Lesson 4 notes

Essays

• Essays are writing exercises: Apply a 'hat' (theoretical lens) to a 'case' (specific situation).
• Resources:
  • Check the OWL (Online Writing Lab) for guidance.
  • Use an article related to your chosen hat and another related to your case.
  • The essay question is pre-defined.
  • Utilize the textbook and the two articles.
• Criteria:
  • Follow the outlined criteria.
  • Use paragraphs for organization.
  • Cite sources properly.
  • Do not cite lecture slides in any course work.

Review: Levels of Analysis

• Choosing the appropriate scale for analysis is crucial.
• Distinguish between 'explaining' (causation) and 'understanding' (interpretation).
• Categories of Theories:
  • Traditional
  • Middle Ground Theories

Realism and Neorealism

Liberalism

English School and Constructivism

• English School: A middle ground between realism and liberalism (Liberal Realism).
• Constructivism: Emphasizes values, shared interests, and social norms in global interactions.
• Link between agents and structures:
  • Structures constrain agents.
  • Structures construct identities and interests (Alexander Wendt).

Constructivism

• Agent.
• Topic.
• Structure.

The English School and Constructivism

• The purported ‘middleground’ of social constructivism.
• Framed as idealists versus realists again.
• Materialist perspective (Krasner):
  • Only the material world and material causes are considered.
• Social facts (Durkheim):
  • Social facts exist beyond individual cognition.
• Focus on intersubjectivity.

Taussig

• Key Works:
  • Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and alterity: A particular history of the senses. Routledge, 2018.
  • Taussig, Michael T. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• Social Constructions: Gender, race, and the nation are socially constructed inventions.
• Importance of literature in politics: Representation, metaphors, symbolism are vital.
• Copies and their impact: Copies dominate our understanding, which changes how we perceive things.
• Epistemically correct, socially created, and creative beings.

Adler

• The middleground of social constructivism.
• Rationalists versus poststructuralists.
• Framed as idealists versus realists again.
• Materialist perspective (Krasner):
  • Only the material world and material causes are considered.
• Social facts (Durkheim):
  • Social facts are larger than individual cognition.
• Focus on intersubjectivity, Epistemic communities (BIS).

Constructivism - Essays

• International Relations (IR) is constructed: How we think matters.
• Securitization: National security frames the social construction of threat (e.g., War on Drugs, Terror).
• Realism and Power Balancing: Countries fighting or cooperating demonstrates stability (e.g., NATO versus Russia).
• Liberal Norms: Normative agreement on policy areas (e.g., Responsibility to Protect, Landmines Treaty, Genocide).
• Identity: The role of identity in policy (e.g., Canada as a country of migrants = open immigration policy).
• Norms as Treaty: Examples include NAFTA, EU, APEC, ASEAN, WTO.

Security as Construction

• Securitization Spectrum:
  • Non-politicized: Issue not in public debate.
  • Politicized: Managed within the standard political system as part of public policy.
  • Securitized: Framed as a security question, an existential threat to a referent object.
• Key Points:
  • Securitization can fail if the audience rejects the securitizing act.
    • Example: Bush and Blair failed to convince the international community of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
  • Narrow vs. Wide Interpretation of Security:
    • Narrow: State defense from external attacks.
    • Wide: Includes non-military threats.
  • Copenhagen School:
    • Security is about survival; existential threat must be articulated.
    • Categories: Military, environmental, economic, societal, and political security.
  • Securitization Dynamics:
    • Determined by securitizing actors and referent objects.
  • Conceptual Precision:
    • Framework needed to define security and determine securitization/desecuritization.
  • Success of Securitization:
    • Requires convincing the audience of an existential threat.
  • Influence:
    • Governments/elites have an advantage in influencing the audience.
  • Subjectivity:
    • What constitutes security is subjective.
  • Political Act:
    • Every securitization process involves a political act.
  • Success/Failure:
    • Depends on the persuasiveness of the discourse.
  • Exceptional Means:
    • Successful securitization allows exceptional measures.
  • Motives:
    • Various motives and intentions explain securitization.
  • Abuse of Power:
    • Can lead to excesses, especially in authoritarian regimes.
  • Desecuritization:
    • Can be beneficial by reintroducing the issue into the political sphere.
• Key Quotes Example:
  • Migration: Australian Immigration Minister on Middle East migrants creating a 'national emergency'.
  • Children: Australian Prime Minister on strip searches justified when children used exploitatively.
  • Asylum/Immigration: UK Conservative leader on lost control and terrorist threat.

