Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.     

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism,Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

This article explains the disparity between the United States (US) military government's efforts to defend and empower local women during the first occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and its reputation for tolerating sexual assault. It argues that US officials, inspired by a progressive ideology that linked the social, economic and political spheres, set out to reshape Dominican sexual and gender norms as a means to ensure political stability. Yet, these efforts fell victim to both Dominican and US Marines’ conceptions of gender and normative sexuality. Building upon a thriving body of scholarship that addresses the significance of US efforts to redefine Dominican gender norms, this article analyses the military government's policies towards women and provost courts’ responses to sexual assault. It concludes that, combined with an aggressive anti‐prostitution campaign, the military government's reforms succeeded only in creating an atmosphere favourable to crimes against women. Moreover, rape and the way it was prosecuted revitalised the patriarchal norms that US officials had set out to transform, thus setting the stage for the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whose thirty‐year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women. Thus, US policies and attitudes not only ensured the failure of progressive reform but also contributed to the ongoing subjugation of the very women the military government had pledged to empower.     

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.     

Decolonizing branded peacebuilding: abjected women talk back to the Finnish Women,Peace and Security agenda

This article interrogates the sexual ideology of Finnish peacebuilding, the country's foreign policy brand and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by examining the experiences of women ‘written out of history’. Using the method of ‘writing back’ I juxtapose the construction of a gender‐friendly global peacebuilder identity with experiences in Finland after the Lapland War (1944–45) and in post‐conflict Aceh, Indonesia (1976–2005). Although being divided temporarily and geographically, these two contexts form an intimate part of the abjected and invisible part of the Finnish WPS agenda, revealing a number of colonial and violent overtones of postwar reconstruction: economic and political postwar dystopia of Skolt Sámi and neglect of Acehnese women's experiences in branding the peace settlement and its implementation as a success. Jointly they critique and challenge both the gender/women‐friendly peacebuilder identity construction of Finland and locate the sexual ideology of WPS to that of political economy and post‐conflict political, legal and economic reforms. The article illustrates how the Finnish foreign policy brand has constructed the country as a global problem‐solver and peacemaker, drawing on the heteronormative myth of already achieved gender equality on the one hand and, on the other, tamed asexual female subjectivity: the ‘good woman’ as peacebuilder or victim of violence. By drawing attention to violent effects of the global WPS agenda demanding decolonialization, I suggest that the real success of the WPS agenda should be evaluated by those who have been ‘written out’.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Platform,Podium, and Public Life: Rhetorical Resilience in the Career of Elocutionist Edna Sutherland

This article extends recent scholarship on women’s rhetorical education and practices, which has focused primarily on the experiences of American women, by analyzing the career of Canadian elocutionist Edna Sutherland (1869–1956). Despite the tendency in Canada’s postsecondary institutions to marginalize public speaking instruction as a merely “practical” concern, Sutherland pursued a 35-year academic career, teaching voice culture and becoming Dean of Women successively at the University of Manitoba and Manitoba College. The article examines her negotiation of local circumstances to achieve this success as an instance of rhetorical resilience. Ultimately, Sutherland’s performative abilities complemented her private and college teaching, while the cultural authority she gained as a result supported her contributions to public life, many focused on opportunities for women. The article considers as well how American and British influences on her advocacy for speech training may reflect broader national trends.     

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.     

The Perils of the Back Seat: Date Rape,Race and Gender in 1950s America

Dating among white American teenagers in the 1950s caused parents considerable concern, as it represented disturbing developments in sexual expectations. While the rhetoric surrounding marriage celebrated traditional gender roles and monogamy, Americans bemoaned social and moral decay, caused in part by women's encroachment on male prerogatives. Sexual experience for boys increasingly became a defining gender characteristic and a means of achieving manhood as well. Ideas about proper marital norms and studies of dating practices among young people naturalised male aggression as proof of masculinity, which made girls, even ‘respectable ones’, vulnerable to violence from their dates. As teens' acceptance of going steady became more widespread, older racialised narratives of sexual danger evolved to incorporate new dating trends. Whereas American, and especially southern white, women knew the dangers of the supposed ‘black beast rapist’, they learnt during the 1950s that a special danger could confront them in the back seat of cars, despite the presence of their white, male date. Even with a white protector, white women remained vulnerable to violence on dates, whether from black men or from their white date. As dating conventions loosened, white women found that that the perils of the back seat only increased.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

St Darerca and Her Sister Scholars: Women and Education in Medieval Ireland

This article examines largely neglected evidence for women's education in Irish saints’ Lives and integrates it with findings from other medieval Irish texts, such as chronicles, devotional works and poetry. The sources attest that education was available to at least some girls and women under male and female teachers in mixed and single–sex schools from the earliest days of the Irish church until the mid–fifteenth century. Their history points to the power, agency and authority open to medieval Irish women and the respect, affection, and admiration their brothers felt for them.     

