Tourist,local, or other?: Greek Canadian women and the heritage fling in Greece

This article examines the romantic and sexual encounters between Greek men and Greek Canadian women vacationing in Greece and addresses how constructions of Greek Canadian female sexuality are related to foreign and local Greek conceptions of femininity during these ‘holiday flings’. Because of their Greek ancestry, Mediterranean ‘looks’, and familiarity with language and culture, Greek Canadian women exhibit ambiguous identities that uphold and cross boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I explore the conceptualizations of ancestral and national identity underpinning Greek women's erotic desires for Greek man who embody ethnic authenticity to them. Yet, Greek men thwart these desires when they subvert Canadian women's economic power through challenging their cultural literacy (such as a lack in language skills, etiquette, or sexual knowledge). This article addresses the question of how diasporic women's heterosexuality subjectivities – bound up with hybrid ethnic and national affiliations – take on different meanings across locales and times where transnational sex and romance are everyday occurrences.     

Ceramics,clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters

This paper provides a new approach to the geographies of cruising and public homosex. For some time, social scientists have contended that, in those semi-public spaces where men meet each other for sex, actions speak louder than words and men's competency in using the space is more important that the (sexual) identities they claim in other aspects of their lives. This paper extends that argument in a new direction through an engagement with recent theorizations of affective geographies and more-than-representational approaches to spatial practices. Through a series of short vignettes of cruising encounters on city streets, in public toilets and in urban green spaces, this paper examines how public homosex is enacted and performed in relation to both human and non-human bodies, objects and the environment in which it takes place. The encounters described in the paper draw attention to the complex choreography of gestures through which cruising is performed and sexual engagement is negotiated ethically. I contend that the site-specific, performative nature of these sexual encounters suggests a more contingent sexuality arising from the interaction of bodies in specific environments and exceeding the boundaries of reified sexual identities.     

Constructing Masculinity and Women's Fear in Public Space in Irvine,California

Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women's lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men's perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men's construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men's performances of two masculine identities—the youthful 'badass' and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.     

‘The greatest loss was a loss of our history’: natural disasters,marginalised identities and sites of memory

This paper examines intersections between space, materiality, memory and identity in relation to lesbian and gay experiences of recent disasters in Australia. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men in two disaster sites, the paper argues that disaster impacts may include the loss of sites of memory that inform and underpin the formation and maintenance of marginalised identities. We explore the ways in which social marginality is experienced by sexual minorities during disasters as a result of threats to sites of lesbian and gay memory. The paper contributes to scholarship in geographies of memory by investigating the impacts of disasters on how memory is spatially located and experienced.     

Working the Yucatán in the neoliberal landscape: household management,consumption and the lives of intellectual elite women

This article examines the lives of academic women in Mérida, the state capital of the Yucatán in southern Mexico. In particular, I consider the relationship between work – including household management – and consumer practices in light of Mérida's changing socioeconomic climate. I address how women's lives have been impacted by the neoliberal restructuring of Mexico's political economy and what these changes mean to their experience of university life, household management styles and consumption practices. I point out how labor and consumption are deeply interrelated cultural practices, which have acquired new meanings in the neoliberal landscape. Accordingly, consumption practices must be understood in connection with women's social and professional identities.     

Superheroes in Shanghai: constructing transnational Western men's identities

This article examines the ‘superhero’ phenomenon, in which Western masculinity is constructed differently in East Asia than in Western countries. This produces an imagined, Occidentalist ‘authenticity’ that frames expectations about the performances and identities of Western men in the context. As a result, sojourning Western men in Asia may feel, and be treated, like ‘superheroes’, because their gendered national identities are attributed (super)powers that are often unfamiliar from prior experiences in their home countries. These object (attributed) identities may be different from individuals' subject (appropriated) identities, with resulting identity tensions for the men themselves. This article reports on empirical, qualitative research from China, and examines the lived realities and identity/masculinity constructions of seven young, heterosexual men, from the UK, the US and Canada, working in Shanghai as English language teachers. The study participants experienced perceptions of increased personal and sexual confidence but also identity tensions, concerns that relationships may be transactional and ethical struggles over peer-sanctioned and locally expected behaviours. The study is framed by literature from tourism studies on the commoditization of identities through the staging of out-group notions of ‘authenticity’. A critical approach is taken to the neo-imperialistic power differentials underpinning relationships in the context.     

Shooting the Isolation and Marginality of Masculinities in Iranian Cinema

This article examines the isolation and marginality of Iranian men living in contemporary Iran with a focus on three post-2005 films. As a patriarchal society, Iran has been the subject of many studies on the subjugation and marginality of women. This study demonstrates how recent Iranian films have skillfully employed the cinematic language to narrate men’s stories of alienation and despair. These filmic constructions provide a valuable and complex insight into masculine identities, challenging perceptions of the essentialized image of the Middle Eastern male. By employing Connell’s hierarchy of masculinities, the article demonstrates the position of marginalized men in relation to the dominant ideals of masculinity and the influence of these discourses on the lives of such men. The films discussed here do not perpetuate the construction of the ‘true’ gender, but instead challenge ideas of heroism, manliness and patriarchy.     

