Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen's Troubled Archive

Rachael Pringle Polgreen, a freed‘mulatto’ woman who owned an infamous brothel/hotel in Bridgetown, Barbados during the 1770s and 1780s became known to her contemporaries through her role in the (sexual) entertainment of transient naval officers and the visits of Prince William of England. Piecing together ‘evidence’ from her will, estate inventory, a nineteenth‐century novel, a lithograph and an interview with a British officer, I engage Polgreen's complicated and fragmented archive, revealing how Polgreen represents an example of the problems with sources depicting women of African descent who lived in a slave society and the silences that inundate their archive. The first part of this article critically re‐examines pieces of her archive, through which an image of Polgreen emerges incommensurable with narratives of her triumphs. Next, through an analysis of the processes by which Polgreen is historically confined by powerful archival and subsequent historical representations, I challenge previous assumptions about her life. Finally, introducing material from the British parliamentary debates in which an incident involving Polgreen is described and new material from Barbados deeds left by Polgreen's former slave, I expose the nuances of Polgreen's ‘agency’ in a slave society – that which depended upon her sexual subjugation of other women of African descent.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Hospital Drama: Visual Theatres of the Medical Rendezvous from Asylum to Hospital with Reference to Specific Works by Anna Furse

Abstract

This paper is informed by Furse’s practice as a theatre maker in two fields of output that are connected by two factors: first, the presence of the woman patient — hysteric/subfertile respectively — within the clinical gaze; second, the significance of the womb to each pathology. In the treatment of each (explored in Furse’s theatre), lens based technologies play their part, whilst the cultural and medical can be seen to have overlapped to produce specific meaning with regard to Her body and its spectacularity. The article presents an overview of some of the key issues in precisely how the woman’s body becomes spectacular within this prosthetic medical gaze and how the medical — and theatrically designed spaces to represent these — become meaningful and potent proxemics that in turn inform medical/ theatrical spectatorship. Overarching nineteenth-century protocols at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (where Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) is set) to contemporary imaging technologies used in the treatment of subfertility with Assisted Reproduction Technologies (the topic of her Art of A.R.T. projects), it examines the way in which photography develops through cinema to X-Ray, ultrasound and then 3D/4D ultrasound to ‘capture’ the woman’s body in ways by which she becomes muted and exposed. These occular technologies that extend the gaze, first to an exterior subject and then, eventually, traversing the flesh without knife, lend specific performativity to the ‘patient’ women, within the context of hysterias and reproductive impairments respectively. Finally, issues of suspension of disbelief are addressed. The spectator’s faith in the screen-based image of Her spectacular body is interrupted in Furse’s work, which is also keenly interested in the effect of such imagery on the woman’s sense of Self. The historical and cultural leaps in this article argue that there is indeed a trajectory through the history of medical imaging since the first application of photography to anatomy to the more advanced scoping technologies of medical imaging today, and that in each era, the production of these images remain fraught with cultural implications.     

Dress-code: gender performance and misbehavior in the manor

This article is a queer reading of the architecture of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf's mansion Mårbacka. Through a combination of performativity theory and architecture theory, the article addresses social and historical constructions of gender and sexuality, complicit with the entities age, class and nationality, through architecture. Architecture is explored ‘on the one hand’ as a representation of social norms and ‘on the other hand’ as a practice which can subvert them. Departing from a performative perspective on identity, the term cross-cladding is introduced as a tool to interpret architecture as dressing and thereby its complex, layered and manifold performances of gender and sexualities. The article writes a social and architectural history of what has been called ‘the most famous manor in Sweden and of Swedish manors the most famous in the world’ (Sterner 1935, 4). Mårbacka was not simply the home of Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) and her kin but also a public display of this Nobel Prize-winning first woman of the Swedish Academy – a national monument. Lagerlöf continuously worked on the main building. In 1919–1924, it was transformed with the help of the architects' office of Isak Gustaf Clason. It also appears in Lagerlöf's novels and throughout the building there are references to her books and biography. There is something queer here. The master of Mårbacka was a woman who loved women and made room for a household of women. This article discusses how architecture can represent a gendered disguise and reveals Mårbacka as an excessive, patriarchal ‘power suit’, which enabled a lifestyle that deviated from the norms of society.     

