Male ‘Providers’ and Female ‘Housewives’: A Gendered Co‐performance in Rural North India

Problems of measuring and public recognition of women's work are not merely statistical. This article highlights the co‐performance of stereotypical gender roles, where men and women jointly seek to establish the status of women as housewives rather than as farmers and of men as providers, thereby upholding a particular social order and simultaneously reinterpreting the meanings of existing norms to include new realities. Evidence from rural north India demonstrates the discernable disjunctures between social norms, narratives and action. Conscious of the growing insecurities faced by their husbands in the context of a rapidly changing economy, women try to allay rather than aggravate them. Instead of asserting their identities as ‘workers’, their strategies for gaining recognition and reciprocity from their husbands focus on reconstituting gender relations in the household, by expanding individual spaces and making incremental gains within the existing social order, rather than struggling for wider transformative changes.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

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.     

The ‘Political’ Economies of Central America: Foreign Aid and Labour Remittances

This paper reviews recent literature to show how foreign aid and labour remittances have transformed Central America's macroeconomy, state apparatus and class structure over the last ten years. They have lifted real exchange rates, changed the composition of investment, lowered food prices, and directly supported large numbers of people. Control over these resources is now a major focus of political activity and donors play a greater role in economic policy. Project administration has become a major function of the state. Planning and public sector personnel management have become more difficult. Foreign funds have favoured decentralization and increased participation, but they have also weakened the core capacity of the state to execute policies. Transfers have fomented new social groups including sectors supported by remittances, foreign-financed soldiers, public employees, non-traditional export producers, financial intermediaries who channel remittances and refugees.     

NRM Regions in Australia: the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’

This paper identifies external factors affecting the capacity of Australia's now‐formalised 56 regional natural resource management (NRM) bodies and their community‐based Boards to meet planning and management responsibilities. It demonstrates that little is known about the basic capacity‐related characteristics of NRM regions, despite the lengthy and elaborate process of regionalism that Australia has embarked upon, with its associated and substantial devolution of responsibilities and resources. A suite of indicators is used to develop an ‘exploratory’ capacity typology of NRM regions. The ten regional ‘types’ identified are found to attract varying budget allocations under the Natural Heritage Trust Extension and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. There are indications that State and regional interests within and outside NRM can significantly influence the distribution of resources. An examination of resources allocated to capacity‐building activities shows significant differences between regions in the scale of resources allocated (0–96% of total budget). The paper argues the case for intervention to reduce the gap between ‘have’ and ‘have not’ regions, and for further exploration of disparities in the allocation of resources to capacity‐building activities. Clarification is needed of the extent to which capacity‐building activities adequately target regional NRM bodies and their Boards.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

‘Benchmarking’ and Participatory Development: The Case of Fiji’s Sugar Industry Reforms

Since the mid‐1970s, opposition has grown within developing countries to the use of ‘top‐down’ development approaches by foreign consultants. Disenchantment with these development strategies, it is often claimed, has led to the current incorporation of participation in consultants’ development practices. This study is concerned with the practice and methods of participatory development planning. It evaluates the Strategic Plan adopted by the Fiji sugar industry in 1997 in response to challenges that are attributed to the pressures of globalization and international competitiveness. The authors assess the external consultant’s self‐proclaimed ‘participatory methods’ in the articulation of these challenges, in the design of restructuring programmes, and in shaping the discourses of reform more generally. The consultant’s use of the fashionable ‘benchmarking’ methodology is seen to be one of the most problematic features of the ‘participatory’ process.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

The ‘Global’ versus the ‘Local’: Cognitive Processes of Kin Determination in Aboriginal Australia

ABSTRACT Morgan and his informants' interpretation of Australian social categories as ‘marriage classes’ has survived in Dumont's (and Viveiros de Castro's) distinction of a ‘local’ (Dravidian systems) and a ‘global’ (Australian systems) formula. This paper explains that the ‘global formula’ is neither a necessary nor an applied device in Australian kin category determination, even when genealogical memory is short and when there is a non‐limitation of range in the extension of categories. Instead, a heuristic model, which is called the relational triangle, is proposed. This model depicts the procedure through which Australian people pragmatically determine and extend kin categories. Moreover, it also offers a visualisation of the cognitive schema and processes framing discourse and behaviour in relation to kinship and draws some parallels with Greenberg's hypotheses on markedness in kinship classes.     

The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain

This article analyses the story of Catalina de Erauso, a Spanish nun, who escaped from a convent at the beginning of the seventeenth century to begin a new life as a military warrior serving under the King of Spain in colonial Latin America. Her story reveals that notions of sex and gender at the time were surprisingly elastic and flexible, and often more associated with acts and behaviour than with physical bodies. By examining how the personage of the Lieutenant Nun has been treated in Spain and in Britain in the nineteenth century, this article also evaluates the extent to which certain pre‐modern ideas about sex and gender continued to survive two centuries later.     

Cartographies of Globalisation,Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

By locating the current usage of ‘diaspora’ within today's cultures, I make a case for the unacknowledged subject of Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic world being Western, urban and male. In order to consider the black Atlantic as the site of multiple and heterogeneouslyproduced subjectivities, I turn to the Jamaican performance poet, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, whose work stages modern black subjectivities that are Third World, rural, domestic and female. Her poems depict black female subjectivities that are both local and global, articulated more through dancehall culture and radio technology than a ‘cut‐and‐mix’ music style that tends to be male‐identified.