‘Some Very Queer Couples’: Gender Migrants and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century America

This article contends that the term gender migrant – which describes a person who changed gender on a long-term basis in their everyday life – offers a useful tool for grappling with the ambiguities of nineteenth-century transgender history. Examining four cases of gender change that circulated in the popular press between the antebellum era and the turn of the twentieth century, the article brings to light intimate relationships that do not fit within the categories of female husbands or sexual inverts that have become familiar to historians of sexuality. Some female-assigned gender migrants lived as men and sought same-gender intimacy in the company of other men. Reading ambiguous cases of love and marriage from multiple angles provides insight into the strategies that resourceful gender migrants used to legitimise their public gender identities.     

Sexual citizenship in Latvia: geographies of the Latvian closet

This study examines sexual citizenship in Latvia. It investigates the process by which political narratives have heterosexed the nation since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. My aim in exploring this process is to develop a deeper understanding of non-heteronormative identities and counter-hegemonic spaces in this heterosexist society. Drawing on discourse analysis of political media statements I argue that despite the legalizing of homosexuality, political narratives have continued to sex the nation as heterosexual, forging the national closet. I then explore how these narratives become experienced in lives of sexual minorities through the state's failure to prevent sexual discrimination. Drawing on participant observation and a decoding of the urban landscape, I investigate how the Latvian closet is materialized in the bodies and places of the everyday lives of ‘gay’ men living in the capital, Riga. Examined in this way insights are given to the spatial forms of political resistance to heterosexism in Latvia and how it differs from western models.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

Sounding “brown”: Everyday aural discrimination and othering

Recent political geographic scholarship has revisited the relevance of banal, everyday nationalism in the context of identity. This article contributes to that literature by focusing more specifically on the role of sound – accent and language – in everyday, banal “othering” and discrimination driven by heightened nationalism. Examining sound, both how it is perceived and experienced, lends insights into how nationalism and exclusion play out in everyday life. Contextualizing and nuancing broader issues of “othering” and discrimination through sound demonstrates that exclusion is not always visual or overt. Based on three years of fieldwork and interviews with Indian Tamils living in the United States, this research examines the banality of nationalism in aural encounters. First, it highlights subtle othering and microaggressions as well as their physical, emotional, and psychological effects. Second, it demonstrates how language and accent can be used to “flag” otherness in ordinary daily interactions and spaces. Third, it shows how attention to aural ‘flagging’ reveals nuance of complex identities often binarized during climates of heightened nationalism. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the impacts of nationalism are embedded in people's daily lives and identities through subtle discriminatory aural encounters.     

Materials,skills and gender identities: men,women and home improvement practices in New Zealand

The article explores the interactions of materials, skills and gender identity through examining DIY practices in New Zealand. It traces the relationship between materials used for home repairs, the competences needed to use them and the (re)production of specific gendered identities. It argues that housing and building materials were an important part of the European settler history of the country and this history forms the context within which New Zealanders work on their houses today. Drawing on interviews with 30 Pākehā homeowners, it explores how both men and women respond to the materials of their homes, how skills are acquired in relation to the demands of the materials used and how these skills become part of the (re)production of specific white, heterosexual gender identities. The figure of the ‘Kiwi bloke’ is discussed as an important imaginary in the negotiation of gender identities for both men and women. Interviewees saw their DIY activities in the light of the creation and re-creation of this specific national and gendered identity. The article reveals the intertwining of history and materiality in the continual negotiation and contestation of gendered identities.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Gendered Space: A New Look at Turkish Modernisation

This article examines how an understanding of gender has challenged and changed the perception of ‘modernisation’ and its relation to Western culture. In so doing it also shows how the traditional division of disciplines, especially between political and social history and historical demography, has limited insights into beliefs and behaviours of both women and men. The decline in the numbers of children born within a family was accompanied by many shifts in daily living, not least in the way housework was structured as indicated by the spatial patterns of both formal social life and domestic labour. A detailed examination of these issues, including the use of various types of household labour – slave, free, waged and the ‘adopted daughter’(evlatlök), and poor relation – brings into sharp focus how the leading segment in the process of modernisation, the urban middle class, was active in and responded to such major changes. Women's involvement in education, politics and the labour market was intimately intertwined with these aspects of family and domestic life – but so, in very different ways, was men's.     

Gender,age and the politicisation of space during the time of political violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

This article examines the way in which the modality of the political violence between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front politicised space in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The article demonstrates how place is actively produced through everyday practices. It shows how the spatiality of the violence shifted – from the body to multiple sites of everyday life such as the school and the household and finally to the neighbourhood. Residents were drawn into the violence differentially on the basis of their gender and age, rather than political beliefs and affiliations. Places were politicised in ways that linked their meaning to the political identity of those found in that space. By presenting a spatialised analysis of the political violence, and illustrating how the production of place articulated with the co-production of political identities, this article makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on political violence in KwaZulu-Natal.     

