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Kimberly Hutchings: I am delighted to welcome our roundtable speakers. We have Professor Vivienne Jabri from Kings College London,
Professor Margot Light from the London School of Economics, Dr
Marysia Zalewski from the University of Aberdeen, Professor Fred
Halliday from the London School of Economics and the Barcelona
Institute of International Studies, Professor Christine Sylvester from
Lancaster University, and Professor Ann Tickner from the University
of Southern California. So, many thanks to all six of them for agreeing
to come and speak. Were going to go in backwards alphabetical order.
Each of the speakers has been asked to give their views on the relation between past concerns and the contemporary and future agenda
of feminist IR.
Marysia Zalewski: Ill speak to the question of feminism in my
comments here with my first point relating to my recollection of the 1988
conference on women and IR at the London School of Economics, which
I attended as an undergraduate student. The main thing I remember
about that conference is a comment made by a PhD student, which had
a profound effect on me at that time. Though it then seemed an odd
thing to be talking about in relation to international politics (even if at a
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asked, not to get an answer, but to gauge what kind of assumptions are
made about what that question means and what kind of answer might be
deemed credible, authoritative or useful. We surely already have feminist
IR. Rephrase we have always had feminist IR if this refers to the many
stories about matters international (which clearly includes the private
and personal) told (or not told) by feminists; or through feminism; or
through narratives which question gender/sex; or those that deconstruct
sex/gender; or those that reconstitute gender/sex (which might include
feminism). This is not necessarily to invoke the work that appears on
some international politics readings lists in universities around the world
perhaps on that week on gender12 the one toward the end, along
with the other vaguely feminized afterthoughts that perhaps do little to
destabilize the field but possibly consolidate it?
No time limit for abortion. Why? On what grounds? These arent the
right questions indeed there isnt a right question here. I think the
political intervention made by that graduate student in 1988 was more of
an act of trying to get her audience to think otherwise about the conceptual architectures that create our philosophical and political coherences.
We spend so much time in academic institutions constructing coherent
stories about subjects, issues and topics to impart them to our students
and whatever other audiences we increasingly aspire to have hear us, we
forget that coherence itself is a construction. We dont learn, hear or even
feel in coherent ways yet this very idea of messiness perhaps exudes too
much of a feminist gloss.
There is clearly much more feminist inspired work that will be done.
Yet I dont want to imply that any of this work has a linear quality. The
idea of consistently, coherently and purposefully moving forward (a
New Labour, neo-management term surely) is deeply problematic. Our
words and concepts repeatedly fail us.13 How could they not? But it is not
easy to keep confronting this particularly in the context of invocations
of feminized anxiety or of misrecognition of feminisms work. So we
construct more edifices methodological, political, ethical to shore up
the fragile boundaries of knowledge, ones perhaps more satisfyingly
masculine.
We should not dismiss the comment made by that graduate student
in 1988 in the light of contemporary thinking; rather we might engage it
to reconsider how words and concepts do not necessarily carry the same
meanings forward in time. I suggest we keep paying serious attention to
feminist stories as well as to the temporal and other stabilizations around
12. Christina Rowley and Laura Shepherd, The Week on Gender: Feminists
Teaching IR. Unpublished paper presented at The Space Between Us workshop
at the University of Bristol, 2006 (Gendering International Relations BISA working group).
13. Robyn Wiegman, On Being in Time With Feminism, Modern Languages
Quarterly, 65, no. 1 (2004): 161.
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feminism to think about what this tells us about the constitution of the
international and the political.
Ann Tickner: Twenty years ago, I had the privilege of spending the
1989 Lent term at the London School of Economics at which time Fred
Halliday and Margot Light introduced the course, Women and International Relations, the first time such a course had been taught at the
LSE. It is, therefore, a special pleasure to participate in this conference as
we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the course, as well as the 1988
Millennium special issue. The course was structured around a number of
guest speakers, the majority of whom were activists working for NGOs
and policy research groups; only a few were teachers of IR. One of the
goals of the seminar, and also of the Millennium special issue, was to try
to find women in international relations. Not that they werent already
there, as the seminar participants well knew, but they had certainly not
been noticed by the discipline of International Relations. At that time,
there was very little material on feminist IR that one could assign to students. The 1989 course relied quite heavily on a fairly extensive bibliography on women and development, and a more limited one on women and
war, and women and the military. But there was practically no scholarship offering a gendered perspective on the discipline of IR. Most of the
visitors in the seminar would not have identified themselves as IR people
anyway.