Style and self‐making: String bag production in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The looped netbag or bilum is one the most culturally significant of everyday objects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Made exclusively by women, bilum are also iconic of female productive and reproductive labour. In this article, I analyze how growing social stratification is expressed through the types of bilums young women produce and wear. I argue that the choices that young women make about what kinds of designs, shapes, colours, and fashions to incorporate into their bilums can tell us a great deal about their desires, experiences, and imaginings. While previous analyses have focused on the bilum as an ambiguously gendered object expressing complex ideas about sexual difference, I argue that bilum style increasingly indexes complex ideas about geography and social location, materializing contemporary Papua New Guinean ‘imaginaries’ of space.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.     

The space between: globalization,liminal spaces and personal relations in rural Costa Rica

Globalization facilitates the movement of people, goods, ideologies and even diseases across borders and into local communities. This article explores the liminal space created by tourism in the rural Costa Rican community of Monteverde as a site where the movement of people, especially Western women (women from the global North), intersects, contests and even reinforces existing heteropatriarchal ideologies. Theories from feminist geography and anthropology provide a lens for understanding and interpreting how Western women and local residents (both male and female) perceive, construct and interact with each other. We argue that ‘liminality’ or the sense of being ‘betwixt and between’ – physically, socially and ideologically – allows Western women a space to both challenge the hegemony of heteropatriarchal ideology and reconstitute it in their sexual relationships with local men. We also explore the implications that sexual relationships between Western women and local men have for local women. We stress the urgency to understand and articulate the nature of these sexual relationships in light of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

Everyday articulations of prostitution: how some Filipina migrants in rural Japan describe sexual–economic relationships

This article draws attention to ‘everyday articulations of prostitution’: the diverse, performative ways that people reproduce and rework meanings of ‘prostitution’ as they mobilize the term in their day-to-day lives. The article offers an ethnographic illustration of this process by exploring why and to what ends a group of Filipina wives of rural Japanese men referred to the behavior of another Filipina woman in their community as ‘prostitution.’ It demonstrates that when mobilizing this term, these Filipina women were not categorizing sexual–economic relationships (like ‘prostitution’) in terms of payment systems, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, geographical and cultural factors, such as the stigma associated with these women's migration histories and their long-term residence as wives and mothers in the small rural communities where they had worked in bars, led Filipina women in Central Kiso to describe such relationships according to the sentiments motivating them, the ways one utilized gifts or money from a sexual partner, and whether or not one demonstrated appreciation of this financial support. The article maintains that attention to everyday articulations of prostitution such as these expands our understandings of the situated meanings people can invest in this term. It illustrates how culture and geography shape the ways discourses of prostitution are mobilized to stigmatize some intimate-economic behaviors and, thereby, legitimize others.     

Warrior Women,the Holy Spirit and HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article analyses a group of Gogodala Christian women in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea who are referred to as ‘Warrior women’ and who pray, sing and call upon the Holy Spirit to cleanse their own bodies and ‘turn their eyes’, so that they are able to see those who threaten the health and well‐being of the wider community. These women have focused primarily on bringing male practitioners of magic — iwai dala — shadowy and powerful men who operate covertly and away from the gaze of others, out into the open. Whilst this has been happening for many years, the spread of HIV and AIDS into the area, fuelled by what many in the area believe is the rise of unrestrained female and male sexuality and the waning of Christian practice and principles, has meant that those perceived to bring harm to the community through their sexual behaviour have become recent targets for Warrior women. HIV/AIDS, referred to in Gogodala as melesene bininapa gite tila gi — the ‘sickness without medicine’ — is understood as a hidden sickness, one that makes its way through the community without trace until people become visibly ill. Warrior women seek to make both AIDS and those who, through their behaviour, encourage or enable its spread more visible. In the process, however, a small number of them are overcome by the Holy Spirit, so much so that they become daeledaelenapa — mad ‐ their behaviour increasingly characterised by childishness and uncontrolled sexuality.