw this specter in more concrete terms. In a lecture on "The Coming Age of Scarcity", Swiss sociologist Isador Wallimann (1999, October 25) helped me see a link between feminist consciousness and the critique of modernity. Wallimann, as a result of his studies of genocide, warns that growing competition over the earth's resources will lead to a crisis in another sixty years when the industrial nations will run out of non-renewable resources and the dream of material advancement as it is known in the modem world will be brought to a an inevitable halt (Dobkowski & Wallimann, 1999). Bringing two billion people in China alone into a modem economy puts an unsustainable pressure on existing land, air, water, and fossil fuels. A different way must be found, and Wallimann believes that Chinese leaders are already beginning to explore a kind of self-sustaining bio-regionalism that will not attempt to achieve a fully modem way of life for everyone. Taiwan itself in many ways bears out Wallimann's thesis. It is a beautiful countryside that in the rapid process of industrialization over the last forty years has become an economic miracle, but at great cost to its beauty, air quality, and grace in land use and urban design. People are well off; educational levels are high; health is good. But thousands of motor scooters with the prospect of one day becoming cars create a specter of even more crowded freeways and even more poisonous air. Admittedly, Taiwan is only a small island. But what if the same kind of change were to occur everywhere else? An entirely modem economy throughout the whole world would become unsustainable. This paradox has only recently become apparent: the prosperity, democracy, and freedom of choice that is possible in the developed part of the world is increasingly dependent on the continued access to cheap natural resources, cheap labor, and huge markets in the less developed parts of the world. Instead of experiencing liberation through modernization, those who are on the periphery frequently experience an actual worsening of life chances: greater poverty, increasing vulnerability to

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inter-ethnic violence, and further degradation of the natural environment. Such a scenario suggests that established modernization theories should now be revised not only to recognize the limits imposed by natural resources but also to sketch an alternative path for future change.

FEMINIST CORRECTIVES: INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM RENEWAL One such alternative framework comes from Nussbaum and Sen (1993) who have developed a list of ten functional capabilities that represent universal ideals of human life: (1) life itself; (2) bodily health and integrity; (3) freedom of movement; (4) senses, imagination, thought; (5) emotions; (6) practical reason; (7) affiliation; (8) ability to live with other species; (9) play; and (10) control over one's environment (Nussbaum, 1999: 41-42). They particularly fault the classic economic model for measuring success in terms of GNP per capita, without taking into account negative outcomes such as a very unequal division of income and services by class, gender, race, and social location. Yet unlike the feminist economists, and in line with Blank's critique, they do not reject a liberal, choice-oriented perspective. Nussbanm (1999: 154-183) instead argues for the tempering of justice with mercy, for the softening of hard, cruel, and equitable universal standards with a soft and gentle sensitivity to the particular. How does the ideal of a full realization of human functional capabilities relate to dealing with the problems of global modernization? First, Nussbaum and Sen state the goals, measures, and outcomes desired and thus move away from a too narrow definition of development in terms of GNP per capita. Second, they recast the problem of development to reframe the question by asking what kind of economic activities, structures, and other human systems are necessary to full realization of functional capabilities. Finally, they illustrate how women, children, and families currently perform functions (hidden to the economists) that are necessary to attaining these goals. But they do not show how social structure can be changed, nor do they recognize that the emphasis on profitmaking rather than national solidarity may vary according to the times. The chief deficiency of the functional capabilities approach as well as the feminist themes of both economic North and South is that they never specifically locate the current crisis in modernity itself. Nor do they explicitly recognize that modern ideas of specialization, comparative advantage, and maximization of utility have been indispensable to the standard of living that the modern world currently enjoys. In particular, the establishment of individual rights and freedoms appear in large part to have been the result of liberation from traditional agricultural society with its domination by the patriarchal family,

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and escape from feudal obligations imposed by class, race, gender, and other circumstances of birth (Goode, 1963; Weinstein & Platt, 1969). Given this history, one might well ask what China's potential strategy of rural containment would mean for women and racial and ethnic minorities - their education, their freedom of movement, and their human rights. The question is significant because freedom and modernization, including urbanization and learning, appear to go hand in hand. Sociologists over the last century have all recognized that the movement from agricultural societies to modern economies represents an enormous human achievement that is associated with a rising material standard of living, better health, and more individual freedom. Many of the classical theorists tried to explain how this was possible. Durkheim ([1893] 1933) compared the process with biological evolution in which higher organisms become ever more complex and their internal organs more interdependent. In contrast with pre-modern segmented societies held together by "mechanical solidarity" based on proximity or family relationship, modern societies with their greater specialization of roles and more differentiated parts are characterized by "organic solidarity" in which interdependence occurs because specialized expertise of each member is needed. Weber ([1925] 1947) pursued a similar idea in his comparison of traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic forms of authority. Modern society has dissociated authority from family patriarchy and inherited rank so that it is more flexible and available to any person who can meet the criteria of office. The feminist voices of the economic North and South and the other critics of modernity all appear to be calling attention to an imbalance between the forces on the side of individual freedom and those that preserve the solidarity of the society and its continuity from one generation to another. In other words, individualistic achievement and profit-making are occurring all right, but the processes of reintegration and system maintenance are insufficient or flawed. Many people are left out of the upgrading process; their standard of living does not rise; and they risk becoming alienated or even actively hostile to the larger society and its established representatives. In his general theory of societal evolution, Talcott Parsons (1966) described the processes by which societies became modern. Improvement or upgrading always occurs in two grand phases: one of adaptation which involves specialization and structural differentiation; the other, of reintegration of the newly specialized structures into the larger system at a higher level of functioning. The adaptive and integrative functions roughly correspond to what the feminist economists have labeled "male" and "female" types of work (Jennings, 1993; Nelson, 1998). Individuation and competitive striving (adaptive phase) are associated with a "male" emphasis on separation of the new from the old,

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Pattern Variables in Orientation and Attitude. Differentiation Phase

Integration Phase

Orientation to others

universalism performance

particularism quality

Attitude of self

affective neutrality specificity

affectivity diffuseness

objectivity and impersonality, and a focus more on getting the job done than taking into account the feelings of the people involved. A concern for how everyone is doing (integrative phase), however, requires such "female" activities as incorporating the new types of behavior into the traditions of the old organization and showing concern for the particular feelings of each member. The orientations of the actors when they are in each of these two phases suggest that differentiation is similar to being "modem" and is found especially in work and the public sphere whereas integration is similar to being "traditional" and is seen especially in the family or private sphere. Listed below are the attitudes associated with each phase that Parsons and Bales (1953: 180-181) identified in their analysis of adaptive problem solving in small groups. Given the strong emphasis on individuation and achievement in modem society, with accompanying norms about fairness, not playing favorites, and keeping our personal feelings out of it, the danger is that we will not know when and how to give attention t o the personal and particular and take feelings into account when they should be. And it is precisely these emotions that are necessary to developing a sense of care and common cause with others. Lack of solidarity then takes its toll in a number of ways - in a lack of mutuality and care between generations, between diverse cultural groups, and among the many types of nations in the world. The intergenerational challenge is how to leave a world that is habitable not only to our own children but to generations still unborn. The traditional peasant family had built-in safeguards that solved this problem. From China to India and Ireland, it was in the interests of parents to care for their children and be able to pass on land and a living so that they could be taken care of in their old age. As living on the land and the strength of extended family has declined, the incentives for parents to care for their children and their ability to pass on resources that will be useful in the future has become much less concrete and

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direct. Without these close feelings of connection, who in society feels directly motivated, or even able to, look out for the interests of the next generation? The diversity challenge is to feel care and concern for people who are very different in race, ethnicity, class, culture, or physical or mental capacity. Without some sense that these others are members of the same human family who deserve as much care and consideration as one's own group, it is quite understandable that inequality should increase, and that any sense of obligation toward these others would be tenuous. Thus some groups are defined as undeserving, as aliens, or as slackers with no claim to help from the able. The international challenge is similar to the multi-cultural one. What obligation does a well-off country have to poor countries? One reason may be a defensive one - to keep them from disrupting the comfortable life or stealing the wealth of the rich. Or a colonial one - to be sure that they continue to yield up their oil and minerals and serve as a source of cheap labor and export markets. Even if integrative actions like international monetary controls and export-import agreements were sufficient for accomplishing these ends, something more would be needed to protect the planet for populations of the future.

RECOVERING THE BASES OF SOLIDARITY There may be a distinctively modern way to build a common sense of membership for all citizens in society. Progressive reform movements at the turn of the century in the United States mobilized women workers and other excluded groups. But the reform impulse is currently in abeyance, and we must examine whether there is a dependable and routine way of building community and common cause in contemporary mass society. Some clues can be found in the ideas of feminists as well as in some of the modes of traditional society. It is of particular interest here that women from the economic South frame their principal social problems in terms of long term survival of the society rather than in terms of their own status relative to men. In order for Western women to find out how to build a sense of commitment and solidarity with women who are more traditional in their relationships to men, it is necessary to observe the conditions under which bridges have been built across social borders when sharing rather than conflict occurs with distribution of resources. Here are some beginning thoughts about ways to build protection of solidarity into modern life.

Thinking of posterity. The immense material change which those over fifty have experienced since World War II is a reminder that along with all the technological and social improvements that the modern world has experienced, it may also have lost some skills in caring for children, communities, and the

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environment that are as natural as breathing to those in a less advanced society. We need to begin observing those who feel a responsibility to the next generation. In the past this took the form of saving, recycling, and do-it-yourself strategies to build up capital. Many of these strategies no longer make sense today because they seem to cost more in time than they save in money. Empathy with people who are different. Rather than lip service to the ideal of equality, joining together in solving a problem may be more important in creating a sense of identity and empathy. In the absence of large families or small communities that foster such feelings, sociologists need to examine the social settings that create a sense of trust and mutual purpose within the routines of a complex urban society. Openness to other values. Some experiences like travel abroad, knowledge of other languages, volunteer work, leadership responsibilities, and charitable religious activity give a sympathetic exposure to other groups. Alternatively, other experiences such as isolation or very rigid ideologies may contribute to xenophobia and lack of tolerance for non-western or unfamiliar conditions. We are very familiar with positive attitudes toward becoming westernized and incorporating modem ideas. What is particularly needed now is a knowledge of the opposite: who those people are who can empathize and respect the traditional and see its potential value in maintaining continuity and a sense of common cause within and between nations. Ability to build bridges, resolve conflict, and give care to others. Certain background characteristics and social experiences appear to lead some people to child care, social work, teaching, managing people, and conflict resolution. A challenge for the future is to provide incentives that will reinforce and encourage good people to do this work,

CONCLUSION The crisis in modernization of the entire world will be felt when we run out of non-renewable resources. Well before that time, the rich nations must find some self-correcting mechanisms that will save coming generations from falling off the cliff. While the feminist economists have identified our problem as primarily one of male-centered thinking that fails to take the needs of women and children into account, the issue is larger than that. All of western society shares a modernist bias and must soon recognize that it needs to discover those mechanisms that will help to achieve the kind of economic development that can be sustained indefinitely.

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This is a tall order that begins with identifying modernity as both culprit and savior, but savior only if it is altered enough to maintain human life over the long term and integrate those on the periphery who have so far either been left out or exploited for the benefit of those at the core. Once the limitations of modernity are recognized, the next steps are practical: fostering nurturant and integrative behavior, justice, and equality, especially in relation to minorities and outgroups - coming generations, people of different color, culture, and class, and the poor countries of the world. The contribution of a feminist perspective to this process is in highlighting the contribution of those persons, many of whom are women, and of the family, where women have traditionally centered their lives, to the immense accomplishment of sustaining human societies over thousands of years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D. C., August 12-16. This paper was completed during 1999-2000 while I was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, with an appointment at the Murray Research Center and Radcliffe Public Policy Center, and a Visiting Research Scholar at Wellesley College.

NOTE 1. Both in the text and in the list of references, an asterisk is used to indicate an author who participated in the 1998 Pre-Congress outside Montreal. Where possible, I have referred to the author's main published work that corresponds with her presentation to the seminar. Where I did not have such a reference, I have cited the author's onepage abstract submitted to the workshop organizers ahead of time.

REFERENCES * Indicates participant in 1998 Pre-Congress of the ISA, Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology. Anand, S., & Sen, A. K. (1996). Sustainable human development: Concepts and priorities. New York: United Nations Development Programme, Office of Development Studies. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R. S., William, M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1996). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in America n life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blank, R. M. (1993). What should mainstream economists learn from feminist theory? In: M. Ferber & J. A. Nelson (Eds), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (pp. 132-143). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Brock, R. N. (2000, April 17). Facing our demons and our angels: The role of religious commitment in the practice of democracy. Lecture in series on Voices of public intellectuals: Feminisms and the practice of democracy, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Chen, M. (1999). The invisible workforce: Women in the Informal economy. Cambridge, MA: Public Policy Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. *Cindoglu, D. (1998). SWains between the feminist and academic self. Ste Anne de Bellevue, Qurbec: Pre-Congress on Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology. Deere, C. D., & Leon, M. (Eds) (1987). Rural women and state policy: Feminist perspectives on Latin American agricultural development. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Dobkowski, M. N., & Wallimann, I. (Eds) (1998). The coming age of scarcity: Preventing mass death and genocide in the twenty-first century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Durkheim, E. ([1893] 1960)~ The div&ion of labor in society. Reprint, translated by George Simpson. New York: Free Press. England, P. (1993). The separative self: Androcentric bias in neoclassical assumptions. In: M. A. Ferber & J. A. Nelson (Eds), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (pp. 37-53). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goode, W. J. (1963). World revolution and family patterns. New York: Free Press. *Jayalakshmi, D. (1998). Rethinking development and challenges to sociology. Ste Anne de Bellevue, Quebec: Pre-Congress on Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology. Jennings, A. L. (1993). Public or private? Institutional economics and feminism. In: M. A. Ferber & J. A. Nelson (Eds), Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (pp. 111-129). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. *Kirby, V. (1997). Telling flesh: The substance of the corporeal. New York: Routledge. *Lorber, J. (1997). Gender and the social construction of illness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. *Miles, A. (1996). Integrative feminisms: Building global visions. New York: Routledge. Nash, J. (1983a). Introduction. In: J. Nash & M. P. Fernandez-Kelly (Eds), Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (pp. vii-xv). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nash, J. (1983b). The impact of the changing international division of labor on different sectors of the labor force. In: J. Nash & M. P. Fernandez-Kelly (Eds), Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (pp. 3-38). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nelson, J. A. (1998). Labour, gender, and the economic/social divide. International Labour Review, 137, 3346. Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex and social justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A~ (Eds) (1993). The quality of life. New York: Oxford University Press. Parsons, T. (1966). Societies: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Parsons, T., Bales, R. F., & Shils, E. (1953). Working papers in the theory of action. New York: Free Press. *Ralston, H. (1996). The lived experience of South Asian immigrant women #z Atlantic Canada: The interconnections of race, class, and gender. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Reich, R. (2000, May 8). The great divide. The American Prospect, 56. Shiva, V. (1989). Staying alive: Women, ecology, and development. London: Zed Books. *Sittarak, S. (1998). The daughters of development." Women in a changing environment. London: Zed Books.

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*Solanki, G. (1998). Development in whose interest: An analysis of state rhetoric, development myths and feminist challenges. Ste Anne de Bellevue, Quebec: Pre-Congress on Feminism Challenges the Heritage of Sociology. Tiano, S. (1987). Gender, work, and world capitalism: Third World women's role in development. In: B. B. Hess & M. M. Ferree (Eds), Analyzing Gender, a Handbook of Social Science Research (pp. 216-243). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Wallimann, I. (1999, October 25). The coming age of scarcity. Lecture presented at School of Social Work, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan. Weber, M. ([1925] 1947). The theory of social and economic organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson & T. Parsons. Edited with an Introduction by T. Parsons. New York: Free Press. Weinstein, F., & Platt, G. M. (1969). The wish to be free: Society, psyche, and value change. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wilson, W. J. (2000, April 12). All boats rise. Now what? New York Times OP-ED, 31.

