Thinking gender from the global South

I have gradually become convinced that there is a profound problem in the way gender theory is usually done. Mainstream gender theory that circulates in the English-speaking world, from de Beauvoir to Butler, is mainly written out of the social experience of the global North, and pays very little attention to the intellectual production of the global South.  Yet the South is where most of the people live. This post gives two examples of theoretical work that ought to get a lot more attention.  There are many more.

The first example is a paper published twenty years ago in the Revista Interamericana de Sociologia by the Mexican sociologist Teresita de Barbieri, ‘On the category “gender”: a theoretical-methodological introduction’. 

This paper starts with feminist movements and their ‘hypothesis’ that the subordination of women is a question of power, not nature. After reviewing a number of feminist thinkers from the metropole, de Barbieri sets out a line of analysis centering on social control over women’s reproductive power, and men’s assertion of their rights over offspring.

This commits her to a relational view of gender, though one in which biological capacities are at stake – it is not a disembodied or purely discursive view.  De Barbieri sees the relationship between the cultural figures of the mother and the male head of household as the nucleus of gender relations in Latin American societies. 

But she does not have a binary view of gender.  Indeed she emphasises the significance of the family life cycle that gives a different social position to post-menopausal women.  Drawing on Brazilian black feminist thought, she explores the interaction of gender with race and class in a stratified society.  She further complicates the gender order by laying stress on relations between men – an issue that was only then beginning to enter Anglophone gender theory.  De Barbieri also lays emphasis on relations between women who find themselves in different class positions, such as the relations around domestic service.

While recognizing the dichotomy of mother vs head of household, de Barbieri goes beyond it to explore the turbulence of social interests arising in the gender order. She instances the cases of men who support feminism, and women who support patriarchy.

In explicit critique of the simplifications of metropolitan gender analysis, she locates gender relations in the context of the Latin American debt crisis, and the impact of global restructuring on the popular classes.

The result is a sophisticated, structurally complex picture of the gender order; at least as diversified - arguably more – than the ‘intersectional’ model that was emerging in the metropole at the time this paper was published.

My second example is a paper by the Chilean cultural analyst Sonia Montecino, called ‘Identities and diversities in Chile’, published about ten years ago.  Montecino is the author of a well-known book Madres y Huachos (fourth edition 2007), that explores the colonial re-making of culture across Latin America and the ideology of ‘marianismo’ that came out of it.

This cultural formation constructs women’s identity on the model of the sacrifical mother, especially the mother of sons.  In the essay ‘Identities and diversities’, contributed to a collection on culture and development, Montecino argues that in a society influenced by a powerful ideology of homogeneity it is difficult to draw out differences.

But differences do emerge, in acts of resistance and reappropriation, and there are in fact multiple feminine identities.  The subject is in process, not fixed.  Montecino traces the dynamics through economic statistics, attitude surveys and cultural materials.

The incorporation of paid work in women’s lives – which happened earlier in the working class than in the middle class - ruptures the ideology of marianismo.  Women’s emergence into the public realm sharpens issues about subordination, so the form of gender politics shifts.  Among the privileged, where much reproductive labour – housework and child care – is handed off to working-class women, an older pattern of feminine labour allows the modernization of gender relations among the elite.  Social fissures open up in gender ideology.  Yet a generic image of women as mothers persists.

In a broader perspective, Montecino argues, gender identities in Latin America are formed in the same way as class identities, i.e. within projects of social change.  It is important then to see the collective identities being formed in different women’s movements. 

This too is a complex story.  Feminist movements, from the time of suffrage struggles on, have emphasised equality and sex differences.  Survival movements among indigenous women assume the existing gender division of labour that feminist movements contest.  Mothers’ movements (which became famous under the dictatorships) struggle for sons’ lives and for human rights.  While feminist movements struggle for change in identities and for women to move into men’s spheres of action, mothers’ movements use the cultural legitimacy given by old identities.

Women’s activism against the dictatorships led to the adoption of some feminist demands by mainstream political institutions.  But the political Right was given ground for opposing changes in women’s lives because they led to immorality and social breakdown.

The net effect, in Montecino’s view, is that real changes in women’s position have occurred, notably better education, smaller families, and more paid employment.  But public politics is still dominated by men on the assumption that women are domestic.  A ‘conservative modernity’ she suggests, is well expressed in the realm of gender identity.

