Women And The Contested State

Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars throughout history, and their participation is only increasing at the turn of the 21st century. Women experience war in multiple ways: as soldiers, as fighters, as civilians, as caregivers, as sex workers, as sexual slaves, refugees and internally displaced persons, as anti-war activists, as community peace-builders, and more. This book at once provides a glimpse into where women are in war, and gives readers the tools to understood women’s (told and untold) war experiences in the greater context of the gendered nature of global social and political life.

Introduction : religion and women in peace and Conflict studies / Monique Skidmore -- Contesting traditions : religion and violence in South Asia / Peter van der Veer -- The citizen as sexed : women, violence, and reproduction / Veena Das -- The nuclear fetish : violence, affect, and the postcolonial state / Betty Joseph -- Overcoming the silent archive in Bangladesh : women bearing witness to violence in the 1971 Liberation War / Yasmin Saikia -- The watch of Tamil women : women's acts in a transitional warscape / Patricia Lawrence -- Mothers and wives of the disappeared in southern Sri Lanka : fragmented geographies of moral discomfort / Alex Argenti-Pillen -- The other body and the body politic : contingency and dissonance in narratives of violence / Mangalika de Silva -- Buddha's mother and the billboard queens : moral oower in contemporary Burma / Monique Skidmore -- With patience we can endure / Ingrid Jordt -- To marry a man or a spirit? : women, spirit possession cult, and domination in Burma / Bènèdicte Brac de la Perrire.

In this book, Lori Brown examines the relationship between space, defined physically, legally and legislatively, and how these factors directly impact the spaces of abortion. It analyzes how various political entities shape the physical landscapes of inclusion and exclusion to reproductive healthcare access, and questions what architecture's responsibilities are in respect to this spatial conflict. Employing writing, drawing and mapping methodologies, this interdisciplinary project explores restrictions and legislatures which directly influence abortion policy in the US, Mexico and Canada. It questions how these legal rulings produce spatial complexities and why architecture isn't more culturally and spatially engaged with these spaces. In Mexico, where abortion is fully legal only in Mexico City during the first trimester, women must travel vast distances and undergo extreme conditions in order to access the procedure. Conservative state governments continue to make abortion a severely punishable crime. In Canada, there are nowhere near the cultural and religious stigmas to abortion as in the US and Mexico. Completely legal and without restrictions, Canada offers an important contrast to the ongoing abortion issues within the US and Mexico. Researching the spatial implications of such a politicized space, this book expands beyond a study of abortion clinic and includes other spaces such as women's shelters and hospitals that require multiple levels of secured spaces in order to discuss the spatial ramifications of access and security within spaces that are highly personal, private, and sometimes secret or even hidden. In questioning what architecture's responsibility is in these spatial conflicts, the book looks at how what architecture 'does' can be used to reconsider the spaces and security around such contested places, and ultimately suggests what design's potential impact might be. In doing so, it shows how architecture's role might be redefined within social and spatial practices.

Contested Images: Women of Color in Popular Culture is a collection of 17 essays that analyze representations in popular culture of African American, Asian American, Latina, and Native American women. The anthology is divided into four parts: film images, beauty images, music, and television. The articles share two intellectual traditions: the authors, predominantly women of color, use an intersectionality perspective in their analysis of popular culture and the representation of women of color, and they identify popular culture as a site of conflict and contestation. Instructors will find this collection to be a convenient textbook for women’s studies; media studies; race, class, and gender courses; ethnic studies; and more.

Since 1980, most elections in the United States have been marked by a “gender gap” in which women are more supportive of Democratic candidates than men by nearly ten percentage points. Women at the Polls finds that this gender gap is quite extensive as it exists in almost all demographic groups and as it is based on similar differences in the political attitudes of women and men over a wide array of issues. This suggests that women are becoming an important constituency in U.S. politics.

Contested States examines how hegemony is created and facilitated through law as well as how people use legal arenas to resist oppression. The essays, written by anthropologists and historians, offer rich historical and ethnographic detail as they engage these themes in such contexts as: colonial and post-colonial courts in Kenya, India, Uganda and the Caribbean; bureaucracies in Tonga and Turkey; and judicial processes in the historical and contemporary United States. Contested States contributes to the new focus on power and social process in legal studies and argues that while states encode and enforce law, a crucial part of the power of law is its very contestability. The book demonstrates that theoretical insights learned in legal arenas can deepen one's overall understanding of sociocultural order and the processes of historical and legal change.

Feminist struggles have targeted corporate capital, male-dominated social structures, and patriarchal ideas and culture. The contest with the state, however, has provided the most substantial focus. The public sector is an employer of great numbers of women; women are the largest consumers of state services; the state regulates both the capitalist economy and the private household; struggle with the state has brought about change that is favourable to women's lives. Or has it? This collection looks at struggles in education, health care, and welfare in Canada, Latin America, and Europe. It includes thirteen brilliantly nuanced reports from the front lines of the feminist revolution. In these accounts the contradictions of women's struggles are made clear. Each victory has its victims. State reforms lead to new contradictions and provide new terrain for the struggle. Readers of this book will be exposed to different modes of understanding the state. They will advance their understanding of how the struggle against the state is to be shaped. And they will be energized to carry on the struggle.