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- Volume 24, Issue 3/4, 2021
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 24, Issue 3/4, 2021
Volume 24, Issue 3/4, 2021
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‘We have nothing to celebrate!’: Fighting gender-based violence in Cape Town, South Africa
By Paula VermuëAbstractThis article illustrates the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of the fight against gender-based violence and femicide in Cape Town, South Africa. Firstly, this article shows how gender-based violence and femicide has been de-politicised through a conservative political narrative of the African National Congress (ANC) and through restricting funding relationships between Northern donor organisations and womxn’s NGOs in Cape Town. Secondly, I argue that, with the emerge of a new autonomous feminist movement in 2018, the Total Shutdown (TTS), the re-politicisation of gender-based violence happened on multiple levels. Not only did the activist movement manage to put gender-based violence back on the political agenda, it also helped NGO benefactors to reconnect with their feminist goals to end femicide in South Africa. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town from September 2018 until January 2019 and includes the stories of Capetonian NGO benefactors and TTS activists.
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‘They tried to exterminate us for 600 years, would you trust them?’ Antigypsyism and the post-racial use of intersectionality in state response to Intimate Partner Violence
More LessAbstractThis paper is an invitation to critically interrogate the ‘post-racial’ understanding of intersectionality in European policy work on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), through a focus on Antigypsyism in Spain’s specialised institutions. Spain’s ‘gender violence’ law has inspired international admiration for introducing measures aimed at the protection of all women regardless of their status or situation. However, its criminal justice system is marked by centuries of legislation constructing Romani women as innately suspicious. Semi-structured interviews conducted in IPV specialised courts, local police, and support services in Madrid indicate that practitioners reject legal colour-blindness and support intercultural mediation but refuse to address this racist legacy. Their intervention exposes Romani plaintiffs to harm by (1) promoting their cultural assimilation, (2) questioning their victim status, and (3) turning against their community support networks.
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Ingredients of empire: An oceanic approach to the study of Dutch imperialism and its aftermath
More LessAbstractThis article turns to the figure of the ship in the controversial Dutch Sinterklaas celebration to explore what an oceanic framework might bring to the study of Dutch imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Drawing on what Renisa Mawani calls an ‘oceanic approach and method’ for the study of colonial history, law, and colonial–racial orders, I examine the ship as an anchor point for abstracting, enacting, and rehearsing a colonial–racial order that emerged during the highpoint of Dutch imperialism and continues to permeate the national imaginary at present. Looking at how a Dutch ‘maritime imagination’ conditions imperial fantasies and desires, this article is an exercise in developing what I call a ‘cultural oceanography’ of Dutch imperialism and its aftermath.
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‘Fighting a ghost’: Collecting data and creating knowledge on sex trafficking in the League of Nations between 1921 and 1939
By Emma PostAbstractThis article analyses the understanding of sex trafficking in the League of Nations, with a focus on how the League collected data, critically dealt with its own data collection, and created a particular image of sex trafficking. I argue that a shift can be discerned in the debates within the Advisory Committee on Traffic of Women and Children, which was responsible for the study of sex trafficking in the League of Nations. Starting in 1921, the Advisory Committee focused on the mobility of women as a major factor in sex trafficking. After an ‘undercover investigation’ in 1927, their attention shifted to security. When the Advisory Committee researched the causes of prostitution in 1934, it finally considered prevention. The Advisory Committee was faced with different challenges and tensions that shaped the knowledge that it produced about sex trafficking. By analysing the minutes of their meetings, I lay bare that process of knowledge creation. Through the method of frame analysis and the concept of ‘biopolitics’, I intend to add to the existing historiographical scholarship on transnational cooperation and the League of Nations with an intersectional approach.
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Dark skin, hourglass figure: The sexualisation of Black women in the Dutch sex industry
By Tarah PaulAbstractThis article explores racial performance and the hypersexualisation of Black women in the Dutch sex industry. In the global sex trade, racialised women are constantly regarded as victims of sex trafficking without any agency, particularly migrant sex workers in European countries. While there is plenty of literature on how racial hierarchy affects Black women in the U.S. sex industry, such relevant research is lacking in Europe. In this explorative research, I deconstruct the images of Black women and set its narrative in the Netherlands. With semi-directive and in-depth interviews, I intend to highlight how Black sex workers perform images of Blackness and racial stereotypes when seducing male clients. My theoretical framework includes Patricia Hill Collins’s ‘controlling images’, Gloria Wekker’s ‘cultural archive’, Philomena Essed’s ‘everyday racism’, and Sunita Patel’s ‘racial performance’.
