Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender,space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.     

Domesticating the Frontier: Gender,Empire and Adventure Landscapes in British Cinema, 1945–59

Before 1945, films of the empire genre, produced in Hollywood as well as Britain, celebrated the masculinity of the British adventure hero, and promoted an imperial world view. This article explores the significance of the incorporation of white women into empire films in the late 1940s and 1950s, focusing on three films from different moments in the period. What are the range of meanings assigned to white femininity in these films, and their significance to the politics of race and gender? How is the white woman represented in relation to colonised women and men? In addressing these questions the article considers shifts in the gendering of the empire genre as part of an attempt to address a range of anxieties – about the transition from empire to Commonwealth, the rise of American power, and the collapse of boundaries between colonisers and colonised.     

Creativity,geopolitics and ontological security: satire on Russia and the war in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Some states create geographical imaginaries that envision the homeland as coherent and good, and the spaces of Others as disordered, dangerous and therefore legitimate objects of violence. Such ‘violent cartographies’ serve not only to justify policy actions, but constitute bordering practices aiming to provide stability, integrity and continuity to the Self, sometimes referred to as ‘ontological security’. This article examines the role of creativity and artistic imagination in challenging dominant geopolitical narratives. It examines satire on the Russian-language internet, which played upon the Russian state’s geopolitical narrative about the war in Ukraine 2014–15. Three themes within this dominant narrative – (1) the imperialist idea of Russia as a modernising force, (2) the gendering of Ukraine as feminine and Europe as homosexual and (3) the idea that the current war was a re-enactment of Russia’s historical battle against fascism – all became the object of fun-making in satire. I argue that satire, by appropriating, repeating but slightly displacing official rhetoric in ways that make it appear ridiculous, may destabilise dominant narratives of ontological security and challenge their strive towards closure. Satire may expose the silences of dominant narratives and undermine the essentialism and binarism upon which they rely, opening up for estrangement and disidentification.     

Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities,Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvel's 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatt's retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.     

MASCULINISM,THE USE OF DUALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGIES AND THIRD SPACES*

First, this paper establishes a ground from which to question not only the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of geographical knowledge, but also the gendering of this relationship. From this starting position, second, it is argued that dualisms permit the gendering of particular binary opposites. The argument is not that certain dualistic categories - such as Reason and Emotion or Time and Space - are inherently wrong or to deny that western societies are organized through them, at least in part. Instead, dualisms are shown - at particular times and in particular places - to mark and help police supposedly fixed, natural divisions between the powerful and the disempowered (as in the masculine versus the feminine). In assuming away dualistic economies of meaning, the danger is that this helps to maintain the reproduction of the power-ridden values which dualisms help to sustain. Indeed, it is because dualist architectures are not as fixed, stable or natural as they are meant to be (i.e., precisely because they need to be policed) that it is possible to refuse them. Finally, this paper describes one alternative episte-mology which draws on the notion of a third space. The idea of third spaces uses a spatial metaphor to suggest an alternative radical geography which mobilizes place, politics and hybrid identities. One such third space is illustrated by an empirical example.     

‘Mɔn’ (to marry/to cook): negotiating becoming a wife and woman in the kitchens of a northern Ghanaian Konkomba community

In this article, I consider the kitchen as domestic space that is at once gendered and gendering in its construction and use by women as they negotiate their social position across the life course. Deeply rooted patriarchal values structure Konkomba society in northern Ghana, and a woman's role is to be a wife, to prepare food in support of her husband's family and community. Although the normative definition of woman's role in society stems from a clear-cut division of labor between women and men, a woman must negotiate her social position and ability to fulfill these labor obligations; she becomes a woman and wife by working to gain access to and control over resources and labor. I explore the shifting dynamics of women's work and social position across the life course, emphasizing the transition from young woman to woman-as-wife-as-cook in her husband's community. These negotiations take place in the kitchen – a fiercely feminine space in which a woman becomes a wife when she earns the right to place hearth stones and prepare a ceremonial ‘first meal’ for her husband and his community.     

