Chinese feminists protesting against domestic violence in blood spattered bridal gowns
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.
Jonathan Neale writes: Islamophobia is now the last respectable form of racism in the West. This new fear has eerie echoes of another time and place. I was a small child in the United States during the time of McCarthyism. Much later, I trained as a labour historian, and when I first wrote on McCarthyism several things caught my attention:
Elizabeth Cook
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: There are three keys to thinking critically and clearly about class and gender. The first is to avoid thinking that there are essential ‘men’ and ‘women’. The second is to understand gender as relational – between men and women, but also between dominant and subordinate men, and between dominant and subordinate women. The third key is to remember that we are not actually unique, bounded individuals. Rather, we are social animals who are fashioned and exist only through exchange and social interaction.
These ideas are familiar to us in our everyday lives. However, it is easy to forget these ideas when ideologies of gender overwhelm us. The point of this Sing-Along is to make it easier to hang onto these ideas when gendering gets rough. Continue reading
An Alternative Radical Bibliography by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.
This list is strong on ethnography, leans left, is shamefully Anglophone, and a work in progress. For each topic, we think these are the best books to start with. Sometimes the sub-title tells you all you need to know, and sometimes we have added comments. The topics are arranged alphabetically. The first two books on each topic are our favourites – the rest are in no particular order.
An invitation: This list will become a permanent page on the blog. Please tell us about any books on gender that have been transformative for you. We will add them to the list, along with your name. Continue reading
Women defendants at a mass trial of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Alexandria, Egypt, November 2013
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale explain the changing international alliances in Middle Eastern politics, and how this is connected to rising Islamophobia in Europe.
In most of Europe and North America now there is only one acceptable form of racism: prejudice against Muslims. This is recent. Until 1978 in most of Europe and North America Muslims were often discriminated against because they were Asian, or Arabs, or people of colour. But in the US, Britain and many other countries they were not singled out for their religion. Continue reading
Netanyahu speaking to the US Congress: ‘Do a deal with Iran and nuclear war is inevitable’
Nancy Lindisfarne writes: One of the reasons Middle East politics is so confusing is that the alliances between the major players keep shifting. Changes in the balance of power are often extremely complicated, and leave plenty of gaps in our understanding of what is going on. In these gaps Islamophobia thrives. This post is meant as an antidote to the Western racism that targets Iran.
The shenanigans we’ve been watching this past week in anticipation of the Israeli election on Tuesday, the 17th March are a measure of the scale of the changes that have been taking place over this past year. We shall write about the new political alignments at length in a later post. Here I want to mark what hasn’t changed nearly as much.
New building, Isfahan
In 2005 I travelled in Iran for a month. I had recently left academic teaching to do art. Luckily, I had remnants of Persian left over from anthropological fieldwork in Iran in the 1960s, and fieldwork in Afghanistan in the 1970s. In 2005 Western propaganda against Iran was relentless and visually dominated by ugly images of dust, terrorists and women smothered in black veils. In Iran, however, people were kind, endlessly helpful, and above all, they lived their lives in colour! Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
Last year seven men from Oxford were convicted in court on multiple counts of rape and abuse of young women and girls. They were part of a criminal gang that prostituted the girls for money. They concentrated on needy and vulnerable girls. The rapes usually began when the girls were between eleven and fifteen. The recent official report estimates, conservatively, that a total of 370 girls in Oxfordshire have been abused by gangs since 2005.
All seven of the men convicted were Asian. Six of the survivors testified. The fascist English Defence League has called a national demonstration in Oxford on April 4. They say that the council and the police did nothing because they were protecting Asians.
Unite Against Fascism and the local trades council have called for a mobilisation against the EDL on the same day, to prevent them from using the suffering of Oxfordshire children for their own ends. They are right to do so.
However, we need more than that. The local Labour MP, Andrew Smith, has called for an official inquiry to investigate how abuse on this scale was allowed to happen. He too is right.
But we also have to face the question of who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue. In this blog we confront the racist arguments about abuse head on. In doing so, we have to say who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue: the senior managers in the schools, the social services and the police.