Classic Thai Example of Securitization

• Drug use and increase in synthetic drugs.
• Perception that Burma is the problem.
• Role of media and populace.
• War on drugs declared by Prime Minister.
• Becomes a national security issue (instead of health).
• Drug eradication becomes #1 security issue.
• Policy focuses on military action, police work, and law responses.

The English School and Constructivism

• Hedley Bull: Mutual recognition of existence leads to norms/laws.
  • Shapes and determines behavior like diplomacy.
  • Anarchy forms a society between states.
    • Equals norms and obligations.
    • Explains both realism and liberalism.
  • Hard to specify, not very positivist.
• Insight repeated by Wendt.

Critical Theories

Why So Many Theories?

• Enduring question exploring multiple theoretical families within International Relations.

Essay Approaches

• Previous:
  • Realist
  • Neorealist
  • Liberal Internationalism
  • English School
  • Constructivist (Realist)
  • Constructivist (Liberal)
  • Constructivist (Norms)
  • Constructivist (Identity)
• This Week:
  • Gramscian
  • World Systems Theory (Marxism)
  • Western Feminist
  • Intersectional Feminist
  • Postcolonial
  • Decolonial
  • Settler Colonial
  • Securitization
  • LGBTQ Rights
  • Queer

Cox, Robert W.

• Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.
• Problem-solving (takes things as we find them) versus critical theory (questions what we find).
• Who does design empower and who does it disempower?

Key Terminology

• Postpositivism:
  • Rejects positivist approach that a researcher can be an independent observer of the social world.
• Interpretivism:
  • Argues objectivity is impossible.
  • Focuses on the framework of ‘qualitative analysis’.
• Neocolonialism:
  • New form of control from legacy of colonialism that bears the blame for developing state economic failures.
• Discourse:
  • Supposed common-sense understanding about a subject or a cause.
  • Legitimizes or delegitimizes language used to describe certain actions.

Positivism: The Challenge

• FIDUROD
  • Formal
  • Intractable
  • Decontextualized
  • Universalistic
  • Reductionist
  • One Dimensional
• How pervasive are these characteristics?

Bricolage as Method

• Research method is more respected than in rationalistic articulations.
• Rationalistic articulation subverts deconstruction of unanalyzed assumptions in passive methods.
• Bricoleurs view research method as a technology of justification.
  • Defending what we assert we know.
  • The process by which we know it.
• Education demands a step back from learning research methods.
  • Allows conceptual distance.
  • Produces critical consciousness.
  • Refuses passive acceptance of externally imposed research methods.
    • Tacitly certify modes justifying knowledges that are decontextualized and reductionistic.

Bricolage as Method

• Bricoleurs understand a basic flaw within the nature and production of monological knowledge:
  • Unilateral perspectives on the world fail to account for the complex relationship between material reality and human perception.
• Ignoring the relationship is costly:
  • Mistaking perception for truth reduces our ability to make sense of the world around us but also harms those with the least power to pronounce what is true.
• Levi-Strauss emphasized that:
  • A knowledge producer never carries on a simple dialogue with the world but instead, interacts 'with a particular relationship between nature and culture definable in terms of his particular period and civilization and the material means at his disposal'.