(A few years after this paper was published, Chilean voters elected their first woman president.  At the end of Michelle Bachelet’s term, they elected another man, the most conservative leader since the dictatorship.)

These are two highly sophisticated texts.  They make substantial but critical use of theory from the global metropole, and they use ideas, as well as data, from the global periphery.  They are broadly materialist but not dogmatically so.  They have a strong sense of the interplay of gender relations with class, and a strong sense of the specificities of Latin America.  They treat the subjectivity of actors in a context of social structure and dynamics, not just discursively constructed identities.

Something for Anglophone gender researchers to ponder!

Barbieri, Teresita de. 1992. Sobre la categoria genero. Una introduccion teorico-metodologica. Revista Interamericana de Sociologia 6: 147-178.

Montecino, Sonia. 2001. 'Identidades y diversidades en Chile', pp. 65-98 in Cultura y desarollo en Chile, edited by Manuel Antonio Garretón. Santiago: Andres Bello.

Congreso Iberoamericano de masculinidades y equidad, Barcelona

The pioneering Iberian-American conference on Masculinities and Equity, held in October 2011, was described in an earlier post.  Here is a video of my keynote address, with Spanish translation (click the phrase "Conferencia Raewyn Connell").

Conferencia Raewyn Connell from Francisco Cobacho on Vimeo.

While in Barcelona, I did an interview with the leading Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.  You can read it here

On Being Translated

There is now a whole genre of research about translation; but not much that I have seen about being translated.  Here are some thoughts about the experience.

Being translated is flattering.  Somebody has thought well enough of my text to put time and effort into it.  I feel warmed, even when the result is a mystery to me.

The Japanese edition of Gender and Power, for example, is a beautiful piece of book-making (see below), but I can only guess what it’s like as a text.  And I can hardly imagine what it would be like to read Gender and Power in Japan, with its own gender order and debates about gender questions.

Gender and Power in Japanese

With a language I can follow sentence by sentence, the feeling is different.  I have an immediate connection with this text; yet it’s still not the text I sweated to produce.  It’s like being a grandmother rather than a mother, perhaps.

When a translator approaches me with queries – something I encourage strongly – I learn unexpected things about my own writing.

I once imagined my prose style to be plain, clear English, a blend of George Orwell and Jane Austen with a touch of Dashiell Hammett.  I discover it is actually laced with allusions, figures of speech and assumptions of prior knowledge – like the previous sentence.

For instance, one translator was stumped when I wrote “letting things slide”.   I hardly thought of that as a metaphor – but it is.  “Jobs for the boys” was another puzzle for the translator – think of the literal meaning.

Worse: I’m from a generation that was brought up on Shakespeare, the Bible, and the anglican Prayer Book.  So I sometimes quote from the 17^th century almost without realizing it, and certainly without identifying it as a quotation.

Nouns in apposition; semi-technical terms, such as “embodiment”; slang, such as “sexpot”: those are traps too.

Allusions and jokes may go dead flat – and not only in translation.  The final passage of Gender and Power is entitled “Concluding Notes on the World to which a Social Theory of Gender Might Lead”.  This is a joking allusion to John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory.  Nobody seems to have noticed.

I have come to realize how much I rely on the rhythm of English to scaffold an argument, connect pieces of evidence, or convey nuances.  When I am writing, I speak the sentences in my head, and constantly correct for sound.  Since punctuation is the main tool for conveying rhythm in written English, I get very touchy about punctuation.  I once had a terrible argument, lasting half the night, with an editor who had deleted all my semi-colons.

How does a translator convey the rhythm, in a language with a different sound-pattern?  I simply don’t know; I’m not fluent enough in any other language to tell.

Some translators have worked very hard on the text, and discussed many of the difficulties with me.  The German translation of Masculinities, for instance, called Der gemachte Mann, is the product of admirable scholarship and teamwork.  I know this translation has a strong reputation in Germany.  It feels good to be associated with such a text, though it was other people who did the work!

There is always a feeling of displacement.  A translation appears later, sometimes many years later, than the original.  I don’t know in advance what pieces will get picked up.  Very little of my work has yet been translated into French, none into Arabic. Some of my best writing has not been translated at all.