In my week in the course, I focused my remarks on asking, and trying
to answer, the question: why are there so few women in international
policymaking and in the IR discipline? Having taught a variety of IR
courses over the previous five years, I had come to realize that very few
of the books I assigned were written by women. In the 1980s, the last
decade of the Cold War and before I started writing and teaching about
feminism, I became aware of how many of my women students were
quite uncomfortable with, or unmotivated by, my IR survey course. In this
course we spent quite a bit of time on national security issues, including
nuclear strategy and, yes, I was guilty of enjoying a sense of linguistic
power when I rolled off those nice sounding acronyms like slickems
(submarine-launched cruise missiles) and glickems (ground-launched
cruise missiles) about which Carol Cohn talks in her insightful work
on the gendered language of nuclear strategy.14 Many of the women
students would say, I really dont think this course is for me. Trying
to figure out why extremely capable students felt so alienated from the
material motivated me to start thinking about IR as gendered. The end
of the 1980s was a hopeful time for new thinking about the discipline
the Cold War was ending and, not coincidentally, IR was becoming
more open to critical perspectives. There was the optimistic sense that
14. Carol Cohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, no. 4 (1987): 687718.
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insecure the lives of certain, often marginalized, people and how the
global capitalist economy could not function without unremunerated
and under-remunerated labour, the majority of which is performed by
women. IR feminists have also pointed to the inadequacies of social
scientific methodologies for answering many of the questions they want
to ask. For example, IR feminists are drawn to ethnographic fieldwork
and linguistic text analysis, methodologies that are rarely used in social
scientific IR. There is now an important emergent literature on feminist
methodologies much needed for our research students who must often
go outside the discipline to seek the kind of methodological training
necessary to do empirical feminist research.16
How do we assess all these positive developments and what the future
holds for feminist IR? In spite of Christine Sylvesters claim that we are
getting beyond marginality, I do think that IR feminist approaches are
still quite marginal in the United States. This may be less true in Europe
where there is more openness to critical approaches more generally. In
the United States, we do have plenty of spaces at professional meetings
for feminist research and conversations, although I agree with Sylvester
that the danger here is that we are all in our own camps and not speaking enough to each other.17 But, in the US, there are very few political
science or International Relations departments at PhD-granting institutions that include any faculty members who specialize in feminist
approaches. PhD students still worry about whether making the decision to pursue a feminist dissertation topic will endanger their chances
of finding a teaching or research position in the academy. In fact, many
young scholars from the US, whose research and teaching is based in
feminist or other critical approaches, are going elsewhere outside
the US, either for graduate research or academic positions. This is a
problem both for the continuation of feminist IR and for the exposure
of IR students to feminist approaches at both the undergraduate and
postgraduate levels. There is a perception in the US that the IR field
more generally may actually be narrowing, at least in terms of its preference for social scientific methodologies. While I very much respect
feminist scholars who choose to situate themselves outside of what we
conventionally define as IR often in Womens Studies departments
or others that are more open to gendered perspectives I do believe
that some of us need to stay connected to IR, whatever that may mean.
Many of my IR students who decide to take a course on feminist IR
come away saying that it has changed how they view the world. Surely,
this is worth our efforts! And the intergovernmental and NGO policy
worlds are often looking for gender specialists. I do agree, however, that
it is time to move beyond what I and others have termed unproductive
16. See for example, Ackerly, Stern and True, eds., Feminist Methodologies.
17. Christine Sylvester, Whither the International At the End of IR, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35, no. 2 (2007): 551573.
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that appear in the literature and that have formal recognition as sections
in IRs professional organizations.