The Evolution of Theory

• Kuhn’s work identified how and why certain theories are accepted.
  • The process happens when theories are no longer relevant and new theories emerge.
• Paradigm approach:
  • Idea that science moves in waves.
• Epistemic bubbles, academic disciplines, academic subfields all function as forms of power over knowledge.
• IR theory works in the same way:
  • Based upon different time periods and personal contexts.
• ‘Great debates’:
  • Meta commentary on the field.
• IR tends to be navel gazing:
  • Not really sure what it's doing.
• Autoethnography, narrative storytelling, media, film:
  • ‘Pop goes IR’.

The Evolution of Theory

• Theory families discussed in this chapter share traits:
  • They are critical, commonly held assumptions in IR since its establishment.
• Why is family used as the metaphor here?
• Since the end of the Cold War, those with critical approaches are better suited to understand and question this complex world.
• This seems like a very western reading (see week 2).

Traditional vs. Critical Theories

• Traditional theories are too restrictive:
  • They take the world 'as it is' for granted and limit the role of the individual.
• Theories that seek compromise or unifying approaches do not go far enough by themselves in addressing injustices and flaws in the global system.
• Focus on 'critical' theories to identify alternative ways of ordering our world.
• Traditional Theories:
  • Realism
  • Constructivism
  • Liberalism
  • English School
• Critical Theories:
  • Marxism
  • Poststructuralism
  • Power
  • Critical
  • Class
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Postcolonialism
  • Feminism

Critical Theories

• Marxism, postcolonialism, feminism.
• Marxism critiques capitalism.
  • Many different kinds:
    • Liberal capitalism
    • State capitalism
    • Democratic/social democratic capitalism

Critical Theories - Capitalism

• How is capitalism critical?
  • Transform all social relations into capitalist relationships (exchange value).
  • ‘Supernatural belief ‘ that capital will always produce more of itself (interest rates) Taussig 128.
  • Supply and demand results in a natural state of equilibrium (prices).
  • Government is an impediment to revolutionary transformation (social mobility, consumerism, inequality as natural).

Polanyi, K. (2001)

• The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon press.
  • ‘Labour is only another name for human activity that goes with life itself, Which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that actively be detached from the rest of life be it stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature which is not produced by man; actual money, finally is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule is not produced at all but comes into being through the mechanisms of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity descriptions of labour, land and money is entirely fictitious.‘

Critical Theories - Capitalism - Marxism

• Emphasis on individualism, private property, market relations, competition, Limited government.
  • Not falsifiable, utopian framing.
• State capitalism:
  • State ownership, intervention, political coordination, political influence, National interest.
  • East Asian Economic growth China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Vietnam.
• Democratic/social democratic capitalism:
  • See discussion of socialism below.

Capitalism in the Academy

• Cultural capitalism:
  • Capitalism turns us into capitalists.
  • Lukacs, Althusser, Benjamin, Adorno (the ones Jordon Peterson hates).
• How capitalism transforms our sense of self (class consciousness).
• Role of the state in capitalism:
  • Poulantzas, Panitch, Gindin, ‘Real news’ crowd).
  • State plays integral role in developing class consciousness and supressing class conflict.

Capitalism in the Academy - Gramscians (Canadian)

• Linked to International Political Economy (IPE) as subdiscipline.
• Robert Cox, Susan Strange, Stephen Gill, David Law.
• Cox:
  • Historical materialism.
  • Global system of capitalism influences IR.
• Strange:
  • ‘Casino capitalism’.
  • Post-1945 states failed to regulate the system.
• Gill:
  • Gramscian approach.
  • Coercion and Consent governs system (Trilateral commission).
• Harmes (mutual funds), van der Pilj (TCC), Arrighi (Geog), O’Brien (labour), Porter (finance), Roberts (SR), Cutler (IL)
  • How does capitalism tilt IR towards elites?

Marxism

• Theoretical family held by one point: the global system should be replaced.
• Takes knowledge from economic, political, and social critique to focus on how the global system empowers the 1% and disempowers the 99%.
• Textbook is anachronistic and wrong.
• Change can only occur by questioning and dissolving the state.
• Eventually:
  • Socialism in the middle.
• Marxists view globalisation as a project that legitimised and locked in patterns of inequality exposed by Marx a century ago.
• This is a legitimately awful description.

