Dangerous brown men:exploiting sex, violence and feminism in the 'war on terror'

Why is the public presentation of the war on terror suffused with sexualised racism? What does this tell us about ideas of gender, sexuality, religious and political identity and the role of the state in the Western powers? Can we diffuse inter-ethnic conflicts and change the way the West pursues its security agenda by understanding the role of sexualised racism in the war on terror? In asking such questions, Gargi Bhattacharyya considers how the concepts of imperialism, feminism, terror and security can be applied, in order to build on the influential debates about the sexualised character of colonialism. She examines the way in which western imperial violence has been associated with the rhetoric of rights and democracy - a project of bombing for freedom that has called into question the validity of western conceptions of democracy, rights and feminism. Such rhetoric has given rise to actions that go beyond simply protecting western interests or securing access to scarce resources and appear to be beyond instrumental reason. The articulations of racism that appear with the war on terror are animated by fears and sexual fantasies inexplicable by rational interest alone. There can be no resolution to this seemingly endless conflict without understanding the highly sexualised racism that animates it. Such an understanding threatens to pierce the heart of imperial relations, revealing their intense contradictions and uncovering attempts to normalise violent expropriation.

Agents for change and changed agents:the micro-politics of change and feminism in the academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom-up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

On the F word:a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 1990-2009

Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an Anglo-American setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts. © The Author(s) 2012.