Embodied negotiations: identity,space and livelihood after trade zones in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse shaped by inter-related gender and racial ideologies of labor as well as the uneven transnationalization of rural and urban localities. I show how the negotiation of social position by subjects marked by race, gender and class is always also a negotiation of spatial position in and between localities structured through raced, gendered and class relations. Men's efforts to remain in urban areas as a form of social ‘whitening’ are compared to women's resistance to rural return as an attempt to stay in circulation as paid labor. Overall, I argue that feminist research on global production should be ‘spatialized’ by attending to livelihoods and practices of subject-making that emerge in parallel to export restructuring.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

The Meanings of Lesbianism in Post-War America

I had been a closet gay before I got married, about 1948, which means I had a relationship with a woman, and I'd been in love with her but I thought I was the only person in the world. There was no others in the world. I had never read a gay book. I didn't even know the word ‘gay’… I didn't know the word ‘lesbian’… And I really believe that women used to dress mannish simply to get you to know who they were … In those days it was very important.¹     

Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists

This article examines the borderlands between transgender MTF (male‐to‐female) and gay male communities in Latina/o Miami through an analysis of the participation of Latinas in the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). Previous research suggests that Cuban and Cuban American gay male culture have historically been associated with gender transgressive behaviour and identity. Because of this, it is often unclear how to distinguish between what is gay male/homosexual expression and transgender expression. If outward gender manifestations that we now call ‘transgender’ were understood in other historical and cultural contexts as ‘homosexual’, how do we label those manifestations today? By labelling them as homosexual are we simply reinscribing the marginalisation of transgender individuals? On the other hand, by labelling them as transgender are we imposing a contemporary category and therefore performing another kind of intellectual violence? In order to address these questions, I analyse a Latino/a organisation that explicitly labelled itself ‘transsexual’. TAO was an early transsexual rights organisation founded in 1970 by Angela Douglas in Los Angeles which moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1972. Drawing on the organisation's publications, Moonshadow and Mirage Magazine (1972–75), and Douglas's self‐published autobiographical texts, Triple Jeopardy: The Autobiography of Angela Lynn Douglas (1983) and Hollywood's Obsession (1992), I analyse the rarely discussed participation of Latinas in the organisation.     

Researching ‘gay Cape Town’ finding value-added queerness

An initiative to market Cape Town as a premier gay and lesbian tourist destination has steadily gathered steam over the last decade. I set out to study this phenomenon thereby adding to conversations about the normalization and globalization of queerness. Rather than straightforwardly presenting my findings, however, this paper considers queer theorizing as an inductive process by detailing the answers I did not find in the field and the questions I did. Based on my close readings of queer theory, I went looking for resistance and therefore queerness in the normalized space of ‘gay Cape Town’. I was disappointed. But I did not instead find outright capitulation. Rather, in this process of queer's commodification, I found anxieties, cracks and fissures beneath a veneer of assured mainstreaming. I found an undetermined process that did not represent either ‘un-African-ness’ or ‘global queer homogeneity’ or ‘African-ness’ and ‘local queer heterogeneity’. I found not an un-queering through commodification, but a queer commodity struggling to gain a foothold in a nation in which the terrain for gay and lesbian politics has drastically changed in such a way that the market cannot be ignored. To grapple with these findings, I argue for a more ambivalent approach to queer theorizing.     

Circulating sadness: witnessing Filipina mothers' stories of family separation

I reflect upon a collaborative research project with activist groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, in which we collected stories of family separation, loss, grief and traumatic returns to more fully trace the impacts of the Canadian temporary work visa program (the Live-in Caregiver Program), which brings mostly Filipino women to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Our hope is that these stories of maternal loss will find an audience and evoke an affective response among policy-makers and a wide public beyond the Filipino community in ways that earlier critiques of the program have not. The article draws upon critical literatures on trauma and testimony to consider some of the risks of circulating these kinds of testimonials, and the possibilities of moving the audience from the position of spectator to witness. I then work closely with two mothers' testimonies to experiment with ways of establishing a ‘more difficult contract’ between those who give testimony and those who receive it, one that creates a complex ethical and political space in which the audience is required to register their own complicity in the other's loss or grief. I consider of the possibilities of assembling stories that tell a collective history without reducing the complexity of individual's lives into the same sad story of victimization, and of telling these stories so that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother are exhausted and the listener/reader is forced to listen/read more closely, just beyond the expected story line or cultural cliché.     