Communism

• Marx and Engels:
  • Communism as final stage of socialism.
• Social ownership of means of production.
• End/limit private property.
• Classless society (social equality).
  • Everyone according to their ability and their need.
  • Same modern problems as last week.
• End of the national state.
  • Global communist utopia.

Communism

• Lenin:
  • Translate Marxist theory into political action.
  • Vanguard party to lead revolution.
  • Dictatorship of the proletariat.
• Stalin:
  • Socialism in one country (versus Trotsky).
  • Purges, central planning, industrialization, cult of personality (Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev , the Kims, Mao, Deng, Xi).
  • Utilizing the state to create the perfect society (Khmer Rouge, Juche).
• Mao Tse-tung:
  • Revolutionary role of Chinese peasants.
  • Little red book.
  • Peasant revolution, Cultural revolution and self-reliance.
• China today as a communist state? If China is communist what is Canada? the USA?

World Systems Theory

• Immanuel Wallerstein.

Postcolonialism

• Focuses on critiquing the inequality between states or regions, as opposed to classes.
• Origins can be traced to the Cold War period when international activity centered around decolonisation and the desire to undo imperialism.
• Central to postcolonialisation is the idea that prejudices, biases, ideas, and understandings that made colonialism possible, did not disappear overnight.
• Neocolonial power structures reproduce postcolonial legacies that created inequalities.

Imperialism/Colonialism

• Imperialism/Colonialism and Capitalism.
• Lenin, Fanon, Spivak, Bhabba, Ahmed, Young.
• Intimately linked to one another.
• Role of slavery in triangle trade, southern US/UK economy.
• Race and trade with colonial possessions (India, Islands, Latin America).

Settler Colonialism

• Settler colonialism, Commonwealth countries (AUS, NZ, CAN, US).
• Ignorance for ongoing basis of dispossession and wealth.
• Ecocide and genocide linked to nation state.

Veracini 2010 - Settler Colonialism

• Settlers made by conquest not just migration.
• Migrants moved to someone else’s society; the settler or colonial remakes their own.
• Always going to involve an element of idealization.
• Not the same as colonialism.
• Doesn’t use existing population to establish government.
• Justification for non-inclusion.
• Dispense ability of indigenous person.

Why Resources Matter in Settler Colonialism

• The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it.
• Though, in practice, Indigenous labour was indispensable to Europeans, settler-colonization is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.
• The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct-invasion is a structure not an event. $26$
• Are resources the foundation of the Canadian economy?

Why Identity is Threatened in Settler Colonialism

• To see the 'settler' as uneasily occupying a place caught between two First Worlds, two origins of authority and authenticity.
• One of these is the originating world of Europe, the Imperium the source of its principal cultural authority.
• Its 'other' First World is that of the First Nations whose authority they not only replaced and effaced but also desired.
• Is this the source of American and Canadian anxieties about lack of identity?

Anglosphere - Vucetic

• Based on demography.
• The defensive project of the 'white man's country, she argued, was shared by places as demographically diverse as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Kenya, South Africa, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Australia.
• Clearly their strategies of government were different ranging from indirect rule to democratic self-government but a spatial politics of exclusion and segregation was common to them all and the 'white man' always ruled the 'natives'.
• In this framework, immigration restriction was merely 'segregation on a large scale' as Stoddard observed in The Rising Tide of Colour. 'Nothing is more striking', he added, 'than the instinctive solidarity which binds together Australian and Afrikanders, Californians and Canadians into a sacred union'.

Colonial Pasts and Colonial Presence

• Colonialism accompanied by:
  • Conquest and elimination of Indigenous civilizations and Peoples.
  • In 1490, Indigenous Peoples made up 20% of the global population; a century later, only 3%.
  • Expanding system of global colonial capitalism.
  • Acquisition and commodification of Indigenous lands.
  • Resource extraction and exploitation.
  • European settlement.
  • Imposition of colonial rule.

