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Review Of Saida Hodzic. The Twilight Of Cutting: African Activism And Life After Ngos. Oakland: Univeristy Of California Press, 2017., Tobe Levin Von Gleichen Nov 2022

Review Of Saida Hodzic. The Twilight Of Cutting: African Activism And Life After Ngos. Oakland: Univeristy Of California Press, 2017., Tobe Levin Von Gleichen

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

With considerable fanfare, in Adieu !'Excision. Histoire et fin d'une tradition (Raymond Hounsa, 2009), Christa Muller rejoices in having saved Benin from FGM, the French text lauding eradication. The effort instigated by a Saarbrucken-based NGO, it has banned blades from the vicinity of vulvae. In 1996, on a state visit, Muller, then married to Saarland's governor Oscar Lafontaine, was asked by Benin's First Lady Rosine Vieyra Soglo1 to assist her Inter-African Committee (IAC) chapter by creating an association. This she did, launching I(N)TACT, e.V. and securing 300,000 Euros for the movement, a sum with strings, however. Berlin insisted on …


Perhaps Discomfort Is The Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism And Imperial Cartographies Of Thinking/Feeling, Saida Hodzic Nov 2022

Perhaps Discomfort Is The Answer: Refusing Liberal Feminism And Imperial Cartographies Of Thinking/Feeling, Saida Hodzic

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs is an unsettling feminist ethnography that traces the movements of three objects: the endings of female genital cutting in Ghana, their relationship to anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of governance they instantiate, and the role anthropology and feminism have played in this governance since colonial rule. It makes the case that the three objects must be studied together: namely, that we need to understand the practice of female genital cutting alongside its endings; that cutting does not exist outside of anti-cutting campaigns; and that anti-cutting campaigns are entangled with both …


Ghosting Humanity: In Search Of An Ethics For The Disappeared, John Kaiser Ortiz Nov 2022

Ghosting Humanity: In Search Of An Ethics For The Disappeared, John Kaiser Ortiz

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper visualizes what an ethics of the disappeared might look like if the troubled ontology of ghosts and their (un)seen realities are posited as real as allied discussions of the victims of human trafficking and other instances of violence against women, including femicide and sexual slavery.


Review Of Walaa Alqaisiya. Decolonial Queering In Palestine. London: Routledge, 2023, Ankita Chatterjee Nov 2022

Review Of Walaa Alqaisiya. Decolonial Queering In Palestine. London: Routledge, 2023, Ankita Chatterjee

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Decolonial Queering in Palestine by WalaaAlqaisiya offers an in-depth study of the conquest of Palestine with respect to the variegated power structures of settler colonialism and underscores the political significance of a reformulated mode of decolonization. It argues for the need to interweave queer into the native Palestinian positionality termed as 'decolonial queering', so as to challenge the (hetero) sexualizing and gendered discourses embedded within both the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial regime and the Palestinian Nationalist visions of liberation. By the 'ethnographic' engagement with the works of Palestinian artists and activists from one of the prominent queer groups, alQaws, the book …


Review Of Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power And Social Change In The Biafran Atlantic Age. By Ndubueze L. Mbah. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. 307 P. $ 33.20., Nadir A. Nasidi Nov 2022

Review Of Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power And Social Change In The Biafran Atlantic Age. By Ndubueze L. Mbah. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. 307 P. $ 33.20., Nadir A. Nasidi

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For a long period of time, women played significant roles in many pre-colonial African societies, serving in various capacities as religious, political, and economic leaders. The exact roles and status of these women, however, differ contrastively from one society to another based on factors such as religion, culture, and social organization. Though this unpopular fact about African history receives little or no attention from scholars, few studies offer some insights into the history and transformation of the powers of female leaders in Africa (Weir, 2000; Ogbomo, 2005; Weir, 2006; Achebe, 2011; Akyeampong & Fofack, 2014). Along this intersection, Mba's Emergent …


Feminists As Cultural ‘Assassinators’ Of Pakistan, Afiya S. Zia Nov 2022

Feminists As Cultural ‘Assassinators’ Of Pakistan, Afiya S. Zia

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Pakistan’s annual Aurat March (Women’s March) signifies a milestone in the culture of feminist protest, but a tense impasse follows a series of encounters between sexual and religious politics, and this has serious implica- tions for rights-based activism in the Islamic Republic.