Narrating feminisms: what do we talk about when we talk about feminism in Estonia?

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this article explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia which has not been thoroughly researched yet, this article calls upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context. Starting from stories of how women became feminists in Estonia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, I reflect on the gaps, chance encounters and tensions that my fieldwork revealed to narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new aspects of feminism in this context. In particular, I focus on two moments: the common imaginary of ‘real’ feminism as Western mass movement and the tensions between the local context and ‘Western feminism’. I complicate the narrative in the article through including interludes in between the main text to highlight how the incidents that happened outside and around the interviews shape my story of feminism in Estonia.     

‘Why can’t they meet in bars and clubs like normal people?’: the protective state and bioregulating gay public sex spaces

State regulation of gay public sex spaces (PSS) has prompted geographers to assess the influence that localised legalities exert in specific micro-spaces of interaction, and to expand this research into cities not considered to be archetypically ‘gay friendly’. Through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, it is important to consider state-directed bioregulatory influences upon toilets and parks as PSS. Such bioregulation, with its aim of producing a ‘healthy’ sexual population, seeks to expose public sex as ‘dangerous’, encouraging a policing of PSS and the men who use them. Part of this bioregulation also enlists men using PSS as responsible for peer surveillance to ensure anonymity and privacy in PSS. This auto-surveillance develops a ‘common code of conduct’ leading these men to develop their own modes of ‘normativity’ within these hetero-challenging spaces. By consulting with men who use PSS, I unearth oral histories of how changing laws, policy and ‘mainstream’ attitudes towards PSS in Glasgow, Scotland, have impacted upon cruising and cottaging. This paper will provide a place-specific reading of gay urban sexscapes, exploring how state bioregulation encourages the creation of new gay practices, identities and geographies.     

Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain

This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants and asylum seekers is discussed. These stories present a view of their tellers as alone and irreconcilably detached from past lives and relationships. These narrative repertoires as well as their telling draw from and elaborate certain views of the ‘proper refugee child’ that circulate through various regimes of immigration, welfare and emancipatory community work that all involved these young people. An approach to the stories as accomplished as well as situated performances that collapse the ordinary division between stories as ‘facts’ or ‘fictions’ is introduced. In this sense, the ‘children's voices’ heard in this study are recognised as situated and interested products of a research relationship.     

Resources,regulation and the state: Struggles over gas extraction and passive revolution in Evo Morales's Bolivia

The indigenous-influenced policies of Evo Morales's Bolivia represent arguably the most important attempt to improve the socioenvironmental implications of resource extraction in recent years, reasserting the role of the state and social movements against ‘corporate-led governance’. In this paper, through combining the regulation approach with neo-Gramscian state theory, I carry out a conceptually informed analysis of struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Bolivia, in order to shed light on the reasons why such an ambitious political project has largely failed to realise its transformative potential. I make two interrelated arguments. First, initial, important advances in the governance of resources in Bolivia were later partially reversed, due to shifting power relations between social movements, the hydrocarbon industry, and the state. This points to the need of understanding resource governance and its changes as reflecting or ‘condensing’ shifting power relationships among social forces. Second, the coming to power of Evo Morales resulted in a ‘passive-revolutionary’ process whereby an initial radical break with the neoliberal order was followed by a gradual adaptation to pre-existing political economic relations and arrangements. Most notably, plans to reduce the country's dependency on gas exports as well as to challenge the transnational domination of the hydrocarbon sector were abandoned, generating an increasingly explicit incompatibility with indigenous demands. I conclude that neo-Gramscian theory offers important insights that enable us to advance our conceptualisation of the state in resource governance research and in political ecology more generally.     