Colonial Pasts and Colonial Presence

• Justified on basis of terra nullius.
• Indigenous lands as empty wasteland.
• Indigenous Peoples framed as childlike, savage, nomadic, uncivilized and non-Christian.
  • Hence need to save and reform through Eurocentric ideas of progress.
• Colonialism not just in the past but a continuously unfolding process.
• Rooted throughout society: institutions, processes, dominant culture.

Territoriality and Extractivism

• Drive for territory at heart of settler colonialism.
• Written into Constitution Act, 1867.
  • S. 91(24) federal power over Indians and lands reserved to the Indians.
• Settlement of the West.
• Numbered treaties (1871-1921):
  • Extinguished Indigenous title to land.
  • Provided colonizers with land, raw materials and new markets.
  • Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands, livelihoods and cultures.
  • Forced Indigenous Peoples onto reserve lands.
• Indian Act 1876:
  • Further marginalized and dispossessed Indigenous Peoples.
  • Regulated every aspect of life on reserves.
  • State control over Indigenous lands.
  • Mandated education through residential schools.
  • Imposed band system of governance.
  • Regulated Indian statuses and band memberships.
  • Restricted Indigenous participation in settler economy.

Western Feminism

Feminism

• Emerged in 1980s seeking to explain why so few women seemed to be in positions of power and the implications of this.
• Various branches include contemporary liberal feminists, Marxist feminists, postcolonial feminists, and poststructuralist feminists.
• Questions how to reconstruct IR to reflect on historical dominance by men and add female perspectives and qualities.
• Critical point: Only qualities deemed to be masculine have been taken to be relevant to theorising about human nature and statecraft in traditional theory families.

Feminist IR

• Linked to but distinct from feminism.
• Butler, Haraway, Kristeva.
• Enloe:
  • Bananas, beaches, cases.
  • Gender in capitalism and war.
• Masculinities (Connell), Asia L.H.M. Ling , Tickner, Whitworth, Sylvester.
• Federici/Buck-Morss: gender in colonialism.
• Cohn, Zalewski: sex in IR.
• Brenner, Bakker, Roberts: Gender and social reproduction.

Intersectional Feminism

• Kimberlé Crenshaw.
• Professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School.

Poststructuralism

• Most controversial as it critiques dominant narratives widely accepted by other theories that evolved into metanarratives.
• E.g., liberals and realists accept the idea of state and don’t challenge this idea. Poststructuralism questions this assumptions of reality.
• Does not focus on ethical judgements about issues but shows how dominant discourses close down available options of response.
• Nothing can be experienced outside of the shared understandings that dominate societies.

Critical Theories

• Theories covered in this book are a solid starting point for understanding where common IR approaches are situated.
• Critical theories are generally more difficult to grasp by students than middle ground theories, but they open up intellectual space to think about gender, class, race, and power.
• IR started in early 20th century with two operational theory families but was substantially transformed in the 21st century.

Genders and Sexualities

Key Questions

• How does the 'personal' shape our understanding of the 'political'?

Genders and Sexualities

• Gender and sexuality at root of key questions in politics:
  • What is political?
  • Who is allowed to participate?
  • Who is allowed to speak and represent?
  • Where does politics occur?
  • Who deserves rights?
• Persistent theme of my interventions so far, weirdly absent until now.
• Yet people continue to be excluded because of gender and sexuality.

Genders and Sexualities

• Identities only make sense as lived.
• Chapters 6 through 10 as Identities.
• My biases:
  • Gender is oppressive and regulatory to bodies.
  • Gender is a limitation of technology and design.
  • Queer is anti-normative and resistant to norms (like bodies).
  • Bodies are ‘polymorphously perverse’.

Normativity, Design, Outcomes

• Design often caters specifically to the population majority.

