Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

‘Man can’t give birth,woman can't fish’: gender dynamics in the small-scale fisheries of Bangladesh

Going beyond the myths prevalent in the socio-cultural embeddedness of rural Bangladesh, this article examines the diverse visible and invisible roles of fisherwomen in small-scale fisheries. This research considered two ethnic groups situated in two different ecosystems: the floodplain freshwater ecosystem is represented by new-entrant Muslim fishers ‘Maimal’ and the coastal ecosystem is represented by caste-based Hindu fishers ‘Jaladas’. From the basic ontological worldview of human dignity, moral individualism, and the social recognition of women’s rights, we argue that fisherwomen’s roles need to be recognized, focused, and valued to develop a horizontal understanding that is a prerequisite to the process of democratization, and the proper functioning of a just society. In the rural societies, a host of attributes, such as the deep-rooted socio-cultural constructions of the motherly myth, extreme tolerance, family teaching, religious antagonism, poverty, lack of education, internalization of a subordinate position, lack of supportive institutions, and fear of loss of societal patronage, profoundly undermine the capacity of women to aspire and raise their voice. Fisherwomen are accrued an inferior social position although they perform unique roles in the areas of childcare, household upkeep, livelihoods, and psycho-social support for the seafaring fishers. Conducive to the ecotone of marine fisheries, this article also portrays how a rigid patriarchal form of society is seasonally transformed to matrifocality when fishermen are away for fishing for half the year.     

Exploring gender and fear retrospectively: stories of women’s fear during the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders

The murder of 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1979 by Peter Sutcliffe who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper can be viewed as a significant criminal event due to the level of fear generated and the impact on local communities more generally. Drawing upon oral history interviews carried out with individuals living in Leeds at the time of the murders, this article explores women’s accounts of their fears from the time. This offers the opportunity to explore the gender/fear nexus from the unique perspective of a clearly defined object of fear situated within a specific spatial and historical setting. Findings revealed a range of anticipated fear-related emotions and practices which confirm popular ‘high-fear’ motifs; however, narrative analysis of interviews also highlighted more nuanced articulations of resistance and fearlessness based upon class, place and biographies of violence, as well as the way in which women drew upon fear/fearlessness in their overall construction of self. It is argued that using narrative approaches is a valuable means of uncovering the complexity of fear of crime and more specifically provides renewed insight onto women’s fear.     

‘Save our NHS’: activism,information-based expertise and the ‘new times’ of the 1980s

This article examines activism in defence of the National Health Service (NHS), which emerges in the 1960s to defend local hospitals from closure. From the mid-1980s, a new form of campaigning developed, which sought to protect the Service nationally. Tracing this campaigning illuminates, first, that small groups played a significant role in negotiating political change, and in contributing to cultural change which, in turn, has become politically powerful. Second, this demonstrates that the 1980s were ‘new times’ in welfare politics, as Thatcher’s changes fostered voluntary interest in information-led expertise, and a new vision of the NHS as a significant, much valued, national institution.     

Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: the perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh,Scotland

Debates about the so-called crisis of masculinity have tended to focus on the experiences of white working class young men and black young men to the exclusion of other groups of men. This article seeks to redress this omission by exploring young Muslim men's knowledge and understanding of the crisis of masculinity and the ways in which they respond to such discourses. Using qualitative data collected during interviews and focus groups with young Muslim men – mainly of Pakistani heritage – living in Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, I demonstrate that young Muslim men's responses to the crisis of masculinity debate are informed by a complex range of issues including their own class position, familial and related gendered expectations alongside the young men's interests in sport and leisure activities.     

‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: what is ‘new’ about the ‘new woman’?

Bollywood’s transnational mechanisms offer a unique space to study gendered subjectivity. My article studies a specific Bollywood movie, English Vinglish (2012) to draw out the profile of the ‘new woman.’ Persistently, I question the ‘new-ness’ to the construction of women when the ‘new’ reiterates the values of tradition, nation, and family. The ‘new’ seems to exist as a particular and unique transaction between local traditions and the global spread of populations that make limiting conceptions of woman, nation, or family, anomalies in a world propelled by expanding market needs and demands. The ‘new’ while offering possibilities for women, concomitantly carries different exclusions based on class, religion, language, and other identities. Understanding the formation of gender under contemporary conditions of transnationalism requires attentiveness to an insidious partnership of possibilities and exclusions that makes it simplistic to think in terms of progress or regress.     

Coffee Shops and Cigarettes: On the ‘Return’ to Tehran of Young Diasporic Iranians

This essay explores the experiences of a young community of diasporic Iranians living and working in Tehran during the years 2007–2009 when the author lived there. Through analysis of the lived experiences of this group, the article highlights a unique experience that is often absent from current discussions of “diaspora.” In the preliminary research, a redeployment of often taken-for-granted concepts such as “home” and “abroad” are proposed and a conceptualization of migration and diaspora that problematizes stasis and movement is reconsidered.     

Unfolding dialogues about gender,care and ‘the north’: an introduction

This paper introduces a special themed section which arose out of a successful symposium, Caring for the North: Gender, Care and Northern Places, held in 2006 at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Considering feminist and geographical research on care, we argue (1) that feminist perspectives have provided key developments for thinking about care, and (2) that care research must take place seriously to allow for both specificity and complexity of approaches to the relationships of gender, care and ‘northern’ places. We then briefly introduce the special issue contributions which address these eponymous concerns, suggesting this collection is an opportunity for unfolding dialogues about the intersections of gender, care and ‘the north’. We hope the diversity of the work that follows demonstrates the range of possibilities for feminist approaches to care and place and furthers the necessary cross-disciplinary conversations.     