Viva the opening up of IR! At the same time, there are some downsides to a basically praiseworthy broadening in the field. It is a transnational and interdisciplinary moment for IR, but one, oddly, that is not
especially connective or intellectually generous. From my locations on
the broad critical wings of the campground, I see sectarianism creeping
in. Time was when scholars critical of mainstream IR formed alliances
and worked across each others lines of inquiry. There was a sense of
solidarity not unity, not uniformity of thought or approach, but solidarity across difference. That trend of the 1980s and early 1990s is largely
over. Were all in fiefdoms now, and it can be easy to go it alone rather
than hook up with those we once worked alongside for field space. In
some critical circles, I even detect a selective shunning of certain allied
knowledges or aims, feminist knowledges in particular. Perhaps camps
imagine that they got IR, or their part of it, right, in which case there
would be little incentive to keep up with what even related camps are
thinking, let alone bring in their ideas. Yet, insularity means that a camp
can myopically claim a unique direction that another camp might have
considered a while back. And all of us can miss elements of the international that our smoky campfires hide.
Feminist IR itself isnt immune to these general tendencies. Im keeping
my eye on what looks to be a proto-nationalist identity line drawn
between feminist IR and gender IR by some contributors to a special
issue of the British Journal of Politics and IR on gender and international
relations in Britain.18 Gender International Relations (GIR) advocates
promise to broaden the various womens questions in feminist IR into
gender questions, which gets men and masculinities squarely into the
gender picture and moves gender analysis away from the margins to the
centre of IR. If margins arent there anymore in IR, though, we really
shouldnt reify them. And if men per se havent been studied in feminist
IR, masculinity certainly has for years. GIR questions the necessity of
framing masculinity studies around effects on only women or gender
relations that affect women. That sounds like a genuine disagreement
within feminist IR to me, and disagreement is fine. Claiming GIR for
Britain, however, tweaks a sectarian concern to pronounce an orthodoxy
on those who might not quite agree with it in Britain, and do so through
a move that relies on the territorial map of old-hat IR.
Masculinity(ies) is(are) important and should not be neglected. At the
same time, we must guard against turning them into another ultimate or
overarching phenomenon, as I think has happened to some initially useful concepts like militarization, capitalism, and rationality. Masculinities
18. Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes (eds) British Journal of Politics and International Relations Special Issue on Gender and IR in Britain, 9, no. 2 (2007).
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finding editorials by feminists about the effects such a move could have
on variously placed women. Surely this is a tailor-made topic for feminist
discussion and argument, pro and con.
How and why we split into so many camps in disciplinary and real
world ways, is an interesting question. Even more interesting to me is
this one: is a camp structure what we really want in the longrun? The
academic generation coming of age now has not known anything other
than camp/sectarian IR. They must think it the norm. Let us think again:
who are we as feminists doing IR, and what is the nature of that exciting
venture at this precise juncture in history? Perhaps we will find that we
need to change ourselves a bit, even as we celebrate what we have well
and truly achieved in post-third debate IR.
Margot Light: What I want to do is to reflect not so much on the subject
matter, but on teaching the option Women and IR. The first thing Id like
to say is what a privilege it was being part of it. Apart from my own birth,
its the only thing Ive been part of thats actually had anniversaries. One
point that was very apparent to me right from the beginning was that there
was something of a confusion between trying to decide whether this was an
activist project or a theoretical project, and that was very apparent amongst
the students as well. What was intriguing to me, and I think this was the
first time Id actually understood this, was that there can be a potential
conflict between being an activist and being a theorist. Because if youre an
activist, you dont always want to go where the logic of the theory takes
you, and that can be a problem in the academic study of Women and IR.
The second thing I noticed, and Id be interested to know whether
this still happens, is that the students who took Women and IR were a
kind of self-selected group, so that what one was doing was preaching
to the converted; you were never actually spreading the message beyond
to a wider audience. That was particularly apparent in the gender of
the students who took the option in all the time that I taught it at the
London School of Economics, there were never more than one or two
male students per year. Now, looking around me today, I would judge
that the gender spread is slightly better, but I would guess that it is still
noticeably predominantly women who study Gender and IR in the UK.