By Nancy Lindisfarne
Kemal Atatűrk -Founding Father of the Turkish Republic
There is a lot to be learned when a society is changing rapidly and radically. This blog is an excerpt from Thank God, We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish Republicanism, published in Turkish in 2001. This is a piece about Turkish Islamophobia, and about the class divide between Turkish elites and the working class. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale argue that to understand ISIS, you have to understand Abu Ghraib. And if you want to understand Abu Ghraib, you have to look through the lens of gender. Continue reading
In a park in Isfahan, Iran, 2005.
Nancy Lindisfarne writes: Using labels which fasten on skin colour, ethnicity or religious identity to treat whole groups of people as Blacks, Chinese, Jews or Muslims, is racist. And there is plenty of it around. If we think of Islamophobia – which literally means a fear of Islam – as another form of racism, we get a better measure of what is going on.
Racisms, in whatever version they appear, always serve the people in power. Far too often one hears comments about Muslims which would be immediately recognised as racist if they were said about black or Jewish people. And often these days such comments go unchallenged.
And as the Charlie Hebdo outcry has made clear, many feminists, Marxists and liberals find any accommodation between feminism and Islam well-nigh impossible. This leaves a space easily filled by cultural racism.
In a series of posts we shall aim to disentangle some of the ideas which make Islamophobia seem acceptable to many people who otherwise loath and deplore global inequality and imperialist wars. Our aim is make it easier to speak out against this hatred of Muslims and Islam.
To do this, we use gender as our lens. It is a powerful device for seeing through racisms that can otherwise seem self-evidently correct. Sexist ideas and practices are often places where a dominant ideology does not quite cohere, where slippages, and contradictions, allow us to glimpse of what is actually going on.
We begin this series of posts on Feminism and Islamophobia with a brief note on cultural racism and ‘the veil’. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale look at Ann Arnett Ferguson’s Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbour, University of Michigan Press, 2001).
This is a very good book about the depth of American racism behind the school to prison pipeline, the Ferguson and Black Lives Matter protests, and the new civil rights movement which is emerging in the United States. Bad Boys should also be read as a model for sociological research and theory. It is a brilliant example of how to do intersectional analysis.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale direct your attention to some striking protests against sexual violence by students in the United States, India and Britain.
Over the last couple of years there have been many high profile protests against rape at universities in different countries. They show how it is possible, with very modest means, to mount actions that are effective, and enormously moving for the participants. Continue reading
For Valentine’s Day, here is something light – a story by Nancy Lindisfarne from DANCING IN DAMASCUS, her collection of short stories about Syria in the 1990s (SUNY, 2000).
LOVELY TITS
‘Come on. I’ll help you if you want.’ Rana grinned. She was lively, shiny, like her curly dark hair. And she was a gorgeous shape. So he didn’t really mind that she was also saying he was hopeless, the kind of guy who didn’t have the gumption to buy a Barbie doll for his kid. Continue reading
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale
There are now many press and internet reports of rape by the Islamic State (ISIS). There are also reports of ISIS killing gays. These reports are being used to justify heavy bombing of ISIS fighters and civilians by the United States, Britain, France and other allies. These bombings are happening in both Iraq and Syria – ISIS controls parts of both countries.
We have to be careful with the evidence. On the one hand, the media usually ignore rape in wartime. On the other hand, there is also a long standing tradition of newspapers accusing the enemy of atrocities they have not committed. However, there does appear to be convincing evidence for widespread use of rape or women, and killing of gay men, by both ISIS and America’s allies.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. To download a pdf of this paper click here NLJN31Jan15FINAL
Resistance to sexual violence is increasing globally. There have been revelations of abuse in many countries, protests against rape in American universities, a riot in Delhi, and mass protests in Kolkota. It seems a tipping point has been reached and this movement will grow. This paper offers a new, and perhaps surprising, way of understanding the roots of sexism, and sexual violence which we hope will help take this movement forward. Continue reading
Anne Bonny Pirate 