F E M I N I S T N E B ULOSA : THEORETICAL

APPROXIMATIONS ON THE REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMINISM IN RECIFE-PE 1 Lady Selma Ferreira Albernaz

LOCATING THE DISCUSSIONS The aim of this paper is to ponder over the reasons why feminism, as a social movement, provokes simultaneous acceptance and rejection in a vast number of people. The fascination of this theme has as a backdrop the context of contemporary society, with its growing importance focused on equality of opportunities in public spaces, models of affectional relations and the division of domestic labor. 2 Feminism is the movement that brought these discussions to the foreground in Western societies and elaborated a theoretical discourse that consolidated practices and political claims. 3 These representations, socially and culturally constructed need to be understood within a process of mutual influence that makes them inseparable. This paper has as its context specific social spaces. I have been in contact with the academic world, especially the human sciences, since the mid-1980s. The University halls and 'O Bar do Bigode' - a hut across from the campus where alcohol is consumed - were spaces where classroom debates and theoretical reflections were extended and discussions on social sciences, classical authors and books recently launched took place. These were also important spaces to

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 195-211. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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share experiences: ardent passions, music, poetry, literature and dreams, many dreams ! One of the most frequent and polemic subjects was the one arising from the debate on gender relations, which back then appeared under several denominations: machismo, matriarchy, sex domination, oppression, exploitation. These were all mixed up, occurring within interpersonal relationships and moral/ethical judgements of courting/marriage, friendships, sexual options. From the debate flourished a typology to define who was macho and who was not and a discussion of whether feminism was necessary. The ambiguity over the theme of feminism stirred up polemics hotter than those roused by our political-party options. The discussion on machismo and feminism became dichotomic, the latter appearing as the former's opposite, and mixing feelings of self-image with political and sociological analyses of feminism. Feminism itself was discussed in neither common sense nor academic terms, but rather comments made involved who was macho and who was not. Being considered macho was often regarded as a personal offense, followed by excuses such as: "I am macho but my father is worse (or my brother or friend)". Or in a defiant tone: "I am a macho man and that's it!" Discussions focused on the feminists often became intransigent complete with stereotyping and labeling: "feminists are unbearable", "they are not needed", "I like feminine woman" and so forth. There were gradations in the more moderate discussions: "some are accepted" and "they are needed to a certain extent". In this context, too, feminism as a movement was disputed. Comments made included: "It splits class struggles", "black issues are more relevant", "they don't represent me", "it is unnecessary for I have changed my affective relations: I do/my spouse does my/his domestic chores, I look after my children/the father of my children shares the responsibilities with me, my girlfriend goes out/I go out alone". Other arguments justified a disregard of feminism in many societies, or made scientific research on women illegitimate, by pointing to ethnographic examples accounting for egalitarian societies, or for societies of feminine or matriarchal domination. In the meantime, in the Brazilian academic world, study, research groups and centers on women flourished resulting in the beginning of theoretical discussions on gender relations. Yet, though the proliferation of such studies and research centers might be conceived as being influenced by feminism, the theoretical stance of the researchers (male or female), did not make explicit the political yearning of the movements nor did it assume a feminist theory. Similarly, feminism gradually appeared in research on the recent transformations of the status of women in Western society, 4 on their increasing participation in the labor market, the emergence of sexual revolution, and on the development of new left activity as well as other societal trends (Cruz, 1982). The social-historical context of the appearance of the feminist movement in North America and

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Europe served to relativize the specificity of their contributions to the on-going remodeling of gender relations. I was intrigued, especially as a militant, to see the movement. For me the guiding light of the transformations in gender relations, 5 can be considered as an appendix of its own context. 6 This way, I think the academic discussion itself contained ambiguities, especially as to the acceptance of the denomination feminist by the women who studied, and characterized that movement (Costa, 1987). 7 Another important aspect of that period was the implementation in the international governmental arena - and to some extent in Brazil - of policies resulting from the fighting banners of the feminist movement (Moraes, 1985). These effects of this are stronger today, as international financing to countries in the Southern Hemisphere is bound to specific gender policies designed to diminish the inequalities between men and women. 8 These same concerns affect projects of Brazilian and international NGO's. Yet with respect to some of these NGO's, while the concept of gender is critical, there is no acknowledgement of the academic origin of feminism as a social movement constructed in a political context (Machado, 1992). 9 This way, in the past as well as in the present, underlying the incorporation of gender equity policies, there are feelings and representations that sway from acceptance to rejection, whenever the terms 'feminism' and 'feminist' come up. It is as though the concept of gender had no connections to feminist discussions. Such was the context in which I first started my reflections: Why did feminism provoke so much polemic while there was so much evidence of inequality between men and women and while concrete attempts were underway to resolve this inequality through projects of the feminist movement? Why were men and women in search for new models of relationships (although they did not achieve the desired end), while rejecting what was called the 'feminist idea' (such as, for example, the sharing of domestic chores out of bonhomie and liberality "I do it because I want it" - rather than out of a discussion growing from feminism)? Why did women find it so necessary to reject feminist labels and pursue ideals of femininity, while in pursuit of equality within the affective, work and political relations, and while using arguments akin to those of the movement and its militants? In short, the principal actor of the debates over sex equality in society was constantly denied, the focus of attention of the transformations was directed to other spheres, such as the sexual revolution and the entrance to the work market, t° My central research question involved the representation of feminism by non-militant persons; it presupposed the definition of feminism as a political movement and thus lent to it a relative legitimacy in the academy, governments and NGOs. The central question is: How are these representations of feminism

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constructed, in societies in which it presents itself as an acting movement, among people who are non-militants, but who share the values espoused by the movement? If there is a relative legitimacy, do non-militant people recognize political action? How does this recognition reveal itself in the construction of the representations of feminism? To what extent is there an acceptance/rejection of feminism in these representations and how do they relate to the practices of this movement within the society it is practiced?

THE RESEARCH AND ITS DIMENSIONS People Interviewed I chose as a universe of research the University Campus, since this context is directly related to the emergence of the problem. I wanted to study feminism among persons who shared the values of equality between sexes. The University context is relevant because studies on change in the family point out that it is in the middle classes and among women with the highest educational levels that the transformations in gender relations in the public and private domains are most evident (Bruschini, 1994). 11 I selected master's degree program students, for they have an accumulated academic culture, when compared to undergraduate students. Furthermore, I delimited two opposing areas of knowledge, one in the human sciences and the other in the natural sciences, in order to determine if the phenomenon could be more encompassing or if it was limited to a particular area of knowledge (Albernaz, 1996). The population under scrutiny was made up of students in the History and Physics Masters Program at the Federal University of Pernambuco. I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with an equal number of males and females, in each course, from March to August in 1994.

The theory used: approaching the notion of Feminist Nebulosa In my analysis, I draw on the praxiological theory by Bourdieu (1983). More specifically, I consider Bourdieu's concept of representations as spontaneous theories of practice - practice that is revealed in the quotidian social relations guided by the habitus within fields of power. In this sense, the practices of the feminist movement and its militants would enable me to understand the construction of representations in the field of gender relations. Then, I took on the task of constructing a definition of feminism, having as support the social relations which it establishes with the society to which it pertains, focusing on

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this society in the field of gender relations. 12 I chose not to limit social spaces, but rather, I examined the places where feminist actions or discussions took place, leaving its footprints. That is, I considered whatever the movement itself sought to demarcate as its spaces. That ranged from mass communication to governmental spheres. I also included stereotypes of feminism and feminists and notions of common sense which focus on women who break the hegemonic relations of gender. Another relevant aspect of feminist practice is the structure of the movement as it concerns its trends of explanations and political propositions to gender relations as well as the internal organization of its groups, militants and spaces of deliberation. 13 The history of feminism is seen through many eyes, and has numerous versions with various identified beginnings. Thus, one can presume that there have been examples of women with alternative proposals to the relations between the sexes since Ancient Greece, and in Europe during the Middle Ages, as well as more recently, in post-revolutionary France (Michel, 1982; A l v e s & Pitanguy, 1985; Buarque, 1991). In a similar way, one might understand that only the so-called new feminism (Costa & Sadenberg, 1991; Moraes, 1985; Cruz, 1982) is the 'real' feminism. 14 The attempt to establish a history/histories of women, from a feminist perspective, as it occurred within the history of the movement, might present different temporal fragments, with some beginning their research in the Paleolithic Period. (D'Euaboone, 1977). Since the focus of this history of women is an 'engaged' one, in some passages, the interpretation of facts might lead women's historic trajectory to be read as if it were the history of the feminist movement itself. ~5 As we analyze the texts intended to account for inequalities in sex relations and the proposals of change of these relations, we realize the diversity of standpoints among authors. ~6 There is a variety of adjectives which, if used together with the term feminism demarcates each trend of the movement. For instance, liberal feminism as we|l as Marxist and socialist feminisms are trends that date from the 19th Century to present time. Radical feminism became emblematic of the new feminism for many authors. And within the new f e m i n i s m there is a variety of other denominations: eco-feminism, feminism and development, lesbian feminism, post-modern-feminism, multi-racial feminism. There is also the merging of feminism with academic branches of knowledge, together with a critical examination of the founding theories and methods of each branch. This terminology presents itself as a rather complex one, becoming even more diffuse as we learn of the enormous number of groups within the movement in Brazil and the conflicts that have been present in the movement over the past 30 years. (Sarti, 1988; Buarque, 1986). The internal structure of the movement is far from resembling the recurrent configurations of the more

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classical social movements, such as the trade union movement, and, even further, from resembling political parties (Moraes, 1985). 17 This differentiation draws our attention to the fact that there are no criteria to commission representatives for these groups. The women speak for themselves but also for all women. That is often regarded as something illegitimate, and leads to various questions. For instance, what women can take part in feminist meetings? What groups of women are represented by these deliberations? Characteristic of the feminist movement is the valorization of direct political action at the expense of parliamentary representation. 18 By contrast western democracy gives a positive value to the representations in the Parliament, thus presenting a challenge to the efficacy of feminism and its legitimacy. The possibility of being a feminist and not participating in groups (independent feminists) creates a variety of spokespersons for the movement. These spokespersons often lack internal legitimacy and do not express the movement's most important trends. In addition, feminist public actions take place on an irregular basis, one occurring long after the other. This renders the understanding of feminism even more difficult for those who are outsiders. When I speak of public actions, I mean more than feminist demonstrations on the streets, I also include those that occur in governmental spheres and mass communication. The privilege of taking action from such sites is counter to parliamentary action, and thus provides another challenge to the 'legitimacy' of feminism as a political movement. Feminism shows its characteristics to society in actions and practices that take place, within the wider society. That is, feminist practice circulate through the history it presents, the political analysis it formulates, the structure it is based on in order to function, and the persons through whom it offers the possibility of speaking about themselves and their projects. The hallmark of what has just been pointed out is the plurality of feminism, its multi-faceted presentation from ideas to social actors and social positions. The plural and multi-faceted aspects of feminist ideas, actors and positions, challenges the available popular image of feminism as consisting of practices held by those involved in the public sphere. The range of actors and positions are seen as the same; all is feminism, a unique feminism. Feminist practices are filtered by the other side, that is, by those (and their ideas) who in the relational process interact with feminism. I refer here to the common sense notions of the rupture of gender relations and feminist stereotypes and feminism long under construction. There are several stereotypes of feminists and feminism. The most widely spread suggests that women who are feminists want to occupy men's spaces, and want to take power away from them. Therefore, feminists are badly-loved, radicals and dykes. If these

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stereotypes add little to the identification of women with feminism, there is a common argument in our society that denies the necessity of the organized movement to break the established gender relations. This argument is based on historical examples of women who managed to break these relations by means of personal and isolated efforts. Finally, mass communication is characterized by traditionalism, and the broadcasting of messages devoid of criticism, and thereby, contributes to a faulty uncritical reading of the movement as empty. It was considering this analysis of feminism, its practices and the results of the interactions that take place in this relational context, that I felt it was necessary to elaborate a synthesis of these relations by means of a conceptual approximation 19 that I named feminist nebulosa. The reason for naming it nebulosa lies in the fact that these relations are not clearly presented. They are diffuse, opaque, and poorly defined, given the plural, multifaceted, multivocal configuration of the feminists and feminism. But there is a substantive meaning of this conceptual metaphor: feminism presents itself as a distant entity, its actions are sparse, not easily found in the social spaces, just like a nebula in the cosmos. Whenever these relations are interpreted by society, they are remodeled and reconfigured through common sense, and become integrated to the nebulosa complex, and they contribute to the elaboration of representations of feminism and feminists (Albernaz, 1996). The notion of Feminist nebulosa, will help us to understand how the feminism representations are constructed. I still find it necessary to point out that this notion initially frightened me. First, its strangeness as a concept affected me; second it posed a threat to the efficacy of a movement in which I was/am a sympathizer. 2° I came to the conclusion that I would either face this problem or the question of the construction of the representations of feminism would remain unsolved. I noticed that whenever the notion of nebulosa was applied retroactively to the experience of my becoming a feminist, it served its purposes in making possible an understanding of the initial difficulties I had to accept in comprehending its diversity. When this diversity was camouflaged, only the hegemonic positions appeared as part of feminist thought. This mechanism also reflects another difficulty of feministinternal power relations. Because there is no specific space in which to delineate mechanisms of representation and alliances among different political positions, differences are dealt with as if they were non-existent. This way, the notion of nebulosa would help us to understand those differences. I also realized that the notion of feminist nebulosa could be one of the reasons for the ambiguities that seem to encompass the feelings and representations of feminism. This ambiguity prompted me to this research problem as well as the construction of that notion. Ambiguity is evident both in the academy (as a space of scientific production) and among non-militant people. As many

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anthropologists often apply their research to the realities they are engaged, I felt the results of my research could help feminism to ponder over its diversity in terms of the efficacy and legitimacy of its political public actions.

THE NEBULOSA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF REPRESENTATIONS: FEMINISM BETWEEN THE GOOD AND THE EVIL My analyses were very suggestive and pointed to a confirmation rather than a rejection of the nebuIosa notion. In spite of the idea of feminism being a diffuse one to the group, all persons were able to present a personal definition of the term which relates to the banners of the new feminism:21 you know that I never stopped to think? ... attempt of women to get the same right as men (M-P); it's the question of feminine emancipation(W-P); it's to obtain an equality of rights between men and women (W-H); Search for equality between men and women.., speciallythe professional one, but also in the affectuous life (M-H). This way, one can say that feminism, as a movement, has a social penetration that enforces the idea of studying representations related to practices of the movement. This realization is very important in the context of this work for it enables the reflection on, or even the review of, the predominant position of the social sciences in Brazil to relativize the specificity of the contributions of feminism in the transformations of gender relations. In the verbalizations of our interviewees there was a general acceptance of the feminist ideas. This acknowledgement was a recurrent one for the majority of the people in the group studied. However, these verbalizations always appeared surrounded by ambiguity, the positive aspects followed by adversative conjunctions, introducing a negative criticism to the movement and its militants: from the social point of view I think women have to search for equality. Indeed, I think this is the legitimatefeminismfor me. . . . On the other hand, I don't think it is nice when some women become like men, OK? (M-P), It's got to be firm (tough) indeed, in, in (break) . . . . it's not to radicalize.., it is a changing process and I think that this cannot be forced. (W-H). This way, I think that the opinions of the minority group, present a greater degree of rejection and express more strongly held stereotypes of feminism. These opinions are emblematic of the representations of feminism that

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effectively circulate through social spaces, and more markedly, in academic spaces. They are filtered by the rational dialogue of moderation, in terms of habitus. As, for example: feminism for me has created a very negative image of the woman, you know? . . . I think feminism . . . it . . . the radical one, ends up repulsing, it isn't? (W-H). Men being men, and women being feminine, both walking together, would have a much more important result than a feminist movement (M-H).

In sum, the ideas of negation more strongly expressed by the minority group, underlie the construction of the representation of the majority. The group that better presents the most negative representations in my study was that from the History Master Program. This fact can be related - as I argue at the end of the text - to the weight attributed (by theoretical discussion) to structural causes that explain social change and gender relations. Feminism, in this sense, would become a less relevant issue. How do those people, then, affirm knowledge about feminist ideas and feminism? The group investigated mass communication as the most recurrent source of knowledge. Therefore, this knowledge is direct. This corroborates the idea contained in the notion of nebulosa that feminism is an agent that moves from afar; it does not present itself in a concrete way to its most encompassing social actors. On the other hand, it seems that the impression of these ideas by the public domain is so strong, that its materialization is made by an empty actor. Such is the case that even the persons who claimed to know feminists personally militants or not forgot to refer to them as they talked about the means through which they were presented to feminism. This perception of the means by which one learns about feminism is coherent with the common sense view that feminism is unnecessary. This is easily verified by the significant verbalizations of the informants (by male and female). These verifications involved counterexamples of women who broke the traditional gender relations by personal efforts, without group connections. These women are emblematic historical persons or women of their family and friendship circles. The speeches that follow indicate this kind of opinion: The (feminist) ideas themselves didn't (influence me). But my mother's attitude contributed much, you know? I didn't even k n o w that it was a kind of feminism . . . But this way I don't think I am feminist (W-H). To tell you the truth, my conscience as a woman came through my History course, not through a feminist movement. (W-H).

