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The Equality Act provides protection against discrimination on the ground of various protected characteristics: sex, race, disability, age, religion and gender. It protects against direct discrimination where there is adverse treatment because of a protected characteristic, and also indirect discrimination where the same rule is applied to all groups but has an unjustified and disproportionate adverse effect on a group. Adverse treatment includes harassment and victimisation. There is in addition a duty of reasonable accommodation for disabled workers. The law also requires equal pay for women for similar work or work that has equal value to that performed by men.
Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.
This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It sets the stage by highlighting contrasts in India’s economy, democracy, and society. It then discusses the main topics covered in the book – democracy and governance, growth and distribution, caste, labor, gender, civil society, regional diversity, and foreign policy. The chapter also outlines the three themes that comprise the main arguments of the book. First, India’s democracy has been under considerable strain over the last decade. Second, growing economic inequalities that accompanied India’s high-growth phase over the last three and a half decades are associated with the country’s democratic decline. Third, society has reacted to changes from below but there are limits to societal activism in contemporary India.
This chapter introduces the volume’s central premise that the uneasy relationship between Bloomsbury’s broad influence and perceived elitism is precisely why it continues to gain traction in critical debates. Instead of viewing the group as either radicals or gatekeepers, it is necessary to grapple with Bloomsbury’s imperialist biases and class complacencies at the same time as we resituate the group’s innovative aesthetics, transgressive relationships, and varied involvement in public life in national and global contexts. In response to Raymond Williams’ classic 1980 essay “The Bloomsbury Fraction” – which in considering Bloomsbury’s social position as an upper-class “fraction” settles into a relatively stable description of the group’s form – I propose friction as a more tangible and productive concept to explore Bloomsbury and its lasting contribution to culture.
This chapter places Bloomsbury at the center of the story of meritocracy in twentieth-century Britain by considering four figures: H. A. L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet and Virginia Woolf’s cousin; educationalist Bertrand Russell; Virginia Woolf, who critiqued meritocratic systems in Three Guineas (1938); and Angelica Garnett, who examined meritocracy in Deceived with Kindness (1984). The chapter argues that Fisher was the architect of a vision of technocratic meritocracy that sought to overcome competition through the promise of a flexible educational system that could meet the needs of every child. Russell and Woolf were critics of the mindscape of meritocracy. Both associated competitive educational systems with militarism, while Woolf harnessed her pacifist critique of meritocracy to feminist ends. Angelica Garnett explores the affective aspects of meritocracy’s ethic of individual effort, competition, and reward. As Garnett’s memoir suggests, exclusion from the meritocratic journey was as defining an experience as inclusion in its rites and rituals.
The way in which our understanding of and approaches to Bloomsbury have been changed by feminist and gender scholarship is under discussion in this chapter. In the main, however, it addresses the gender politics of Bloomsbury itself primarily through how Bloomsbury artists engaged with feminism and gender in their creative endeavors and in their personal relationships, and how their gender politics accorded with or diverged from what was happening in the broader public sphere in terms of social movements such as suffrage, and cultural institutions such as marriage. The chapter discusses Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and E. M. Forster, among others. Far from seeking to present a coherent position among the group, this chapter teases out the contradictory and shifting views of various members. It ends by considering the group’s legacy in terms of whether and how Bloomsbury contributed, artistically and politically, to the reorientation of gender in its day, and ours.
Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and—even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them—they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800–1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers’ conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society’s constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.
This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.
Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.
Contemporary India provides a giant and complex panorama that deserves to be understood. Through in-depth analysis of democracy, economic growth and distribution, caste, labour, gender, and foreign policy, Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali provide a framework for understanding recent political and economic developments. They make three key arguments. Firstly, that India's well-established democracy is currently under considerable strain. Secondly, that the roots of this decline can be attributed to the growing inequalities accompanying growth since the 1990s. Growing inequalities led to the decline of the Congress party and the rise of the BJP under Narendra Modi. In turn, the BJP and its Hindu-nationalist affiliates have used state power to undermine democracy and to target Indian Muslims. Finally, they highlight how various social groups reacted to macro-level changes, although the results of their activism have not always been substantial. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand democracy in India today.
This research note introduces a new publicly available dataset identifying which federal candidates are out as LGBTQ2S+. The dataset comprises 4,201 candidates who ran in 2015, 2019 and 2021 for the five parties that won seats in the House of Commons. In this research note, we describe the replicable procedure we followed to identify out LGBTQ2S+ candidates, which involved systematic individual candidate searches. This procedure identified 176 LGBTQ2S+ candidates in total, which is more than in previous datasets. We illustrate how the data can be used by documenting how LGBTQ2S+ candidates changed over time relative to straight cisgender candidates. This dataset will allow researchers to examine a range of questions about LGBTQ2S+ representation as well as conduct intersectional analyses.