I still feel there is something miraculous about my words going out into the world in new forms. Every translation means an unexpected audience, a chance for new connection and exchange of ideas.  That is culturally and politically important, given the xenophobia being whipped up in my country, and around the world, today.

But it leaves a dilemma.  To write the best work I can – the most worth translating - is to write English at full stretch, using the marvellous resources of the language.   But using all those resources makes the product more difficult to translate.   When I give a lecture to an audience whose first language is not English, I try for clarity above all.  I used to think that was the priority in writing, too.  But now I’m not so sure.

Sociology Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Sociology has an evil reputation.  We might predict the future, mend broken hearts, cure cancer, defeat alien invasions and save the planet, but we Cannot Write.  Sociology is a by-word for jargon, abstraction, pretentiousness and convoluted curdled prose.

With some reason.  When I began in the trade, the greatest sociologist in the world was Talcott Parsons of Harvard University, whose idea of fine English prose was a literal translation of mutterings by Max Weber with a headache.  Later I discovered that one of Parsons’ predecessors in the professoriate at Harvard was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the world’s windiest poet, which seemed to explain a lot.

Still, if you boiled his prose down (C. Wright Mills, who had a sense of humour, once shrank a book of Parsons' theory into four paragraphs) it did say something you could sink your teeth into, and prove how bad it was.  Other theorists spent years building systems of definitions that said nothing substantial about anything, and couldn’t even be refuted.

This bothered me as a beginner, and to tell the truth, it still does.  Sociology deals with the most important issues in contemporary life.  Why shouldn’t sociological writing be noted for vivid description, crisp analysis, vigorous and witty argument?  Why shouldn’t our books be best-sellers, shaking the nation and attracting admiring reviews, questions in parliament, and furious television debates?

The topics that sociologists concern themselves with can be the subject of very fine writing.  Consider the delicate ethnography of country life in Ontario in the short stories of Alice Munro, who should have been awarded three Nobel Prizes by now.  Family dynamics, generational turnover, labour processes, gender relations, urban-rural relations, social change: it’s a whole textbook of sociology.

Or consider the haunting picture of a decayed imperial outpost and the corruption of power in Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, who did get the Nobel Prize.  Or the terrifying evocation of illness, time and social dislocation in his Age of Iron.  Or...

But sociology is science, not fiction.  Its claim to attention involves empirical knowledge as well as capacity for critique.  We do research, we don’t dream up our facts.  We document our procedures and our sources. We compare findings in one study with those in another.  We have peer-reviewed journals, the worst method of scientific quality control except for all the others.

With all that, sociology is capable of good writing.  Consider Robert and Helen Lynd’s urban ethnography Middletown, a classic of US sociology in its period of greatest creativity, the 1920s.  Admittedly they didn’t have Alice Munro’s way with words.  But they did build up a memorable picture of a local social order, performing the eerie feat of making the familiar strange.

Or consider Michael Messner’s Out of Play, published just five years ago.  Messner is one of the leading sociologists of sport, and this book collects essays that go behind the glossy surfaces to questions of justice, gender stereotyping, violence and exclusion.  They include vivid description as well as reflection, they are written with passion and humour, and they are very good sociology.

Powerful writing can occur in unexpected genres.  Saskia Sassen’s Global Cities is structural sociology, tracing the concentration of power and wealth around transnational corporate headquarters.  But there is a fierce irony in this book, as Sassen shows the consequences: heightened exploitation in the urban hinterland, among the service industries and migrant workers who make possible the daily life of the privileged.

And if we are looking for irony, consider Michael Gilding’s Secrets of the Super Rich.  It sounds like an airport self-help title, but is actually a subtle sociological study of the new rich.  When a rising businessman has spent a lifetime defeating his rivals and building a fortune, what does he do with it at the end?  Hand it over to sons? Daughters? Managers? Bigger companies?  Will struggles over the fortune wreck the family it was built for? Read on – it’s a gripping tale.

Much of sociological writing, it’s true, does not sparkle.  University life in every discipline allows formulaic publications.  The neo-liberal managers who control higher education systems nowadays are ramping up competitive pressures that will produce more of this.  When sociology is dull, it’s usually because the authors are not thinking about who they are speaking to and what news they are bringing.

