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AbstractCuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade.

Can an elite-sponsored outcome be a social movement outcome? In Kreil v. Germany, the European Court of Justice issued a judgment hailed as a feminist victory, censuring Germany's exclusion of women from the military. But the women's movement did not sponsor the case; it was an organizational achievement for the nascent court that extended its jurisdiction to public security while preserving its legitimacy among potentially non-cooperative member states. With this case, I reassess movement-elite relations in the context of past protests that forged discursive resources. The women's movement did play an important role in this case: the court relied on discursive resources from past feminist activism to legitimize its decision and frame it as a matter of women's rights, drawing attention away from its uncertain jurisdiction. I present a model of "borrowing" from movements, a relationship distinct from alliances and cooptation, to show how elite-sponsored outcomes can still be movement outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

Girls and young women are participating in unconventional forms of political participation through Ladyfests. The first Ladyfest took place in 2000 in Olympia, Washington, United States. Ladyfests are activist-oriented festivals that include art, spoken word, music, workshops, artisan fairs, and other performances. Since the first Ladyfest there have been approximately one hundred and twenty spanning the globe. I argue that Ladyfests provide the organisers and attendees alternative communities to network, educate, share information, and build offline and online communities. This form of contemporary cultural activism relies heavily on engaging culture as a means of both commentary and action. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by girls and young women is on the rise, including as activist and networking tools. Ladyfesters are web savvy and use ICTs to organise the events, share information about their Ladyfest and others, as well as build networks after the event.

This essay draws on & speaks to an installation of mixed-media print, drawing, & painting work by the author that was mounted in partnership with the Centre for Women's Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in Nov 2006. The various pieces are manifestations of an ongoing process of inquiry into her life, attempting to understand how any presumption that aims to define or label her (girl, lesbian, butch, femme, creative vs logical, etc) can be something she experiences viscerally as yet another physical confinement. She explains how these & other words can have more than one meaning simultaneously. The various pieces also reflect a deliberate decision to tell the story of the statement 'you are a girl' again. Figures. J. Stanton

The writings of Judith Butler are now canonised in the fields of feminist and queer theory, yet her contribution to politics and her role in the field of political theory remain uncertain. I argue, perhaps uncontroversially, that Butler's is a politics of subversion; I also contend, perhaps more contentiously, that Butler's understanding of subversion only takes clear shape in light of her implicit theory of heteronormativity. Butler's work calls for the subversion of heteronormativity; in so doing her writings both illuminate the general problem of normativity for politics and offer a robust response to that problem. Butler resists the tendency to treat norms as merely agreed-upon standards, and she rebuts those easy dismissals of theorists who would take seriously the power of norms thought in terms of normativity and normalisation. Butler's contribution to political theory emerges in the form of her painstaking unfolding of subversion. This unfolding produces an account of the politics of norms that is needed desperately by both political theory and politics. Thus, I conclude that political theory cannot afford to ignore either the theory of heteronormativity or the politics of its subversion.