These examples were seen as more significant, to the informants, whenever they were understood as portraying rebel women with no involvement with feminism discussions.

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This way of perceiving who is feminist gives the opportunity for the construction of models for them. Women might or not belong to groups or organizations of the movement. In a more extreme point of view they simply do not exist. This way, the informants (males and females) construct a scale of the feminist that ranges from the least radical to the most radical ones, and from the least to the most acceptable ones. Let us see some examples: there are no feminists, there are people that defend this equality (M-H); It's m y mother, my s i s t e r . . . You don't need to be [from a group], you can be a militant inside your own home (M-P); It seems to me as I was an admirer of feminists, mainly feminine feminists (M-H); But at the same time I am against that radical feminist, who hates men. (W-H); Look, I guess it is a necessary evil• Generally a feminist is a very radical and hopeless person• (M-H).

The ideal model of the 'evil' feminist is that of the radical feminist. This is the more influential model. For some informants it synthesizes all of the moments in which the feminist set of ideas is criticized. These moments are also, in general, identified as the militant ones. The 'good' feminists appear as exceptions and are frequently associated with an informant's circle of relations such as that of the family or of a group of friends. In short, for the majority of the group there is an ideal type of feminist, generally laughable, based on a conduct of radicalism, anger and unhappiness, associated with the movement. That makes such denomination, when it is imputed to some women, a way of insulting them. The word feminist has a contemptuous sense . . . it was like they wanted to offend you, to curse you (W-P).

This way, it is easy to suggest that the stereotypes of the feminist remain practically unaltered. The synthesis of this group's analysis on feminism manifests and is interrelated with the view that the ideas of equality between the sexes circulate with no body, no actor, and no group. It occurs as a process of natural evolution of Western Society. I think that many women and men, in many places of the w o r l d . . , have debated the issue • . . and I think this general debate, not restricted to a m o v e m e n t . . , has really changed the visions about men and women" (M-H); • . . within an historical process, like they are doing, somehow in a diffusing way, trying to occupy each more space in society" (M-H).

And until this natural evolution of the relations between sexes reaches equality, it is associated with the romantic idea of harmony and complementation of the

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relations between men and women in Western society that is shared by the group. It seems rather frightening to the interviewees (male and female) to think of gender relations as power relations which engender conflicts in which negotiations are difficult, and solved outside the arena of consensus, through the rupture in the distribution of power for each sex. For many people in the group, the movement is associated with or comes close to the rupture in gender relations. This rupture appears in verbalizations of radicalism associated with both feminism and feminists. Radicalism is translated into proposals of feminism, which extol rapidness of changes and reconfiguration of the masculine and feminine categories, considered essential, without the consensus, which accentuates the conflict and disputes of power. Therefore, fundamental to the group is the separation of the ideas of equality between sexes, which circulates in society, from its social realization stemming from the feminist movement and especially from its militants. This representation is in accordance with the refusal by of some of the people in the group to confer legitimacy to the feminist movement, due to its present structure, for neither does it make clear how it delegates power to the group nor how the feminist representativity is constructed. House of Women!? (Referring to an advertisement about a feminist group) I have never heard about that! Who do they stand for? (W-H). This refusal is coherent with the hegemonic ideology in our society that values political representation through parliamentary representation, in detriment of the direct action that characterizes feminism (Pinto, 1994). This way, feminism is criticized on account of two parameters contained in the notion of nebulosa: the structure of the movement and the ideological basis that furnishes the elements to enable the reading of social phenomena by the actors of society. This structure confers to the relations of feminism with society an opaque, diluted quality. This idea is overlapped with the analysis, which contextualizes changes in gender relations in a way that relativize the contributions of feminism. That is, as they pointed to changes in gender relations, such as the participation of women in the work market with equal opportunities, the fact most valued and visible by the group, the interviewees emphasized these changes are a result of such social phenomena as increases in educational attainment, the sexual revolution, and access to the labor market itself by women. Not exactly feminism, but it was a more intellectual or more political people. Womenwere much more freed ... (M-P).

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Even nowadays, a woman who conquers a place is the one who has money, who goes to university, who has a job! (W-H). The result is the mutual strengthening of these two ideas: the idea of the illegitimacy of feminism and its weak contribution to the transformations of gender relations, which are a reference and a justification to the negative representations of feminism by the group. So, following the interpretation line I have given to the verbalizations, how do representations of feminism condense? How do they make evident its relation with the feminist nebulosa, which I understand to be one of the founding elements of these representations? What is evident is a dichotomic classification of the feminist movement; its militants can be expressed in two ways: (1) feminism is 'good', positive, legitimate when it postulates equality through a gradual process, consensus, without power disputes and, especially preserving the feminine and the masculine, as essential qualities of men and women. (2) Feminism is 'evil', negative and illegitimate when it acts in a radical fashion, exacerbating conflict, disputing power, in a fast process and principally because it intends to eliminate the masculine and the feminine as essential qualities of each sex. It is not uncommon for a person to defend both ideas, however, some people only share the negative values of these representations. These representations are fraught with ambiguities, not only because one ego defends the two positions, but also because, in order to see feminism positively, it is separated from its militants and defined as a set of social ideas emptied of a concrete actor. Then, 'good' feminism is the one, which circulates, that is transparent, distant, opaque, and to some extent idealized feminism. 'Evil' feminism, in turn, has flesh, bones, and blood. It is represented by the radical feminists, and holds all disparaging elements that I used in the construction of the nebulosa (it is illegitimate, it offers little contribution for change, it is unnecessary). This way, the acceptance of feminism translates a re-reading of feminism that is confusing, making evident the opaqueness of the relations between feminism and society, exposed here through the notion of feminist nebulosa. And, this rereading of feminism permeated by the nebulosa is even more evident as the group accepts the feminist ideas but denies its existence by refusing to accept its militants. It is interesting to notice that the group more permeable to the notion of nebulosa, that is, the one that perceives the movement in a more negative way, is made primarily of historians, academic people bordering the social sciences. This discipline constructed an epistemology to explain social changes and their actors in the processes of modernization, through categories such as Economy/Class/Structure. That is, History created a hierarchy of explanatory causes for the social processes. This hierarchy was present in some of the

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comments of the historians here interviewed. In these reports people detach or lessen the importance of feminist fights in changing processes of gender relations in Western societies. In this sense, social theories that inform this kind of interpretation could be incorporated into the notion of nebulosa, they are among the elements that narrows the comprehension of feminism. This one, finding no place in an already consolidated theory, is then re-signified, being put out of the explanations about gender relations. This fact seems to me very useful for a reflection on how the nebulosa can be present in the conceptualizing of the relations between feminism and the academy. To understand this tension inside History leads us to think about another dimension of social scientists practices: what are the relations between our theoretical positions and our everyday actions, our vision of the world? Even though permeated by the critical - or supposed critical - reflections about the social, social scientists (including myself) are not free of transforming them in a conservative reading of this social world. The history of feminism, its first academic rejection, is a good example to unravel this point. We, academic people, perhaps incorporate theory in everyday life, re-elaborate it by 'common sense' - even though an intellectual common sense - and come back once more to theory and reincorporate ourselves to scientific elaboration. What seems to be important is the fact that the nebulosa enables a less relativizing reading of the contributions of feminism in the transformations of the relations between sexes, both in previous researches and in researches to be conducted. In this perspective, the investigations that exaggerate in giving a lesser weight to feminism in the configuration of gender relations, certainly contribute to an elaboration of the representations of feminism - in the academic and personal dimensions - that are more negative than positive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people contributed for the final version of this article, and it would be impossible to quote all the names. I thank particularly Marcos Homero Ferreira Lima for the first version in English; and Simone Frangella for the final revision. The base of this work, my Master Thesis, wouldn't be concluded without the support of Odete Vasconcelos, whom I thank in a special way.

NOTES 1. Text translated by Mat-cos Homero Ferreira Lima, Anthropology graduate student at Federal University of Pernambuco. The modifications for the second version were made by Simone Frangella, Doctorate Student at State University of Campinas.

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2. See literature on changes in values and family smacture: Velho (1987), Figueira (1987), Goldani (1994). 3. Refer to the literature that ascribes to feminism the elaboration of these proposals for society and its achievements: Franchetto et al. (1981); Soares (1994); Moraes (1985). 4. On this theme see: Corr~a (1984); Cruz (1982); Luz (Ed.) (1982). 5. I agree with Soares' statement that feminism is the generating nucleus of many ideas of change in gender relations, whose primary aim is to elaborate claims and construct theoretically interpretations/explanations to account for gender relations. See also Buarque (1991); Costa and Sardenberg (1991). 6. The present attitude of the academy towards feminism has undergone changes that point out to a categorical assertion of its role in society and in the theoretical constructions of the human sciences. See Gulbenkian Commission (1996). 7. A text by Saffioti (1987), is exemplary of this issue, when the author emphasizes the relation between the radical current of the American feminism and the rejection of the movement as a whole in the academy and in the Brazilian society. 8. Moser (1991), analyzes in details the emergence of the concept of gender and its development, as it arises from the discussions of feminists in countries of the Southern Hemisphere, and the diverse shades of its incorporation into governmental policies. 9. I have been currently conducting a research together with an NGO, in which the gender debate is beginning with a relative consensus, however, whenever the debate on feminism occurs, it raises controversies. 10. Throughout the text, whenever I speak of feminism as a developer of the proposals and its central place as a political articulator I neither deny the other factors nor that they are interrelated, undergoing influences in the transformations of the position of women in Western society. I am not advocating a positivist relation of cause and effect in a univocal direction, rather I want to emphasize the role of feminism since, in my opinion, it has never been studied from this point of view. I also understand that social ideas circulate from specific points of reference, and I reassert that I see feminism as one of the principal developers of the reflections on the relations between sexes in Modem Western Societies. 11. See also Figueira (1987). 12. The definition of gender that I use here interchanges the reflections by Scott (1996); Saffioti (1992); and Heilborn (1992). I understand that discussion by Saffioti and Heiborn, the former interrelating this concept with class places its importance in the analysis of other social fields, and the latter for highlighting gender as a category and its classificatory implications in the construction of hierarchical values, serves to a less rigid understanding of Scott's definition of gender as power relations, enriching this debate. 13. The sources I used here were the history of the movement mad the reflection of the feminists on the trends of the movements and its philosophical constitution. The term philosophical being applied here to refer to the explanations on the origin of the inequality between the sexes. I perceive three of these explanations within feminism: biological causes which define the differences of Sex as essential and immutable for men and women - essentialism; social causes which focus on the differentiation as constructions of culture and history, so that men and women may have identical characteristics - this perspective draws on rationalism; and finally the differences as result of historical constructions, however the equality is constructed in the political spaces without eliminating cultural differences between men and women - pluralism based on the concept of gender. These explanations of the origins might contain opposing currents

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from the point of view of its political proposals to transform gender relations. See Collin (1993a, b); Yannoulas (1994). 14. When I started taking part in the movement in Recife, this was a position that circulated with a certain frequency. 15. The book by D'Euboone cited previously is exemplary of the necessity of readings of this kind. 16. The literature I analyzed was the one produced at the outset of the new feminism, considering that the proposals which have been presented ever since are the ones which interests me for the analysis of the representation of this movement. In this analysis I considered the texts that make political proposals to the movement, such as the ones produced to try to come up with a typology of these political trends of feminism. 17. The constitution of many of those groups as non-governmental organizations requires an even more detailed analysis, which is not convenient for me now. 18. Following the considerations by Pinto (1994), with which I agree. 19. I agree with Fourasti6 (1994, p. 24) when she affirms that, "after all, the concept is useful only to face certain aspects of reality, notably constructing hypotheses, orders of possibilities, associations which do not exist this way in society. They purely constitute a construction of the spirit, necessary but not sufficient to evaluate the phenomena of nature and the cultures". 20. It is important noticing that I consider the construction of the nebulosa closer to an ethnological than to a theoretical reflection, this is so, exactly by the necessity it has to mature with the passing of time. 21. During the analysis that follows it will be given representative examples of speeches of the investigated group, intercalated in the text, quoted in italic and identified in a key between brackets. The convention for the key was done according to two criteria, sex and course: W for women; M for Men; P for Physics and H for History. The quotations can be found spread all over the fifth chapter (Representations of Feminism: the nebulosa and the afection mad professional practices) of my Master's Dissertation.

REFERENCES Albernaz, L.S.F. (1996). Feminismo, por6m at6 cello ponto ... representa96es do feminismo no contexto das prticas profissionals e de g/mero. Unpublished masters thesis, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife. Alves, B. M., & Pitanguy, J. (1985). O Que ~ Feminismo. S~o Paulo, Abril Cultural: Brasiliense. Bourdieu, P. (1983). Ensaio de urea teofia da prfitica. In: R. Ortiz,. (org.) Pierre Bourdieu. (pp. 46-81) Sociologia. Silo Paulo, Atica. Bourdieu, P. (1983). Trabalhos e projetos In: R. Ortiz, (org.) Pierre Bourdieu. Sociologia. (pp. 38-45) S~o Paulo, Atica. Bruschini, C. (1994). O trabalho da mulher brasileira nas d6cadas recentes. In: Estudos Feminisms. Ano 2, No. Especial, jul./dez. 179-201. Buarque, C.. (1991). O feminismo; mudanfa do paradigma. Unpublished masthers thesis, Federal Unisersity of Pernambuco, Recife. Buarque, C. (1986). Movimento de mulheres no Nordeste: estudo preliminar. Recife, mimeo. Collin, 15'. (1993a). Prdxis da diferenfa: notas sobre o trgico do sujeito. (2a. ed.). Recife, SOSCorpo.

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Collin, F. (1993b). As mesmas e as diferengas. (2a. ed.) Recife, SOS-Corpo. Comiss~o Ulbenkian Para a Reestruturagao Das Ci~ncias Socias. (1996) Para abrir as Ci~ncias Sociais. S~o Paulo, Cortez. Corr6a, M. (1984). Mulher e famflia: um debate sobre a literatura recente. BIB. Rio de Janeiro, n. 18, jul./dez. 21-44. Costa, A. A., & Sardenberg, C. M. B. (1991). Feminismo, feministas e movimentos sociais. Rio de Janeiro, mimeo. Costa. A. O. (1987) t~ vi~ivel o feminismo nos tr6picos? Reslduos de insatisfaq~o. In: Oliveira, E. M. (org.) Mulheres: da domesticidade & cidadania. Estudos sobre movimentos sociais e demoeratizagao. (pp. 87-93) .h.guas de Sao Pedro, CNDM.

Cruz, A. G. V. (1982). Os movimentos de liberta9fio da mulher na Franqa e na Ithlia (1970-1980): primeiros elementos para um estudo comparativo do novo feminismo na Europa e no Brasil. In: M. T. Luz, (org.). 0 lugar da mulher. Estudos sobre a condig6o feminina na sociedade atual. (pp. 33-58) Rio de Janeiro, Graal. D'eauboone, F. (1977). As mulheres antes do patriarcado. Lisboa, Vega. Drumont, M. P. (1982). O machismo como sistema de representaq6es ideol6gicas recfprocas. In: Luz, M. T. (org.). O lugar da mulher. Estudos sobre a condigao feminina na sociedade atual. (pp. 73-86) Rio de Janeiro, Graal. Figueira, S. (1987). O 'moderuo' e o 'arcaico' na nova farmqia brasileira: notas sobre a dimens~o invislvel da mudan~a social. In: FIGUEIRA, S. Uma nova famflia? 0 moderno e o arcaico na famflia de classe m~dia brasileira. (pp. 11-30) Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar. Fourasti6, B. (1994). Fenomenografia e vitalismo sociol6gico. In: Encontro das Ci~ncias Sociais, 2. Anais. (pp. 23-32) Recife, UFPE Editora Universitria. Franchetto, B., Cavalcanti, M. L. C. V., & Heilborn, M. L. (1981). Antropologia e feminismo. In: Franchetto, B., Cavalcanti, M. L. C. V., & Heilborn, M. L. Perspectiva antropoldgica da mulher. (pp. 11-48) Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, vol. 1. Goldani, A. M. (1994). Retratos de fanuqia em tempos de crise. Estudos Feministas. Ano 2, N Especial, jul./dez. 303-35. Heilboru, M. L. (1992). Fazendo g~nero? A antropologia da mulher no Brasil. In: Costa, A. O., & Bruschini, C. (org.) Urea questao de G~nero. (pp. 93-126) Rio de Janeiro, Rosa dos Tempos. Heilborn, M. L. (1991). G~nero e condi~o feminina: urea abordagem antropoligica. In: Neves, M. G. R., & Costa, D. M. Mulheres e polfticas ptiblicas. (pp. 23-37) Rio de Janeiro, IBAM/UNICEF. Luz, M. T. (1982). O Lar e maternidade: institui96es polfticas. In: Luz, M. T. (org.). O lugar da mulher. Estudos sobre a condi~ao feminina na sociedade atual. (pp. 9-23) Rio de Janeiru, Graal. Machado, L. Z. (1992). Feminismo, academia e interdisciplinaridade. In: Costa, A. O. & Bruschini, C. (org.) Uma questgto de G~nero. (pp. 24-38) Rio de Janeiro, Rosa dos Tempos. Michel, A. (1982). O Feminismo: uma abordagem hist6rica. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar. Morales M. L. Q. (1985). Mulheres em movimento. O balango da D6cada da Mulber do ponto de .vista do feminismo, das religi6es e da polftica. S. Paulo, Nobel/Conselho Estadual da Condigao Feminina. Moser, C. O. N. (1991). La planificaci6n de g6nero en el tercer mundo: enfrentando las necesidades pr~icticas y estrat6gicas de g6nero. In: Guzmann V., Portocarrero, P., Vargas V. Una nueva lectura: g~nero en el desarrollo. Lima, Entre Mujeres. Pinto, C. R. J. (1994). Mulher e pofftica no Brasil: os impasses do feminismo enquanto movimento social, face as regras do jogo da democracia representativa. Estudos Feministas. Ano 2, N ° Especial, jul./dez. 256-70.

