Narrating intersections of gender and dwarfism in everyday spaces

Dwarfs, midgets, even freaks, are among the terms that have been used to label little people. Feminist theorists have argued that discursive identities of women prevent any meaningful essentialised analysis of their experiences. Similarly, disability researchers have argued against generalising the experiences of disabled individuals. This paper explores the intersection of gender and dwarfism through the narratives of four women who are little people. Findings suggest that the ways women, who are little people, negotiate public spaces are affected by discourses of gender, disability and common conceptions of what is physically normal. Furthermore, these discourses have material implications in the everyday lives of these women. A brief historical overview of dwarfism is followed by narratives that describe experiences in public spaces, perceptions of height related to age and capability, gendered spaces and sexual stereotypes, uncomfortable spaces, violations of personal space and transportation. This paper provides a partial perspective on how discourses of dwarfism are manifest in social spaces and the built environment. Despite these significant commonalities that little people shared with other disabled people, there are socio‐spatial experiences that appear to be unique to people with dwarfism .     

Being NGO girls: gender,subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata

This article discusses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a cultural and political force in shaping the gendered and classed subjectivities of young women growing up in ‘red-light areas’ in Kolkata, India. It foregrounds the flexible deployment of NGO gender narratives by ‘subjects’ of NGO development to improve their everyday lives. Drawing on debates of NGOization, post-colonial urban Indian femininities and intersectionality, it demonstrates how several young women who grew up as ‘subjects’ of NGO development mobilize, reject and improvise contested NGO-inspired femininities for their everyday gain. At the same time, it illustrates how NGO gender narratives that are useful to some young women in their renegotiation of gender norms are deemed ineffective, if not obstructive, by other young women, particularly those whose lives remain entangled in multiple marginalities.     

Cultural memory, gender and age: young Latvian women's narrative memories of war-time Europe, 1944–1947

This paper examines the war-time experiences of dislocation and loss, as well as the transition to independent adulthood, of 25 Latvian women who came to Britain as European Volunteer Workers after the end of the Second World War. Despite the recent work in cultural history exploring memories of wartime dislocation and the growing use of oral narratives in this exploration, relatively little is known about the 1944 migration from the Baltic States to the UK or about the particular experiences of young women in this movement. This paper begins to address this forgotten history through interviews with now-elderly women living in Britain in the context of recent debates about cultural memory and forgetting.     

From Partisan Warfare to Memory Battlefields: Two Women's Stories about the Second World War and Its Aftermath in Lithuania

This article explores how women fighters tell their stories in relation to the dominant state narratives about a partisan war. In addition to engaging their individual stories, it explores how they speak, write and act as memory entrepreneurs, creating collective memory about a past that they have experienced instead of allowing others to select actors and events for historical narratives. It argues that memory regimes and gender cultures are intertwined, and that gender cultures are essential in understanding the cultural choices made by memory entrepreneurs in memory making. The article analyses the oral testimonies and written memoirs of two women, Rakhel’ Margolis and Aldona Vilutien? (neé Sabaityt?), who were partisans in Lithuania during the Second World War (Margolis) and its aftermath (Vilutien?) and created the first museums dealing with the Second World War and its legacy in post‐Soviet Lithuania. Read as stories about what it was like to be a woman during a partisan war, the narratives include some common themes: widespread betrayal, the difficult physical conditions that they had to endure as women and the vulnerability that came with these experiences. Read as stories told by memory entrepreneurs, the narratives reveal that the two women acted as mnemonic warriors fighting for competing memory regimes built on opposing gender ideologies.     

Crossing boundaries: bras,lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

Abstract

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this article examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The article articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the article makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden.     

The power of the “Stockpile”: American aid and China’s Wartime everyday

ABSTRACT

This article argues that American and British narratives about the existence of a “stockpile” of Chinese goods had a powerful impact on US-China relations, China’s war effort, and China’s wartime everyday. Focusing on both the material and discursive construction of the so-called stockpile in the early 1940s, the work seeks to deconstruct a powerful symbol that was long used by both British and American officials (particularly in the US War Department) to delegitimize the Nationalist government’s war effort against Japan. Drawing on sources collected at archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan, the article seeks to rethink many commonly held assumptions about American aid and to reveal the powerful influence that the symbolic presence of the stockpile had in shaping Sino-American relations in the wartime period and beyond.     

Displacement,memory and home(less) identities: Turkish Cypriot women’s narratives

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the narratives of Turkish Cypriot women in the north of Cyprus who were displaced during the ethnic conflict between the 1950s and 1974. We have conducted 21 interviews with Turkish Cypriot women who were living in different parts of Northern Cyprus. We used oral history, both as a method and as an epistemological stance to re-phrase the near past of Cyprus and the Cyprus issue from the perspective of gender/women’s studies. The study follows the traces of modernity, patriarchy, and nationalism in women’s narratives, about the place, home, belonging and homelessness. The narratives describe Turkish Cypriot women’s experiences of being a woman in conflict and displacement (‘göçmen olmak’ in daily talk in Turkish) making a home out of a house and undertaking daily routines for their families. The study also reveals that ethnic conflict and displacement have empowered women to a certain degree.     