Managing Marginalization: Young French-North Africans and Local Associations

This article is about associational life among French-North Africans in the Paris suburbs. Associational life has been seen as an important means for excluded groups to exercise agency, especially in the two following bodies of theory: new citizenship and transnational studies literature. This article contrasts these influential theoretical perspectives with empirical research on youth engagement in associations. I argue that both the literature on new citizenship and transnational studies tends to focus our attention too much on heroic notions of a) new participative democracy and b) first-generation global networks of immigrants. As a result, other processes of locally embedded marginalization of ‘second-’ and ‘third-generation’ immigrant populations, such as in Paris’ banlieues and local association networks, can be overlooked. This article therefore takes as its empirical focus, research carried out on the relationship between young people of North African origin and local associations in Aubervilliers. Rather than a patchwork of participative local democracy or a ‘breeding ground’ for transnational immigrant agency, my fieldwork reveals that associations can often be half-hearted antidotes to social disenfranchisement and, sometimes, actual mechanisms which maintain exclusion.     

The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City's High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line's redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.     

Feeling sexual transgression: subjectivity,bodily experience,and non-normative hetero-erotic practices in women's cross-border sex in Costa Rica

Participating in sexual tourism and cross-border sex, heterosexual Euro-North American women are a targeted social group whereby accusations, such as ‘fucking gringa’, label them as sexual transgressors for violating multiple boundaries of heteronormativity. The complex power dynamics of women's cross-border sex are due to negotiations of race, gender, and class that are played out in specific locales and political economies of desire. Within these dynamics, women are agentive social actors and exert considerable sexual agency in their desires for local men who are positioned unevenly vis-à-vis tourist women's mobilities within erotic markets. Yet women's hetero-erotic sexual practices, which are experienced at the level of the body, cannot be assumed; looking at the lived experiences of women as sexual trangressors in these spaces promises to complicate non-normative heterosexuality and the gendered dynamics of (straight) transnational sex. Using critical ethnography and a performance approach to writing that places subjectivity at the center of the ethnographic record and analysis, this article conveys an ‘insider’ or emic account of women's transnational sex taking place in a Caribbean region of Costa Rica renown for women's sexual and romance tourism. In taking this approach, I aim to show how heterosexuality, hetero-erotic practices, and cross-border sex are not always what they seem and a glimpse into ‘the subjects’ worlds in their words' (Madison, Soyini. 2005. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. London: Sage, 174) has implications for theory concerned with the body and performance as fundamental to the social production of sexual transgression.     

Girls,consumption space and the contradictions ofhanging out in the city

Geographers have effectively examined girls' reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and reinscribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls' spatial practices, as well as girls' resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls' public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption's symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls' identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.     

Intimate mobilities: emotional embodiment and queer migration

This paper offers theoretically-informed empirical insights into queer migration in the contemporary West. Understanding the rationales, patterns and outcomes of migration is important for scholars researching the life experiences of gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals. This paper advances knowledge of queer migration by interpreting interview data from thirty-seven gay and lesbian Australians. The analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and the urgings of new mobility studies to account for the embodied and emotional dimensions of migration. Interrogating gay and lesbian Australians' migration narratives over the life course, I scrutinise the emotionally embodied nature of queer migration. I focus on the body as a vector of displacement, and explore how emotions, desires and intimate attachments shape queer mobilities. Respondents particularly emphasised the roles of ‘comfort’ and ‘love’ in relocation decisions. I found that these feelings interleaved with three patterns of emotionally embodied queer migration in the data—coming out, gravitational and relationship migrations. The embodied affects of comfort played a key role in coming out and gravitational migrations, while the exigencies of love underpinned relationship migration.     

The tyranny of transnational discourse: ‘authenticity’ and Irish diasporic identity in Ireland and England

Through the prism of current state discourses in Ireland on engagement with the Irish diaspora, this article examines the empirical merit of the related concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Drawing on recent research on how Irish identity is articulated and negotiated by Irish people in England, this study suggests a worked distinction between the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Two separate discourses of authenticity are compared and contrasted: they rest on a conceptualisation of Irish identity as transnational and diasporic, respectively. I argue that knowledge of contemporary Ireland is constructed as sufficiently important that claims on diasporic Irishness are constrained by the discourse of authentic Irishness as transnational. I discuss how this affects the identity claims of second‐generation Irish people, the relationship between conceptualisations of Irishness as diasporic within Ireland and ‘lived’ diasporic Irish identities, and implications for state discourses of diaspora engagement.     

Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.