Embodying modernity: reading narratives of Indian women's sexual autonomy and violation

References are often made in contemporary Indian discourse, both popular and academic, to the ‘new Indian woman’, a subject position that is seen as coterminous with the emerging identity of the Indian nation as modern – the ‘new India’. This article unpacks key discourses that construct the ‘new woman’ in the public imagination and suggests that the modernity of this imagined figure is founded upon a notion of autonomy that is deeply embodied. While the characteristics of this embodied modernity challenge influential feminist arguments as to the ‘shallow’ modernity of the ‘new Indian woman’, it nonetheless has problematic implications from a feminist perspective. The narrative shaped by these discourses around the question of what it means to be modern not only perpetuates an historically pervasive reductionism in which woman is seen to be defined and determined by the corporeal but also, and more problematically, constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes women whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault. This narrative exclusion is perpetrated in at least three ways: through a discursive rendering of the woman as passive, the objectification of the woman, and a narrative structure that mimics the act of violation. Such erasure of the autonomy of sexually violated women is not inevitable, however, and an analysis of two ‘counter-narratives’ demonstrates how discourses of rape may both reinscribe the autonomy of such women and re-orient the reader to a position of empathy rather than opposition.     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

Fani Popova–Mutafova

The article explores the life and professional activities of Fanny Popova–Mutafova – the most prominent of the few writers of historical fiction in Bulgaria and one of the most prolific and published Bulgarian women authors of the interwar period. Her life spanned two epochs – the ‘bourgeois’ epoch prior to World War II, and that of the communist regime. While she was celebrated as one of the best and most productive writers and intellectuals in Bulgaria before 1944, the communist regime pronounced her ‘a people’s enemy’, held her responsible for ‘Great–Bulgarian chauvinism and fascism’, banned and destroyed her books and ruined her life. The story of her life is embedded in several decades of Bulgarian intellectual life and, besides giving an idea of a woman writer’s existence there at that time, reveals wider sociopolitical and ideological contexts in which various discourses affecting Bulgarian women were articulated.     

Gendered Archetypes of Wartime Occupation: ‘New Women’ in Occupied North China, 1937–40

This article examines the creation and use of gendered archetypes by the Provisional Government of the Republic of China (PGROC), the first collaborationist government established in China following the Japanese invasion of 1937. Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, it traces how this regime's messages about where women ‘belonged’ in an occupied China resulted in the creation of unique and complex archetypes which were deployed to convince Chinese women of the advantages of PGROC rule. Chief among these archetypes was the figure of the ‘PGROC new woman’. I show how this figure developed in PGROC poster art and propaganda, and eventually in film, as well as how it evolved out of early wartime and pre‐war precedents. In addition to detailing the uses and meanings of this (and other) archetypes, the article suggests that comparative analyses of gendered archetypes of collaboration developed in cognate regimes during the same period can help shed light on the extent to which the peculiar circumstances of wartime collaboration often resulted in specific ideas by male collaborationist leaders about the roles women were expected to play under occupation.     

Edna O'Brien and narrative diaspora space

Given the persistent presence of migration in the work of Edna O'Brien, it is surprising how marginal a theme it is in critiques of her work. This article explores how questions of diaspora have reached a renewed level of depth and intensity in her novel The Light of Evening (2006) and the related short story ‘My Two Mothers’ (2011). Looking, in particular, at how letters play a central role in the relationships of three generations of Irish women across three countries, it analyses how issues of mother(land), diaspora and belonging are mediated through migrant fiction. It draws on the work of Avtar Brah and Paul Ricoeur to argue that, along with related forms of textuality within O'Brien's oeuvre, letters represent a ‘narrative diaspora space’ which illuminates the relationship between mothers, daughters and writing in Irish migrant experience.     

Drawing (on) women’s military experiences and narratives – Israeli women soldiers’ challenges in the military environment

This article utilizes arts-based methods as a feminist methodology for understanding women’s experiences in military service, according to theories of feminist security studies. It explores how non-combatant women in the army retrospectively narrate stressful situations that happened during their military service. Using arts-based methods, we examine how they derive meaning from their experiences in a masculine, military environment, affected by ongoing conflict. This article analyzes twenty images drawn by Israeli women who served in the army in the previous 2–4 years. The women drew a stressful event from their military service, explained the image, and elaborated on how they coped with the situation. A content analysis of the pictures and the narratives produced three themes: the responsibility for others in life threatening situations, the military as a first professional work experience and the interaction between military and gender hierarchies. In general, women soldiers experienced the army as complex as they encountered their first adult work space in which they learned responsibility and skills of the ‘adults’ world’. However, they were also exposed to a rigid hierarchy and to stressful security situations typical of army contexts. While non-combat women soldiers were allegedly protected from the violence of the army, they are also indirectly exposed to the danger inherent in an army context. This analysis goes beyond the hero narrative, and moves into taboo territories of young women’s narratives and experiences in the military.     

Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies

This article introduces the possibilities of a new term, ‘genderism’, to describe the hostile readings of, and reactions to, gender ambiguous bodies. Genderism is used here to articulate instances of discrimination that are based on the discontinuities between the sex with which an individual identifies and how others, in a variety of spaces, read their sex. The article suggests that intersections between queer theories, that destabilise the dichotomy of man/woman, and performative geographies, that recognise the (re)formation of space, could facilitate, and indeed necessitate, a consideration of how the illusion of dichotomous sexes is (re)formed at the site of the body (re)constituting men and women in context. Nine women, who participated in a wider research project about non‐heterosexual women's lives, spoke of being mistaken for men yet understanding themselves and living as women. Using these narratives the ‘bathroom problem’, where women are read as men in toilets and as a result subjected to abusive and even violent reactions, is examined. These policing behaviours demonstrate the instability of sexed norms as well as how sites can be (re)made ‘woman only’ and simultaneously ‘women's’ bodies (re)produced. The article then examines how women negotiate the policing of sexed spaces such that bodies, sexed sites (toilets) and the location of these sites (nightclubs, service stations) are mutually constituted within sexed regimes of power. In this way the article aims to explore how sexed power relations (re)form the mundane ‘stuff’ of everyday life by examining moments where boundaries of gender difference are overtly (en)forced.     

These are not ‘regular places’: women and gender studies classrooms as heterotopias

This article questions the transformative potential of women and gender studies classrooms through a discussion of student experiences of privilege and oppression in these spaces. Using in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students from two contrasting Canadian universities, this article explores how women and gender studies classrooms function as heterotopias or ‘other places’ – sites that challenge ‘regular’ places outside of the academy. Critically analyzing student experiences illustrates to how the intersections of space/location, power, and identities inform notions of privilege and oppression within these classrooms. Analysis of the participants' reflections points to how it is through these ‘other places’ that students are able to recognize identities that were once unknown to them, become conscious of their embodiments via feelings of worry and discomfort, and question their sense of place in the classroom. It is because of these findings that this research functions as a call to instructors regarding the need to prioritize student experiences, so as to be able to critically reflect upon the social and academic significance of women and gender studies classrooms.     

Some reflections on religion and nationalism

The metamorphosis undergone by Jewish women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the result of modernization, secularization, and education. Similarly, the offspring of the new Jewish woman, the “new Hebrew woman” was the embodiment of various schools of thought, in particular the liberal and the socialist, which were prevalent at that time. The new Hebrew woman offered a feminist interpretation of the malaise of the Jewish people in general, and of Jewish women in particular, challenging the roles designated to her by her male peers and offering her own alternative interpretation. She chose Eretz Yisrael and Zionism, to “auto-emancipate” herself rather than waiting passively for her emancipation by others. In this sense, the new Hebrew woman collaborated with and reflected the hegemonic Zionist ideals and priorities. This article aims to analyze the discourse of the new Hebrew woman, as manifested in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael in the first half of the twentieth century in order to shed light on the link between gender and nationalism in the Zionist context. In particular, it considers how men and women envisioned the new Hebrew woman; how class, political affiliation, and gender shaped their interpretation; and how the new Hebrew woman differed from her counterpart, the new Jewish woman.     

Defining dreams: young mothers’ agency in constructions of space

Understanding young mothers’ emic, or insiders’, spatial experiences is critical to realizing how their agency manifests in constructing and producing spaces, as opposed to common images of them as passive, vulnerable women living in deprived neighbourhoods. Set in the shrinking region of Parkstad Limburg in the Netherlands, this article draws on in-depth interviews and long-term participant observation in order to explore which modalities of agency emerge from young mothers’ spatial engagements with their neighbourhoods and homes. This article contributes to greater diversity and more agentic representations of young mothers than commonly perceived, and to a nuanced understanding of agency. The findings reveal that these women are continually navigating the social, physical and economic–political dimensions of space, from which four modalities of agency emerge: (1) ‘adhering to norms’, (2) ‘defining dreams’, (3) ‘challenging rules’ and (4) ‘considering options’. Contrary to understandings within a dominant independence-oriented discourse of agency as taking subversive action, this article shows that agency occurs in tacit, routine spatial practices, whilst navigating through individual circumstances and sociospatial structures and norms.     