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Saffioti, H. 1. B. (1992). Rearticulando g~nero e classe social. In: Costa, A. L., & Bruschini, C. (org.) Uma quest~o de G~nero. (pp. 183-215) Rio de Janeiro, Rosa dos Tempos. Saffioti, H. I. B. (1987). Feminismos e seus ffutos no Brasil. In: Sader, E. (org.) Movimentos socials na transif~o democrdtica. (pp. 105-157) S~o Paulo, Cortez. Sarti, C. (1988). Feminismo no Brasil: urea trajet6ria particular. Cadernos de Pesquisa. $6o Paulo, No 64, fev. 38-47. Scott, J. (1996). G~nero: urea categoria ~til para a andlise histdrica. Recife, SOS Corpo - G~nero e Cidadania. Soares, V. (1994). O movimento feminista: paradigmas e desafios. In: Estudos Feminisms. Ano 2, N Especial, jul./dez. 11-24. Velho, G. (1987). lndividualismo e culture: notas para uma antropoIogia para as sociedades contemporaneas. (2a.) Rio de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar. Yannoulas, S. C. (1994). Iguais mas n~o idanticas. Estudos Feminisms. Ano 2, voL 2, n. 3, jan./jun. 7-16.

BEING A WHITE AUSTRALIANCANADIAN FEMINIST DOING RESEARCH WITH SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN OF COLOR IN THE DIASPORA: CROSSING BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES, CREATING SPACES Helen Ralston

INTRODUCTION What are the implications of feminist research and action for a White AustralianCanadian doing research with South Asian 'women of color'1 in the diaspora? What does it mean for a researcher and for an immigrant woman to cross borders and boundaries and create a new space for herself? My concern is with issues of crossing race, class and other borders and entering another person's space. Who has the right, the capacity to do research with whom? Whose 'project' am I doing? Who owns the project? To whom and how do we present our research findings? For this sociologist, the question is not "Knowledge for what?" but rather "Knowledge about and for whom?" Who can 'really' know about other w o m e n ' s experience? How do we know that our findings and understandings are true or valid - above all, when others have different findings about women in supposedly similar situations?

An International Feminist Challenge to Theory, Volume 5, pages 213-231. Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 0-7623-0720-X

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All of the above challenging questions have informed the research I have been doing for more than a decade. I am by no means the first feminist researcher to highlight the dilemmas of doing research across borders of race, ethnicity, class and nation) In this paper, I attempt to make inroads into the thorny boundary between black and white feminist researchers. I explore some of the conceptual and biographical underpinnings of my experience as a researcher with immigrant women of South Asian origin. I then describe the research program that involved comparative studies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I outline its objectives and its theoretical and methodological approaches. I discuss the processes of doing the projects with a diverse research team, as opposed to the findings of the studies. I indicate by footnotes where I have published results. Finally, I present some response to my questions at the outset of the paper and raise an even more challenging question for women of color and white feminist researchers of the twenty-first century.

CROSSING BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES Border and boundary crossing has material, symbolic and identity dimensions for immigrant women and for feminist researchers. Most obviously, it refers to geographical migration from one country, region, context or space to another. From the perspective of the immigrant woman, departure from the homeland and customary extended family networks and migration to a foreign country to settle among unfamiliar people of different race, ethnicity, language, culture and religion can be an alienating experience. It can also be a movement of growth and change. Border-crossing refers to continuously crossing intersecting boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, caste and gender to reconstruct new identifies, new structures and new relations. From the standpoint of the researcher, doing feminist cross-cultural research with women of the South who are 'other' than white, middle-class, professional women of the North can make visible, break down or create, borders, boundaries and barriers of communication. It involves the researcher's exploration of self-definition and self-identity "consciousness-raising concerning feminist ethnocentrism, a subspecies of Western/Northern ethnocentrism and racism" (Reinharz, 1992: 113). Crosscultural feminist research investigates culturally specific factors with a view to building bridges and creating common space between women of color and white women and to facilitating positive social change in our everyday world. Yet, neither women of color nor white women are homogeneous categories. There are borders and boundaries constructed within each category; for example, caste, class, religious, regional and national origin boundaries.

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INTERSECTIONS OF PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY AND H I S T O R Y IN ' M I G R A N T N E S S ' Forty years ago, C. Wright Mills (1959) presented the classic exposition of the significance of intersections of biography and history in the construction of critical sociological knowledge. 3 For me, long since a migrant from Australia to Canada, a passage to India for a sabbatical year in 1979 was the prelude to many further border crossings and to my ongoing research with South Asian immigrant women in the far-flung South Asian diaspora. 4 Having been born and brought up in Australia, as a child, I painstakingly colored in large expanses of red on the world map, while carefully maintaining territorial boundaries, to signify the far-ranging expansion of the British Empire. The Indian subcontinent was familiar to me. Classmates in my Sydney boarding school were English wartime evacuees whose parents were administrators of Britain's Empire. There were no South Asian girls among my classmates. Indeed, until I was a young woman, I never met a brown or black girl, for I grew up in the largest metropolis of White Australia. Aborigines were actually, as well as politically and socially, 'fringe dwellers' in Australia at that time. My grandparents were migrants from two English dependencies, Scotland and Ireland - no friends of their English rulers - to the then British colonies of New South Wales and Queensland. In my twenties, I also became a migrant to another part of that far-flung, but already contracting, British Commonwealth - the Dominion of Canada. In 1948, the Australian Citizenship Act told me that I was indeed an Australian citizen, after all those years of knowing and believing myself to be a citizen already. We knew that the 'mother country' defined us as colonials. I came to Canada with an Australian passport, but the cover told me that I was a British subject, Britannia ruled the waves that my ship traversed. Globalization was the reality of the economy, communications and transportation of people, goods and services. The discourse - Empire, Dominion, colony, subject - underlined the hegemony of Britain in the international political economy of those pre- and early post-war years. Like my Australian peers, I wanted to work as well as travel in North America. I therefore completed an immigration application form and sent it by ordinary mail to the Canadian High Commissioner in Canberra - together with my passport and the necessary medical certificates and photographs. I had no guaranteed job in Canada, just some tentative offers. Because I was young, unmarried and well educated, Canada accepted me with alacrity for landed immigrant status in the independent applicant category. I did not have to go to Canberra for an interview. The acceptance came in the mail. When my ship reached the Canadian port of entry, Victoria, British Columbia, in May 1956,

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I was given a slip of paper that was duly stamped in English and French: 'landed immigrant/immigrant re~u' (not 'immigrante regue'). The borders of the British Commonwealth of Nations were quite permeable to one such as me. I experienced 'difference' and alienation on only two occasions: when I was fingerprinted for a United States visa to visit a childhood friend in California, and when I was verbally labeled by a United States immigration officer at the port of Honolulu as 'alien' and summarily separated with other alien goats from the United States citizen sheep. At Montreal, I had no difficulty in getting immediate employment in my profession at the time - medical social work. My Australian education and certification were recognized as equivalent to Canadian qualifications - with commensurate salary, of course. Until I became a Canadian citizen, I carried around the flimsy piece of paper that testified to my landed immigrant status. I could vote in elections and had the same rights and privileges as native-born Canadian citizens. In contrast to my South Asian colleagues and friends, no one, to my knowledge, ever identified or labeled me as 'immigrant woman.' Occasionally, friends in Canada have referred to me as "our Australian" - like some exotic exhibit from Down Under. When I visit India, I cross another border of the Commonwealth into a country that was once the jewel in the crown of the British imperial ruler. Because of my hybrid cross-cultural accent, I am often identified there as English. More frequently, I am socially defined as 'European' - along with Canadian, American, German, Australian, English and others whose ancestors originated in the European continent and were separated from Indians by boundaries of race and skin color. After all, we "all look the same." However, I shared with Indians the historical status of being a former colonial or imperial subject of the British Crown. That is my story of being a White Australian migrant to Canada - a very different story from that of my brown South Asian interviewees. Upon settlement in the new country, race explicitly determined the relative permeability of Canada's social, economic and political boundaries for us. My personal biographical and historical experience has had a lot to do with my ongoing research with women who trace their ancestral origins to the Indian subcontinent.

THE RESEARCH PROGRAM Introduction Migration of South Asians from the Indian subcontinent to Canada, Australia and other British Empire/Commonwealth countries is one of the most important

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movements of peoples in the development of the international political economy of modern times. It had in the past mad continues to have an enormous impact on the economic development of Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries. In the last decade, which has seen a shift to Asia as the major continental source for migrants to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India has moved into third place for Canada and eighth place for Australia as a source country. Yet, the migration of South Asians throughout the Commonwealth has received relatively little systematic attention from researchers. The migration of South Asian women has been virtually ignored. The experience of migrant women is assumed to be the same as that for men. The term 'South Asian' is sociologically problematic. It encompasses distinctly different ethnocultural groups. Being 'South Asian' refers not so much to the personal qualities of individuals who emigrated directly from the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh), or else indirectly from East and South Africa, the Caribbean or Fiji through their ancestors, but rather to social characteristics which have been constructed and reconstructed in historical and ongoing social relationships in specific social, economic and political contexts. South Asian is a relatively new social construct in Canadian society that has been shaped and reshaped by the immigrants themselves and by other Canadians in their day-to-day activities, s How South Asian immigrant women construct their identity and represent themselves tends to vary in terms of whom they are addressing. In conversations, few 'South Asians' identify themselves as such. More commonly, particularly where there are large concentrations of regional cultural groups, women will identify themselves as Punjabi, Pakistani, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Sri Lankan, Fiji Indian and so on. Such self-definitions set limits and boundaries between 'the community' and other South Asian groups as well as other Canadians. When an interviewer such as me is cognizant of regional, linguistic and religious distinctions among people of the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora, then South Asian women will be extremely specific about representing their identity. My visits to India and other parts of the British Commonwealth, my return visits to Australia and New Zealand, my life as a Canadian have all aroused my interest in the long history of migration of people from the Indian subcontinent, their experiences of exploitation, and their unacknowledged enrichment of the countries where they have settled. As a woman and a feminist scholar, I have been particularly concerned with the differential impact of migration and state policies on South Asian women as compared to men. Moreover, over some thirty years of residence in Atlantic Canada - a hinterland in the Canadian political economy - I have been irked by the assumption that what

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is true for immigrant women in central metropolises like Toronto is true for them in the rest of Canada. In fact, once in mild protest, I introduced myself at a conference as coming from "elsewhere in Canada" - the only reference to Atlantic Canada in the literature that I had read about South Asian Canadians. My point is that only comparative studies of experiences in different politicaleconomic, social and cultural contexts can capture the realities of lived experience of immigrant women and men. I therefore initiated my research in the neglected Atlantic Canada hinterland. With the help of research assistants, I have now interviewed South Asian women in Atlantic Canada, British Columbia, Australia and New Zealand. In addition, I have interviewed a sample of non-migrant sisters of interviewees who live in India and the Fiji Islands .6

Objectives The objectives of the research program were: (1) to undertake a comparative study of how gender, ethnicity, race and class and their interconnectedness in state policies have affected the lived experience of South Asian immigrant women in three Pacific Rim Commonwealth countries - Canada, Australia and New Zealand; (2) to compare the findings from these three projects with the lived experience of a sample of sisters of these immigrant women in India and Fiji - the principal source countries of the women. The research was funded by seed money from three Saint Mary's University Research Grants for pilot projects and two large Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grants to do the major comparative studies. Three types of state policies have been considered in the three settlement cotmtries: (1) intake or immigration selection policy; (2) settlement policy; and (3) multicultural and multiracial policy. The impact of the policies has been examined in terms of the experience of women of South Asian origin in four spheres of life: (1) migration experience; (2) education and paid work experience; (3) domestic life experience; and (4) organizational experience. Key questions addressed in all projects of the research program have been: • What are the connections among state policies and practices and the lived experience of contemporary immigrant women of South Asian origin in the three settlement countries? • How has the region where women settled made a difference in their lives? • How does the experience of immigrant women compare with that of their non-migrant sisters? • What are the policy and action implications of the findings?

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DOING FEMINIST RESEARCH As a white hyphenated Australian-Canadian feminist doing research with South Asian women of color in the Diaspora, I was concerned about the interactive relationship in interviews between my white self and the brown interviewees. I made every attempt to be a responsive listener and to communicate my knowledge of India, my love of its people and its diverse cultures, my acceptance of its economic, social and political realities - with all its warts which had become part of my being through many visits to the subcontinent. In interviews, I introduced myself as a migrant, who had come from another Commonwealth country to Canada, alone as a young, single adult. From the standpoint of any immigrant woman, departure from the homeland and migration to a strange country in order to settle and start a new way of life in a different climate and unfamiliar surroundings is a dramatic step to take. I shared this experience with the women. As it turned out, South Asian immigrant women in Atlantic Canada were, and still are, mainly urban middle-class professionals. I also shared that social identity with them. The motivation for my research with South Asian women has been to listen to the voices of women who are socially and demographically constructed as "visible minority women" in Canada and as non-English-speaking-background (NESB) women in Australia. v My goal has been to record the stories of their lived experience from their standpoint, and to examine the salience of skin color and language, respectively, in their lives. I have analyzed the relations of ruling that determine that lived experience. 8 Rather than appropriating their voices, I have attempted to provide a forum where the women are heard and heeded and where their experience, culture and productive labor are valued. I hope that the book and other publications I have produced will achieve these goals. In sharing the results of the research with South Asian women's groups at Halifax, Vancouver, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth (Ralston 1996d, 1997a, b, c), I have sought feedback as to whether my description and analysis rings true to their experience and is of value to them. 9

THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH At the time of my initial research with South Asian women, namely 1987, there was little theory or methodology to address the lived experience of immigrant women. There was none that focused on women in Atlantic Canada. I consciously adopted Dorothy Smith's feminist sociological perspective in my

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theory and methodology. Her book, The Everyday Worm as Problematic, had just been published. Drawing on the core ideas of symbolic interactionism, Dorothy Smith (1987, 123-125) noted that "the concerting and coordination of actual activities by actual individuals . . . is continually being worked out in the course of working together, competing with one another, conversing, and all the other ways in which people coact." In her conception, "(t)he social construction of reality means precisely that of creating a world we have in common." She has pointed out that "(e)stablished sociology has objectified a consciousness of society and social relations that 'knows' them from the standpoint of their ruling and from the standpoint of men who do that ruling" (Smith, 1987: 2-4). When society and social relations are known and understood solely from the perspective of men, then the gender subtext of 'relations of ruling' is largely invisible. By exploring immigrant women's activities in everyday life that is, 'lived experience,' the largely invisible unequal relations of immigrant women's lives in household, community and the larger society are made visible. Smith's goal is to discover women's experience and to link it to "the politics and practice of progressive struggle" (Smith, 1992: 88). In all projects, I and my research assistants started from the standpoint of immigrant women who described their everyday lived experience. We explored "from that perspective the generalizing and generalized relations (of ruling) in which each individual's everyday world is embedded" (Smith, 1987: 185). Following Dorothy Smith's theorizing (1987, 1992) and that of Roxana Ng (1981, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1993a, b), the concept 'lived experience' is to be understood in terms of practical activities in all spheres of everyday life, be they the so-called 'private' or 'public' sphere. I have explored what actually happened - that is, what the women did rather than their 'perceived experience' of the situations in which they found themselves. Such practical activities include things like doing housework, cooking meals, ferrying children to and from schools and after-school activities, working in various full-time or parttime, paid or unpaid job-related activities, doing volunteer work, performing various personal, familial, communal and religious activities, and participating in cultural, religious, social, political and women's organizations. By exploring these activities, women's lived experience is made visible, their voices audible. As Roxana Ng (1984: 1) has pointed out, Dorothy Smith's method of inquiry "grounds the sociological problematic in the actual conditions of people's lives rather than the academic discourse." Our research goal of "taking the standpoint of the immigrant woman" is drawn from feminist standpoint theories and approaches, as explicated by Dorothy Smith (1974, 1987, 1992), Nancy Hartsock (1983), Sandra Harding (1991, 1993) and others. Feminist standpoint theory has its critics, of course. 1° -