On Normalcy

• The constitution of problems’ in society à tells us more about society than the problems themselves.
• Normalcy only emerges in 1840.
• What would a world without normalcy look like?
• Modern obsession with ideal-types, progress and mythological perfection.
• Are we as a society still interested in progress? If so what do we mean by it? What does it look like?

Feminist and Queer Activism

• Queer = anti-normative/non-normative.
  • ‘Queer is intentionally ambivalent, resisting a monolithic definition, understanding or specific characteristics or identity’ (Sedgwick 1993, 8.).
• Intersectional feminist theory.
  • Intersection of gender, class and racial oppression in construction of hierarchies of power and privilege among women.
  • How gender and sexuality differently constructed, regulated and experienced on basis of other identities.
  • I.e. Black and racialized women vital in feminist movement but rendered invisible.
  • Kimberlè Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde.
• How would we characterize where gendered social learning primarily happens (home, friends, school, public, private?).
• Social facticity: Whose job is it to take out the garbage?

1974: The Combahee River Collective Statement

• "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual,”

National Security as Sexual Regulation

• Canada Timeline.
• Before 1967, to be labelled as gay was akin to being called a dangerous sex offender, and often destroyed professional reputations and personal lives.
• Before that point, if I had even asked a same-sex person to engage in sexual behaviour, that was a criminal offence.
• You had to be pretty bold if you wanted to engage in sexual behaviour, and you had to be pretty sure of who you were talking to or you could wind up in jail.

Transgender and Queer People

• Gender binary remains powerful (?) in Canadian political life.
• More diversity but formal politics remains male, cisgendered, heteronormative.
  • Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning 'on this side of', which is the opposite of trans-, meaning 'across from' or 'on the other side of'.
• Theodore Adorno: Liberals: We need diverse oppressors. Me: How about no oppressors. Liberals: Why do you hate diversity?
• 2021 federal election: 30% seats won by women.
• 2021 Conversion therapy banned.
• Eight “out” MPs.
• Two Spirit NDP MP Blake Desjarlais.
• Do we objectify power when we envision others as the problem? Is there an objective understanding of power?

Internalization of Institutional Norms

• Should we buy this narrative?
  • ‘masculinity is presented as strong, rational, independent and aggressive’.
  • ‘femininity presented as weak, emotional, nurturing and passive’.
• Who is the wedding dress for?
• Internalization of white supremacy, misogyny, heteropatriarchy?
  • White women elected trump.

Trump and Women

• Trumps casual attitude towards SA/GBV.
• Misogyny as platform?
• But 53% of white women selected Trump.
  • Race trumps gender in their minds (Racial contract?).
• ‘Feminism’ more than ‘woman’.
  • Expresses an antagonism, a rupture (claim for justice).
• What was ‘50 shades of Grey’?

Transgender and Queer People's Rights Beyond the Binary (or just people's rights)

• Barriers faced by Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people in formal politics.
• Targets for discriminatory policies and laws by federal and provincial governments.
  • Laws against “homosexual sex’’.
  • Bans on federal government jobs.
  • Denial of Marriage and spousal benefits.
  • Not allowed to adopt children.
  • Bans on blood donation.
  • Absence of intersex discussion here (gender as oppressive).

The Binary of Rationality and Emotions in Electoral Politics

• Reasons for the underrepresentation of women in electoral politics:
  • Type of electoral system.
  • Hostile public opinion towards women in politics.
  • Biased and sexist media coverage of women candidates.
  • Parties as gatekeepers.
  • Politics as an “old boys club”.
  • Stereotypes of women as emotional and irrational.
  • Aggressive culture in Canadian politics.

The Binary of Rationality and Emotions

• Gendered and racialized binary of emotion and rationality (respectability).
  • White people: “advanced, civilized and rational”.
  • Indigenous peoples: “savage, uncivilized and emotional”.
  • White women: “emotional and passive”.
  • Black women: “emotional and angry”.

