States of Injury: Josephine Butler on Slavery, Citizenship, and the Boer War

Burton, Antoinette

doi:10.1093/sp/5.3.338

Cited by 31 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…The possibility of applying Brown's work to examine the role of the 'suffering prostitute body' in the construction of certain feminist identities was suggested to me by Burton's (1998) application of Brown's analysis. Burton uses Brown's work to analyse a particular production of Victorian feminism: Josephine Butler's Native Races and the War (1900).…”

Section: Wounded Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the following section, I revisit Burton's (1994) work on Victorian women's campaigns against prostitution in India in the light of Burton's own later application of Brown's theory. This opens up wider possibilities for exploring the construction of the 'third world traf cking victim' in CATW's discourse.…”

Section: Wounded Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Burton (1998), the extension of anti-slavery discourses by Victorian feminists beyond their original political context in the early anti-slavery movement points to the importance of 'suffering others' for Victorian feminists in establishing their claim to be included in the body politic. The use of 'slavery' by feminist and nonfeminist campaigners was extremely powerful: as a site of 'irrefutable injury' it served to demonstrate the need for women's involvement, rst in public philanthropy, and later directly in politics (Burton, 1998).…”

Section: Victorian Feminists and Prostitutes' 'Suffering Bodies'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Contagious Diseases Acts in India were enacted shortly after those in England and were meant to serve the same purpose: to protect the health of British soldiers. Chatterjee, 1992;Burton, 1994). After the successful campaign for repeal of the Acts in England and Wales, feminist abolitionists, led by Josephine Butler, turned their attention to India (Burton, 1994).…”

Section: Victorian Feminists and Prostitutes' 'Suffering Bodies'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The term 'injured body' is drawn from Wendy Brown's States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995). In a more recent article, Burton (1998) applies Brown's theorizing to the question of Victorian feminists' relationship to empire. This is not the rst time that the 'injured third world prostitute' has gured in international feminist campaigns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Doezema¹

2001

Feminist Review

203

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Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking. The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have configured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘trafficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.

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Section: Wounded Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Wounded Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Victorian Feminists and Prostitutes' 'Suffering Bodies'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Victorian Feminists and Prostitutes' 'Suffering Bodies'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Doezema¹

2001

Feminist Review

203

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‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

Roy¹

2010

Feminist Review

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The article examines a few short stories of Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib who spent a number of decades in the late nineteenth century in India with her husband, a British colonial official. Steel's short stories are interesting because they were produced at a time when most Anglo-Indian fictions (especially those authored by memsahibs) focused exclusively on station romances, and they explore with some seriousness and sense of complexity, issues related to the impact of Imperial reformatory intervention in the lives of Indian women. Her female contemporaries wrote fictions that more often than not completely ignored the existence of Indians, and even famous male writers like Kipling stereotypically reduced Indian women either to sexually licentious or completely passive, voiceless entities. Steel, in her stories, examines questions of gender, sexuality and reform in the context of Indian women's lives in ways that often seem to go beyond such racial stereotypes. The stories have been examined within the context of the different political and social formations of the specific regions -Punjab or Bengal -in which they are based, since women's reform had very different trajectories in these regions. The remarkableness of Steel's stories, however, lies in their attempting to look at the reform question from the Indian women's perspectives. What cannot be ignored are the ways in which these stories attempt to go beyond the prevalent Anglo-Indian modes of stereotyping or completely erasing Indian women and register their voices in examining questions related to their reform. This is not to say that racial and Imperial hierarchies are entirely abandoned in her writings. In fact the omniscient narrator in these fictions often narrates in ways that sustain and strengthen such hierarchies. However, there are moments when the diegetic narrative mode gives way to an ironically nuanced narrative voice and to ambivalences that seem to gesture at complex questioning of the bases of Imperial authority and its ostensibly benevolent intervention in the lives of Indian women. It is these moments that make the stories worth exploring.

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Governing peacekeeping: the role of authority and expertise in the case of sexual violence and trauma

Harrington¹

2006

Economy and Society

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States of Injury: Josephine Butler on Slavery, Citizenship, and the Boer War

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

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‘A Miserable Sham’: Flora Annie Steel's Short Fictions and the Question of Indian Women's Reform

Governing peacekeeping: the role of authority and expertise in the case of sexual violence and trauma

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