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Nevertheless, I would argue that a standpoint theoretical and methodological approach has produced fruitful research. It comes from a feminist consciousness of the material realities of women's lives. In the specific research context, there is also a heightened awareness of the alienation realities of migration and migrantness, especially for women of color. These realities are analyzed as "structural consequences of an unjust social order . . . (that) can become a resource for social transformation" (Code 1995: 41). In practice, in the process of gathering interview data, "taking the standpoint of the immigrant woman" involves an initial and ever-developing awareness of the personal and structural barriers and boundaries between interviewer and interviewee. These real and symbolic barriers of race, ethnicity, class, language, education, religion, citizenship and so on, can blind the researcher to the institutional and structural barriers that the immigrant woman encounters in everyday life. Insofar as it is possible, the researcher steps out of her well-worn shoes of native-born or longterm settler to put on the newer shoes of the immigrant woman and to look at the world with her eyes. To my knowledge, my studies have been the first major research to apply consciously Dorothy Smith's feminist sociology of everyday life to the study of a particular immigrant group, in this case, South Asian women. The book, The Lived Experience of South Asian Immigrant Women in Atlantic Canada: the interconnections of race, class and gender (Ralston, 1996) brought together two important theoretical concerns, namely, the conceptualization of lived experience and its associated methodology and theorizing on the interconnections of race, ethnicity, class and gender, and it showed how the latter interact to produce the specific lived experiences of the women inside and outside the home and in community organizations. Furthermore, it was the first study of how Canadian immigration policy since the turn of the present century has affected women's lives. The research program expanded to comparative studies within and beyond Canada and to further exploration of the impact of state policies and practices on the women's lives. H

QUALITATIVE

DATA

COLLECTION,

ORGANIZATION AND ANALYSIS Research Samples The focus of the projects has been on race, class and gender intersections in state policies and programs and their impact on the lived experience of migrant women in the countries and regions in which they have settled. To that end, I

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selected samples of women for all projects. 12 The research samples comprised women of diverse national, regional, cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds (14 birth countries, 18 mother tongues and 7 religious affiliations). The total samples of 126 women in Atlantic Canada, 100 in British Columbia, 50 in Australia and 10 in New Zealand were drawn from first-generation immigrant women 15 years of age and over, in proportion to the settlement distribution of South Asians in the respective region. Finally, to compare the experience of migrant women with their non-migrant sisters, I collected data through interviews in Fiji (10 women) in May 1995, and North and South India (20 women) in December 1995 to January 1996.

Semi-Structured Interviews with Participants We adopted a Case Study approach and conducted in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews with each woman. We explored, from the perspective of the women themselves, their lived experience. In Dorothy Smith's terms, activities of everyday life of South Asian women, rather than their attitudes and opinions toward family roles and relations, housing, education, work in and outside the home and the like, defined lived experience. The vast majority of all interviews were conducted in the participant's home, unless she chose to name another preferred location. Furthermore, she had first choice of time for the interview. The interviews were conducted in English, or with the help of an interpreter, if a woman had limited or no knowledge of any form of the English language. Each interview lasted about one and a half to two hours. A research assistant, Emily Burton, MA, interviewed 45 women in metropolitan Vancouver. I conducted the remaining interviews myself.

Language of Communication Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 195) has drawn attention to the role women play in constructing and reproducing the culture of a collectivity. She has referred to Armstrong's (1982) notion of symbolic 'border guards' which identify people as members or non-members of a specific collectivity and maintain ethnic distinctiveness. Language of communication is one of the most important of such symbolic border guards. Armstrong (1982: 8) has noted that "words are particularly effective as traffic lights warning a group member when he (or she) is approaching a barrier separating his (or her) group from another." The majority of interviewees spoke relatively fluent but accented English. Their accent, however, clearly identified them as 'immigrant women.' Moreover,

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many used syntax and vocabulary that was Indian-English, with origins from British-English, rather than Canadian-English. Australian South Asian women had similar problems as Canadian South Asians with accent but had less difficulty with Australian-English vocabulary. Having been educated in Australia, as well as being a frequent visitor to India, I was well aware of these differences in forms of the English language. I adopted them, when appropriate in the interview. My use of the English vocabulary of the interviewee, together with correct pronunciation and spelling for Indian names and places, created a more permeable communication boundary between us. Taking her way of expressing herself, her standpoint, elicited wry comments from both Canadian and Australian South Asian women, respectively. For example, when I asked them, "How well did you speak English when you first arrived?.... Better than most Canadians/Australians!" was the response in the respective country. Nevertheless, South Asian women described the 'stop lights' they encountered when they approached an employer for a job interview or in a paid work context. For the native-born white Canadian interviewer, skin color racialized their identity. An unfamiliar English-language accent imposed a barrier to inclusion among 'normal' Canadian employees. For example, an Indian-born woman, a Christian who had earned a science degree in an English-medium university in India, and who was working in Atlantic Canada, related, Sometimes you have problems when you communicate. A few people just take it for granted that they don't understand anything when you talk. They try to make you feel like you are not saying things in the proper way and all that. That makes you feel a little - well, put down, because you studied. You studied grammar, pronunciation and everything. When it comes to a different country, when you talk, the other person, knowing that, tries to make you feel that way - down. But I never showed that to anybody . . . . Sometimes I think that the person who is talking to me may not be used to speaking to different types of people. So I don't blame them. If someone talks to me in whatever way they speak English, I can understand what they are trying to say. I call people all over the world for orders because of my work. They never say, "Can you speak properly. I don't understand the way you are speaking."13

This woman's story of her experience highlighted two important points: (1) her willingness to keep the barriers of communication as permeable as possible by 'understanding' what a person is trying to say in "whatever way they speak English;" and (2) her own experience of the employer's construction of an impermeable communication barrier that denigrated her because of her accent. The feminist researcher who takes the standpoint of the South Asian interviewee will be alert to cultural differences in English language usage and accent. If the interviewee's meaning is not clear, she will ask for clarification and, where appropriate, share her way of communicating the same thought in English. In that way, the communication barriers between interviewee

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and interviewer become more permeable and authoritarian 'relations of ruling' are reduced. 14

Other Interviews I also conducted interviews with active community or association leaders and members and with other informed people in order to gather socio-historical data and information about the current concerns and activities of women in the communities. Furthermore, I interviewed various federal, provincial/state, and municipal government officers to assess how ways of thinking about gender, race, ethnicity and class have influenced particular methods of implementing migration, settlement, employment and multicultural policies.

Other Types of Data In addition, I collected data from government documents and statistics relating to migration flows, settlement patterns and multiculturalism, from historical and sociological sources, and from other independent studies of South Asians.

Co-workers in the Research Enterprise In the initial Atlantic Canada project, three student research assistants, David Estabroooks, Virginia Bennett, and Anamitra Shome, transcribed taped interviews and analyzed data. The two first-named persons were undergraduate sociology students. The last-named person was an Indian national who was a commerce graduate student. His fluency in various forms of English and in Indian-accented English, together with his familiarity with Indian place names and cultural activities ensured very accurate transcriptions. At the same time, his temporary student visa status and unfamiliarity with the local South Asian community was a safeguard of the confidentiality of the interview material. Catherine Chandler, a Nova Scotian and an experienced data processor, earned my undying gratitude for learning Macintosh computer skills very competently, so that she could input data with my chosen StatView qualitative data program. Catherine Chandler continued to work with me for about three years of the comparative projects. As well as inputting the data, she was overall Project Manager among a team of four women. Emily Burton, a Pernvian-born Canadian whose MA thesis I had supervised, conducted 45 participant interviews in Vancouver during the summer of 1994. She also analyzed the interview data in the light of the project objectives. Emily Burton made a major contribution to designing a method for summarizing a wealth of qualitative data about the

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women's everyday life experience. Together we modified a design she had used for her thesis fieldwork with peasant women in Christian base communities in Nicaragua. She was solely responsible for producing what we came to call 'The Daily Round' forms. Lina Samuel, the only member of the research group of South Asian origin, and Colleen McMahon, a woman of First Nations background, analyzed interviews in light of the conceptual framework and research questions. The research team of diverse cultural backgrounds who worked on the comparative projects 'was a fantastic group of competent and dedicated women. Their identity and experience - as a migrant woman, a woman of color, and a visible minority woman - had heightened their awareness of gender, race, ethnic and class borders and boundaries. These experiences coupled with their academic training honed their skills as data analysts. They dialogued together about analysis decision. My fieldwork in British Columbia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and India meant that there were long periods without face-to-face contact with me, the principal investigator and supervisor. We used E-mail and couriers for regular communication. Catherine Chandler, the Project Manager used her outstanding personal and team skills to work with the research assistants in my absence. The work was done very well indeed and everyone, I above all, learned a great deal about doing feminist comparative research across borders and boundaries of continents, cotmtries and cultures. "The Daily Round" How to organize and analyze qualitative data from semi-structured interviews can seem like an insurmountable boundary to cross. One question, "Could you describe your life here? A typical day?" asked of each woman well on into the interview, proved to be a rich source of knowledge about the realities of relations in everyday lived experience. As she told her story, we were careful to explore in detail actual activities throughout the entire day. The concept of 'The Daily Round' helped to organize a wealth of data by suggesting chronology as an ordering dimension. Different types of activities were then grouped into general categories: household tasks, personal care, care and socialization of children within the home, activities external to the household: paid and unpaid work, and other organizational, recreational and study activities. In the interviews, we asked the women what they actually did. For example, when a woman described the events of the day in chronological sequence, we asked who actually prepared the morning cup of tea, the cut-lunches, I5 drove the children to school, paid the bills, prepared the meals and cleaned up afterwards, did the household shopping and the accounts, shoveled the snow,

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and so on. We teased out what belonging to an organization actually entailed. For example, the spontaneous remark that a husband was president of an ethnic organization might have evoked the additional wry comment, "I do all the work - stuff envelopes, send out mailings, make phone calls, organize the pot luck suppers and the like." In other words, the husband held the prestigious position that suggested a productive contribution to the organization; the woman's real productive work was invisible. The stories told by the women provided a dynamic account of lived gender relations at home and race, gender, class relations outside the home. In many instances, the woman's account of her daily activities was partially validated by our observations in informal interaction with family members over tea and other refreshments, which were offered by almost every woman after the formal interview was completed. Moreover, as any qualitative researcher knows, the informal conversations 'after the interview' removed the barrier of the tape recorder and proved to be a rich source of research material.

CONCLUSION Can a white migrant woman do valid and fruitful research with migrant women of color? The research has raised serious questions and criticism about the ability to do research across race, class, ethnic, sexual orientation, marital status, religious and other boundaries. An academic critic has argued 16 that "who the researcher is and who the subjects are do make a difference in terms of research findings." The argument contends that "The kind of information we obtain from the interview process varies depending upon whether it is a woman of color interviewing a woman of color or it is a white woman doing that work. In addition, the perspective we bring to our research also varies depending upon whether we are insiders or outsiders to the group we are studying." This argument suggests that 'color' - and, by implication, brown or black skin color, is an impermeable boundary of greater salience than any other 'difference' in the research process. It suggests, for example that a Muslim religious outsider of brown skin color would be a more appropriate interviewer with a Christian (or Hindu) brown woman than a white Christian woman. 'Color' is identified as the essential (sole?) criterion that distinguishes insiders and outsiders. Moreover, it assumes that the 'insider' (however defined) has the 'real' knowledge and the 'outsider' cannot really 'know' the experiences of another, 17 as I have observed above, women of color are a heterogeneous category of women. They are distinguished, and sometimes separated, by class, caste, religion, national origin, generation and other boundaries. In fact, a Pakistani Muslim woman

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reported to me that she would not consent to an interview with an Indian Hindu woman. Similarly, an upper-caste North Indian woman would not speak openly to a South Indian lower-caste woman. Advertisements for arranged marriages in the Indian diaspora are a good indicator of the boundaries among South Asian women of color. In fact, 'fair skin color' appears to be a prized attribute among some parents for their daughter's arranged marriage. As 1 revised this paper, I was struck by the remarks of Elaine Power, a University of Toronto Ph.D. candidate, in a recent Atlantis article (1999: 23-24): I recognize that there will always be boundaries and borders between the researcher and the researched, but that some will be wider and thicker than others. The researcher's job is to try to make those borders as thin and transparent as possible, in order to gain understanding of, and insight into, the situations and experiences of others. I end, therefore, with another question rather than an answer to the questions posed at the outset of my paper: How can one make the boundaries more permeable between a white feminist researcher and so-called women of color? How can one create a space among equals for meaningful dialogue, exchange and action for social transformation and gender justice?

NOTES 1. In Canada, the term 'women of colour' (sic) is a pro-active political construction of black and brown women. At annual academic meetings 'women of colour' caucuses meet. Grassroots activists and academics regularly talk, write and teach courses about 'women of colour' and advocate and act on their behalf. 2. See, for example, Wolf (1996). Others, such as Hill Collins (1986), Hawkesworth (1989) and Lorber and Farrell (1991), have addressed the issue of 'insider' and 'outsider' research. 3. Peter Berger's Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (Anchor Books 1963) also developed the same theme. 4. The term diaspora has biblical origins in the dispersion of Jews and their settlement among the gentiles after Babylonian captivity. It is used now to refer to the dispersion of Jews in many countries around the world. By extension, it refers to the dispersion of any relatively homogeneous cultural group. 5. The social construction of South Asian within a specifically Canadian context is highlighted by the fact that immigrants from India to the United States are referred to as 'Asian Indians' to distinguish them from the indigenous population. The latter have been socially constructed as 'American Indians.' The different experience and sociohistorical relations of an immigrant to Canada from an immigrant to the United States have constructed a different social identity in the respective countries. 6. My research with first-generation South Asian immigrant women began in Halifax in 1987 after my return from extended research in India. I was awarded seed money through a 1987-1988 Saint Mary's University Research Grant for an exploratory study to interview 16 women in Halifax. In the meantime, I successfully applied for a

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1988-1991 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant for a project entitled "Ethnicity, Class and Gender Among South Asian Women in Atlantic Canada" - all four provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island). 7. In Canada, it was the increasing flow of immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean who were visibly different in skin color from earlier (mainly European) immigrants which led to the social construction of 'visible minorities' by the government, dominant white citizens, and, ultimately, the members themselves, to describe these immigrants, as distinct from another social construction, 'invisible minorities,' who were visually indistinguishable from the dominant white "charter" groups - those of British and French descent. See, for example, (Elliott & Fleras, 1992, p. 249). Statistics Canada, in the 1991 Census Dictionary (Catalogue 92-301E 1991, pp. 113-114) notes that "According to (the Employment Equity Regulations that accompany) the Employment Equity Act (1986), visible minorities are persons (other than Aboriginal persons) who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour. Because there is no question on race or colour in the census, data on visible minorities are derived from responses to the ethnic origin question, in conjunction with other ethno-cultural information, such as language, place of birth and religion." In Australia, the term Non-English-SpeakingBackground (NESB) migrants is used to distinguish them from the less commonly used term English-Speaking-Background(ESB) migrants from countries like Britain, Canada, and the United States, where English is the national language. 8. See, for example, Ralston (1994, 1995, 1996a, c, 1998, 1999a, b). 9. In addition, I have communicated the results to participants and government and non-government agencies in written reports (Ralston 1996b, 1997a, b). It was the unsolicited positive feedback that I received from young women after a public talk at the South Vancouver Neighbourhood Centre that encouraged me to embark on my current research program with daughters of previously interviewed South Asian immigrant women in Canada and Australia. 10. See, for example, Code (1995) for an elaboration of some of the criticisms. 11. I have written an article that compares the impact of Canadian and Australian immigration policies, respectively, on South Asian women (Ralston, 1994). The Canadian case is examined and analyzed in Canadian Woman Studies 19 3(1999b, 33-37). In another article, I have discussed the impact of multicultural policies in each of those countries (Ralston, 1998). 12. The non-probability sample for the Atlantic Canada study comprised 126 first-generation South Asian immigrant women 15 years of age and over, one-tenth of the estimated total population of South Asian women of that age in the Atlantic region at the time. I drew the sample from a directory in proportion to the distribution of South Asians in the four Atlantic provinces. In the 1991 census, the South Asian population in British Columbia had grown to 103,545 (from 69,250 in the 1986 census). Of these, 75,430 (73%) resided in Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) Vancouver. Because the study included Indo-Fijians, who numbered 4,945 in British Columbia (with 4,640 of these in CMA Vancouver), 74 of the sample of 100 women were interviewed in CMA Vancouver; 26 proportionately drawn from other places in BC - t4 in Vancouver Island; 12 in interior BC. In British Columbia, Australia and New Zealand, it was not possible to draw a non-probability sample. Rather, a snowballing method was used, with a deliberate attempt to select women of diverse ages, class, community backgrounds, countries of origin, dates of entry to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, respectively. In all projects, care was taken to ensure that no specific