The Fundamentalist Nexus Of Neoliberalism, Rentier Capitalism, Religious And Secular Patriarchies, And South Asian Feminist Resistances, Fawzia Afzal-Khan Nov 2022

The Fundamentalist Nexus Of Neoliberalism, Rentier Capitalism, Religious And Secular Patriarchies, And South Asian Feminist Resistances, Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In two case studies from Pakistan, which I then link to Afghanistan (under the Taliban before and after the Soviet/ US proxy war there) as well as the Farmer’s Movement in India—I wish to proffer an intersectional analysis of debates around the issue of women’s rights in the global south. Feminist artivism (art-as-activism), can help build solidarities to mount resistances against globally-inflected state repression in our age of neoliberal economic and religious fundamentalisms, which, working in tandem, seek to roll back the rights of women and minorities in and across South Asia, as elsewhere.


Black Queer Times At Riis: Making Place In A Queer Afrofuturist Tense, Jah Elyse Sayers Nov 2021

Black Queer Times At Riis: Making Place In A Queer Afrofuturist Tense, Jah Elyse Sayers

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper posits a queer Afrofuturist mode of spatiotemporal production in queer and trans Black, indigenous and people of color’s navigation to and making of a queer beach to honor Black queer and trans histories and build Black queer and trans futures in opposition to multiple forms of displacement.


The Fantasy Of “Home”: Locating Dislocation, Loss, And Silence, Roksana Badruddoja Nov 2021

The Fantasy Of “Home”: Locating Dislocation, Loss, And Silence, Roksana Badruddoja

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The meaning(s) of “home” are once again a robust conversation in the American national landscape as we continue to struggle over postcolonial empire-inspired borders. As a queer Person of Color, Woman of Color, and Mother of Color in the U.S.; an American offspring of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant parents; and a professor of social inequalities, I am particularly concerned about thinking through neoliberal anti-liberatory U.S. racialization projects and the notion of “home” or what I call the “neoliberal home.” I concern myself with diverse languages, images, myths, and rituals through which “home” is represented and constituted, and from the dispatches of …


Artist Statement: Tutorial On Radiance, Kearra Amaya Gopee Nov 2021

Artist Statement: Tutorial On Radiance, Kearra Amaya Gopee

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Tutorials on Radiance explores a queerness beyond the physical body and extends to the lived environments of queer people. I am particularly focused on Anglophone Caribbean cultures of queerness. I will be looking specifically at the boundaries of the 2D image in relation to queerness, portraiture and visibility.


A Vacation Is Not Activism Part Iii —On Tourism And Ecosocial Disasters, Bani Amor Nov 2021

A Vacation Is Not Activism Part Iii —On Tourism And Ecosocial Disasters, Bani Amor

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.


Review Of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, And Schooling In San Francisco, By Savannah Shange, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, Siobhan Brooks Nov 2021

Review Of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, And Schooling In San Francisco, By Savannah Shange, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, Siobhan Brooks

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist, in 1831 visited the United States to observe U.S. democracy, and in 1835 he wrote Democracy in America. One of the observations Tocqueville made was that slavery coexisted with ideals of freedom. This observation from almost 200 years ago informs Savannah Shange’s groundbreaking book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco.


Review Of Melancholia Africana By Nathalie Etoke, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, Kristen Kirksey Nov 2021

Review Of Melancholia Africana By Nathalie Etoke, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, Kristen Kirksey

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition by Nathalie Etoke, is equal parts ruminative meditation and urgent call to action for Black Africans and those in the diaspora. The titular concept, melancholia africana, is “an extensible concept that examines how sub-Saharans and people of African descent cope with loss, mourning, and survival in a practice of everyday life contaminated by the past.”


Racialization.Spectacle.Liberation, Sm Rodriguez, Chriss Sneed Nov 2021

Racialization.Spectacle.Liberation, Sm Rodriguez, Chriss Sneed

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This special issue navigates the complexity of racialization, experiences related to identity, social structure, and inequality, and that which emerges when one/many embark on journeys towards liberation. “racialization.spectacle.liberation” is an intentional provocation; in both punctuating each word and leaving them affixed, wegesture towards the curious amalgamations that are produced at the intersections of where each project begins and ends. Such processes are not benign.


