Women, Gender, and Politics

N16 - Women, Disaster Management, and Uprising

Date: Jun 14 | Time: 08:30am to 10:00am | Location: 680 Sherbrooke St. West 1065

Chair/Président/Présidente : Iris Bradford (Concordia University)

Scaling the Pandemic: Women, Social Reproduction, and Crisis Management: Jacquetta (Jacquie) Newman (King's University College at Western), Patricia Mockler (Queen's University)
Abstract: Drawing from oral histories gathered from women community leaders in London, Ontario during the height of the COVID pandemic (2020-2022), this study intends to show how women constructed, contested, and negotiated the larger social arrangements that put a premium on social reproductive work and care during the crisis. This project uncovers the gendered nature of crises and crisis responses, highlights how women navigate and resist the various scales defining a “logic of appropriateness” (Chapell 2002; Findlay, 2014) of their work, and demonstrates the intimately gendered nature of crises and crisis responses. This study responds to three central research questions: 1) How did women leaders negotiate the multi-scalar nature of the crisis? 2) How did the care work tasks carried out by women leaders evolve in response to the crisis?, and 3) How did women leaders navigate the intimacy of the crisis response? Our study provides a nuanced account of the gendered contours of care work at multiple scales during the pandemic and interrogates the gendered expectations embedded in crisis responses.

“Women, life, freedom” Role of Women in Current/Latest Iran's Uprising: Aras Syhamanssuri (Charmo University), Farhad Mamshai (Virginia Tech)
Abstract: To what extent Iranian women will be the center of change in Iran’s today and Iran’s post-Ayatollah? This is the main question of this paper that attempts to argue the importance of women not only in the inner structure of society and families in Iran but their role in positions of leadership and politics. The latest death of the young Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, also known as Zina Amini, due to police brutality, has repositioned the power of women in political platforms in Iran. Thus, it seems women will play a significant role within the government to create the link between freedom and progress for women's liberation. The center of the argument will be structured by women and in favor of women. Although the feminism movement, e.g., the Iranian Women's Rights Movement, has a long history that goes back to the 1910s, the latest Iran uprising united most Iranian men and women, Persians, Kurds, Arabs, and local and exiled opposition groups or figures. Accordingly, the current Iranian women's movement is fundamental because it challenges the hijab as a characteristic of the national identity of Iran, and the future of women in Iran seems to be growing. A fundamental characteristic of this unrest-turned-movement has been the wide participation of women. Iranian women are leading the charge, coming from all ages and backgrounds, demanding justice, reform, and their rights. “With thousands of men joining in as well, the protests have spread from Tehran to a reported 50 other cities and towns across Iran. The streets are filled with angry demonstrators crying, “Death to the dictator,” and women are out burning their headscarves and cutting their hair in open defiance of the regime’s strict control over Iranian women.” Even if the unrest in Iran would not lead to regime change, the signal is new for the Iranian regime because this is a new form of movement that was led and started by women. In the meantime, millions of men around the country and the globe joined the movement. The moment is new in Iran’s history as it has created new challenges for the Ayatollah version of Islam. However, due to the evolving nature of the Islamic Republic under Khamenei, the clergy's traditional religious spirits have taken on a more political, ideological, and comprehensive character. The clerics have transformed from a simple, traditional institution into a vast and complex bureaucracy, with all clerics under constant ideological surveillance and punishment system if they cross the red lines set by the Supreme Leader. Therefore, it has become clear that the situation will not continue as it is due to the rise of opposite voices in Iran. And the “women, life, freedom” is the latest one that seems to continue for a long term.

Creating and Sustaining the Home: Geopolitics and the Canadian Military Household: Leigh Spanner (Saint Mary's University)
Abstract: Canadian military families move three to four times more frequently than civilian families. This operational requirement of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) calls on military families, especially wives, to undertake a variety of labour practices in order to create “the home” at each new posting. It is from “the home” that military members receive significant support that enable them to serve, including moral and emotional support. Moreover, “the home”—which extends to the creation of the “nation”—becomes a motivation for military service and military engagement: that which we must protect. Both the tangible practices and ideas that create and sustain the home are gendered, and call on the labour of and ideas about women in order to persist. This paper considers how the creation of the Canadian military home, both as a material space and as an idea, is gendered and connected to Canada’s military and military capacity. I draw on in-depth interviews with 28 members of Canadian military families to reveal how modern warfare, domestic practices of everyday life, and “the home” are connected to one another and are co-constituted. In so doing, this paper contributes to literature on feminist geopolitics by emphasizing how geopolitics not only shapes households, but how geopolitics emerges from and is shaped by the home. It reveals how mundane practices within the home and family life are in fact deeply political and shape politics at national and international levels.