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category of women of South Asian origin was excluded and that non-members of ethnocultural organizations were included. 13. Atlantic Canada interview no. 6, 16/2/88. 14. In a recent visit to Australia, I was reminded of everyday language barriers that can occur in the use of English vocabulary. I asked a 'New Australian' attendant at a service station (not gas station there) if I could use the 'washroom.' He looked at me blankly until a native-born Australian beside me reminded me that, 'We call it the toilet here.' Although I had remembered that I wanted the 'windscreen' (not "windshield") wiped, I had not completely reverted to my Australian-English language of communication. I was the one at a disadvantage in this exchange with a service station attendant who had acquired correct, accented Australian English. 15. In United States English language usage, 'lunch' refers to: (a) a light meal or snack taken at any time of the day or night, or (b) a colloquialism for 'luncheon,' a meal taken in the middle of the day. In Indian, English, Australian and (sometimes) Canadian English language, 'lunch' has retained its original meaning of 'a lump,' usually of bread, but also cheese, or any food, such as cooked meat. Cut lunches are meals cut to size. For the South Asian mother, the issues of concern in preparing meals taken at school can be complex, problematic and matter for negotiation. Will it be vegetarian or non-vegetarian? Indian or CanadiarffAustralian? Not surprisingly, the child will frequently opt for a meal similar to that of his or her peers. 26. In an anonymous review of my research. 17. Wolf (1996) has an extensive review of the dilemmas of 'insider/outsider/ both/neither' feminist researchers.

REFERENCES Armstrong, J. A. (1982). Nations before nationalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to sociology: a humanistic perspective. New York: Anchor Books. Code, L. (1995). How do we know? Questions of method in feminist practice. In: S. Butt & L. Code (Eds.), Changing Methods. Feminists Transforming Practice (pp. 14-44). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the Outsider within: the sociological significance of Black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33, S14-$32. Elliott, 2. L., & Augie Fleras. (1992). Unequal relations: an introduction to race and ethnic dynamics in Canada. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall Canada Inc. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Hartsock, N. C. M. (1983). Money, sex, and power." toward a feminist historical materialism. New York & London: Longman. Hawkesworth, M. E. (1989). Knowers, knowing, known: feminist theory and claims of truth. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14, 533-557. Lorber, J., & S. A. Farrell. (1991). Feminist research strategies. In: J. Lorber & S. A. Fan"ell (Eds), The Social Construction of Gender (pp. 211-216). Newbury Park/London/Delhi: Sage Publications. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ng, R. (1981). Constituting ethnic phenomenon: an account from the perspective of immigrant women. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 13, 97-108.

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Ng, R. (1984). Sex, ethnicity or class? Some methodological considerations. Studies in Sexual Politics, 1, 14-45. Ng, R. (1986). The social construction of 'immigrant women' in Canada. In: R. Hamilton & M. Barrett (Eds), The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism (pp. 269-86). Montreal: The Book Centre Inc. Ng, R. (1989). Sexism, racism and Canadian nationalism. In: J. Vorst et al. (Eds), Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers (pp. 10-25). Socialist Studies~Etudes socialistes A Canadian Annual 5. Toronto: Between the Lines. Ng, R. (1993a). Sexism, racism and Canadian nationalism. In: S. Gnnew & A. Yeatmen (Eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference (pp. 197-211). St. Leonard's: Allen and Unwin and Halifax: Femwood. Ng, R. (1993b). Sexism, racism, Canadian nationalism. In: H. Bannerji (Ed.), Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (pp. 162-196). Toronto: Sister Vision Press. Power, E. (1999). Making the borders thin: reflections on becoming a researcher. Atlantis: A Woman's Studies Journal~Revue d'~tudes sur les femmes, 24, 15-26. Ralston, H. (1994). Immigration policies and practices: their impact on South Asian women in Canada and Australia. Australian-Canadian Studies, 12, 147. Ralston, H. (1995). Organizational empowerment among South Asian immigrant women in Canada. International Journal of Canadian Studies~Revue internationale d'~tudes canadiennes, Women in Canadian Society/Les femmes et la socigtg canadienne 11 Spring/Printemps, 121-146. Ralston, H. (1996a). Race, class, gender, and work experience of South Asian immigrant women in Atlantic Canada. In: W. Mitchinson., P. Bourne., A. Prentice., G. Cuthbert Bran&., B. Light & N. Black (Eds), Canadian Women: A Reader (pp. 405-416). Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company Canada. (Reprinted from Canadian Ethnic Studies XXIII, 129-139.) Ralston, H. (1996b). Community organizing among South Asian women. Public Talk on the Preliminary Findings of SSHRC-funded research program, given at the Halifax Main Branch Library, 1 February 1996, with the collaboration of research assistants, Emily Burton, Colleen McMahon and Catherine Chandler. Ralston, H. (1996c). The lived experience of South Asian immigrant women in Atlantic Canada: the interconnections of race, class and gender. Lewiston, NY/Queenston, ON: The Edwin Mellen Press. Ralston, H. (1996d). The experience of South Asian immigrant women in Pacific countries: a comparative study. Report for British Columbia participants and other members of the South Asian community. A report of British Columbia project of SSHRC-funded research program, December 31, 1996. Ralston, H. (1997a). Being South Asian Canadian women in British Columbia: moving into the 21st Century. Public talk on results of SSHRC-funded research program, hosted by the India Mahila Association, South Vancouver Neighbourhood House, 19 February 1997r. Ralston, H (1997b). The experience of South Asian immigrant women in Pacific countries: a comparative study. Report for Australia and New Zealand participants and other members of the South Asian community. Report of Australia and New Zealand projects of SSHRC-funded research program, March 1997. Ralston, H. (1997c). Being South Asian women in the South Pacific: moving into the 21st century. Public talk on results of SSHRC-funded research program, hosted by the Pan-Pacific and South-East Asia Women's Organization, Auckland, New Zealand, 9 December 1997; in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, February and March 1998.

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Ralston, H. (1998a). Race, class, gender and multiculturalism in Canada and Australia: lived experience of South Asian immigrant women. Race, Gender & Class, 5(2), 14-29. Ralston, H. (1999a). Violence against immigrant women knows no religious bounds: a comparative analysis of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Australian-Canadian Studies, 17, t-19. Ralston, H. (1999b). Canadian immigration policy in the twentieth century: its impact on South Asian women. Canadian Woman Studies, 19, 33-37. Reinharz, S. (1992). Feminist methods in social research. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, D. E. (1974.) Women's perspective as a radical critique of sociology. Sociological Inquiry, 44, 7-13. Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. E. (1992). Sociology from women's experience: a reaffirmation. Sociological Theory, 10, 1, 88-98. Statistics Canada. (1991). 1991 Census Dictionary (Catalogue 92-301E). Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Wolf, D. L. (Ed.). (1996). Feminist dilemmas in fieldwork. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Ethnicity, gender relations and multiculturalism. In: P. Werbner & T. Modood (Eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity: multi-cultural identities and the politics of racism (pp. 193-208). London & New Jersey: Zed Books.

CAN RESEARCH, ACTIVISM, AND FEMINISM CONVERGE? SOME NOTES ON COLLABORATIVE ACTION-ORIENTED INQUIRY Deborah Harrison

INTRODUCTION The term 'collaborative action-oriented research' is used to describe research carried out as a collaborative partnership between academics and community practitioners, to realize specific goals of action and social change. Not all collaborative action-oriented research is feminist. Nevertheless, since its processes are ideally non-hierarchical and inclusive, collaborative action-oriented research is generally believed to be compatible with feminist principles. In this paper I will describe collaborative action-oriented research, assess its effectiveness, and assess its compatibility with feminist principles. As I do so, I will draw on the experience of the five Canadian family violence research centers, established in 1991, whose mandate was to establish partnerships between academic and community researchers in order to carry out collaborative action-oriented research and public education on aspects of woman abuse and family violence. In particular, I will highlight the family violence research center with which I am most familiar - the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research at the University of New Brunswick.

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In 1991, in the wake of the massacre of 14 women at Montrtal's l'Ecole Polytechnique on December 6, 1989, Health Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada announced a competition whose result would be the establishment of five family violence research centers across Canada, each of which would be granted $500,000 over a five-year period. The centers would be mandated to carry out action-oriented research and public education on family violence and violence against women by building and sustaining partnerships among academics, policy makers, and community workers, obtaining useable and policy-oriented research results, distributing these results widely, and where possible following through with policy and action. The competition was initiated under the assumption that a comprehensive strategy which integrated research with community action would be the most effective way to eradicate family violence. 1 In 1992, family violence research centers were established in five cities: Vancouver, Winnipeg, London, Montrtal/Qutbec, and Fredericton. Between 1992 and 1999, 220 researchers on 20 research teams throughout the Atlantic Region of Canada chose to affiliate with the the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick. These teams have carried out research, education, and action on family violence in contexts which have included rural communities, schools, dating relationships, workplaces, immigrant communities, religious faith communities, aboriginal communities, military communities, the elderly, girl children, foster children, sex offenders, substance abuse, abuse of persons with disabilities, and the relationships between woman abuse and various aspects of the family court system. The MMF Centre has also embarked on a longitudinal study of family violence which will follow families for a generation or more in an effort to isolate causes and consequences. Apart from research, the MMF Centre offers a multidisciplinary graduate course on family violence at the University of New Brunswick and a 10-course Certificate Program in Family Violence Issues whose purpose is to enhance the knowledge and skills of front-line workers and policymakers. The MMF Centre has mounted several important training initiatives, public education events, and conferences; it maintains a comprehensive Web site; it houses a large resource library on family violence, and an updated list of research projects and educational programs underway in the Atlantic Region. Most important for the purposes of this paper, 146 of the MMF Centre's 220 researchers are neither academics nor students, but front-line community workers, survivors, government policymakers, and representatives of community organizations.

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Collaborative Action-Oriented Research When it is carried out successfully, collaborative action-oriented research has four characteristics which distinguish it from traditional academic research: commnnity-based structures of accountability; community-based sources of knowledge; action as a criterion of success; and an equal weighing of process and results. Let us start with accountability. First and foremost, true partnership between academic and community research team members means a willingness on the part of academic team members to set aside the traditional structures of academic accountability. One of these is the age-old question: what is research for? In the traditional academic view, the results of research represent knowledge which is valued for its own sake. Certainly, research which uncovers a new cure for cancer is highly valued. However, immediate amelioration of the human condition is not an essential precondition of esteemed scholarly work. Also prized within the academy is research which leads to the development of new intellectual paradigms, such as symbolic interactionism, postmodernism, or political economy. In the traditional academic view, new paradigms push back the frontiers of knowlege by raising new questions which demand answers, and encouraging us to experience our physical or social realities in previously unexplored ways. The academy also values quantitative information acquired through surveys, such as the percentage of a given population which is likely to vote for a particular political party in the next election. To apply these standards of accountability to the area of woman abuse: in the traditional academic view, causation paradigms such as 'patriarchy' or 'learned helplessness' are considered useful in their own right; so are results of surveys that tell us how many adult women in a particular population have experienced violence in their intimate relationships. In any subject area, academic research is considered to be useful in its own fight in the sense that once the information has been gathered and published, the researchers are deemed to have finished their job. In the view of community research partners, in contrast, knowledge is valuable mainly as a conduit to some form of meaningful social action. This is particularly true in a social problem area such as family violence, in which the public resources that are available to prevent the problem, treat the perpetrators, and mitigate the damage done to survivors are minuscule relative to the need that exists for these resources. Given the overwhelming need for services to survivors of woman abuse and family violence, frontline community workers are impatient with the idea of dollars being spent on research. 2 Given that basic research into the statistical magnitude of the problem has been done, frontline workers believe that the need for action has been justified and,

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accordingly, all public resources for family violence eradication should now be channelled into action and service delivery. When academics tell frontline workers that additional research is essential to the justification of enhanced services, the frontline workers remain sceptical, occasionally hostile. Even after the frontline workers have bought the assumption that more research is necessary, some of them become impatient with the enormous time research takes. It follows that if academic and community members of a research team are to be equal partners, the research done by the team must be research which is as justifiable in the minds of the community partners as it is in the minds of the academic members of the team. This lays two special problems at the feet of the academic members of the team. First, they must choose a research project which is acceptable to their community partners. Second, as far as some of their community partners are concerned, the academics must be prepared to justify the need for research itself. Another potential bone of contention between academic and community partners is the communication of the research results. In this area too, the academic members of the research team must be prepared to change their view of to whom their work is accountable. Within the academy, the rules of accountability are clear: a successful academic career requires the presentation of research papers at academic conferences, and the publication of scholarly books and articles in refereed journals. For community practitioners, in contrast, what is important after research is done is getting the message of its results out to people who can use and act on them: that is, other community practitioners and members of the general public. Again, a working partnership between academic and community researchers means transcending these differences and reaching an acceptable compromise. Since, by definition, action is a crucial part of the mandate of collaborative action-oriented research, it is usually the academic team members who must be prepared to shift their priorities. The second difference between traditional academic research and collaborative action-oriented research has to do with where the most valuable knowledge is believed to originate and reside. Many traditional academic researchers believe that the most valuable knowledge originates in the academy, even if the raw data for that knowledge comes from the world outside. The assumption governing collaborative action-oriented research, in contrast, is that knowledge about a social problem which originates outside the academy, in work or human experience, is equally, if not more, crucial. What happens on a collaborative research team is therefore shaped not only by community-based systems of accountability, but also by the community-based knowledge which community members bring to the process. Certainly, the academic members of the team

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bring important assets to collaborative research, such as their knowledge of research methodologies, their organizational skills, their writing skills and, in many cases, the time their university employment allots to them to carry out the 'grunt work' associated with writing grant proposals, obtaining research funding, designing research instruments, carrying out research, analyzing data, and disseminating results. Nevertheless, community knowledge permeates collaborative action-oriented research in two crucial ways. First, the eventual 'users' of the research results - the frontline community workers and policy makers - are on the team from the beginning, which means that their conceptualizations of what is important are integral to the research questions that the team sets out to ask. What the team sets out to investigate is less likely to originate in an academic review of literature than it is in the experience of the team's practitioners and policy makers. Second, at the stage of communicating results, validation from the community is as important (or more important) to the team as validation from academic peers. If, for whatever reasons, the research done by the team is not believed to be worth translating into action by the practitioners and policy makers who would be in a position to do so, at least as much of a problem is created for the team as would be created if an article written by an academic team member for a scholarly journal were turned down. Third, as well as being believed by team members to have the potential to lead to action and social change, action-oriented research must in fact lead to action and social change in order to be defined as successful. In the Atlantic Region of Canada, for example, the research carried out by the MMF Centre's Religion and Violence team brought the issue of woman abuse out of the closet within church communities, and programs and brochures on woman abuse produced within these communities literally mushroomed. The results of the conflict-resolution work of the MMF Centre's Creating Peaceful Learning Environments team in eight New Brunswick school districts provided the basis of the provincial Department of Education's new province-wide Positive Learning Environments initiative. These are examples of influences of research teams on social change. Even more immediate influence sometimes also happens, as when a community practitioner changes the way she does her job as a result of being a member of a collaborative team. In the value system of collaborative action-oriented research, these influences are considered crucial; publications by themselves are not. Finally, process and results, as goals of social research, are weighted differently in collaborative action-oriented research than they are in traditional academic research. In traditional academic research, results are all-important. Academics have been moulded by their professional socialization to be content

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with delayed gratification. They are willing to work for several years, through a process that is often arduous, in anticipation of the one payoff at the end in the form of a published book or article. For community members of collaborative research teams, in contrast, the process of the research is as important as the results. It is true that community research partners also anticipate future payoffs in the forms of presentations of results to community organizations and/or implementations of results by policymakers. However, these payoffs come more frequently and quicldy than scholarly payoffs. In addition, community members require more than future payoffs to be satisfied with the experience of carrying out collaborative research. Community practitioners are often burned out from the stresses of their jobs and expect research team participation - in itself - to be a source of peer validation and support. For them, the team meetings must be fun. Meetings of at least one research team of the MMF Centre are always preceded by a pizza and gossip session, during which members exchange news with one another, tell jokes, share frustrations, and talk about anything and everything except the work that they are doing together. Since community team members are less oriented than academics toward future payoffs, they will not remain on the team unless they find it enjoyable. Apart from having fun, community practitioners expect to take away from their team experience lessons that are concrete enough to apply to their everyday work. They expect the way they do their work to improve as a result of their membership on the team (e.g. in the direction of being more responsive to clients' needs), and they expect to be able to notice the improvement as it occurs. Process is important in collaborative action-oriented research for the additional reason that collaborative teams need to produce a 'glue' to counteract their divergent orientations. The glue is the non-instrumental interaction that occurs on a team, through which researchers get to know one another, validate one another's experiences, develop appreciations of one another's talents and personal qualities, and develop personal bonds. The glue that is the by-product of valuing process counteracts the inevitable tensions that arise during the time that academic and community members of the team spend learning to compromise with one another and to transcend their differences. Finally, the research carried out by the team will evolve more readily to social action if the group has had the opportunity to bond as a result of having met and problem-solved together over a significant period of time.