Landscapes of (neo-)liberal control: the transcarceral spaces of federally sentenced women in Canada

This article maps the racializing, classing and gendering cartographies of cross-spatial marginalization and social control experienced by women who were formerly federally incarcerated in Canada. By investigating women's criminalization, prison and post-prison experiences, this article traces practices of racialization, gendering and classing that underwrite liberal to neo-liberal forms of social control. Results from 68 interviews with women released from federal prisons in Canada show that women's criminalization cannot solely be traced to shifts from liberal to neo-liberal governance, but rather to the ways in which structures of oppression have influenced women's criminalization across liberal to neo-liberal rationalities. This analysis shows how liberal ‘welfarist’ ideas and ideals are embedded in neo-liberal reforms and provide the discursive platforms of an extended and widened network of social control of criminalized women beyond prison walls, across institutions, including a variety of (non-)government actors and the women themselves. This widened web of (neo-)liberal social control constitutes practices that have formed carceral spaces beyond prison walls and have perpetuated and exacerbated women's marginality after their release from federal prisons in Canada.     

Messing with the attractiveness algorithm: a response to queering code/space

Responding to the collection of articles, ‘Queering Code/Space,’ this article discusses how algorithms affect the production of online lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) spaces, namely online dating sites. The set of articles is well timed: lesbian bars have closed en masse across the US and many gay male bars have followed suit so that online spaces fill – or perhaps make – a gap in the social production of LGBTQ spaces. I draw on Cindi Katz’s idea of ‘messy’ qualities of social reproduction and the necessity of ‘messing’ with dominant narratives in order to think about the labor, experience, and project of queering code/space.     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.     

Female Patriots: Women,War and the Nation in the Period of the Prussian‐German Anti‐Napoleonic Wars

The period of the wars against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815 represents a central phase in German history for the formation of a national political culture organised along gender lines. Acting as a sort of catalyst, these wars accelerated and intensified the nationalisation of the gender order and the ‘gendering’ of the nation, and also permanently influenced the fundamental structures of the relationship between women, the state and the nation. The article analyses the contents and forms of patriotic national women's activities during this period, as well as the ways in which they were perceived and judged in public discourse. In so doing, it explores the relationship between women, war and the nation.     

Gendered Geographies of Environmental Injustice

Abstract:  As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender—and women's—inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of "gender mainstreaming" in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice.     

The unavoidable salience of gender: notes from Australian childcare work

This article explores the gendering of work in Australian childcare settings from a post-gender perspective. Much early childhood research focuses on encouraging men into the field, seeing their presence as beneficial to the perceived worth of childcare work. Such research ignores how women’s gendered experiences, as the overwhelming majority of the workforce, are already shaping the field, creating an image of this work apparently unpalatable to most men. I show how gendered relations have a profound impact, even in mono-gendered spaces like childcare, to the continuing disadvantage of women. Workers caught within binary understandings of gender appear to draw on normative gendered discourses to understand the social and economic positioning of the field, rather than more emancipatory framings. This article argues that perspectives that actively question biomedical understandings of gender can be useful in understanding and challenging the gendering of particular societal spaces, such as childcare services.     

Warfare,political identities,and displacement in Spain and Colombia

This paper explores the causes of displacement during civil wars. Recent scholarship has shown that conventional civil wars – those in which forces are relatively balanced – and irregular civil wars – those in which one side is substantially stronger than the other – exhibit different patterns of violence. We hypothesize that, while the mode of violence differs, the form of displacement should be consistent across the wars: displacement is a tactic of war that armed groups use to conquer new territories. By expelling civilians associated with rivals, armed groups improve their odds of gaining control of contested territory. This implies that members of a group are targeted for displacement because of their identity and presumed loyalties. We test the theory using two fine-grained datasets on individuals displaced during a conventional civil war, in Spain (1936–1939), and an irregular civil war, in Colombia (1964–). In both cases, the war cleavage was ideological and reflected in national elections: the locations where political parties received support indicated which populations were sympathetic to rivals. In both civil wars, we observe higher levels of displacement in locations where more sympathizers of rival armed groups reside. The article is the first comparison to our knowledge of the sub-national dynamics of displacement within two different civil wars and it shows that the microfoundations of displacement are similar across types. Finally, the article explains macro-level differences with a coherent micro-level framework.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