I was struck by the difference when I went to teach in the United States,
at Dartmouth College for a term. I offered Women and IR as a senior
undergraduate course, and I was absolutely amazed to discover that
most of the students who took it were male and not female. I was also
horrified, however, because Dartmouth has this horrendous practice
(I think) of parents attending the classes once a term. To have a group of
dads sitting at the back of the room when I spoke about womens unpaid
labour was rather trying, to say the least.
Another thing that was very obvious to me then, and Id be interested
to hear from colleagues if this is still the case, was that Women and IR
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fighter. But again, in a country where now everybodys wearing the veil
or the hejab and talking about identity politics and all that stuff, here was
a pretty clear universalist message. There was a song and I think this is
a unique feature of the revolutions of South Arabia about the popular
alliance that said: long live the workers, long live the peasants, long live
the fishermen, long live the Bedouins and the nomads, and then it said
we must liberate women, we must give arms to the women. Ive never
known another revolution that actually took this position, and its a long
way from where we are now.
So much for the 1980s. I agree with those who say weve made progress, in particular in international law and womens human rights. I think
also the fact that there are now prominent politicians in world politics
who arise out of that period, Mary Robinson who was President of my
country being one example, Michelle Bachelet of Chile being another.
I recently met for the first time Shirin Ebadi from Iran, for whom I have a
great admiration.27 But Ill also say something that most of you wont like,
the best work being done now in gender and IR is being done by people
like Martha Nussbaum, serious work linking universalist political theory
and rights to issues of concrete development, combining a high level of
theory with activist involvement. For me, if you want to put someone
on a reading list to really focus these issues it would be someone like
Martha Nussbaum or Amartya Sen, who have taken, whatever you want
to call it, the liberal, quantitative, universalist agenda, and theyve done
very serious work on it.28At the same time, things have gone backwards.
Our colleagues have been polite about this, but IR is in a mess, lets face
it! IR, as Christine said, is in its silos, its in its camps. The realists have
come back, red in tooth and claw, responding to the world as it is, but
I also have to say, against what most of you believe, that I do think the
post-modernist trend has been a disaster for IR and womens rights as
well. Here I am with Martha Nussbaum in her excellent article on Judith
Butler, which Im now going to quote.29 Nussbaum argues that in the
old days feminist scholars engaged in concrete projects, like reform
27. Mary Robinson, formerly President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights; Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile; Shirin Ebadi, winner of
the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to promote democracy and human
rights.
28. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993); Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
29. The article quoted from here is The Professor of Parody by Martha
Nussbaum, The New Republic, 22 February 1999. Nussbaums critique of Judith
Butlers work provoked a storm of responses, some sympathetic and some critical, which reflected deep divisions in the US academy and beyond about the
intellectual and political credentials of poststructuralist argument. For a rather
different feminist reading than the one offered by Fred Halliday see, Ratna Kapur,
Imperial Parody, Feminist Theory 2, no. 1 (2001): 7988.
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of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of
domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving womens economic
opportunities, working conditions, and education; winning pregnancy
benefits for female workers, etc. And then she says in the United States,
however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting
trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to
the struggles of women outside the United States. Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy, and I would add in the prominent debates of feminism and IR. It
is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a
type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women. Feminist thinkers of the
new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist
politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of
lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness, this from a leading political
theorist. An excellent article in the New Republic from about 10 years ago,
and I would associate myself with it.
I would repeat the challenge, or if you like the falsifiable proposition,
which I coined in 1988, which is my main contribution to the field.
Its very simple, that theres no area of international relations, interstate relations, or transnational relations that does not have a gender
dimension. Not espionage, not nuclear war, not development, not
globalization, not terrorism, all of these have a gender dimension. In
todays world I would focus on three things in particular. First of all
the issue of rights, if we ditch rights were lost. Rights are the last grand
narrative and if we get into the netherworld of relativism and identity
politics then we are sunk. Second, globalization, a lot of people are
doing work on the economic and ideological effects of globalization.