Presumed Nonhuman: Black Women Intellectuals And The Struggle For Humanity In The Academy, Andrea N. Baldwin Nov 2021

Presumed Nonhuman: Black Women Intellectuals And The Struggle For Humanity In The Academy, Andrea N. Baldwin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this article I engage with the work of Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and Kevin Quashie, weaving in my own personal narrative of being presumed nonhuman to detail the everyday struggles Black women academics face. Herein I also illustrate how these struggles become sites of resistance, building, and hope.


Dreaming With A Future: Queer Memory Beyond National Trauma, Cynthia Melendez Nov 2021

Dreaming With A Future: Queer Memory Beyond National Trauma, Cynthia Melendez

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This article examines queer memory in Peru through the works of artists Christian Benday.n, Barboza-Gubo and Mroczek, and the collective No Tengo Miedo. I suggest that they construct alternative memories to the hegemonic one, as they denounce the violence against the LGBTIQ population during the years of political violence (1980-2000).


The Fantasy Of Spotting Human Trafficking: Training Spectacles In Racist Surveillance, Elena Shih Nov 2021

The Fantasy Of Spotting Human Trafficking: Training Spectacles In Racist Surveillance, Elena Shih

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In January 2019, in honor of National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month in the US, the Marriott International hotel group announced that it had successfully trained 600,000 hotel workers to spot the signs of human trafficking in its hotel properties around the world. This training, planned and executed in partnership with anti-trafficking organizations and law enforcement, reflects the recent proliferation of training schemes to identify victims of trafficking. This paper explores how such trainings script racist optics into the surveillance and policing of potential victims. Using proxy markers of poverty, sexuality, race, and nation, victim identification trainings expand policing--by …


Exhibit Me / Prohibit Me, Alok Vaid-Menon Nov 2021

Exhibit Me / Prohibit Me, Alok Vaid-Menon

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.


The Mammy, The Strong, Or The Broken: Politics Of Hair Afrocentricities In Scripted Television, Hayley Blackburn Nov 2021

The Mammy, The Strong, Or The Broken: Politics Of Hair Afrocentricities In Scripted Television, Hayley Blackburn

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The general literature on the experiences of Black women in America consistently discusses the way that more Afrocentric appearances— whether through skin tone, hairstyles and textures, clothing, language, or a combination of all the above— have been negatively framed throughout cultural and media histories ...


Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu Nov 2020

Veronica Porumbacu’S ‘Return From Cynthera’ (1966): A Conceptual Manifesto Of Socialist Feminism, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Veronica Porumbacu (1921-1977) was a Romanian poet and translator who has been unjustly forgotten today due to her proletcultist poems of the 1950s. Yet her work was widely published and well-known during the socialist regime, and is especially relevant for the two decades of growth and ideological innovation of the 1960s and 1970s. In my article I analyze a remarkable volume of hers published in 1966, situating it in the context of her work and in the wider frame of the political context of Romania. I argue that Return from Cythera can be considered a conceptual manifesto of socialist feminism, …


The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas Nov 2020

The Return Of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair, Jasmina Tumbas

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay considers women’s emancipation in Socialist Yugoslavia as central to the socialist project. I focus on the feminist art of the 1970s and 1980s, aswell as contemporary engagements with the question of Yugoslavia. I put in conversation performance works by Sanja Iveković, Vlasta Delimar, Marina Gržinić, and Šejla Kamerić. The title of this essay, “Return of Jugoslovenka: An Unrequited Love Affair” points to how contested the position of Yugoslav women was during socialism, and how much it remains so today, albeit for very different reasons. As I show in the article, Yugoslav women in the arts embraced socialism as …


Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack Nov 2020

Review Of Gender In 20th Century Eastern Europe And The Ussr, Edited By Catherine Baker. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, Katharina Wiedlack

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The anthology Gender in 20th Century Eastern Europe and the USSR is a collection of fourteen essays on a wide range of gender-related topics, from motherhood to concepts of masculinity, sexuality, and professional work.


Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin Nov 2020

Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’S Activism And Global Solidarity During The Cold War. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2018. Isbn 978-1-4780-0181-2 (Pbk), 328 Pp., Renata Jambrešić Kirin

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

While most recent feminist studies on the socialist heritage are preoccupied with the conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions of the 1990s and beyond, Kristen Ghodsee’s book Second World, Second Sex (2018) evokes the most vibrant decade of women’s global activism marked by joint initiatives of women from both socialist and decolonized societies from the Global South.


Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović Nov 2020

Editorial: Gender Relations And Women’S Struggles In Socialist Southeast Europe, Dijana Jelaca, Nikolay Karkov, Tanja Petrović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

For readers versed in the tradition of North Atlantic feminist theory, the intersection of “socialism” and “feminism” is relatively uncomplicated. As a rule, the theory proffers a critique of the “double oppression” that women experience under patriarchy and capitalism, with the exact relationship between these two systems then up for debate. While often not explicitly thematized, the theory’s geographical roots in North American and Western European struggles and contexts inform its epistemological practice and organizational protocols.


Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević Nov 2020

Biljana Jovanović, A Rebel With A Cause Or: On ‘A General Revision Of Your Possibilities’, Tijana Matijević

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

By analysing Yugoslav writer Biljana Jovanović’s early novels, the essay follows her possible literary speculations on the capacity of the Yugoslav society to fulfill the promises of the revolution, together with her imagining of an alternative form of sociability, as that which could result in universal, human emancipation. Offering a peculiar portrait of the urban society of the late seventies in Yugoslavia, in her novels Jovanović tests if and how the problem of women’s emancipation is connected to the problems of class. Yet, a failure of class emancipation, an ‘impossibility to revise’ the society is antagonized from the scrupulous and …


Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca Nov 2020

Towards Women’S Minor Cinema In Socialist Yugoslavia, Dijana Jelaca

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay theorizes the concept of women’s minor cinema in socialist Yugoslavia, conceptualized through examples of cultural texts that circulate within the so-called women’s genres: romance films, “chick flicks,” and TV soap operas. Women’s cinema is here not defined solely as films made by women, but rather, films that address the spectator as a woman, regardless of the spectator’s sex or gender. I argue that, in the context of Yugoslavia, such works frequently articulated emancipatory, feminist stances that did not demarcate a dichotomous opposition to the socialist state as such, but rather called for the state to fulfill its original …


Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc Nov 2020

Agency, Biography, And Temporality: (Un)Making Women’S Biographies In The Wake Of The Loss Of The Socialist Project In Yugoslavia, Tanja Petrović, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s agency in socialist societies. Focusing on socialist and post-socialist Slovenia, it explores the ways agency reveals itself in interviews with and biographical portraits of the socio-politically active women – or “political workers” (politične delavke), as they were called during Yugoslav socialism – Mara Rupena Osolnik and Aleksandra Kornhauser Frazer. In these texts, agency unfolds as a mosaic of multiple, naturally intertwined activities and engagements aimed at the common good and at improving the position of women and other socially marginalized groups. This kind of agency – understood as the ability to …


The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović Nov 2020

The Other Side Of Everything, Dir. Mila Turajlić (Hbo Europe, 2017), Dragana Obradović

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

The Other Side of Everything is a documentary about an apartment in Birčaninova 20, a leafy street in Belgrade, Serbia. It is the family home of Mila Turajlić, the film’s director (known for her much-lauded film Cinema Komunisto from 2010), who uses this well-appointed interior to explore the intimacy of history.


General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković Nov 2020

General, Dir. Antun Vrdoljak (Hrvatska Radiotelevizija, 2019) The Diary Of Diana B., Dir. Dana Budisavljević (Pff, 2019), Sanjin Pejković

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Ideologically charged arguments about truth, often linked to fabrications of the past, have been discussed for decades in post-Yugoslav countries. They have also contributed to memory conflicts in different discourses. In addition to relativizing historical facts, marginalization of one’s own crimes and enlargement of others have also contributed to fragmentation of the truth and the emergence of parallel stories about the historical past.


Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos Nov 2020

Lilijana Burcar, Restavracija Kapitalizma: Repatriarhalizacija Družbe [Restauration Of Capitalism: Re-Patriarchization Of Society], Sophia, Ljubljana 2015, Iva Kosmos

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In her book Restavracija kapitalizma: repatriarhalizacija družbe (Restauration of capitalism: Re-patriarchization of society), Lilijana Burcar compares the systemic and structural conditions of women’s position in socialism and capitalism.