Maria Carbin

The intersectional turn in feminist theory: A dream of a common language?

Today intersectionality has expanded from being primarily a metaphor within structuralist feminist research to an all-encompassing theory. This article discusses this increasing dedication to intersectionality in European feminist research. How come intersectionality has developed into a signifier for ‘good feminist research’ at this particular point in time? Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory the authors examine key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted to the concept. They interrogate the conflicts and meaning making processes as well as the genealogies of the concept. Thus, the epistemology and ontology behind the ‘intersectional turn’ in feminist theory is the main concern here. The authors argue that the lack of ontological discussions has lead to its very popularity. Intersectionality promises almost everything: to provide complexity, overcome divisions and to serve as a critical tool. However, the expansion of the scope of intersectionality has created a consensus that conceals fruitful and necessary conflicts within feminism.

Administrators or Critical Cynics? A Study of Gender Equality Workers in Swedish Higher Education

Gender equality workers have to perform a balancing act between feminist ideals for change and neo-liberal management trends. So-called audit discourses have gradually been introduced into Swedish universities, in line with an enterprise model. In this new context, the aim of our article is to investigate how gender equality workers at universities articulate gender equality and possibilities for change. What are their visions and strategies for achieving gender equality? This article is based on interviews with gender equality workers at three Swedish universities and explores how the legitimate gender equality worker is constructed. We found that there is a lack of visionary thinking among gender equality workers, which manifests itself in a sense that the distinction between visions and strategies has collapsed and technologies like auditing have become the vision. It seems that, whilst navigating between liberal feminist discourses and an increasingly neo-liberal setting, two positions are available for gender equality workers. The first is the “administrator”, who asks for more tools and monitoring of gender equality, in order for the work to become more efficient and legitimate. The second position, the “critical cynic”, makes scepticism and resistance to the increasing bureaucratization of gender equality work possible, but lacks alternative visions and strategies. Gender equality initiatives have thus become increasingly embedded in auditing technologies, and the possibilities for articulating alternatives or visionary ideals, beyond liberal values of anti-discrimination, seem limited.

Opening up a space for the political? : a study of diversity practitioners in Swedish academia

Abstract Analysing interviews with diversity practitioners at three Swedish universities, this article explores how diversity is deployed and the ways in which the articulations of practitioners might contribute to politicising issues of ethnicity and race. In the post-political era of New Public Management, audit technologies, quantification and bureaucratisation often render diversity apolitical, and deprive it of its political nature. These processes of depoliticisation tend to downplay political conflicts and ignore or even reinforce social hierarchies such as those based on norms of whiteness and middle-class masculinity. Paradoxically, in this interview study, it is shown how seemingly neutral, apolitical procedures such as mapping, counting and producing statistics led to debates that revealed underlying antagonisms, and opened up a space for rearticulating diversity that could provide a destabilisation of the whiteness of academia.

Feminist Teaching: Contesting and Creating Boundaries

Issues of racism, difference, and othering processes will constantly challenge feminist theorizing. On-going debates regarding who counts as a legitimate subject of feminism not only highlight zones of conflict but also provide inspiration for theoretical and political change. For example, Nordic post-colonial feminist scholars have explored how discourses on gender equality create borders between more or less legitimate national subjects (de los Reyes et al. 2002; de los Reyes & Mulinari 2005; Tuori 2007; Keskinen et al. 2009). In the thesis Othering Processes in Feminist Teaching, Chia-Ling Yang builds on these earlier critical studies of gender equality and examines the role of feminist teaching in constructing divisions between “us” and “them”. As the title suggests, a highly relevant key concern of Yang’s thesis is the on-going processes of othering taking place within feminism. If earlier research has primarily focused on the media, politics, and welfare institutions, Yang has instead devoted her critical exploration to a feminist adult education institution, the Women’s Room, in Sweden. Her choice of object of study is especially important since it gives her the opportunity not only to analyse discourses of gender equality, but also to explore feminist educational practices. In addition to this, it is her intention to analyse how feminist teaching draws upon or resists nationalist assumptions of Swedish gender equality. An essential concept of the thesis is intersectionality. In line with the rapidly growing field of intersectionality studies, Yang explains that she considers categories such as gender, race, and class to be intertwined and intermeshed with each other in complex ways. In particular, Yang analyses the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity, but she also discusses the importance of nation, class, and sexuality as categories to consider. The aim of the thesis is to “explore processes of othering in a feminist adult educational institution in Sweden”. And furthermore the thesis provides “a study of how difference is negotiated, resisted and/or (re)produced in the discourses and practices of feminist teaching” (p. 14). In order to answer her research questions, Yang has conducted an ethnographic study of the Women’s Room. The Women’s Room is a women’s folk high school ( folkhögskola) that was established by a group of feminists in the 1970s. TheWomen’s Room has both a main school in the city centre and a branch in one of the suburbs

Dangerous brown men: exploiting sex, violence and feminism in the ‘‘War on Terror’’, by Gargi Bhattacharyya

Dangerous brown men: exploiting sex, violence and feminism in the ‘‘War on Terror’’, by Gargi BhattacharyyaGargi Bhattacharyya’s Dangerous brown men sets out to examine how the rhetoric of democracy and rights has been used in the ‘‘War on Terror’’ to justify the United States’ and its allies’ military involvement and continuing presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bhattacharyya shows how feminist and other, on the surface, progressive ideas about women’s rights used in the ‘‘War on Terror’’ have mutated into expressions and practices of sexualized racism. Furthermore, she aims at showing how the ‘‘War on Terror’’ has produced a global public connecting people and nations from all over the world in a sense of shared values and a common enemy the terrorist. Bhattacharyya’s book offers an important contribution to post-colonial feminist critique of the ‘‘War on Terror’’. The book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in understanding how representations of masculinity, femininity and race have been deployed in the ‘‘War on Terror’’ and how a global media arena has been formed in this endeavor. In the chapters ‘‘Bodies, Fears and Rights’’ and ‘‘State Racism and Muslim Men as a Racialised Threat’’, which form the thematic core of the book, Bhattacharyya analyses how masculinity and femininity are constructed in the political and media logic in the ‘‘War on Terror’’. In these two chapters, Bhattacharyya develops her argument and provides insightful examples of parallel patterns of racist discourses. Bhattacharyya shows how representations of the black man as hyper-sexualized and violent as well as the representation of the circumcised Jewish man have served as nodes in racist discourses. Against this backdrop Bhattacharyya develops her argument that the ‘‘dangerous brown man’’ presents in part a new racial stereotype. In contrast with the hyper-sexualized black man, in the ‘‘War on Terror’’ discourse the brown man is conceived as performing masculinity in the wrong way with a toocovered body, too-bearded face, too-rigid views on gender and gender roles, and that, in addition, he does not participate in consumerism. Interestingly, Bhattacharyya’s analysis reveals that the ‘‘War on Terror’’ is not in fact a war against Islam, nor against any ethnic group, but a battle over values and ‘‘our way of life’’ against ‘‘theirs’’. This is in line with Beverly Skeggs’ findings that class and nation are expressed through values (Skeggs 2003). As always in nationalist narratives, women are at the center of the battle. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how the ‘‘brown woman’’ is articulated as a figure that performs femininity in an incorrect manner. Here, especially, motherhood is at stake. She shows how mothers