Tag: feminism

On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change

By Jade S. Sasser

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back” – and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back – and why now? In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground – until now.

Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites – from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference – Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Although well-intentioned – promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community – these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible. On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.

Read the book here.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

By Meenakshi Thapan

This book explores the development of a sociology of embodiment in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. Through a critical analysis of gender and class, the author unravels the complexities that are intrinsic to the multi-layered and fluid construction of a woman’s identity in relation to embodiment.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India is the first book that unfolds an understanding of women’s experience of embodiment by a careful analysis of the facts gathered from an Indian metropolis. The author brings out numerous voices representing multiple subjectivities through interviews of working class slum women, professional upper class women, adolescent young women in secondary schools and in a slum, and the visual and textual representation of women in a women’s magazine in English.

Read the book here.

The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea.

By Jieun Lee and Euisol Jeong

Recently, in Korea, young feminists launched the 4B (4非) movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu, meaning the refusal of (heterosexual) marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships. The 4B movement encompasses not only criticisms of the pro-natalist turn in state policy and protests against it, but also various forms of self-help discussions and practices that are explicitly oriented towards women’s individual futures. In this article, Lee and Jeong explore how the 4B movement has given young feminists the opportunity to envision the future that they had been discouraged from imagining. Presenting a lived critique of contemporary Korea, these feminists ask how young women are led to imagine their current, single life as a temporary state, as consumer capitalism and the patriarchal state together place these young non-married women in an economically vulnerable position. They see this as achieved by endorsing ‘feminine’ desires and a presentist lifestyle, as well as excluding non-married women from opportunities in the job market and state-sponsored benefits in welfare services. They argue that the 4B movement and its discourses on the future and self-help could offer these women one possible way to envision a feminist future as individuals without being part of the state’s reproductive future.

Read the article here.

“Nomadity of Being” in Central Asia: Narratives of Kyrgyzstani Women’s Rights Activists

By Syinat Sultanalieva

This book offers a new framework for understanding feminism and political activism in Kyrgyzstan, “nomadity of being. ” Here, foreign information and requirements, even forced ones, are transformed into an amalgamation of the new and the old, alien and native—like kurak, a quilted patchwork blanket, made from scraps. Conceptualizing feminist narratives in Kyrgyzstan, while keeping in mind, the complex relationship between ideological borrowing, actualization, appropriation or self-colonization of “feminist” concepts can expand both scholarly and activist understanding of specificities of post-Soviet feminisms from a historiographic point of view. Kurak-feminism is feminism that is half-donor-commissioned, half-learned through interactions (personal, media, academic, professional), unashamed of its borrowed nature and working toward its own purpose that is being developed as the blanket is being quilted. Weaving in elements from completely different and, to a Western eye, incompatible approaches nomadity of being might pave the way toward a Central Asian reframing of non-Western feminisms. This provocative text will interest scholars of European politics, the post-Soviet sphere, and feminists.

Read the book here.

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