Illegible ethnicity and the invention of Scots-Irish narratives on the stages of Belfast and Appalachia

Theatrical stages have long been home to performances of identity, creating and sustaining legible visions of various peoples and groups for their audiences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, the playwright/actor Dion Boucicault popularised the “stage Irishman” for Irish and American audiences alike, thus contributing to the invention of “Irish-America”. This paper examines a similar attempt in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to query the definition of a distinct group of Irish-Americans: the Scots-Irish. Productions from Belfast, Northern Ireland, as well as from the southern Appalachian Mountains, demonstrate how the illegibility of the Scots-Irish – in other words, their status as a non-recognisable, incoherent segment of the white population in the USA – allows for narratives about this group to be highly malleable. Contemporary productions of the Scots-Irish story demonstrate the ways in which ethnic identities emerge as constructions of past and present, memory and history, and politics and culture.     

Cross-cultural sexual narratives and gendered reception in Republican China

ABSTRACT

This article examines nonfiction sexual narratives inspired by foreign thought in Republican China. It highlights female viewpoints to recover their hidden voices in history and shows the socio-cultural significance of the gendered reception of cross-cultural theories. I focus on three foreign female thinkers – Ellen Key, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai – whose works stood for different schools of free love and drew numerous adherents in China. My study shows a nuanced but telling difference in the focuses of sexual narratives along gender lines. Whereas male writers sought to modernize marriage and liberate sexuality from socio-eugenic perspectives, female writers pursued sexual autonomy from relatively more personal stances. The rhetorical feature of Chinese female essayists, I argue, was essentially iconoclastic towards sexual conventions and yet reticent about free sexuality, as opposed to the progressive eloquence often shown in male writings about sexual matters. In sum, this article illustrates how Chinese female essayists retained gender propriety when openly addressing intimate matters, while male writers glamorized free sexuality and free love as a panacea for nation-strengthening and social/racial progress in a cross-cultural context.     

Whores Aboard and Laws Abroad: English Women and Sexual Slander in Early Colonial New South Wales

In the nineteenth century, a gendered reform movement – the Slander of Women Acts – swept through the British common law world, making it easier for women to sue for defamatory allegations of sexual immorality. By examining two slander cases brought by women in early New South Wales and radical reforms passed in 1847, this article locates the Australian colonies within this global campaign. Arguing that slander worked to reinscribe a woman's colonial category, police ‘savage’ speech and rectify respectability for economic purposes, it shows how ideas of reputation and its protection diverged across the UK, USA and Australia at this time.     

Proving One's Manliness: Masculine Self‐perceptions of Austrian Deserters in the Second World War

While important work has been produced on discourses of masculinity and the normative masculine ideals in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Europe we know very little about the actual experiences and self‐images of individual men. This article, largely based on oral history interviews with former deserters, analyses the gendered identities of Austrian men who were recruited to serve in the Wehrmacht and who later deserted. Deserters were brutally persecuted in the Third Reich and denounced as ‘traitors’ and ‘cowards’. The glorification of martial masculinity in Nazi Germany played a crucial role in the defamation of deserters, whose manliness was called into question. Based on Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity, the article aims to establish the actual influence of dominant ideals of masculinity. It investigates how these deserters perceived themselves as men and how they negotiated their gendered identities in interaction with their surroundings. The analysis reveals the considerable influence of the hegemonic ideal of ‘hard’ masculinity, which was far greater than the impact of the rather short‐lived ideal of martial masculinity. But it also demonstrates the contradictory nature of gendered identities and gives valuable insights into the selective appropriation of masculine values.     

Security,secularism and gender: the Turkish military’s security discourse in relation to political Islam

This article examines the sexual and corporeal constructions of risk within the security discourses of the Turkish military in response to the rise of political Islam and Islamist identities in Turkey. I look at the Turkish military as the self-proclaimed guardian of the secular Republic, which, until recently, has actively configured political Islam as a risk to national security and ingrained such risk onto the body of the headscarved woman. My analysis covers a time frame from 1980s to late 2000s when the military issued memorandums and public statements against the rise of political Islam and pursued a belligerent campaign to erase ‘Islamist’ identities both from civilian politics and its own structure. The military implemented security regulations and dress codes to detect the ‘Islamist’ military personnel who are most conspicuously identified with the dress style of the women in their families. I explore these security regulations through women’s everyday and personal experiences in relation to their dress, headscarf style and comportment in military spaces and try to understand how ‘Islamism’ is constructed as a security threat in sexually and corporeally specific ways. I demonstrate how secularism is constructed, and needs to be protected, on the basis of a particular regime of gender and sexuality at the merger of traditional gender norms and secular Western modernity.