Emotions in Politics

• Politics not emotionless or rational, but only some allowed emotion.
• “Anger privilege” reserved for already privileged individuals and groups.
• Donald Trump and the angry white man.
• Politics (society?) remains hostile and aggressive towards women and racialized peoples.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
• Amplification of extremes in a advertising-driven social media landscape.
  • Was there ever a mainstream? Who was it for?

Where do Politics Occur? What is Political? The Public and Private Spheres

• Sexual contract: society divided into public and private spheres.
  • Oppositional gender binary.
• Women relegated to private sphere.
  • Private sphere natural, corporal, and emotional.
• Public sphere where politics occurs.
  • Man-made, intellectual, rational.

What is Political?

• State as a physical body analogous to an individual.
  • Relations envisioned as male: conflict/cooperation (Realpolitik) vs. social/ethics of care (ICRC).
• Violations as penetrations/violation/imagery of violence.
• Individuals as non-reproductive (pregnancy in states), normal processes of self governance.
• Gendered, colonial normativity as embedded core of the political?

The Private Sphere as Political

• Private sphere supposed to be apolitical.
• Challenged by feminist and queer academics and activists.
• Two spheres not separate.
• Private is political in four ways:
  • (1) Private Relationships are Political
    • Members of private space engaged in power relationships.
    • These relationships integral part of political life.
    • Identity as intermediation of institutional and personal.

The Private Sphere is Political (2) Political Work is Carried out through Private Channels

• Politics occurs in formal and informal, “private” ways.
• The idea of a hidden curriculum – ‘must knows’.
• Shadow archives, critical pedagogy.
• Indigenous, Black and racialized women sought out alternative means of doing politics.
  • Community building and advocacy.
  • Grassroots organizations, collectives and associations.
    • Black Women’s Collective.
    • Idle No More.

The Private Sphere as Political (3) The Government Regulates the Private Sphere

• State regulation of individual bodies and sexual activities.
• Required to be sexual beings in ways sanctioned by state.
• 1969 changes to the Criminal Code.
  • Only private gay sex acceptable.
  • Hence the need for pride!
• 1981 ‘Operation Soap’ - raiding bathhouses.
• Persistent criminalization of sex work.

Sexual Citizenship and the Private Sphere

• People punished or rewarded on degree of compliance with state-sanctioned sexual conduct.
• Sexual citizenship:
  • How rights and responsibilities as citizens differs based on sexualities (sexual practices).
• Mid-20th century emergence of Two-Spirit and LGBTQ social movements.
  • Challenge heteropatriarchal norms.
  • Denial of rights and protections to LGBTQ folx.
  • Demands for same-sex marriage rights.

The Private Sphere as Political (4) Public and Private Spheres are Mutually Dependent

• Social reproduction: women needed in private sphere to reproduce future workers and citizens.
• Women’s work vital to sustaining economy and governance but undervalued and unpaid labour.
• Racialized women historically had no choice but to work for others.

Social Reproduction = ‘Political Economy’

A) biological reproduction of the species (babies)
B) reproduction of labour force which requires subsistence, education and training (who works and who gets paid)
C) the reproduction and provisioning of caring needs which may be privatized within families or socialized by the state (the role of the state)

Fertility and Frequency of Birth

• Social reproduction.
• Fertility and frequency of birth dependent on:
  • Period of infertility after birth.
  • Time between ovulation and conception.
  • Average length of pregnancy.
  • Fetal mortality.
  • Presence or absence of birth control techniques.
• Length of time between births has the biggest impact.
  • Can be adjusted by cultural factors ( breast-feeding).
• Not weaning children until three, four or five.
• Cultural taboos on postpartum sex.
• What do you consider normal breast-feeding time?

Impact of Social Factors on Social Reproduction

• Social dynamics.
• Nuclear family versus extended family.
• Nuclear family product of specific socioeconomic situation.
  • Extended family draws on greater social bonds to supplement child rearing,