‘This we will Maintain’: Gender,Ethno‐Nationalism and the Politics of Unionism in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the gendering of unionist national identity in Northern Ireland through an analysis of organizations that are central to unionist politics today. While the commonplace observation that unionist women are ‘tea‐makers‘ conveys a critical dimension of the gender order within unionism, it does not fully capture the significance of women's contributions to the establishment or maintenance of unionism. The article analyzes how Stormont constituted an ethno‐gender regime, examines unionist women's political engagement during the Stormont era and under direct rule, investigates how the peace process and Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement have affected the unionist ethno‐gender order and the gender politics of unionism, and explores the possibilities for political transformation.     

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.     

Gender,Technology and Local Culture: Tradition and transition in a Swedish municipality

The article is concerned with the gendering of technology, place and time and the interaction between them. The Swedish community of Lindesberg which changed its local policy towards industry and commerce in the 1980s is presented as a case-study. Before the changes, the local policy was restricted to traditionally male jobs; afterwards, it included jobs for women such as 'distance-working' or telecommuting opportunities. The expansion of the local policy is explained by the population's request for work opportunities for women also, although the local image is still very masculine. The old jobs were considered to be traditional but technically qualified jobs. The new jobs were described by the local authorities as new but technically qualified jobs. The first judgement was supported 'by everyone' while the latter was opposed 'by everyone'. The failure to keep the image of technically qualified work connected to the new opportunities for distance-working is explained by the gender labelling of the new work tasks. As they were given to women, and traditionally women are by definition lacking in technical competence, it was not possible to give the work tasks a label of technology and qualification.     

Establishing Development Orthodoxy: Negotiating Masculinities in the Water Sector

Despite important work in development studies on the ‘male bias in the development process’, it is generally recognized that gender and development analyses have been slow to engage with masculinities. Focusing attention on the nexus between identity and globalizing development discourses, this article explores the relationship between masculinities and development through an analysis of the gendering of water paradigms. By analysing the example of the recent Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia, and placing them in historical context, the author explores how gendered representations and language are used to downplay and upgrade particular understandings of modernity as they relate to water management, and examines the mechanisms through which specific gendered identities become associated with the most successful versions of ‘modern’ development.     

A harbour in the country,a city in the sea: Infrastructural conduits,territorial inversions and the slippages of sovereignty in Sino-Sri Lankan development narratives

This paper adopts infrastructure as a lens through which new understandings of the inter-relationships between territory and sovereignty can be advanced. It argues that inverting the terrestrial assumption of territory can lead to “slippages” of sovereignty in which territorial sovereignty is indirectly claimed through the assertion of governance rights. For the purposes of this paper, I explore these inversions through the reclaiming of land from the ocean, and the removal of land by the ocean. Drawing on ethnographic research exploring the effects of China-backed infrastructure mega-projects in Sri Lanka, these territorial inversions are explored, respectively, through the Port City Colombo project – in which territory is claimed from the ocean through the creation of an island infrastructure – and the Hambantota International Port project – in which territory is removed by the ocean through the creation of a man-made port. Both projects reveal the ways in which infrastructure investments are implicated in the region-building ambitions of the Belt and Road Initiative, and thus provide conduits through which Chinese sovereignty can be asserted. As conduits, they foreground the realisation, but also the reimagination, of what “islandness” can mean in/to post-war Sri Lanka.