Constructing Masculinity and Women's Fear in Public Space in Irvine,California

Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women's lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men's perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men's construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men's performances of two masculine identities—the youthful 'badass' and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.     

Gender,Nation and the Politics of Dress in Twentieth‐Century Philippines

This paper examines the politics of dress in twentieth‐century Philippines, exploring the imbrication of dress, politics and gender. It argues that there was an inherent tension between Western Dress/Filipino Dress in the period as the contrast between these two types of dress came to represent opposing political and gendered identities. The visual categories of Western Dress/Filipino Dress did not always 'naturally' correspond to not nationalist/nationalist, powerful/disempowered, modern/traditional, or even other/self. The gendering of costume mirrored men's and women's positioning in the political axis of the nation as the status of 'bearer and wearer of national tradition' shifted from women to men once the colony became an independent nation‐state.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

Hybrid identities: American Muslim women speak

Drawing upon postcolonial theorizing on diasporic positionalities and Homi Bhabha's theorization on ‘third space’ and hybridity, this study shows how young American Muslim women engage in their own interpretations of Islam based on their individual needs and situations. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 respondents in Ohio and Texas in order to gain insights into the identities of American Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds. Respondents emphasized their own ‘research’ on Islam as an important foundation of their faith. The narratives of the American Muslim women showed that they subverted and transgressed dominant meanings, while negotiating new ones through their everyday lived experiences. However, without indulging in an uncritical celebration of interstitial spaces, this study also strives to highlight the power relations implicit in the performances of complex, hybrid identities in the post-9/11 American context.     

Embodying Islam and laïcité: young French Muslim women at work

In this article, I consider how the racialisation of Muslim identities in the French context affects the education and employment trajectories of six young French Muslim women with post-secondary education, living and working in Paris. I call attention to the pernicious effects of the intersection of three sets of governing discourses: laïcité, post-feminism and neoliberalism. These discourses obscure the way state-endorsed racialisation intersects with class and gender relations to erect barriers to Muslim women's employment opportunities. I examine the complex discursive and performative work Muslim women engage in, to inhabit, reproduce, reject or contest various interpretations of pious feminine Muslim and of French secular republican subjecthood. Work sites become important places where both pious and laïque subjectivities are often simultaneously produced and negotiated through performance and corporeality. In this way, the women's narratives challenge the discursive construction of the incompatibility of pious and secular subjectivities. Participants disrupted their racialisation as oppressed women who embody Muslimness by emphasising their individual and conscious choice to practise their religion. Yet, in doing so, and in the light of the challenges finding work for those wearing the headscarf, they were inadvertently rendered the agents of the discriminatory treatment that disadvantaged them in the labour market. The rational, free-choosing, neoliberal ‘self’ that they construct must then take individual responsibility for the negative consequences on their lives of broader collective racialising discourses.     

Marginalisation,Islamism and The Production of the 'Other's' 'Other'

Drawing on the findings of an empirical study of working-class Pakistani Muslims in southern England, this article considers the links between marginalisation, the politics of identity and the position of Pakistani Muslim women. The author shows how marginalisation (emerging from a nexus of oppressions) reinforces 'group' identity, how women are made central to 'group' identity, and how this centrality serves to legitimate their disempowerment. In this way the border that is erected to contain the group is dependent on internal divisions, the existence of which contradicts the notion of group homogeneity.     

The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women's dress,mobility and Islamic knowledge

The issue of veiling marks an ideological fault line in urban Turkey. Based on focus groups conducted with migrant women to Istanbul in the spring of 1999, this article aims to show how veiling, as a form of dress, is a spatial practice that gains its significance through women's urban mobility and their construction of Islamic understandings in the city. At the same time, both urban mobility and Islamic knowledge are structured by wider relations of power, such as the struggle between the secular state and resurgent Islamic politics. In order to situate the practice of veiling within these structures, the author argues that Istanbul is marked by a pattern of shifting 'regimes of veiling,' and that these spatialized norms of dress affect the meaning and enactment of women's veiling choices. This concept is particularly useful to draw out the ways in which veiling, despite providing some protection from urban harassment, may actually constrain women's urban mobility in the context of Istanbul. The focus group analysis illustrates these points and demonstrates how women's views on Islam provide a basis for their attitudes towards veiling, mobility and space. The author suggests that among the participants, two main trends in Islamic understandings related to veiling can be observed: one towards the 'privatization' of religion along secularist lines, accompanied by a flexible attitude towards veiling, and another towards the public contestation of formal anti-veiling regimes justified in terms of knowledge gleaned through direct, textual engagement with Islam. In this way, this study aims to link veiling, as a socio-spatial practice, to the local, gendered production of Islamic knowledge in Istanbul.     