But the news sociology brings is important.  It’s about what people do and suffer in a world of giant institutions, massive inequalities, and complex differences. Working at its full capacity, sociology can produce accounts of human life as subtle as anything in mainstream literature, and more relevant to the decisions we, collectively, have to make.  Science, and art, both.

Gender in Vienna

In October I visited Vienna, for events in gender studies and boyswork.  On 13 October I gave a public lecture at the University of Vienna, about global perspectives on gender theory.  The Austrian colleagues have kindly made and posted a video of the talk, which can be found here: "Gender Theory on a World Scale".

With the Social Sciences in Brasil

I spent 24-27 October at the annual conference of ANPOCS, the national social science association of Brasil.  I gave a plenary address, on “The Coming Revolution in Social Theory”, to a vast cheering crowd of revolutionaries.  Well, I exaggerate slightly.  But there were getting on for two hundred people.  Simultaneous translation, and I had an entertaining talk beforehand with the translators. I’m thinking of patenting TIB, the Translators’ Index of Boredom, as a key performance indicator for speeches; translators must have to put across a lot of dreadful stuff at corporate and government events.

Hotel Gloria, site of ANPOCS conference

This is a big conference, it combines sociology with political science and anthropology.  I hung out with a clan of anthropologists working on childhood, a clutch of gender/sexuality studies folk, and a gang of sociological theorists.  It’s held in Caxambu, an old spa town in the highlands, mainly in a second-empire era hotel, full of wood panelling and incredibly noisy and maze-like, but great for unexpected meetings.

They run later than we do in staid Australia, one night I was at a panel that went on well after 11 pm.   They joke about Brasilians never being on time, but in fact the conference ran like clockwork. Many people worked for this, but it will be principally down to the Executive Secretary of ANPOCS, Maria Filomena Gregori, universally known as Bibia, an anthropologist, a gender researcher, and certainly an amazing person.

My Southern Theory argument was received with interest, both by the translators and the audience.  I talked about Hountondji’s stuff, showed pictures of interesting social thinkers from around the periphery, developed an argument about the need for global re-shaping of social science, showcased some of the Australian work in the area.

They know about these issues already in Brasil of course – a source of critical thought on development as long ago as the 1950s.  But when I look at the Brasilian journals and at the conference book display (from which I have acquired a small library) most of it is still very European- and US-centered in terms of theory - also true of Australia.  The Brasilians have a lively academic culture and should have more impact internationally.  It really is a problem of hegemony - the usual assumption is that if you engage with Bauman, Bourdieu, Habermas and Foucault you are engaging with Theory, there is no sense that these guys represent specifically European experience.

Conference delegates conferring not swimming

The topics of the papers are quite like those in Australian social science conferences, with the extra edge of a society with mass poverty, a fair bit of violence, and a still-reformist though partly neoliberal labour government.  I have been to sessions on LGBTT politics (add ‘travesti’ to the debatable international acronym LGBT), on internationalization of social science, on Brazilian social thought, on environmental politics, on ‘Reinventing the Brasilian classics’, and on something we have in Australia but don’t theorize in the same way, ‘dilemmas of modernity in the periphery’.  The style of the sessions is pretty top-down, often with little chance for discussion.

My three words of Portuguese didn’t stretch very far, but I could recognize abstract nouns and some personal names in the presentations, and could understand the interactions in the sessions ethnographically.  A nice moment came in a session on the future of social science.  The Man From the Ministry, correctly dressed in suit and tie, did a long fast PowerPoint presentation with all the statistics of how funding was up, numbers were up, and the output of international publications was exponentially up (all true).  Then the bolshie academics, in jeans and open-necked shirts, tore it all to pieces, and even I could follow the dark mutterings about academic neo-colonialism and intensification of labour.  Familiar.

Another thing the Brasilians do well is press liaison.  There were many press reports of papers from the conference, I kept an eye on the bulletin board where the conference staff put them up, and there were so many that they had to change the display twice a day.  I featured too, with an interview in “Folha de S. Paulo”, said to be the leading daily in the country, 29 October, page A17 if you want to try your Portuguese.