This article examines some recent trends within the scholarship on ancient Greek women. The field of gender and women’s studies is vast, and so this review is necessarily selective; it is also historical in focus, though I have deliberately tried to include works that cover a broad chronological and geographical range, and those that draw on different kinds of source material. It is divided into three parts: part 1 examines questions concerning ‘real’ women, part 2 is on agency and part 3 draws some observations on the difficulties of, and opportunities for, writing histories of women.
Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.
This paper explores diversifying legislatures within a context of ethnonationalism, populism, and democratic erosion. Although diversity and inclusion are often viewed as symbols of democratization, research increasingly challenges this. In fact, diversity and inclusion can occur in tandem with democratic erosion—how so? How do minorities navigate hostile environments? To answer this question, I analyze how women politicians with intersecting identities strategically use their gendered and racialized identities. I conduct a qualitative study of four different women politicians in the Israeli Knesset—Miri Regev of Jewish Mizrahi [Moroccan] descent, Pnina Tamano-Shata of Jewish Ethiopian descent, Merav Michaeli of Jewish Ashkenazi [European] descent, and Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian-Israeli. I find that women will highlight the aspects of their identities that they believe will benefit them the most, resulting in their promotion of ethnonational divisions and reducing opportunities for solidarity among minority populations.
There is an increasing global focus on gender diversity and equality in the workplace, particularly regarding women in leadership roles. Our study explores this focus in the wine industry in Australia, examining women's representation in CEO, winemaker, viticulturist, and marketing roles. By using results from a previous Australian study, we find that women have significantly increased their presence in all roles but one (marketing role) when comparing 2007–2013 with 2021–2023. Our study also confirms that women are more likely to be in winemaking and viticulturist roles, conditional upon a woman being in the CEO role. However, women in winemaking and viticulturist roles still lag behind women in leadership roles across other industries in Australia. We offer conclusions and directions for future research.
In what ways, if any, do justice-involved Black women make political demands? How do they understand their role and rights as citizens? Previous work has focused on identifying forms of political behavior, both formal and deviant (i.e., resistance, subversive acts), and the degree to which different groups participate in these behaviors. Few studies have focused on the sensemaking and ideologies likely motivating the behavior of justice-involved Black women both within and outside the formal political realm (e.g., elections). Drawing on the responses of Black women residents of an urban prison reentry facility, this article illustrates how this group engages in what we describe as “political claimsmaking,” a type of deviant discourse in which participants negotiate the power dynamics informing their social reality to make political demands. Further, we argue that while this political claimsmaking acts as a form of resistance and assertion of citizenship, it is simultaneously a form of inequitable political labor. Understanding Black women’s political claims, and the labor involved in making them, has serious implications for imagining more liberatory futures in which the benefits associated with citizenship are more freely accessed.
Historical analysis of Ghana’s late colonial mine communities has been extensive and overwhelmingly dominated by organised and politically active male mineworkers. Questions regarding the linkages between formal and informal mining actors and cultural ideas in the broader mine communities have remained inadequately explored. This article makes a timely investigation by critically analysing a range of governmental and corporate archival documents and situating the discussion within the context of expansive literature on Asante, and complemented by oral histories. It centres on the Asante/Akan term “kankyema”—a sociocultural phenomenon which women transformed towards economic ends to navigate the late colonial political economy’s mining income disruptions. The article argues for the essential need to centre marginalised voices in understanding diverse agencies in African mining history and for a deeper reflection on the potentialities of contextual sociocultural ideas—notably, how marginalised actors invoke and evoke their capacities over different times.
The experiences of Latina women and girls with state surveillance, and their responses to unfair policies and practices, remain underexplored. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Latinas—primarily of Mexican descent—living in San Diego, we examine how encounters with local police and immigration enforcement shape their political practices. Participants described repeated negative encounters with police and immigration enforcement agencies over the life course. These cumulative experiences fostered distrust of police and critical views of surveillance practices designed to restrict the mobility of immigrants and other systematically minoritized groups. In response, many of the women engaged in community organizing and adopted counter-surveillance strategies. Our findings show how patterned experiences with state surveillance generate political critique and action.
Latinas and Asian American women are often labeled “women of color” (WOC). But taking up the identity of WOC is a choice; not all Latinas and Asian American women self-identify as WOC. Building on intersectionality theory and recent work on “of color” identities, we propose that WOC identification has the potential to translate into broader political alliances with other marginalized groups. We evaluate this expectation with data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). We added a survey question about self-identification as WOC to the 2020 CMPS, making research possible about the nature and implications of the WOC ID. We theorize that Latinas and Asian American women who self-identify as WOC will be more supportive of policies that disproportionately benefit marginalized outgroups. We find evidence that WOC ID is positively related to supporting these policies, as hypothesized. We also investigate whether racial resentment limits the effects of WOC ID and discuss the implications. We argue that this study demonstrates the significance of the WOC identity and its role in the creation of political coalitions.