Revising history: Elvira Giallanella’s Umanità and the editing of gender

A mix of fantasy, history, spirituality, and political engagement, Elvira Giallanella’s film, Umanità (1920), is a sort of Carrollian ‘through the looking glass’ in which reality resembles itself but upside-down. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Giallanella’s film – a revision of Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s 1916 children’s story from 1916. children’s story – both reflects and critiques gender roles that had been temporarily fissured by the war itself. A feminist position transpires in the juxtaposition of the pre-war male-authored text with the postwar female-directed film, further revised by men. An invaluable historical source, Umanità not only offers insight into a woman’s and a feminist’s perspective on the Great War and its aftermath but also sheds light on the moral, political, and philosophical atmosphere of destabilization at the time. Coming full circle, Umanità suffered from the very same revisions by the re-established postwar patriarchy, and by the end of the 1920s, cinema itself had been reclaimed as male territory, leaving the film lost amongst the debris. Umanità’s resurfacing in 2007 allows us to reflect on the process of history-making in itself: what is omitted, what is included, and more importantly whose voices will be validated enough to be heard along the way. This instance – one amongst several – can serve as an example of how history is indeed a continuous process made up of (re)visions, and never a singular, univocal one.     

America’s ‘Religion of Civility’ and the Calvinization of the World

This article examines the importance of Calvinism in producing the public/political “mind-set” of the United States, and how, after the Second World War, the export of this mind-set was as significant as the export of democracy, rock-’n’-roll, jeans, and Coca-Cola. It discusses the historical legacy and evolution of Calvinism from a civil religion to a religion of civility, and how the form and manner of Calvinist thinking—more specifically its ethic and aesthetic—has persisted in a secular manner so that much that Calvin would have found damnable is now intrinsic to the “religion of civility.” It then concludes that the central principles and practices of this religion of civility have had success within nations already “Christianized” but, perhaps understandably, not outside of that sphere.     

‘What’s left of the flag’: the Confederate and Jacobite ‘lost cause’ myths,and the construction of mythic identities through conflict commemoration

The use of battlefields and associated conflict sites provide tantalising hooks upon which to hang tapestries of grand narratives relating to regional and national identities, often defined by what the identities are not. This paper examines the unlikely connection between Jacobite and Confederate romanticism, and how battlefields, conflict related sites, and symbolic material culture are mobilised through active commemoration by some heritage groups in support of a created, mythic identity of a ‘Southern Celt’. Furthermore, it examines the production of a mythic history that whitewashes and recasts the Confederacy, the reality of the Civil War, and the Confederate Flag, while at the same time minimising, hiding, or ignoring competing narratives.     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Children’s independent mobility: the role of school-based social capital

ABSTRACT

Research has documented the decline in children’s independent mobility (CIM) globally. CIM is a measure of the level of a child’s freedom to move about his or her local neighbourhood without direct adult supervision. This paper explores the effectiveness of three intervention programmes to change travel behaviours of children to and from school in 26 Catholic primary schools in a range of urban and regional settings in Victoria, Australia. Using pre and post intervention surveys with 1600 students and parents, and interviews with school principals, we measured the influence of a range of individual, social, and built environment factors on the effectiveness of these intervention programmes. The degree of social connectedness of the school and the individual was found to have the most impact on the effectiveness of the intervention programmes to change behaviours, while the interventions themselves were not greatly effective without being embedded in a supportive school culture.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.     

‘It’s the best place on Earth’: Newfoundland women’s outmigration,diaspora and the myth of return*

This article explores Newfoundland women’s experiences of outmigration as a gendered process of displacement. Experiences of displacement can provide significant insight into Newfoundland and Labrador’s fractured political relationship with the nation of Canada. This article argues that Newfoundland outmigration must be viewed through the lenses of diaspora and intersectionality, as nationalist sentiment and the province’s peripheral place within Canada affect women’s experiences of outmigration. Tensions shaped by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status affect their ability to integrate into Canadian society and influence their decisions about returning home.     

Stories of lifestyle mobility: representing self and place in the search for the ‘good life’

In recent decades, mobility researchers have paid increasing attention to the flows of relatively privileged individuals whose mobility practices are largely understood to be lifestyle-motivated, consumption-led and tourism-induced (e.g. Benson, M., & O'Reilly, K. (Eds.). (2009). Lifestyle migration: Expectations, aspirations and experiences. Surrey: Ashgate; King, R., Warnes, A. M., & Williams, A. M. (2000). Sunset lives: British retirement migration to the Mediterranean. Oxford: Berg). Situated within the context of lifestyle mobilities, this paper aims to analyse the significance of place and representations of place in the movers' stories of mobility. The mobility experiences of Swedish retirees practicing routinised and seasonal mobility between Sweden and Malta have been analysed, and this paper explores how they actively give meaning to their choices and decisions. In their narratives, the movers express their representations of themselves in relation not only to their imaginings of places and to their belongings to and engagements with these places, but also to their mobility practices. The findings contribute to a discussion of how place imaginaries and self-identities are constructed through lifestyle mobility practices.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.