Between Worlds: Considering Celtic feminine identities in The Secret of Roan Inish

This article explores the ways in which Celtic oral traditions concerning the 'place' of women are replayed within a contemporary textual form, namely the 1995 film, The Secret of Roan Inish. Through an examination of the representation of gender relations within the film, we address how the incorporation of mythic elements is intended to provide a sense of female 'empowerment'. While the film has been praised for its positive portrayal of Irish Celtic women, we suggest that the various qualities of strength associated with the female lead characters are expressed within the context of a discursive framework that valorizes certain roles and behavior as 'natural' at the expense of other modes of life, and, further, ties the construction of subject identities into a fixed, or essentialist, notion of 'place'. Rather than presume that this filmic vision of Irish Celtic feminine identities is intrinsically regressive, however, we note that in our act of viewing Roan Inish those identities are recontextualized further in, we hope, a progressive, post-structuralist manner.     

Emotional geographies of veiling: the meanings of the hijab for five Palestinian American Muslim women

This article explores experiential and emotional dimensions of veiling practices, the ‘emotional geographies of veiling,’ in relation to Muslim women's community activism. By approaching the hijab as a symbol with both discursive effects and personal meaning – a psycho-social space – this article offers important insights into the intertwined, complex processes of internal embodiments and public manifestations of Muslim female identities. Based on the analysis of life narratives of five Palestinian American Muslim women in Milwaukee, a medium-sized city in the American Midwest, this article comes to the conclusion that public visibility through veiling entails both socio-spatial and emotional/internal processes. The analysis of these women's narratives explores how veiling practices can guide personal piety and self-transformation, and contributes to the solidification of a politically and religiously identifiable community.     

Wife Seclusion and the Spatial Praxis of Gender Ideology in Nigerian Hausaland

In much of Nigerian Hausaland the prevailing religio-cultural ideology of female seclusion (if not always the practice) impinges on married Muslim Hausa women to a greater, or lesser, degree. This article examines the intimate relationships between space, gender and ideology in contemporary rural Hausa society, showing the social construction (and connectedness) of gender identities and associated spatial identities, thus illustrating how spatial praxis is based on hegemonic patriarchal gender ideology. Observations and interview material gathered from a village case study in Kano State demonstrate how gender divisions correspond with the ideology and contemporary practice of wife seclusion. Intersecting patterns of gender, space and time are revealed by detailed analyses of time- and space-use data, which scrutinise men's and women's daily activities and mobility patterns. The cross-cutting of gender with class, age and marital status is shown to be highly significant in determining everyday experiences of spatial praxis, especially for women. A materialist feminist theoretical framework is used to explain this gendered geography of Nigerian Hausaland in which men's and women's worlds are spatially segregated, yet complexly interlocked and interdependent beyond simple public‐private divisions of ‘female’ household compounds (private space) and ‘male’ public space. For this peasant society, aspects of the rural economy and ideology emerge as powerful factors in determining the nature of seclusion as part of gender praxis. It is argued that due to various cultural and religious factors socio-economic development in Northern Nigeria has not been translated into improved autonomy for Hausa women.     

The Genesis of the British Hosiery Industry 1600–1750

Abstract

This article examines the historiography of children's dress, arguing that it has been limited by an unreflexive, uncritical conceptualisation of children and childhood. Drawing on insights afforded by the emergent field of childhood studies, by socially inflected perspectives on fashion and dress and by theories of consumption and consumer culture, the discussion turns toward ways of reconfiguring the historical study of children. It is suggested that future work may do well by embracing the ambiguities of children's identities, rather than trying to attenuate them.     

'Hard and Heavy': Gender and Power in a heavy metal music subculture

This article analyses gendered structures of power in a heavy metal (HM) music club. Although both male and female HM devotees often declare that they are engaged in a rebellious activity, this romantic conviction sits uneasily alongside the HM scene's reinforcement of conventional gender relations and identities. Although many women gravitated toward the HM setting in order to escape stifling adolescent situations, they wound up in another oppressive context. Both the forceful corporeal practices of men and the highly gendered structures of power meant that women 'did' gender on men's terms. HM texts, narratives, identities, and corporeal practices constituted a complex and contradictory gender regime that literally kept women 'in their place'.     