Well, when my time comes, I can die happy, for I have gone dancing with Brasilians in Brasil.  ANPOCS is famous, I was assured by many people, for its end-of-conference parties.  The 2011 party got underway about 11 on the last night, with hundreds of delegates gathered around the Hotel Gloria pool chatting away.  There was a tremendous cloudburst and we were washed inside.  It didn’t dampen the party however, which just re-assembled in the disco room.  The conference photographic display about the life and work of Celso Furtado (very important theorist and policy activist) had been cleared away, and the place set up with turntables, loudspeakers, laser lights, smoke machine, glitter ball, a DJ and security guys – clearly the hotel is used to this.

Hotel Gloria breakfast room, the morning after the party.

The DJ was pretty good, making perfect transitions between tracks.  He started with some pretty easy pop stuff going back to ABBA, and then even deeper into prehistory.  After I started dancing, the DJ took one look at me and put on “Twist and Shout”.  Amazingly, many of the younger people knew the words, how is this possible?   I’m glad to say the other overseas speakers were also on the dance floor, full marks to the Anglos.  The vice-rector of a regional university was also dancing pretty well, though I wouldn’t like to try in the heels she was wearing.  So a good time was had by all, and perhaps they got on to samba later in the night and perhaps they didn’t, but I faded out about 2 am, and slept like a log until breakfast. Thank you ANPOCS!

Men & masculinity: two conferences

During October I shared in two conferences about masculinity politics, in different corners of Europe.

The first was in Barcelona, held in an old, old municipal building – renovated now – that had been a historic cultural centre for women (see the picture, left).  Titled "Congreso Iberoamericano de Masculinidades y Equidad", 7-8 October, it was a mixture of research and activism. Details: http://www.cime2011.org/ There was some participation from Latin America though most delegates were from Spain - a meeting of men’s groups for gender equality from around the country.

About 250 people came to the opening plenary, when I gave the keynote address. I was quite nervous, but got into the swing about 10 minutes in, and I think gave a decent talk on the theme of masculinities, men, global politics and gender justice.  I don’t speak Spanish, so there was simultaneous translation, done by a guy hidden away in a back room, a bit eerie. Enough people were listening to the translation that when I made a joke, there were two waves of laughter, about three seconds apart.

Opening session, CIME Barcelona

The congress was partly about research, more about action.  They were trying to agree on a political platform, and through the fog of my extremely limited Spanish, I listened to a two-hour debate over the draft document.  Spanish political style is different from Australian, more eloquent certainly, and seemingly more intense.  They did agree on a declaration, by acclamation at the concluding session. The text is online now, called the "Declaration of Barcelona".

Two weeks later was the Austrian "Männertagung 2011", 20-21 October, also a mixture of activism and research.  Held in Graz, a thousand-year-old city in the pretty hill country of Styria, once a Hapsburg hangout and now a university town.  I came by train from the north, through the mountains with autumn snow and leaves.  Details of the conference: http://maennertagung2011.mur.at/

The conference was in the technical university on the working-class side of the river, a gritty industrial building in a gritty industrial area.  About the same number of people as in Barcelona, and again I gave the opening plenary address, very well received - thank you, colleagues from Austria!  Here there were more people from social work and other human service professions.  Austria has a network of men’s counselling centres, and is almost unique in having a national office of men’s affairs, located in the social welfare ministry.  (They have a separate ministry for women.)

So the big political moment in Graz was when the Minister turned up, gave a short address, and answered questions from the floor.  He’s a Social Democrat, tipped as a future leader; the current conservative government is struggling in a big corruption scandal.  A theme of the conference was ‘hegemonic masculinity’. The irony did not escape the conference participants, when the Minister and university authorities offered us a perfect illustration – affable, authoritative, and giving absolutely nothing away.

But the main work of the conference was done in workshops.  I shared with Elli Scambor, one of the conference convenors, a research workshop about hegemonic masculinity.  Other workshops dealt with migration, men’s health, queer issues, equality politics, violence, fatherhood, and youth work.  In another plenary, Thomas Gesterkamp from Germany (http://www.thomasgesterkamp.de/) gave an illuminating tour of the politics of masculinity, including the menacing masculinity-fundamentalism that has emerged in right-wing politics in Europe.

The Birthday Party, Graz

A conference party with a difference!  Celebrating the anniversary of the Graz men’s counselling centre, it was held in a music/drama venue, with a cake...  And no, it had not been left out in the rain.