The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement.

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt’s theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.

‘Is there a right time for gender just peace? Feminist anti-war organising revisited’

This paper addresses the question of totalising gender power relations that have led to and shaped the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia and the emerging ethno-national states on the ‘periphery’ of Europe. I argue that the same type of gender power relations continue to dominate the region, notably Serbia, and to perpetuate gender inequalities and gender based violence in its many everyday and structural forms, causing profound levels of human insecurity. My analysis aims to set in motion a debate on how to tackle these continuing gender inequalities and GBV in post-war societies. In so doing, I propose a shift from focusing on the hierarchy of victimisation that has characterised much of the feminist analyses, activism and scholarly work in relation to these (and other) conflicts, to a relational understanding of the gendered processes of victimisation in war and peace, that is - of both women and men. Such an approach holds a potential to undermine the power systems that engender these varied types of victimisation by ultimately reshaping the notions of masculinity and femininity, which are central to the gender power systems that generate gender unjust peace.