Problems and Rewards of Collaborative Action-Oriented Research Even when it is carried out at a research center with a collaborative actionoriented philosophy, collaborative action-oriented research is a challenge to

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sustain, owing to the fact that most research centers are housed within traditional academic institutions. These difficulties exist for several reasons. The first one is the requirements of academic careers. Scholarly publications comprise the main route to academic success. Scholarly publications are achieved at a faster rate by lone scholars than they are by academic members of collaborative teams. Lone scholars do not have to contend with team-building issues or with a group of colleagues who believe that action is the major yardstick of success. Hence, membership on collaborative research teams creates problems for young scholars that can result in the delay of promotions or tenure. Secondly, university culture exacerbates the differences which divide academic and community research partners. In addition to the different orientations academic and community partners bring to the table, the pervasiveness of university culture makes it difficult for the academic team members to emancipate themselves from their longtime habits of hierarchical research committees, authority exercised almost exclusively by principal investigators, a high premium placed upon speed, centralized control over budgets, and little or no attention paid to process. The extent to which this difficulty is surmounted is crucial to the success of the team. Third, in this era of scarce public funding, university administrations are less supportive of collaborative action-oriented research centers than they are of initiatives which more readily attract corporate and government sponsorships and research contracts. From the present standpoint of most universities, the social objective of incorporating the perspectives of service providers and survivors into research on family violence, or some other social problem, pales in comparison with the financial and political rewards of ostentatious new buildings, generous overheads on contractual research, and the appearance of contributing to business' and governments' 'important' economic and scientific work. Collaborative action-oriented research centers are less likely to be valued by university authorities than centers which do the kind of research that governments and corporations finance more generously; university resources which are available for collaborative action-oriented research centers are consequently relatively meager. Apart from the power exercised by traditional universities and university culture, the potential impact of collaborative action-oriented research can raise complex issues. To cite an example: sometimes everyone on the research team agrees on both the research question and the research method. Everything proceeds smoothly until the research is done. However, once the results are available the situation changes, and some of the community partners decide that social harm may ensue if the results are made known. For their part, the academics belong to a profession which holds the value of 'science' in high esteem and adheres to the dictum: knowledge must not be suppressed. An MMF Centre

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team temporarily collaborated with the board of a transition house in a rural area to discover why the transition house was under-utilized. The collaborators received a grant from the provincial government, and were allotted one year in which to do their work. Partly because their timetable was rushed, the collaborators were unable to take the time to team-build, establish trust, resolve issues of authorship and ownership, and ensure that both sides envisioned a similar-enough product at the end. A complicating factor was that the membership of the transition house board turned over almost 100% while the research was being done. In the end, the collaborators disagreed. As the board saw it, the report on the research was written in such a way as to cast aspersions on the management of the transition house, and to risk the possibility of the transition house being closed down. For the most part, the team stood by the report's original wording. The incident illustrated the problems that can result from temporary collaborations, which inevitably entail less attention to process and 'bonding' than is possible on regular teams. It also illustrated the fact that, even when they participate in the research, the members of the community being studied may view the impact of the results differently from the academic, and even some of the community, members of the research team; and conflict over dissemination may ensue. Some of the problems inherent in collaborative action-oriented research can be solved. For example, to the extent that universities have s o m e appreciation of the benefits of research partnerships between academics and community practitioners, their promotion and tenure committees may become convinced to recognize participation in collaborative research as a criterion of academic success, along with the more traditional ways of doing academic research. Fortunately for participants in collaborative research, community accountability may be beginning to become a measure of university success. It is also possible for academic researchers to shed enough of their socialization into hierarchical university culture to be effective members of collaborative teams. Finally, when it works well, collaborative action-oriented research broadens the horizons of its participants. Community team members develop an appreciation for socially relevant research. Practitioners and government employees develop a more solid understanding of one another's work. Practitioners and government employees who are charged with implementing the results of collaborative research do so on the solid footing which reflects the fact that they have been in on the discovery process from the beginning. Academics start to understand social problems from a 'gut' as opposed to a purely intellectual level. Their reference groups expand beyond the narrow confines of the academy. They learn to see the social world in a new way. They learn to be team players in a context that is larger, more challenging, and ultimately more

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satisfying. Academics learn to enjoy and value the process that winds its complicated way from initial beginnings to team-building to findings and the implementation of results. As rewards they had not foreseen accrue to them, academics' impatience for quick publications diminishes, just as community team members wait more patiently for social action. Many team members find cherished new friends and allies. Despite the many problems, in retrospect most who participate in collaborative research are glad that they did. Is Collaborative Action-Oriented Research Feminist?

The answer to this question is Yes and No. Let us first look at the 'No' side. Collaborative action-oriented research is not necessarily feminist for two reasons: the diversity of the people involved in the research, and the diverse research methodologies that are employed. Not everyone involved in collaborative action-oriented research is - or needs to be - someone who defines (him)herself as a feminist. Not all the goals of collaborative action-oriented research are necessarily feminist goals. For example, in the case of a social problem like family violence, feminists only comprise a portion of the many people from all walks of life who want to eradicate it. Some people who want to eradicate family violence do so out of a concern for children and from the political vantagepoint of 'family values,' even though the term (and the practice of) 'family' has been criticized by feminist scholars for years, for papering over the unequal status of women within families? The organizations that are represented on MMF Centre research teams include the legal system, government, corporations, hospitals, the military, the police, school boards, banks, counseling centers, transition houses, and churches. Most of these organizations have missions that cannot be described as feminist; the individuals who work for these organizations and belong to MMF Centre teams must operate within these constraints. In addition, research centers are almost never financially independent entities; in order to survive, they must cultivate a diverse group of contributors and stakeholders. Accordingly, apart from a very heterogeneous group of researchers, stakeholders in the MMF Centre include government departments which have awarded research contracts to the center, a private foundation which raised a $2.5 million endowment fund whose interest pays most of the center's operating costs, and the corporations which donated to the endowment fund. Some of the individual members of these stakeholder groups would describe themselves as feminists - others would not. The philosophy and practice of the MMF Centre has been to work with people as they are, starting from where they are, on a plane in which they can comfortably operate. The MMF Centre has believed that its large number of

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members and stakeholders will translate into a greater impact on the eradication of family violence thma would be the case if its numbers were small. For the most part, the MMF Centre's stakeholders have attempted to set aside their political differences in order to concentrate on what unites them. In these lean times for socially progressive research, family violence is only one area to which such pragmatism has been applied; other areas have included women's health, sustainable urban communities, and access to information technology. Collaborative action-oriented researchers also do not necessarily use feminist methodologies. There are many definitions of feminist methodology. However, contrary to positivist research methods, most research methods which are considered feminist eschew the notion that research is an essentially passive process in which the properties of 'truth' reveal themselves to the researcher who is able to perceive them accurately because s/he is 'unbiased' or 'value neutral.' In contrast, feminist methodologists assert the view that research is an active process during which the researcher inevitably exerts power over the researched by virtue of the fact that it is his/her experience, rather than the experience of the research participants, which determines the definition of the research problem, the research questions asked, and how the answers provided by the participants will be interpreted.4 According to this same feminist view, the fact that until recently most social science researchers were white middle class males has meant that most so-called 'value neutral' positivist research has actually been based on white middle class male experiences. These experiences, in turn, have determined the content of the research monographs and textbooks that have subsequently molded the values and preoccupations of younger generations of researchers; hence, the androcentric traditions of social science research have carried on. 5 As a way of counteracting the inevitable power relations that arise in and are perpetuated by social science research, most feminist methodologies are qualitative. Whereas all the questions in survey research need to be formulated before the research is begun, qualitative research methods tend to be less hierarchical by virtue of being receptive to the perspectives of participants throughout the research process. Most feminist methodologies also attempt to counteract the inevitable power exercised by the researcher by privileging the perspective and voice of the research participants and, instead of regarding the products of their research as simply 'data,' conducting their research for the explicit purpose of enabling the voices of their participants to be heard. As would be expected of endeavours with so many stakeholders, collaborative action-oriented research projects do not necessarily employ feminist methodologies. Certainly some MMF Centre research teams have used such feminist methodologies and data-gathering techniques as feminist grounded theory,

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feminist focus groups, in-depth interviewing, and institutional ethnography. Other teams have used the more traditional methods and techniques of survey research, scales, and literature review. Most teams have used a combination of feminist and traditional methods and techniques. In some cases, the methods used have been traceable to the androcentric social relationships surrounding particular teams. For example, one MMF Centre research team had several government employees as members, and did contractual research which asked the questions that the provincial government wished to have answered, using the methodologies that government wished to use. Some teams have forged a complex relationship between research and feminism by using non-feminist methodologies to achieve feminist goals. For example, the Dating Violence team conducted a survey which discovered that 22% of adolescent girls and 12% of adolescent boys had already experienced upsetting incidents of physical and/or psychological violence. The results of the survey, and of subsequent focus groups, are being used to develop programs with goals that include the empowerment of adolescent girls. Even though surveys do not employ a feminist strategy, their results can advance the status of women by producing numbers that will convince policy makers to allocate more resources in woman-centered ways. And - as was the case in the example mentioned earlier - contract research can gather valuable information which contributes to the creation of a community in which women can physically feel more safe. In short, neither all the personnel nor all the practices of collaborative actionoriented research are feminist. However, the world we live in is not feminist, and the world is the context in which much of our research must make its way. Research centers need to negotiate with many aspects of this world if they wish to survive. Additionally, in order to maintain its optimism, any institution which equates success with action must develop an appreciation of the good that can result from a variety of actions which originate in a variety of ways. Apart from all that, there are several respects in which collaborative actionoriented research always represents feminist practice. First, some of its goals exemplify feminist principles. For example, a major goal of collaborative research on family violence is the eradication of controlling, violent, patriarchal social relationships. A major goal of collaborative research on women's health is to increase the health, quality of life, and life expectancy of women living in a particular geographical area during a particular time. Second, and more importantly, the process of collaborative action-oriented research is feminist at its core: (a) because it has an inclusive method of choosing who will carry out the research; (b) because it has an inclusive method of deciding what is valid knowledge; (c) because the social relations among its researchers are, as much as possible, non-hierarchical; (d) because during the process of carrying out the

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research, some of the personal needs of the team members are attended to and met.

CONCLUSION In arriving at an assessment of collaborative action-oriented research, it is useful to attempt to answer two questions. The first question is: 'does collaborative action-oriented research enable research and action to converge?' Based on the experience of the M M F Centre, my answer is 'yes' - especially if academic and community researchers are able to collaborate as equal partners who respect one another, and are willing to do what it takes to work their differences through. Doing so is a partly-intangible process that involves bonding, developing trust, and shedding original preconceptions in order to develop objectives that are shared. Additionally, such inherent structural problems as the 'publish or perish' mindset of academia and the hierarchical nature of university research must be overcome, suspended, or otherwise bracketed, if the convergence is to succeed. To varying degrees, these good outcomes occur. The second crucial question is: 'is collaborative action-oriented research feminist?' Again based on the experience of the M M F Centre, my answer is 'tentatively yes.' When the diversity of potential stakeholders - and potential methods - are taken into account, not to mention calculations about how to maximize social impact or survive financially in difficult times, the results are mixed. However, the inclusiveness of collaborative action-oriented research, along with the other ways in which collaborative action-oriented research incorporates feminist process, works to preserve the essential feminist character of this research genre, even as some of its empirical manifestations temporarily digress.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am grateful to Rina Arseneault for her comments on an earlier draft.

NOTES 1. Government of Canada, Family Violence and Violence Against Women: A Joint Initiative of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Health and Welfare Canada. 2. Jan Barnsley, Co-Operation or Co-Optation? The Partnership Trend of the Nineties, in Leslie Timmins (ed), Listening to the Thunder: Advocates Talk About the Battered Women's Movement.

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3. See Meg Luxton, More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of W o m e n ' s Work in the Home; Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy. 4. See especially Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: Feminist Sociology. 5. See Diane L. Wolf, Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fietdwork. In Diane L. Wolf (Ed.)., Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork.

REFERENCES Barnsley, J (1995). Co-Operation or Co-Optation? The Partnership Trend of the Nineties. In: Leslie Timmins (Ed.), Listening to the Thunder: Advocates Talk About the Battered Women's Movement (pp. 187-213). Vancouver: Women's Research Centre. Government of Canada (1991). Family Violence and Violence Against Women: A Joint Initiative of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Health and Welfare Canada.

Ottawa, November. Luxton, M. (1980). More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women's Work in the Home. Toronto: Women's Press. Smith, D. E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walby, S. (1990). Theorizing Patriarchy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolf, D. L. (1996). Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. In: Diane L. Wolf (Ed.), Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (pp. 1-55). Boulder: Westview Press.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Lady Selma Ferreira Albernaz is an anthropologist. She is a professor in the Social Sciences Department at Pernambuco Federal University in Brazil and a member of the Family, Gender and Sexuality Group there. She is also a doctoral student in the Social Sciences Programe at the University of Campinas. I~da Chapoval is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her current research examines the impact of privatizafion on labor, focusing on the Brazilian banking industry. Other research interests include social change and development, sociology of work, sociology of sex and gender, women and development, sociology of the family, sociological theory, sociology of health and illness and stratification. Dr. Abha Chauhan has worked at the Centre for Women's Development Studies in New Delhi for three years. She completed her doctorate in sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in 1994. She began her career as a lecturer in sociology in 1987 and, after nine years of teaching, involved herself full-time in research and action projects. Her interests are in gender and tribal/community studies. She has published articles in national and international journals and two books: Tribal Women and Social Change in India (1990) and Tribal Women: Continuity and Change (1999). L a u r a Corradi is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Universita degli Studi in Calabria, Italy. Her research, teaching and humanitarian work have taken her to many parts of the world. Ann Denis is a professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa (Canada) and has been involved in the university's interdisciplinary Women's Studies Program (now the Institute of Women's Studies) since its inception. She was chair of the Department of Sociology from 1994-2000, and vice-president, president and past president of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (1995-1998). She has been active in Women in Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association (WISISA), including as its co-chair (1999-2002). Her research interests focus on gendered analyses of 247

248

About the Contributors

paid and unpaid work, especially in Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean, of ethnic relations in Canada, and of the use of new information technology by Franco-Ontarian young people. She is co-anthor of Femmes de carribre, carrikres de femmes (presses de l'Universit6 d'Ottawa, 1999). Simel Esim is an economist in the Economic Analysis Division of the International Center for Research on Women. Her research and program work have been in the fields of international political economy, institutional economics, and gender and economic development. In the last decade, she has collaborated and consulted with a range of institutions including UN agencies (UNIFEM, UNICEF, World Bank), USAID, host country governments, international and local NGOs, women's organizations and networks. She has written and published articles on impact of globalization on women's employment, microenterprise development (business development services), engendering macroeconomics (public expenditure priorities, informal sector), and education. Her work has taken her to Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Mexico and the Philippines. Janet Zollinger Giele is Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University founding director of the Children's Policy Center in the Heller Graduate School (19901996). Before joining the Brandeis faculty in 1976 she was a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University and Principal Consultant to the Ford Foundation Task Force on Women. She has received numerous grants and fellowships and is the author of Women and the Future (Free Press, 1978) and Two Paths to Women's Equality: Women's Temperance and Women's Suffrage, 1830-1930 (Twayne, 1995), editor of Women in the Middle Years (Wiley, 1982) and co-editor of Women: Roles and Statuses in Eight Countries (Wiley, 1977) and Women's Work and Women's Lives: The Continuing Struggle Worldwide (Westview, 1992). She was recently honored with the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal for her pioneering work in the study of gender and women's changing roles. Deborah Harrison is Professor of Sociology and Past Director of the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research at the University of New Brunswick. She is author of The Limits of Liberalism: The Making of Canadian Sociology (Black Rose, 1982), co-author of No Life Like It: Military Wives in Canada (Lorimer, 1994), and national coordinator of the collaborative research project, The Canadian Forces' Response to Woman Abuse in Military Families, which is being carried out jointly by the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre and the RESOLVE Violence and Abuse Research Centre at the University of Manitoba.