Calls for educating girls in the Third World: futurity,girls and the ‘Third World Woman’

In this article I examine three calls for Western support for girls' education in the ‘developing world’. Using transnational feminist theory and discourse analysis I look at three examples of these calls; Three Cups of Tea, ‘Because I Am a Girl’ and the United National Girls Education Initiative. I suggest that what Mohanty (1988) terms the ‘Third World Woman’ – a homogeneous, static image of women in the third world – is the spectre used to motivate Western support. Through representations of girls, Western viewers/readers are hailed to invest in order to save the girl-child from the haunting ‘Third World Woman’. The girl-child, through her particularity as a girl, her future womanhood as motherhood and her neoliberal potential, becomes presented as emblems of a better future with the investment of Westerners.     

Constructing Gendered Workplace ‘Types’: The weaver–millworker distinction in Dundee's jute industry,c. 1880–1910

Victorian and Edwardian Dundee was labelled a ‘woman's town’ due to the high proportion of women who worked in the city's staple jute industry. In this article, drawing on a range of contemporary sources, I use the work of feminist historians and Foucauldian notions of discourse to interrogate this label and explore why and how working women came to be marked as particularly problematic. Further, in questioning this label, I demonstrate how two specific workplace ‘types’—the weaver and millworker—were identified and constructed in contrast to one another. This article probes the processes through which these two ‘types’ were created, contested and performed in relation to the segregations and working conditions of their respective workplaces, and argues for a markedly spatial interrogation of gender identities and the category ‘working woman’.     

Feeling at home in public: diasporic Moroccan women negotiating leisure in Morocco and the Netherlands

Muslim women are often cited as subject to restriction in their mobility through public space, especially in European contexts, in comparison with non-Muslim community members. Yet any woman might face restriction in her access to leisure outside the home through geographies of risk and fear, as well as geographies of care and responsibility. In this article, we describe the ways in which Moroccan Muslim women resident in Europe negotiate access to leisure outside the home, in both Europe and Morocco, demonstrating that they practice mobilities framed by safety, risk and responsibility combined with individual volition to be participants in public spaces. Using examples from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we discuss a notion of ‘viscosity’ as safe public space that acts as an extension of the home, where women feel comfortable enacting their daily lives and engaging in leisure practices. By comparing data from the Netherlands and Morocco, we highlight the role of Muslim-dominant and Christian-dominant public spheres in these negotiations of leisure. The ways women inhabit such spaces reflect individual concerns about personal safety, as well as maintaining respectful relations with family and being protected from unknown dangers, in ways that reflect not only religious beliefs but also geographies of risk related to other factors. Inhabiting such spaces implicates how they become part of the community at large, as visibly present participants, by negotiating many factors beyond religious beliefs as part of their access to public leisure spaces.     

Finding mobility: women negotiating fear and violence in Mexico City’s public transit system

Feminists have long known that a woman’s confidence, sense of possibility, aspirations, and personal growth depend on their ability to be mobile. Yet gender-based violence and sexual harassment against women commuters greatly limit those freedoms. How then should cities adapt in order increase women’s equal access to mobility? To address this question, this article looks at the case of Mexico City, investigating how women pursue mobility despite hostile and violent conditions that immobilize them. Based on women’s testimonies, comments made on online debate forums, and surveys among women commuters in Mexico City, this article maps the ways women cope with violence and harassment on public transportation. The analysis also pays particular attention to how women’s coping strategies are restructured through state interventions, including women-only transportation. The data reveals that gender-based violence in Mexico City’s public transportation limits women’s mobility and reinforces gender inequality. It also shows, however, that under the right circumstances women-only transportation can be used as a place to create a rights-based movement. The article concludes that Mexico City is an example where women-only transportation has played a role in changing the traditional gender norms which have reinforced violence against women commuters.