Global policy paradigms,gender equality and everyday lives in Beijing,Hong Kong,Seoul and Taipei

Focusing on the interface between gender equality, the labour market, and everyday lives in four East Asian societies – China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan – this article seeks to articulate the spatial expression and multi-scalarity of global governance and policy paradigms. It will demonstrate that whilst regions, places and people are influenced by global processes and paradigms, these move and embed in different ways across spaces, time and scales. In this context, the article seeks to develop a more nuanced appreciation of ‘the social lives’ of global policy models, engaging with the role of ideas and institutions and the interactions of transnational, national and local dynamics in the shaping of gender equality policies and everyday experiences. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei the article draws out the perceptions of individuals from different policy, sectoral, social and cultural settings of gender equality. It highlights the tensions and disjunctures between general principles and particular situations, and in embedding gender equality policies into the social imaginaries and everyday lives of women and men. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing the role of place and power relations in shaping localized responses to and experiences of gender justice.     

(Re)Producing and challenging gender in and through urban space: women bicyclists’ experiences in Chicago

This research, which uses an intersectional feminist methodological approach, explores the relationships and intersections among women, public urban space, and bicycling, and the gendered processes through which the use of space is claimed, negotiated, and constrained. It builds on the existing scholarship on the gendered nature of public space, and uniquely uses bicycling as the site of inquiry. Drawing primarily from interviews with women cyclists in Chicago, this article explores how gender and other social identities are constructed, challenged, and constituted through an interaction with public space, urban processes and structures, and societal expectations and attitudes. It brings to the forefront and centers these narratives and empirically contextualizes them by linking the scholarship on the gendered (and raced, classed, and sexualized) nature of public space with the scholarship on women’s participation rates and barriers to bicycling. This research examines, through the everyday lived experiences of bicyclists and their multiple subject positions and privileges, how the gendered nature of public space affects the participation and experiences of women cyclists; how public space is negotiated and constrained; and how gender can be both (re)produced and challenged in and through urban space via women bicyclists’ actions. In particular, the research findings explore how women bicyclists must demand and negotiate public space; how their movement and activities are constrained in public space; how gender roles and social reproduction issues intersect with bicycling; and how social, quasi-advocacy group bicycle rides are used as a strategy, with mixed results, to address barriers to women bicyclists’ mobility.     

Women anti-mining activists’ narratives of everyday resistance in the Andes: staying put and carrying on in Peru and Ecuador

This article explores the ways in which activism and resistance are incorporated into the everyday lives and practices of rural women in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes, theorising the nature of women’s everyday resistance in long running social conflicts. Drawing on research with women anti-mining activists in Peru and Ecuador, the article emphasises that their resistance is rarely concerned with large-scale protests, transnational activism, and the spectacular, but rather depends on daily resistance and resilience in, often fractured, local communities. I explore how rural women make extraordinary circumstances, including facing lawsuits and accusations of terrorism, part of their everyday lives, and how they articulate their resistance and situate it in place through narratives of staying put and carrying on, drawing on emblematic notions of rural livelihoods to challenge large-scale mining developments in their communities.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.     

Cartographies of encounters: Understanding conflict transformation through a collaborative exploration of youth spaces in Beirut

This paper explores practices and imaginations of space among young people in postwar Beirut. Relying on an innovative collaborative-mapping methodology, it shifts the focus from the traditional analysis of the city at war, centred on anxious urbanism, toward spatial dynamics of conflict transformation. It deploys an ethnographic approach to shed light on everyday perceptions of the urban landscape among a group of students. Their visions of space are composed along conventional tropes, comparable to Bakhtin's notion of chronotopes: images that connect temporal and spatial relationships to describe their ways of inhabiting the city. These images reveal that their experiences of space are not produced exclusively in relation to the memory of wartime topographies and politico-religious territories. Rather, they are also the result of their personal trajectories and agency. For these young people, ordinary encounters inspire a reframing of the political geography of the everyday, including renewed narratives on coexistence and strategies of circumventing the sense of spatial confinement they inherited from the war. The analysis shows that the experiences of these students stand in sharp contrast with the dominant image of unbending intergroup boundaries in postwar Lebanon. Young people's abilities to navigate, negotiate and rediscover social encounters in a complex, changing environment call attention to the transformative power of micro-situations in postwar contexts. Through highlighting their original lifestyles and ways of thinking, this paper argues that the city, far from only symbolising and reproducing conflicts, is also the place where mundane practices and imaginations reinvent the social fabric.     