About tt~eContributors

249

Vicky Kirby received her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program~ University of California at Santa Cruz, and is now a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology at The University of New South Wales in Sydney. She is the author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Routledge, 1997) and has contributed to scholarly journals including, Signs, Hypatia: Journal of

Feminist Philosophy, Anthropological Quarterly, Semiotic Review of Books, Australian Feminist Studies, and Mankind as well as to encyclopedias and anthologies, including Encyclopedia of Semiotics, Derrida Downunder: Deconstruction at the Millennium, Feminism and the Politics of Difference, and Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces. Judith L o r b e r is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate School, City University of New York. She is the author of Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics (Roxbury, 1998, second edition, 2001), Gender and the Social Construction of Illness (Sage, 1997), Paradoxes of Gender (Yale, 1994), and co-editor of Revisioning Gender (Sage, 1999) and The Social Construction of Gender (Sage, 1991). She was founding editor of Gender & Society, official publication of Sociologists for Women in Society. She received the American Sociological Association Jessie Bernard Career Award and has held the Marie Jahoda International Visiting Professorship of Feminist Studies at Ruhr University in Germany. Barbara Marshall teaches sociology and women's studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change (Polity Press/Northeastern University Press, 1994) and Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics (Broadview Press, 2000), as well as a number of articles on feminist theory and feminist politics. Her cun'ent research on the gendered construction of sexual dysfuntion is exploring the historical and social technologies that link gender, sexuality, science and consumerism. Paola Melchiori is a founding member and currently president of the International Branch of the Free University of Women, in Milan, Italy, a research and training oriented feminist association of women from various intellectual backgrounds, social classes and cultures (since 1978). She is the author of various essays, co-author of various books and author of three books: on the philosopher Simone Weil, on the relations among women in the women's studies and pedagogical contexts, and on feminist theory within the Italian movement. Her theoretical and field work includes North-South cooperative projects in the context of cross-cultural women's exchanges.

250

About the Contributors

Helen Ralston is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. For over a decade she has been doing research with women in India and with South Asian immigrant women and their daughters in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. She has published two books and several articles on these related topics. She works actively with students in the Inter-University (Saint Mary's, Dalhousie and Mount Saint Vincent) Graduate .Women's Studies program in Halifax. Annemiek Richters is a physician and medical anthropologist. She has been a professor in Women Health Care at Leiden University Medical Center since 1995. Since November 2000 she holds the chair of Culture, Health and Illness. Some of the issues that are the focus of her present work are: gender, culture, violence, trauma, health and healing, the quality of reproductive health care for black, migrant and refugee women in the Netherlands, and the cultural comparison of medicine and women's body politics in the context of globalization.

Gladys Symons is a full professor at the l~cole nationale d'administration publique in Montrtal, Canada, where she teaches organizational sociology, epistemology, and research methodology in the graduate program. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Montreal and a member of the research team GRES (Groupe de recherche, ethnicit6 et socitt6), at the Center for Ethnic Studies (CEETUM) at the University of Montreal. Professor Symons does research in the area of organizations, gender studies, the sociology of emotions and race/ethnic relations. She is currently studying emotional space in organizations, a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

EDITORS Vasilikie Demos is a professor of sociology at the University of MinnesotaMorris. She has studied minority families in the United States and is currently completing a monograph on her study of Kytherian Greek women based on interviews in Greece and among immigrants in the United States and Australia. With Marcia Texler Segal, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of Sociologists for Women in Society and of the North Central Sociological Association, and has been an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales. Marcia Texler Segal is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean for Research and a professor of sociology at Indiana University Southeast. Her

About the Contributors

251

research and consulting focus on education and on women in Sub-Saharan Africa and on ethnic women in the United States. With Vasilikie Demos, she is co-editor of the Advances in Gender Research series and Ethnic Women: A Multiple Status Reality (General Hall, 1994). She is a past president of the North Central Sociological Association, a past chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Sex and Gender, and current chair of the ASA Section on Race, Gender and Class.

INDEX

accommodation, 79 activists, 157 adaptation, 79 Afro-American, 151 Africa, 165, 184 South, 167 alienation realities, 221 analogue, 52, 53, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68 narratives, 53, 56, 59, 63, 67 anorexia, 58, 59 anthropology/anthropologists, 27, 54, 72, 202 anti-feminist, 104 Asia, 165, 216-219, 223, 225 South, 165, 167, 216-219, 223, 225 migrant women, domestic life experience, 218 education and paid work experience, 218 migration experience, 218 organizational experience, 218 Southeast, 165, 167, 168 authoritarian, 42 Asian Women Human Rights Council (AWHRC), 17

Black, 151, 155, 158 blood, 56, 57 body, 4548, 51-59, 61, 63, 65-67 politics, 63, 64 Bolivia, 164 Brazil, 197 Breast Cancer activism, 45 British Commonwealth of Nations, 216 Pacific Rim, 218 Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW), 152, 155 capitalism, 74 Caribbean, 165 categorical theory, 100 change, 155 agents, 155 objects, 155 recipients, 155 class, 43, 44, 59, 75, 87, 145, 185, 187, 188, 190, 214, 221 collaborative action-oriented research, 233, 235, 236, 238-244 colonialism, 74, 75, 152, 158 "comfort women", 18 community, 72 community based research, 236 concept(ion), 3, 97, 156, 157 conduit, 235 consciousness raising, 13, 16, 19, 22, 171, 182 constructionism, 44 control, 143, 184 cooperation, 171-173 cooperative, 169, 172, 173 financial, 169 non-financial, 169

Bangladesh, 164 binary, 85, 88, 89, 93 configurations, 3 bio-determinations, 36 bio-feminism, 105 biological differences, 72 biology, 3, 36, 73 biomedicine, 4, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61, 63, 65-68 biopolitics, 13 bisexuality, 130 bisexuals, 125, 126 253

254 co-optations, 20 feminisation, 20 cosmetic surgery, 59 cost, 156 cross-cultural research, 214 cross-dressing, 126 cultural, 34, 36, 37, 122 culture(s), 3, 4, 15, 25, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 46, 58, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 81 cultural activity, 15 cultural conservative, 104 cultural determinations, 36 cultural synchronization, 54 culture, 3, 4, 15, 25, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 46, 58, 61, 65, 66 decision-making, 79, 143 decoding, 87 deconstruction, 71, 85, 87-90, 93 degendering, 120, 131, 132 democratic frame, 14 dependency, 92 development, 6, 7, 151-153, 155-157, 159, 160 devolution, 6, 139, 149 diaspora, 213, 219, 227 dichotomy(ies), 5, 71-73, 77, 80, 81, 88, 90, 154, 159, 196, 206, dichotomous concepts, 44 difference, 103, 122, 124 digital data, 60 digitalization, 52, 63, 64, 67 digitaliz, -ed, -ing, 57, 58, 64, 65, 67 languages, 53 disabilities, 123 distress, 56, 64 diversity, 103, 155, 189 division(s) of labor, 27, 30, 93, 143, 144, 154, 202 sexual, 93 dowry, 74, 79, 80 dualism(s), 4, 73, 99 dualities, 4 economic, 7, 153, 155 organizations, 163 informal, 163 microcredit, 164

INDEX microentrepeneurs, 164, 165, 168, 171, 176 microenterprises, 168 microfinance, 164 savings, 163 economy, 27, 179 informal, 179 North, 180 political, 27 South, 180 underground, 179 education, 153 embodiments, 53, 59, 67 emotional(ity), 85, 93 emotions, 89 empirical research, 43, 45 empiricism, 34, 36 empowerment, 52, 155, 157 Enlightenment, 11, 18, 28, 86 European, 1, 3, 86 entrepreneurs, 163, 164, 170 small, 171, 173, 176 environment(al), 7, 180, 191 movement, 45, 48 epistemological, 85, 86, 159 equality, 155, 181, 184, 185, 195, 198, 204, 205 equity, 77, 79, 81 essential, -ism, -ized, 6, 26, 27, 44, 73, 102, 107, 142, 159, 181, 182 biological reductionism, 142 ethnic, 19, 41, 122 relations, 152 ethnicity, 59, 108, 145, 152, 185, 190, 214, 221 ethnocentrism, 182, 214 Eurocentric, 42, 155, 159 Europe, 165 evolution, 120 extended kinship, 75 family, 85, 90 female body, 16 passivity, 16 subjectivity, 15 feminism, 8, 11, 14, 27, 28, 32, 41, 43, 85-88, 141, 151, 153, 154, 160, 195-199, 201-203, 205

Index

gender, 105 new, 199 eco-, 199 feminism and development, 199 lesbian, 199 multi-racial, 199 postmodern, 199 radical, 199, 204-206 of color, 43 white, 42-44 feminist, 2, 9, 29, 32, 36, 71, 72, 76, 81, 85, 87, 88, 92, 94, 119, 120, 122, t80-182,184, 185, 190, 197, 199-201, 213, 214 analysis, 5 eco-, 4, 41, 44 economists, 182, 183, 187, 191 epistemology, 2 evil/radical, 204 good, 206 practice, 2 methodologies, 242 researchers, 2, 213 scholarship, 2, 3, 5 sociologists, 48 theorists, 2, 6 theory, 2, 41-45, 139, 140, 144-149 development, 139, 142, 144-147, 149 models, 139 Gender and Development (GAD), 139, 140, 142-144, 154 Women and Development (WAD), 139, 141, 143, 144 Women In Development (WID), 139, 141, 143, 144 white, 213 feminization, 36 "fringe dwellers", 215 gender(s), 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 27, 33, 42-44, 59, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, 92, 94, 97, 99, 108, 120, 122-124, 152, 154, 158, 171, 176, 180, 181,184, 187-190, 214, 221 age, 77, 78, 87, 147 equality, 8, 143 inequalities, 171, 197

255 relations, 71, 140, 142, 144-147, 196, 198-200, 202, 205, 206 roles, 27 specific, 153 stereotype, 77 Gender and Development (GAD), 101 geneticization, 66 glass escalator, 124 global context, 109 globalization, 42, 51-53, 57, 59, 63, 65-68, 180, 185 health, 51 heterosexual matrix, 107 Hindu(s), 76, 78 Hindu Succession Act, 74 history, 27 homogenization, 159 household, 78 joint, 78 nuclear, 78 humanity, 74 identity, 16 immigrant women, 220, 221 imperialism, 152, 158 economic, 158 intellectual, 152 India, 71, 74-78, 165 caste, 72, 75, 77, 78, 214 class, 75, 77 Indian, 75, 76 religion, 77 South, 73 individualism, 106 industrialization, 153 informal economy, 165 interests, 145 integrated research with community action, 234 interrelatedness, 5 intersexuals, 128 Islamic, 158 kinship network, 78 knowledge, 235, 236, 239

INDEX

256 Latin America, 165, 168, 184 lesbian feminism, 130 "life's lesions", 54, 55, 64 lived experience, 219, 220 mainstrean, 99 man, 71, 72, 80, 81 margins, 42 marginalisation, 20, 41, 142, 143, 146, 147, 152 marxist, 154 masculinity, 16, 107 medicalization, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 63-65, 67 men, 2, 4, 6, 60, 122, 153, 157, 164, 168-170, 181, 182, 190, 197 menopause(al), 56, 57, 64 metanarrative, 88 metaphysics, 28 methodology, 43 misogyny, 16 power, 16 modernist theories, 3, 7 modernity, 22, 98, 99 modernization, 56, 90, 179, 180, 181, 191 move san, 55, 56 multidimensional research, 120, 123 multiplicities, 122 Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research, 233, 234, 237, 239, 241-244 natural, 25, 31, 45 nature, 4, 25-29, 32, 33, 35-37, 46, 71, 72, 74, 81 nebulosa (explained), 201, 206, 207 nerves, 56, 57 networks, 171 objectified bodies, 59 oppression, 43, 66, 141, 144, 154, 155, 158, 180, 181 organization theory, 85, 89 Patamaba, 165, 166 patriarchal, 27, 91, 181, 182 patriarchy, 20-22, 44, 73, 74, 76, 154

patrilineal, 74, 79, 80 personal, 19, 89 Phillipines, 165 policies, 153 immigration selection, 218 multicultural and multi-racial, 218 settlement, 218 policy makers, 159 political, 7, 13, 19, 77, 155 action, 14 positivism, 36 postmodern, 28, 34, 37, 71, 75, 85-88, 94, 103, 119, 121, 122 poststructural(ist), 28, 31, 33, 37, 103 poverty, 7, 55, 141, 144, 146, 175, 180, 186 power, 92, 94, 143, 160, 198, 205 prestige, 143 private, 4, 5, 11, 13, 18, 22, 19, 71, 74-77, 79-81, 85, 89-91, 93, 99, 154, 159, 198 domestic sphere, 74 privileged, 152 procreation, 21 psychiatry, 56 public, 4, 5, 11, 13, 18, 22, 19, 71, 73-77, 79-81, 85, 90, 93, 99, 154, 159, 195, 198 outside sphere, 74 queer theory, 122, 130 "queers", 127 race(ism), 41-45, 59, 87, 108 145 152, 158, 182, 185, 187, 188, 214, 221 racial, 122 racial stereotypes, 59 radical gender-benders, 127 rationality, 85 reality, 3 recognition, 42 regional, 72 research, 235, 238 resources, 7, 143, 153, 157, 168, 169, 180, 184, 186, 190, 191 role theory, 100

Index

scholars, 4, 151, 159 segregation, 20 self-alienation, 16 SEWA, 165, 166, 167, 176 sex, 2, 5, 87 sexism, 141 sexual abuse, 17 sexual dimorphism, 98 sexual exploitation, 146 sexual identity, 15 sexual orientation, 87 sexual preferences, 43 sexuality(ies), 21, 22, 27, 74 social, 25 social action, 235 social arrangements, 27 social class, 152 social construction(ism), 105, 119-122 social divisions, 45 social justice, 155 social sciences, 32, socialist, 154 socialization, 152 sociological theory, 43, 44, 47 sociologist, 181, 182, 188 sociology, 41, 97, 98, 151 status dilemmas, 125 stereotype, 93, 196, 199, 200, 202 subcontracting, 168 subordination, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, 152, 182 symptomatologies, 54, 55 technologies, 51, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66 biotechnology, 60 genetics, 60, 66 medical, 62 reproductive, 61, 66 transgenetics, 60 theories, 179 economic, 179, 184 sociological, 179, 184 third world, 5, 155, 185 transgender, 122, 125-127, 129, 130 studies, 120 Turkey, 163, 169, 171, 176, 177

257 "undo" gendering, 127, 131 Uniform Civil Code, 76 United Nations, 101 Conference on Human Rights, 17 universalism, 11, 73, 87, 144, 155, 181 value(ing), 8, 30, 31, 181, 198, 200 violence, 17, 18, 21, 22, 234, 235 against women, 234, 235, 241, 143 domestic, 55, 56, 146 family, 234, 235, 241,242 violent, 20, 26 virtual, 62 visible minority women, 219 visibility, 6, 7,12, 42 WIEGO, 167 work, 85, 90 home based, 168, 174, 175 women, 2-6, 11, 13, 55, 60, 62, 67, 68, 72, 75, 80, 81, 85, 140, 141-144, 148, 153-155, 159, 164, 165, 168-170, 181, 190, 196-198, 205, 213 disadvantaged, 75 indigenous, 47 of color/non-white, 46, 75, 213 non-western, 75 third world, 140, 142-148 tribal, 75 white, 153, 155 Women in Black, 19 Women in Development (WID), 101, 153, 154 Women in Society Research Group of the International Sociological Assn. (WISIA), 152 women's autonomy, 21 women's body politics, 52, 29 women's movement, 27, 76, 78 women's rights, 79 women's studies, 15