Jemima Repo

The Gender Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism in Africa

This article examines Anglo-American news media through a discourse-theoretical framework to study first, how celebrities are constituted as gendered humanitarian subjects acting on behalf of African problems, and second, how the concept of ‘Africa’ is produced, not only as a place, but also as a purpose in the world system. The debate surrounding celebrities is at an impasse, where they are seen as either instrumental or detrimental to African development. To break this standoff, we begin by placing celebrities in their neo-colonial context. We argue that the legitimacy of Bono, Bob Geldof and Angelina Jolie as humanitarian actors is underpinned by particular reproductions of race, class and gender. They are positioned in a heteronormative world political framework in which celebrities recreate Africa and its proper place in the neoliberal international system through a performative perpetuation of historically embedded subjectivities. The analysis then turns to Madonnas Malawian adoption in 2006 as a case that does not entirely ‘fit’ and probes its subversive capacity. The article argues that the adoption controversy made visible the privileged, neo-colonial position from which celebrities, and western humanitarianism broadly speaking, happens, and gives rise to further questions pertaining to Africas childlike position in the western imaginary.

A feminist reading of gender and national memory at the Yasukuni Shrine

Abstract This article is a feminist examination of gender and national memory at the Yasukuni Shrine. It argues that the spaces and practices of Yasukuni and the adjoining Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum idealize a militarized masculinity, which is constructed through enshrinement to produce nationalist bereavement and a celebration of sacrificial death for the nation. An examination of female enshrinement and presentations of femininity at the shrine raises questions concerning the appropriate roles for women under the nation-state. The analysis then focuses on female military nurses, specifically the Himeyuri Student Nursing Corps, who form the majority of the few women enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine. Their depiction as ‘sacrificial daughters’ is problematized through the concepts of gender, sexuality and otherness to understand the context that enables their enshrinement. Finally, the article assesses the possibilities for resistance to the dominant narrative of national memory in both mainland Japan and Okinawa, with special attention to the recollection of experience in survivor testimonies of the Himeyuri, understood as a discursive negotiation of national memory.

The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus

This article argues that gender was invented in the 1950s as a new sexual apparatus of biopower. Through a reading of mid-century sexological studies against the background of structural–functionalist and behaviorist theories of social order, it shows how gender was born in the clinic to discipline the reproduction of life in new ways. The truth of sex was no longer found in the genitals or mind, but in the contingent cognitive processes of a behavioral control system. The gender apparatus produced systematized protocols for sex reassignment surgeries for infants with ambiguous genitalia and rendered the family a panoptic institution, all to ensure that children were socialized into normative gender roles guaranteeing the continued reproduction of the life of the species. The violence of this new life-administering technology was crystallized in the pedagogical techniques employed by physicians designed to persuade their child patients to submit themselves to the normalizing care of surgeons and psychiatrists.

Gendering violence in the school shootings in Finland

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet , authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The authors argue that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence.

Herculine Barbin and the omission of biopolitics from Judith Butler’s gender genealogy

This article argues that Judith Butler’s neglect of biopolitics in her reading of Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality leads her to propose a genealogy of gender ontology rather than conduct a genealogy of gender itself. Sex was not an effect of a cultural system for Foucault, but an apparatus of biopower that emerged in the eighteenth century for the administration of life. Butler, however, is interested in uncovering how something we call or identify as gender manifests itself in different times and contexts, rather than asking what relations of power made necessary the emergence of gender as a discourse. After examining the theoretical configurations underpinning Butler’s engagement with Foucault’s Herculine Barbin, I suggest a more biopolitically informed reading of how the material body becomes captured by the discourses of sexuality and sex. Finally, the article sets out preliminary questions with which a more strictly Foucauldian genealogy of gender might be conducted.

‘We’re all princesses now’: Sex, class, and neoliberal governmentality in the rise of middle-class monarchy

This article examines the idea of ‘middle-class monarchy’ emerging in Europe from the internationally publicised marriages of Kate Middleton to Prince William in the United Kingdom and Charlene Wittstock to Prince Albert in Monaco. Through a careful analysis of sexuality, class and race in three major British newspapers, we demonstrate how media discourses surrounding the marriages deploy European monarchies as sites of neoliberal governmentality. Deployed as transmitters of instrumental happiness and conceptualised as an individual choice and project achievable through the control of the body and realisation of one’s desires, Kate embodies the white postfeminist vision of a highly educated, post-liberation woman able to combine the roles of consumer, homemaker and dutiful wife. This contrasts to the foreign Charlene, whose apparent domestication in an old-fashioned marriage of convenience was pitied widely. Finally, the article examines the Closer topless photo scandal as an incident that both challenged and re-sedimented the sexed, raced and classed neoliberal obligations of individual happiness and self-control.

Gary Becker’s economics of population: reproduction and neoliberal biopolitics

Abstract This paper argues that Chicago School economist Gary Becker’s theory of fertility underpins contemporary rationalities of global population governance. Drawing on feminist critiques of biopolitics, the paper proposes reproduction as a missing link that ties Becker’s homo economicus to the aggregate question of population. It argues that Becker’s work challenged macroeconomic theories of fertility by figuring reproduction, and hence population patterns, as governed by the personal utility-maximizing decisions of individuals. It further examines how his approach to fertility inaugurated reproductive decision-making as a regulatory node of population quality, one also tied to a particular sex, race and class politics. Finally, the paper briefly analyses the relationship between Becker’s contribution and today’s focus on women’s reproductive and productive decision-making in population governance in the context of development.

Book Review: Frühstück, S. (2007). Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army. Berkeley: University of California Press

of Unconventional Warfare. Ydén concludes that the Swedish armed forces should promote officers with experience from international missions; university degrees; or special forces, PsyOps, or intelligence branches. Reserve or regular status, an issue in Sweden, should not be a factor, in Ydén’s view. He warns that “keeping the traditional structure, or some mildly modified version of it, is hoping for A while rewarding B” (p. 108). This truly is fuel for thought in any armed forces or even insurgent group attempting to adapt. With the publication of this book, the Swedish National Defence College has done a service to all concerned with conflict in expanding the Swedish debate on EBO and transformation to include all those who read English. Wood-burning locomotives were a Swedish response to the challenge of the aftermath of nuclear attack. This book provides some Swedish responses to the challenges of EBO and transformation that confront military organizations.

Book Review Essay: Engagements with Feminist Knowledge and Methodology in International Relations

Feminist methodology comprises various theoretical positions, disciplinary backgrounds and areas of focus, but uniting them is their principal emphasis on knowledge production, particularly when and where knowledge is situated and exercised, as well as how and by whom (cf. De Lauretis, 1984; Butler, 1990; Harding, 1993; Zalewski, 2000). Methodological development of the relatively young field of feminist International Relations (IR), however, has been gradual since the mid-1980s, when Cynthia Enloe published her groundbreaking work on gender and militarism Does Khaki Become You? (1988). Her most recent work, Globalization & Militarism (2007), discussed in this essay, is her fifth monograph on feminist IR. In Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (2006), edited by Brooke A.Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True, pioneers such as J. Ann Tickner, Marysia Zalewski, Carol Cohn and Christine Sylvester contribute to a critical discussion of feminist methodological issues in IR.