Femininities on transnational journeys and sexual health risk: experiences of Chinese immigrant women in Canada

Negotiations at work in a globalising China in regard to femininity, sexuality, and family relationships have been well documented from the 1990s. Nonetheless less is known about them in a transnational context, and femininities are far less explored than masculinities. Drawing on interview data from a larger research study of transnationalism and gendered HIV vulnerability, this article investigates the intersection of femininity, sexuality and sexual health risk through Chinese immigrant women’s narratives about their experiences in Canada. It examines to what extent these intimate negotiations within China are re-enacted through Chinese immigrant women’s transnational experiences in Canada. These women live ‘in-between’ China and Canada in terms of identity, space and time with their cross-cultural connections unveiling both virtual and actual relations. Gender norms and roles, intimate and sexual experience, and family relations are realigned in the transnational lives of these women and are impacted by both their home and host societies, as well as their past and present experience in China. Used in the article as a concept and an analytical lens, gender is acknowledged as a key organising principle in post-immigration individual and social experience.     

Gender,households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

Since the late 1990s, migration of single women from the rural north to the urban south in Ghana has been making up a growing share of migrant streams. While the livelihood strategies of these migrant women in their southern destinations have been recently examined, the experience of reintegration for those who return to their place of origin has rarely been studied. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant women, returned migrant women (RMW) and their family members, this study examines everyday reintegration experiences of RMW within their households in a rural Dagomba community in Northern Region, Ghana. We conceptualise the household as an arena of everyday life wherein RMW exercise agency to learn to generate livelihoods that support their own as well as household members’ joint well-being. We combine this conceptualisation of household with feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as situated process. Our conceptualisation makes it possible to illuminate gender dynamics around the everyday repetitive decision-making acts that constitute livelihood generation as performed by RMW within specific intra-household dynamics in the context of reintegration in the situated community. Through the examination of the diverse and contradictory ways in which RMW exercise agency in making decisions about livelihood strategies within their households in the studied community, we show how the everyday repetitive acts of RMW contribute to micro-transformations of a situated gender ideology.     

CIRCULAR MIGRATION AND LIFE COURSE OF FEMALE DOMESTIC WORKERS IN BEIJING

This study examines the migration experiences of 24 female domestic workers in Beijing through in-depth interviews. Most of these women were involved in a circular pattern of movement between their home villages and cities. The pattern of reverse and circular migration was closely related to the life-course transitions of Chinese rural women and their socially-assigned gender roles such as marriage, childbirth, childrearing and caregiving for family members. For individual domestic workers, working in Beijing is a bittersweet experience. The women were subjected to unfavourable work conditions and pervasive forms of exploitation. Nevertheless, they benefited from the experience through increased access to income, knowledge and other resources unavailable in rural areas. Although these women challenged, through migration, the traditional social roles imposed on Chinese rural women, their own limitations and institutional barriers left them with few options for improving their social statuses in cities.     

‘You’re not big,you’re just in Asia’: Expatriate embodiment and emotional experiences of size in Singapore§

This article brings together work on privileged migration with critical geographical work on body size. In uniting these areas together I focus on the role of embodiment within expatriate experiences of migration to Singapore. I argue that despite a developing body of critical work on migration, this work has failed to explore embodied experiences of size. To counter this gap, this research demonstrates the importance of recognising how sized narratives and experiences are shaped through gendered migration and the need to explore the multiplicity of experiences of women in different places of the city. Drawing upon empirical research with expatriate women in Singapore I advance work within critical geographies of body size by presenting original work that challenges dominant and medicalised understandings of fatness as inherently bad. Furthermore, I contribute to the growing area of work that places emphasis on the subjective nature of size through recognition of work on migration. In this article, I explore how migration was embodied and discussed through size, firstly by looking at how women discussed losing their sense of identity. Secondly, the temporal and spatial embeddedness of size. Finally, how women rejected and resisted dominant discourses through humour and indifference.     

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.     

"I Didn't Do Anything Important": A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview

In the course of gathering oral histories from women who servedin the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II, an unusualconversational pattern has emerged. The women almost invariablydiminish the importance of their wartime contributions; a commonrefrain is "I didn’t do anything important." Their individualexperiences, as revealed during the interviews, belie that assertion.In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what ismeant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe theydid not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessaryto participate in the very public process of oral history, placingtheir names and life stories within the historical record? Consideringboth the content and the context of the women's words from afeminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain thisseemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that thewomen do not really mean to belittle their life experiences(and military service), but instead are using the phrase asa way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral historyinterview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only placetheir experience into the historical record but also to affirmthe importance of their wartime work.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Popular geopolitics of Chinese Nanjing massacre films: a feminist approach

This article attempts to deconstruct the masculinised contract among the war narrative, popular culture, and Chinese nationalism by exploring the roles of women in Nanjing Massacre films with war narratives and Chinese audiences' emotional ‘readings’ of these women. Based on the analysis of City of Life and Death (2009) and The Flowers of War (2011) and audiences' comments on these two films from Douban Movie, this article has mapped a popular geopolitics of these two films through a feminist approach. The main argument of this research points out that, through the production and consumption of these two films, the women of the Nanjing Massacre can be territorialised as Nanjing/China and used to represent China's attitudes towards both the historical and current Sino–Japanese relationship. In this way, the women of these films can be considered an articulation of popular culture and politics, and they are empowered to establish Chinese nationalism and construct anti-Japanese identities in Chinese society. To a wider extent, this article can be read as a contribution to the literature on gender, nationalism and popular geopolitics.