Morals,modern identities and the Catholic woman: fashion in Famiglia Cristiana, 1954–1968

Abstract

This article uses the prism of dress to explore the ways in which ordinary women negotiated Catholic morality codes in Italy during the great social transformations of the ‘economic miracle’ and afterwards. These years saw dramatic changes in gender roles and the influence of the mass media in society, as well as a rapid increase in migration, urbanization and financial well-being among Italians, and all of these changes were reflected in a very visible, everyday sense in changing fashions. At the same time, the Church was on the defensive and launched a morality crusade, focusing particularly on feminine ‘purity’ and modesty in dress, seeing more modern ways as a threat to Catholic values and traditions. Here, the advice column of Italy's leading – Catholic – magazine in these years is used to examine how individual Catholic women negotiated the competing influences of these years as they decided how to dress.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

Young People's Narratives of Rural-Urban Difference

Although recent research by geographers interested in children and young people has examined young people's experiences in a range of both 'rural' and 'urban' environments, the significance of narratives of rural-urban difference for young people's identities has received comparatively little attention. This paper draws on theories of narrative identity to explore how narratives of rural-urban difference (and, in particular, the cultural hierarchies created and reinforced by these narratives) are significant for the construction of young people's identities. Using empirical material drawn from two separate studies in the USA, one from a mid-sized Sunbelt city and one from rural northern Vermont, the paper examines ways in which narratives of rural-urban difference are significant for young people's senses of self, processes of 'othering', and the constitution of local youth cultures.     

Identities and agency in religious spheres: a study of British Muslim women's experience

This article examines the ways in which British born South Asian Muslim women engage with Islam through study circles, using data drawn from participant observation of, and interviews with, 25 women in two major cities in northern England. I argue that the religious spaces within which the women participate allow them to assert various identities, as well as agency, as they collectively search to comprehend Islam. In particular, I demonstrate that in traversing these religious spheres, women transform them from male dominated sites to spaces wherein feminine, political and cosmopolitan identities are expressed. Scholarship on Islamic feminism in western contexts has focused on visible symbols such as the veil and little attention has been given to the social processes that Muslim women may engage in order to better understand and practise Islam. For the women who formed part of this study, the veil was only one aspect of their religious identity. In examining religious spheres such as the mosque, I argue these are not disembodied sites where only religious rituals are performed, but are created, discursive spaces and social networks that allow women to feel empowered within British society.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

Gender Justice and (In)security in Pakistan and Afghanistan†

ABSTRACT

This article argues that gender justice becomes a politicised issue in counterproductive ways in conflict zones. Despite claims of following democratic principles, cultural norms have often taken precedence over ensuring gender-sensitive security practices on the ground. The rightness of the ‘war on terror’ justified by evoking fear and enforced through colonial methods of surveillance, torture, and repression in counter-terrorism measures, reproduces colonial strategies of governance. In the current context, the postcolonial sovereign state with its colonial memories and structures of violence attempts to control women’s identities. This article analyses some of these debates within the context of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s security dynamics. It begins with the premise that a deliberate focus on the exclusion and limitation of women in Muslim and traditional societies sustains and reinforces the stereotypes of women as silent and silenced actors only. However, while the control of women within and beyond the nexus of patriarchal family'society'state is central to extremist ideologies and institutionalisation practices, women’s vulnerabilities and insecurities increase in times of conflict not only because of the action of religious forces, but also because of ‘progressive’, ‘secular’, ‘humanitarian’ interventions.     

Sociology of the Veil in Saudi Arabia: Dress Code,Individual Choices,and Questions on Women's Empowerment

Veiling is commonly practiced in many Muslim societies, but its prevalence, and enforcement in Saudi Arabia is extraordinary. With changing status, Saudi women have started to defy the practice; and it is suggested that its enforcement has also become less frequent. In contemporary Saudi Arabia, many women, following the dress code of the abaya (black cloak) and hijab (head cover), have started to discard the naqab (face veil). Does this indicate a widening of the margins so far as veiling is concerned? Or is it an indication that Saudi society is becoming amenable to individual choices? To conclude that veiling has become a matter of individual choice would stretch the point beyond fact, but suggesting diversity in veiling practice would not be wrong. Saudi women continue to face structural constraints and systemic discrimination, but their improving socioeconomic conditions have provided them the ability to choose the way they want to be dressed in public so far as the use of naqab is concerned. Though a minor development, contextualized in the larger discourse on women's empowerment, this is no small achievement and is indicative of ruptures in the established social norm of veiling.