There are some negative trends in globalization, internet pornography is
one, trafficking women is another, the expansion of global sexism. And
finally, the war on terror: 9/11 and the war on terror has provoked a
massive and reactionary re-masculinization of public space and the use
of violence and terror to subordinate women, thats the agenda on both
sides, and we should focus on it.
Laura McLeod: Ive got a question. There were several things that jumped out
at me about what everyone said; one was the question of teaching. I taught a
second-year introduction to international relations seminar, and we had our
week on gender. At the end of that seminar I asked my students, how has
the way Ive taught you this term so far been feminist? That was met with
complete silence. And then they said, it was really nice to have a woman
teaching us international relations. The fact that even bright, intelligent second-year undergraduates still think that feminism is about women simply
being present in the classroom is astonishing. Maybe you could comment
on that? Then there is the question of why were even choosing to celebrate
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1988? Why not 1987 when Elshtain published Women and War? Why not
1989, when Cynthia Enloe published Bananas, Beaches and Bases?30
Anonymous Question: My question comes out of a number of peoples
comments. What sort of feminism in IR? What sort of rights in IR? I think
there are some very different and conflicting ideas here. Its to take up
Vivienne Jabris point about Cosmopolitan Feminism and its complicity
in the hegemonic discourses of IR, and Marysia Zalewskis point about
abortion rights, highlighted in 1988. Abortion rights were about the
sovereignty of the body, the right of the woman to determine what she
wants to do, instead of the state or authorized professionals. On the other
hand, two decades on we have Kimberly Hutchings point about the
invasion of Afghanistan in the name of women. If you look at that, you
have an assumption of a right of intervention. Rights, essentially, of the
great powers to intervene in weak states. If we look at whats happened
in rights, weve shifted away from rights as non-interference, where the
great powers cannot interfere with the rights of the weak (the autonomy
championed by feminism being analogous to decolonization arguments
of the third world against the great powers). Now we have a situation
where, in international feminist legal scholarship in particular, rights of
non-interference are transformed to legitimize great powers intervening
in weak states. One needs to look critically at the feminist legacy. I would
argue that the road to Basra was through Catherine MacKinnon.31
Fred Halliday: I just spent two days with Shirin Ebadi, the noble prizewinning liberal lawyer. Shes absolutely against any American attack on
Iran, but shes in favour of universal rights. She did talk at length about
the long history of womens struggles in Iran, which is neither colonial nor
imperial, but has a long history of struggle over 100 years in which gender
issues were absolutely central. She is not in favour of intervention, in fact,
shes dead set against it, but shes absolutely clear and uncompromising
on universal principles, and I admire her very much for it.
Marysia Zalewski: Why not 1987 or 1989? On the one hand, the choice
of date is arbitrary; but arbitrariness has a philosophy and politics of its
own. It could have been many different years, but this anniversary gives
us a forum to take the time to think about issues that seem important.
And remember we are celebrating British gender and IR, so relating our
discussion to the 1988 conference at the LSE is important. Your question
reminds me of a dilemma facing members of the Feminist Theory and
30. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989).
31. See Catherine A. Mackinnon, Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace, in Stephen
Shute and Susan Hurley (eds) On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures,
1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
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Gender Section at the ISA some years ago in relation to Eminent Scholar
Panels. These panels are a tradition at ISA a tradition with perhaps
something of a masculinist veneer? Did the FTGS section want to join
in with this? There are reasons why feminist scholars might not want to
reproduce this traditional academic activity more patting each other on
the back, or rewarding privilege twice (or more) over but I think the
view was that FTGS also needed to acknowledge important or significant
contributions, and, at the same time, why shouldnt feminists indulge in
this and have another excuse for a party!