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Recht doen aan schrijfsterschap: Belle van Zuylen en haar correspondentie
More LessAbstractIsabelle de Charrière/Belle de Zuylen was born in the Netherlands, where she lived until her marriage at age 30. We know her therefore best as Belle van Zuylen (in spite of nearly all her work having been written and published in French, when she was living in Switzerland and known as Isabelle de Charrière). She tends to be represented in the Low Countries as an ever-young woman, the focus often being on her need of finding an appropriate marriage candidate. It was her particular attitude towards some of these marriage candidates that has led to the frequent use of one ‘quote’ that is often supposed to be representative of her feminism. This essay suggests that more attention should be paid to the whole of her personality. Her correspondence, which covers her entire life, allows for a more complete understanding of Van Zuylen as a person and as an author. These letters will soon be accessible online.
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The nuns’ story: Empirical research into religious, post/colonial, and gender power issues as illustrated by the lives and work of the missionary congregation, the Zusters van de Jacht
By Jane McBrideAbstractThis article is based on interviews carried out with sixteen members of the Zusters van de Jacht, a congregation founded in Belgium, and whose Belgian Sisters are today a mainly retired community. The Sisters served abroad as missionaries throughout the world, during and in the aftermath of colonial rule, and this article investigates issues of power using a three-fold lens of religion, post/colonialism, and gender. As nationals of the colonising country of Belgium and as members of an established church, the Sisters had a certain power and authority in the mission field, which they exercised in different ways. As foreign women and members of a religious congregation, they held roles of leadership and influence abroad, which allowed them to be effective bringers of change and help as well as active entrepreneurs. These roles transcended the gendered roles of submission they would have held as religious Sisters in the Roman Catholic Church back in Belgium. This article examines where and how power was exercised and experienced in their frequently adventurous, sometimes dangerous, missionary lives. It situates the life stories of the Zusters van de Jacht in the context of ongoing debates about the role and influence of missionary women. It makes a contribution to the oral history of religious missionary women by presenting extracts from their life stories in their own words.
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Connecting feminist, antiracist, and animal politics: A bridge too far?
By Mariska JungAbstractIn the past decade, animal and antiracist politics are on the rise in the Netherlands and Belgium. Both integrate feminism into their political practice, albeit in divergent ways. Nevertheless, their core concerns are generally viewed as antithetical on a conceptual, normative, and politically practical level. This paper explores the extent to which feminist, antiracist, and animal concerns are (in)commensurable. Coupling the ecofeminist analysis of dualism developed by Val Plumwood with recent developments in black studies advanced by Claire Jean Kim and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, processes of animalisation and dehumanisation are scrutinised. It is demonstrated that the onto-epistemological categories of gender, race, and animality connect on the level of being subjected to the logic of domination exemplary of Western thought (1), and on the level of being the abject yet constitutive Others of the normative category of ‘the human’ (2). Subsequently, to build bridges between feminist, antiracist, and animal advocacy movements, it is argued that animal advocates need to critically question the assumption of ‘human privilege’ and stop using slavery analogies, while feminists and antiracists should aspire to divest from human supremacy. A new approach to collective liberation in the Low Countries is needed, one that acknowledges the interconnectedness of gender, race, and animality alike.
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The strong global trend of prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation
More LessAbstractOver the last 30 years, more than 85 countries have prohibited sexual orientation discrimination in employment. Enacting such legal prohibitions has thereby become the most common form of legal recognition of homosexual orientation (more so than the decriminalisation of homosexual sex or the opening up of family law to same-sex partners). The trend is global (ten countries in Africa, more in Asia/Oceania, many in Europe and the Americas). The trend is reflected in supranational rules of the European Union and the Organisation of American States and also in decisions of international human rights bodies. On the basis of these numbers and developments, and in light of the various factors that help explain the strength of this global trend, the author argues that it is to be expected that the trend will continue to reach more and more countries. Explicit legal prohibitions of sexual orientation discrimination in employment can play a useful – perhaps central – role amongst other legal, educational, and social strategies aimed at increasing LGB inclusion.
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