Jim Jose

Reframing the 'governance' story

In recent years the concept of ‘governance’ has become a widely used concept within political science discourse. Although the meanings of ‘governance’ are contested, its position of influence is rarely questioned. This paper contends that the term exercises a prescriptive influence that shapes understandings about how governing should be interpreted and executed in the current era. The paper begins by examining briefly several prominent ‘narratives of governance’ that currently frame contemporary understandings of the terms significance. Attention then turns to an analysis of the return of ‘governance’, conceptually speaking, to the discourse of political science in Australia. The paper identifies when this began to occur and then examines the conceptual load that scholars expected ‘governance’ to carry at that time. These meanings are then counterpoised against the currently dominant cluster of meanings noted earlier in the paper to illustrate that they are not the only ways of interpreting how ‘governance’ should be understood. Furthermore, it will also be suggested that these hegemonic meanings represent a trajectory that, paradoxically, de-politicises what was once a clearly politicised term.

Foucault and Spinoza: philosophies of immanence and the decentred political subject

Deleuze has suggested that Spinoza and Foucault share common concerns, particularly the notion of immanence and their mutual hostility to theories of subjective intentionality and contract-based theories of state power. This article explores these shared concerns. On the one hand Foucaults view of governmentality and its re-theorization of power, sovereignty and resistance provide insights into how humans are constituted as individualized subjects and how populations are formed as subject to specific regimes or mentalities of government. On the other, Spinoza was concerned with how humans organized themselves into communities capable of self-government. In particular, his idea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas of freedom and power. We argue that Spinozas approach to power and causality prefigures ideas developed by Foucault in his theory of governmentality, especially with respect to his biopolitical rethinking of power and resistance.

Marriage and marginalisation in Singaporean politics

Abstract This article charts the ways in which gender politics have featured within political landscape of contemporary Singapore. It is shown that there has been remarkable consistency in the approaches of the Singaporean government to women and gender relations in the post-independence period. Gender policies have consistently been interventionist and proactive, and have revealed the willingness of the government to subordinate the interests of women to those of the state. Fluctuations in policy regarding women are traced, and shown to be related to such factors as changes in Singapores position within the global economy, the putative invasiveness of Western culture and perceived ethnic imperatives of Singapores dominant ethnic group, the Chinese.

Drawing the Line: Sex Education and Homosexuality in South Australia, 1985

This paper examines a specific controversy over the control and content of sex education in South Australia in 1985 that was triggered by concerns about homosexuality. Drawing on Foucaults idea of the “deployment of sexuality”, the paper examines the way in which the issue of homosexuality became the focal point for a concerted struggle over sex education in state schools. It is argued that the idea of homosexuality, or more accurately male homosexual sexuality, served as a boundary marker that both defined and revealed the content and scope of school-based sex education. It is shown that this controversy was an instance of the “deployment of sexuality” through which public opinion was concentrated and mobilised to ensure that prevailing heterosexual norms remained the defining parameters for sex education. Thus it is also demonstrated that sex education is deeply implicated in both the construction and maintenance of prevailing (gendered) sexual norms.

Reproducing Political Subjects: Feminist Scholarship and the Political Science Curriculum

In this article we analyse 16 politics textbooks that feature in introductory courses in politics, political theory or political thought taught in Australian universities. Our concern was to investigate how commonly used first-yearintroductory texts position feminist political theory (and its underlying scholarship) within political theory, and by extension within the discipline of political science. Our findings suggest that the scholarship of feminist theorists remains only occasionally visible to students of political science. It is mostly confined to the safety of managed enclaves, occasionally acknowledged, but certainly not integrated into what counts as the real knowledge of political theory.

Globalization, the Patriarchal State and Women's Resistance in Singapore

This article explores the impact of globalization and the state policies on women in Singapore. It traces the trajectory of the governments globalizing policies and its deliberate use ofgender to counteract the perceived erosion of traditional social relations in the workplace and the home. Singaporean women have been economically marginalized and remain vulnerable in many respects, as the recent economic crisis has shown. Nevertheless, the pursuit of global integration by the Singaporean government has produced a steadily rising standard of living with increased opportunities for womens education and employment. This has led to the womens resistance, and given them leverage to pressure the government to acknowledge womens social and political claims. This article suggests that globalization has generated new political dynamics, transcending the power of the nation-state, in this case the Singaporean state, with some positive outcomes for women. The article thereby challenges the idea that the effects...

A (con)fusion of discourses? Against the governancing of Foucault

Over the past two decades the term ‘governance’ has found a new lease of life. Scholars using the term usually offer some acknowledgment of its source for their work. While explanations for this vary with the discipline, an increasing number of scholars spanning diverse disciplines have attributed the idea of ‘governance’ to the work of Michel Foucault. This paper explores the alleged link between ‘governance’ and Foucaults ideas. It is argued that attributing this concept to Foucault is misplaced for two reasons. First, such attributions assert a degree of commonality for discourses that may have little else in common besides the use of the term ‘governance’. Second, it is doubtful that Foucault ever used the term ‘governance’, either directly as a distinct term or indirectly as an un-named cluster of ideas that are now understood as ‘governance’. The presumed Foucauldian basis for ‘governance’ rests on a confusion of discourses.

Historicising sexual harassment

Abstract The paper uses a 1912 case study from South Australia to provoke questions about the way in which feminists have treated historical cases of sexual harassment. It suggests that there are three ‘danger zones’ In these representations: the tendency to assume that we today deal more successfully with instances of harassment, the tendency to interpret complaints in the past as ‘less serious’ or even as trivial, and the tendency to portray women in the past as disempowered by prevailing mores and/or legal presuppositions. The larger message is that these misrepresentations can undermine attempts to deal with sexual harassment today.

Power-Sharing in Zanzibar: From Zero-Sum Politics to Democratic Consensus?

Power-sharing has become a common strategy to resolve political conflicts in Africa. However, it has rarely survived for very long, and much of the scholarship on power-sharing remains largely negative. Yet Zanzibars power-sharing approach, adopted in 2010, points to a more positive democratic possibility. We explore the background to this development, note some of the issues behind the move to power-sharing, and look briefly at its implementation following the 2010 elections. We argue that Zanzibars power-sharing strategy appears to have ended the zero-sum nature of Zanzibari politics, ushering in a more consensus-based approach reminiscent of Julius Nyereres concept of ujamaa. For Nyerere ujamaa was a specifically African alternative to the institutionalised oppositional politics of western liberal democracy. We conclude that Zanzibars experiment in power-sharing demonstrates that a multi-party political system need not be structured according to a two-party oppositional model in order to achieve stable and functional democratic government.

Strangers in a stranger land: political identity in the era of the governance state

The ‘governance state’ is characterised by radically reconfigured relations between public and private authority such that sovereign political authority comes to be dispersed along several axes of organised power. Paralleling the dispersal of sovereign political authority is a concomitant dispersal of familiar forms of political identity. Individuals and groups become disconnected from the familiarity of their respective social fabrics by the routine operations of a governance state having little or no concern with the nation-building agendas (and their related understandings of citizenship) of the past. The shifts of political identity possible in a context of nation-building states, of settler and postcolonial societies alike, become increasingly harder to effect. The individualising of ethical positions, of relegating such experiences to the sphere of the personal, creates a kind of closure in which resisting the states authority comes to be interpreted by individuals as simply resisting their selves, their governance-state identities. This is precisely the kind of situation confronting us as contemporary citizens, an unfamiliar political terrain in which we find ourselves negotiating as strangers in a stranger land.