There are unsurprisingly many contradictory things coming up in the
discussion here both from the panel and from the audience. The second
question is very interesting. My brief response is that the point about abortion
may appear to be simply about rights, but I dont think this is the significant
thing to draw from it. It perhaps can only be heard in the context of rights in
a contemporary setting. I think the comment about abortion made by that
student in 1988 was about something else. But your last point is intriguing
and provocative and has credibility but why Catherine MacKinnon instead
of any number of rights-arguing men? Are womens crimes (whether
physical, epistemological or political) worse than mens?
Vivienne Jabri: I used the term complicity in an article I published in
the journal Alternatives (2004), which was part of a series of papers that
Kimberly brought together on the subject of feminist ethics.32 My point
there and now is that particular forms of feminism Jean Elshtain is an
example have been complicit in their support of hegemonic wars, and in
taking up, very simplistically, the discourses of the Bush Administration.33
So, there are feminist voices who have sustained and supported a neoconservative agenda (Edward Said referred to Elshtain as a conservative
feminist, and I would agree with him). Any ideology has differences
within it, and feminism is no exception. Weve been rather incapable of
acknowledging these very real ideological differences within feminist IR.
However, these differences are beginning to come to the fore in a context
which some have referred to as dark times, a context where violations
of rights are not just happening in other peoples societies but here at
our doorstep. Just in reference to Freds comments, Judith Butler cannot
simply be reduced to talking about identity politics and neglecting the
question of rights. One of the most powerful texts recently published on
the violation of rights and specifically on Guantnamo Bay is Butlers
Precarious Life.34 In writing about these matters, her concern is to highlight,
32. Vivienne Jabri, Feminist Ethics and Hegemonic Global Politics, Alternatives
29, no. 3 (2004): 265284.
33. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power
in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
34. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London:
Verso, 2004).
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of time knocking down those who disagree with them. Maybe this goes
with the territory of international politics. The fact that weve been nice to
each other may be a constructive way of building comprehensive knowledge from very different perspectives rather than the paradigm wars
in which IR tends to engage. Your question has intrigued me because
I have sometimes thought that were too kind to each other but perhaps
were engaged in a constructive intellectual project, which I rather like
the sound of.
Christine Sylvester: I like to think that everyone who contributes to a
field is doing so in good faith. That isnt always the case, but then politics
is the realm of power and disagreement. If we didnt have both we
wouldnt have political institutions. I try to assign contrasting viewpoints
to students so they can see scholars disagreeing. I also tend to read
the enemys writings you know, the neoconservatives like Francis
Fukuyama, the essentialists like Martha Nussbaum, the old realists, the
neorealists. Often my students and I get confused when we do this or find
the experience of reading outside the approved box an uncomfortable
one. When we stick within the box, though, it can be downright difficult
to find contrasting feminist IR positions to read. Theres considerable
conformity and predictability in some areas of our scholarship. I hope we
learn to engage each other critically, and seek to expand our horizons of
feminist IR, in ways that work, but that are not necessarily the ways that
other groups would charge at one another.
Fred Halliday: One of the things I find very offensive is when people say
we are in a post-feminist age, as if the agenda of the 1960s and 1970s has
been achieved. In that sense, I am faithful to the agenda of the 1960s and
1970s because we are a long way from achieving it. If you take just four
transnational and international issues: 1) equal pay, basically still 40%
difference within European countries. 2) Sexism and language, why isnt
Arnold Schwarzenegger being hounded by feminists for talking about
girlie men and all the other stuff? We seem to not see it as a political issue.
3) Pornography and the debate, which is a perfectly legitimate and complex
one, about where does sensuality and eroticism end and pornography
begin? We can all agree that the films shown in hotels around the world
are inhuman and demonic, corrupting and virtually violence against
women. Yet, is this issue present in the US presidential campaign? Are
people protesting about it? Hardly at all. 4) The issue of domestic labour,
the old issue that the Marxists went on about. Its gotten worse under
globalization, because people work longer hours, they travel more; I worry
about the effects on younger people, all this 24/7 culture and people
travelling all the time. Those are four old-fashioned issues, equal pay,
language, pornography and domestic labour, which I think are absolutely
essential to equality. In that sense, we need the reassertion of feminism.
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